After
Inner City Press Scoop On Guterres Cover
Up and Swanson Audio Ben Out of UN Feb 6
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Audio, Patreon
UN GATE, Jan 31 –
Three weeks after Inner City
Press published leaked audio
of UN investigator Ben Swanson
recounting being ordered by UN
Secretary General Antonio
Guterres NOT to
investigate sexual harassment
committed by a UN Assistant
SG, now more Swanson audio has
emerged (see here
for description and below),
and now put online by Inner
City Press on SoundCloud, here,
with related letter here.
Now on January
31, 2025 Inner City Press
report that Swanson is out at
the UN, as of February 6.
Swanson said:
"this whole thing
of retaliation has got the
potential to cause us massive,
massive problems if we get it
wrong.” As he describes
the system, he says the U.N.
used to open an investigation
in response to a complaint,
“and it was taking a long time
because some of them are
horribly complicated and some
of them are just so trivial
that they’re just not worth
investigating entirely.”
He says the office trialed a
process of getting the
complaint from the U.N. ethics
office, at which point it
would write to the person
accused of retaliating against
a whistleblower or someone who
reported misconduct, and ask
them to “tell us why you’re
not guilty.” ”We’d
get the stuff … in from the
ethics office, we then write
to the subject and, I’m
paraphrasing here, saying,
‘Look, the ethics office have
said that prima facie that you
have retaliated therefore you
are guilty of retaliation
against Staff Member A, here’s
all the material, here’s the
ST/AI, write back to us in 10
days and tell us why you
haven’t … why you’re not
guilty of retaliation,'” he
says, to chuckles from others
in attendance.
Continuing, he says: “We’ve
managed to cut the time down
from 247 days down to about 45
because they write back
straight away and invariably
it’s ‘I don’t know anything
about a protected act and this
is nonsense, all I did was
send out an email telling
people to behave
themselves.'” “Then we
sort of make the judgment of
whether, is it worth getting
64gb of emails to prove that
they haven’t only sent the
email out, or do we take their
word, their sworn word, for it
and then say ‘well, ethics
office, there is never ever
going to be any sanction
imposed for this retaliatory
act, or whatever it’s called,
and we’re not going to do
anything else’?” He says
they are effectively doing the
ethics office's job and the
office had “swallowed it up
and accepted it. We’ve done
two now, and I think we’ve got
another two in the pipeline,
and it’s working quite nicely,
that brings the figures down
[and] that gets the Americans
off the U.N.’s back, [it]
means they don’t reduce their
contribution.”
Inner City Press, which
Guterres has banned from the
UN as it asks about these and
his abuses, received
from outraged UN
whistleblowers video of sexual
exploitation, they said, in a
white UN-marked vehicle, here.
Now Instagram,
Facebook.
Inner City
Press exclusively published
audio of OIOS' Ben Swanson
saying that one of Guterres'
Assistant Secretaries General
thrust his hand down the pants
of a female staffer - and
Guterres, "a politician," said
to cover it up. Audio
here, here
on Patreon, transcribed here:
"I was summoned
to a meeting in the SGS
conference room in February
(2018) where the SG, DSG,
Legal Counsel and of all the
special advisors and all that
were there. The SG is a
politician and he wanted a
sound byte result and the
soundbite result was that
paragraph which I showed you
before. I tried to make
the point that there's three
overlapping things with this,
there's the culture, the
investigations and there's the
accountability
piece. Now,
I was trying to tell him what
actually apart from the
numbers that's coming in, the
investigations piece is
already, we're OK because we
know what we're doing and
we're able to do the
investigations. It's just with
the increase in demand and I
said the accountability is a
problem because of whatever
the tribunals are doing. And
it's your culture's the
problem. I said I said I
had a D1 female D1 in my
office last week. She in tears
telling me about how an ASG
put his hand inside her
trousers and when she tried to
discuss how to complain about
it, she was told it wouldn't
do her any good and he was a
favored son. And you're a
woman. So I tried to
tell the story and I got
(knock on table) I was cut
there."
On July 1
AFP reported
of the UNTSO video that "It
was originally published on
June 23 on the Twitter account
of Inner City Press, a blog in
open conflict with the UN,
which has been denied access
"for 721 days" , said its
author Matthew Lee. The
account claimed a few days
later that this scene was
filmed in Tel Aviv (Israel)."
[Would they say that the
Rappler is "in open conflict"
with Duterte?]
Inner City
Press will continue to demand
re-accreditation.
On June
26, despite the story now
being reported from Austria
to Israel
to Switzerland,
those let in from Al Jazeera
and other publications asked
nothing. We'll have more on
this. Watch this site.
***
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