The Real News Network coverage of the recent Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence, with contributions from many of the whistleblowers involved:
Category Archives: CIA
The Petraeus Affair
My recent interview on RT about the Petraeus Affair and the possible real reasons for his exposure and resignation:
Asymmetric Extradition — the American Way
Published in the Huffington Post UK, The Real News Network, and Information Clearing House
I blame my partner. There I was having a perfectly nice day off, pootling my way through the Sunday newspapers and finding such intriguing articles about the fact that Britain has invaded all but 22 countries around the world over the centuries (France is the second most prolific invader but also has the dubious distinction of being the country most invaded by Britain, apparently).
Then he has to go and say “well, if the US ignores other countries’ laws, why should we be subject to theirs?”. This post is the unavoidable result.
I had made the tactical blunder of sharing two articles with him. The first was an excellent interview in today’s Independent with news supremo and financial subversive, Max Keiser; the second was an article I found in my Twitter stream from the indefatigable Julia O’Dwyer about her son’s ongoing legal fight in the UK.
The connection? Unfortunately and rather inevitably these days — extradition.
Richard O’Dwyer is the Sheffield student who is currently wanted by the USA on copyright infringement charges. Using a bit of old-fashioned get-up-and-go, he set up a website called tvshack.com, which apparently acted as a sign-posting service to websites where people could download media. Putting aside the simple argument that the service he provided was no different from Google, he also had no copyrighted material hosted on his website.
Richard has lived all his life in the UK, and he set up his website there. Under UK law he had committed no crime.
However, the American authorities thought differently. O’Dwyer had registered his website as a .com and the US now claims that any website, anywhere in the world, using a US-originated domain name (com/org/info/net etc) is subject to US law, thus allowing the American government to globalise their legal hegemony. The most notorious recent case was the illegal US intelligence operation to take down Megaupload and arrest Kim Dotcom in New Zealand earlier this year.
This has already resulted in foreign websites that attract the wrath of the US authorities being taken down, with no warning and no due process. This is the cyber equivalent of drone warfare and the presidentially-approved CIA kill list.
As a result, not only was O’Dwyer’s website summarily taken down, he is now facing extradition to the US and a 10 year stretch in a maximum security prison. All for something that is not even a crime under UK law. His case echoes the terrible 10-year ordeal that Gary McKinnon went through, and highlights the appalling problems inherent in the invidious, one-sided UK/USA Extradition Act.
So how does this link to the Max Keiser interview? Reading it reminded me of an investigation Keiser did a few years ago into the extraordinary rendition of a “terrorist suspect”, Abu Omar, from Italy to Egypt where he was inevitably, horrifically tortured. Since then, 23 CIA officers have now been tried under Italian law and found guilty of his kidnapping (let’s not mince our words here). The Milan Head of Station, Robert Lady is now wanted in Italy to serve his 9‑year sentence, but the US government has refused to extradite him.
So let’s just reiterate this: on the one hand, the US demands EU citizens on suspicion that they may have committed a cyber-crime according to the diktats of American law, which we are all now supposed to agree has a globalised reach; on the other hand, US citizens who have already been convicted by the due legal process of other Western democracies are not handed over to serve their sentences for appalling crimes involving kidnapping and torture.
I have written at length about America’s asymmetric extradition laws, but this is taking the system to new heights of hypocrisy.
Just why, indeed, should European countries religiously obey America’s self-styled global legal dominion and hand over its citizens, presumed innocent until proven guilty, to the brutal and disproportionate US legal system? Especially when the US brushes aside the due legal processes of other democracies and refuses to extradite convicted felons?
It appears that the USA is in a hurry to reach and breach Britain’s record for foreign invasions. But in addition to old-fashioned military incursions, America is also going for full-spectrum legal dominance.
Bleat: the assassination of dissidents
OK, so I’m not sure if my concept of Bleats (half blog, half tweet) is being grasped wholeheartedly. But so what — it makes me laugh and the Black Sheep shall perservere with a short blog post.….
So I’m a bit puzzled here. UK Prime Minister Dave Cameron is quoted in today’s Daily Telegraph as saying that:
“It is not acceptable to have a situation where Colonel Gaddafi can be murdering his own people using aeroplanes and helicopter gunships and the like and we have to plan now to make sure if that happens we can do something to stop it.”
But do his American best buddies share that, umm, humane view? First of all they have the CIA assassination list which includes the names of US citizens (ie its own people); then those same “best buddies” may well resort to assassinating Wikileaks’s Julian Assange, probably the most high profile dissident in international and diplomatic circles at the moment; plus they are already waging remote drone warfare on many hapless Middle Eastern countries — Yeman, Afghanistan, Pakistan.….
Oh, and now the UK government seems poised to launch covert spy drones into the skies of Britain. Even the UK’s most right-wing mainstream newspapers, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, expressed concern about this today. Apparently these drones have yet to be weaponised.….
It’s a slippery slope down to an Orwellian nightmare.
The Real Reason for the Police State?
I haven’t written here for a while, despite the embarras de richesses that has been presented to us in the news recently: Dame Stella saying that the UK is becoming a police state; drones will patrol the streets of Britain, watching our every move; databases are being built, containing all our electronic communications; ditto all our travel movements. What can a lone blogger usefully add to this? Only so much hot air — the facts speak for themselves.
Plus, I’ve been a bit caught up over the last couple of months with Operation Escape Pod. Not all of us are sitting around waiting for the prison gates to clang shut on the UK. I’m outta here!
But I can’t resist an interesting article in The Spectator magazine this week. And that’s a sentence I never thought I would write in my life.
Tim Shipman, quoting a plethora of anonymous intelligence sources and former spooks, asserts that Britain’s foreign policy is being skewed by the need to placate our intelligence allies, and that the CIA is roaming free in the wilds of Yorkshire.
His sources tell him that the UK is a “swamp” of Islamic extremism, and that the domestic spies are terrified that there will be a new terrorist atrocity, probably against US interests but it could be anywhere, carried out by our very own home-grown terrorists. According to Shipman, this terrible prospect had all the spooks busily downing trebles in the bars around Vauxhall Cross in the wake of the Mumbai bombings.
Apart from the suggestion that the spies’ drinking culture appears to be as robust as ever, I find this interesting because well-sourced spook spin is more likely to appear in the august pages of The Speccie than in, say, Red Pepper. But if this is an accurate reflection of the thinking of our politicians and intelligence community, then this is an extremely worrying development. It goes a long way to explaining why the UK has become the most policed state in the Western world.
Yes, in the 1990s the UK practised a strategy of appeasement towards Islamic extremists. MI5’s view was always that it was better to give radicals a safe haven in the UK, which they would then be loathe to attack directly, and where a close eye could be kept on them.
This, of course, was derailed by Blair’s Messianic mission in the Middle East. By unilaterally supporting Bush’s adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the teeth of stark warnings about the attendant risks from the head of MI5, Britain has become “the enemy” in the eyes of radical Islam. The gloves are off, and we are all at greater risk because of our former PM’s hubris.
But now we apparently have free-range CIA officers infiltrating the Muslim communities of the UK. No doubt Mossad is also again secretly tolerated, despite the fact that they had been banned for years from operating in the UK because they were too unpredictable (a civil service euphemism for violent).
And I am willing to bet that this international perception that UK spooks will be caught off-guard by an apparently British-originated terrorist attack is the reason for the slew of new totalitarian laws that are making us all suspects. The drones, the datamining and the draconian stop-and-search laws are designed to reassure our invaluable allies in the CIA, Mossad, ISI and the FSB. They will not be put in place to “protect” us.