We live in an executioner's epoch, wrote Joar Tiberg on 16 November 2012.
Criticism of his remote controlled murder machines is powerful, but that doesn't bother Obama.
The US sends political prisoners to prison and torture chambers all over the world - Guantánamo, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria - but this foul treatment of human beings never touches the nation's president. The US spy on everyone, but a name like Snowden still doesn't stick to Obama.
We might think this is waste product from the years of George W Bush. We think Obama actually wants something else. We see a black democrat from a humble background, and when he speaks, he sounds so comfortably intellectual. Our antiracism and our admiration for the erudite class climber are that inverted.
Hardly any of our top politicians wanted to be photographed with Bush when he visited Gothenburg in 2001, despite his not yet launching his despicable 'war on terror'. Things are different with Obama. When people talk about the state visit on 4 September, PM Fredrik Reinfeldt smiles with almost his entire face. Even our 'liberal media' get worked up. It matters not what Obama has on his conscience. Drone attacks, mass surveillance, billions in support of the junta in Egypt - everything rolls off him.
Carl Bildt is the happiest of them all. He sees this visit as personal triumph. And of course he should.
Bildt was European gofer for the US before he became foreign minister. His career began where it should have ended - he traveled to the US with classified Swedish documents about Russian submarines. As a lobbyist in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and with strong connections to Donald Rumsfeld, his task was to convince a sceptic Europe about the need to invade Iraq.
No holds are barred as regards Sweden's cooperation with the US. As Lisa Röstlund and Leo Lagercrantz revealed, Bildt has created a secret shadow foreign office, a semi-private security organisation, located in the suburb of Nacka outside Stockholm. The Institute for Security and Development Policy manages relations between the US and controversial states such as North Korea. Veteran Palme investigator Walter Kegö has an important position there, and works with people from the US ultra right.
NATO propaganda's never been as strong as now, even though threats to Sweden's sovereignty are conspicuous in their absence. One understands that NATO lobbyists find this uncomfortable - that's the reason for their desperate attempts to breathe life back in their moribund Russia scare. It just won't work for them. Even the stubborn Russia-eater Stefan Hedlund is forced to admit that Putin does not represent a threat to Sweden. The department of defence recently reached the same conclusion. But still they keep on, weaving their stories, and they're hoping to get a boost from Obama's visit.
NATO member or no, Sweden is closer to the US than many of the NATO countries.
Sweden has morphed into a vassal state. We are so used to the perverse western liberal war on terror that we don't even care that Cameron personally sent security forces to the Guardian to force journalists to erase their hard drives - which tragically they did. Stasi exists in a symbiosis with McCarthy, but we just shrug our shoulders. An example: the text for this piece was processed by Aftonbladet's own surveillance agency - Gmail. Not even our publishing houses understand the portent of their revelations.
Obama was met by protests when he visited Germany. Protests even at government level. But there won't be even a murmur in Sweden. Not a word about surveillance or drones or torture chambers or anything. Obama knew what he was doing when he spun that globe and let his finger come to a stop on Stockholm.
Postscript: Åsa Linderborg
Åsa is culture chief of Aftonbladet since 2009. She was accused by Olle Andersson of 'losing it' over the Assange affair, perhaps giving into concerted feminist lobbying.
Åsa was involved in the investigation into the Bonniers following the diplomatic scandal of 2009 brought about by Donald Boström's report on Israeli trafficking in body parts. She, Johannes Wahlström, and others published a series of articles showing how one of the world's biggest publishing houses cut secret deals with the government of Carl Bildt: in return for the promise to not prosecute for illegal ownership of Swedish media and new legislation relaxing requirements for media integrity, the Bonniers agreed to direct their news organisations to support the sitting government of Fredrik Reinfeldt and Carl Bildt.
Our reporters are not to concentrate on impartial investigations in the future. They are instead to fill our pages with material dictated by our major sponsors. - Gunnar Lindstedt, Veckans Affärer, 12 June 2009
We like to think of Sweden as the world's most democratic country, something that encumbers each and every conversation about the power exerted de facto outside our duly elected governments. And paradoxically, those who investigate the situation with our media are accused of attempting to stifle freedom of speech - when of course it's precisely the other way around. I still remember how [social democrat] minister for culture Marita Ulvskog had to chase the Bonniers' media companies all those years. The European Commission's recent report indicates such a concentration of power is in violation of EU statutes. But that doesn't seem to bother the current right wing minister for media and culture. - Åsa Linderborg, Aftonbladet, 8 November 2010
Postscript: Obama the Musical
ABBA played it, now you sing it. To be performed for the Peace Prize laureate's visit in September.
I have a drone
A way to kill
No one leaves home
It's such a thrill
If you hear the thunder
Up there in the skies
You will know we're coming
Better run and hide
I believe in torture
I believe in empire just for me
I believe in lying
I believe in true democracy
I give the nod
I have a drone