Lars Findsen, Denmark’s Defense Intelligence Service (FE) chief—the equivalent of the U.S.’s CIA director—walked into Copenhagen city court with three large police escorts pressed against the country’s leading spy charged with treason. Findsen is forbidden to speak to reporters, but they understood his opinion about his arrest when they saw the paperback in his hand: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.^[1]

He was one of four FE and PET (Danish Security and Intelligence Service—the police equivalent of the FBI) employees arrested last December 8. Findsen was charged with violating Criminal Code §109—“disclosing highly classified information from the intelligence services”—an act of “treason” punishable by 12 years’ imprisonment.^[2]

Copenhagen City Judge Merete Engholm allowed his name to be released in a subsequent court hearing, January 10, 2022, at his request. Findsen told reporters from a distance: “I want the preliminary charge brought forward, and I plead not guilty. This is completely insane.”

Findsen has since been forbidden to say one word to any media from any distance. The other three persons’ names and whereabouts are unknown to the media and public. It is not even known if they are formally charged and awaiting trial, either in prison or at home.

The prosecution and the judge refuse to disclose what information on what secret matter(s) Findsen allegedly disclosed or to whom he disclosed them. At the end of the 10-hour court hearing, the judge continued his remand detention until March 3.

DR court reporter Trine Maria Ilsøe explained that Findsen’s detention allows him television but no access to IT or telephone. He is allowed a few visitors but cannot speak about the case. Guards watch. (DR is Denmark’s largest media outlet—online, radio and TV—and is state-supported.)

This case can well be associated with the U.S.’s Espionage Act, Britain’s Official Secrets Act, and what the U.S./UK are doing to Julian Assange now. Yet the mass media do not mention any of that. It seems Julian Assange’s name is taboo.

Since the judge and government will not say what the case is all about, reporters predict that we may never be told, which leads to even more speculation. The fact that the judge is keeping Findsen confined until trial—which has no time limit and some remanded prisoners have been kept in jail for more than a year—also raises questions of lack of respect for human rights.

The judge simply agreed with the state that, if he were released, he could talk to the media and/or in some way hinder the police investigation, or even continue to commit whatever “crime” he is charged with.

DR produced a video in the style of a future detective novel. It speaks of three possible issues that could lay behind these arrests:

1) FE delivered a recent report to the government about children of Danish citizens involved with Islamic State terrorists. They are now interned in a Kurd-controlled concentration camp in Syria. FE told the Danish government, which does not want them returned, that they could be trained in terrorism and return to Denmark to do damage.

2) A Danish citizen, Ahmed Samsam—assumed by Danish journalists to have been an FE agent, and perhaps a PET agent as well—was arrested in Spain for aiding the Islamic State there. He received eight years in prison, and apparently Danish intelligence personnel are upset that their government has not aided him.

Ahmad Samsam [Source: theolivepress.es]

Journalists were again kept out of the February 4 hearing by double-locked doors. They protested the lack of transparency, sparking speculation that Findsen may be considered “too open toward the media.”

Lars Kjeldsen, one of Findsen’s two lawyers, said the 57-year-old career intelligence officer is “sad and shocked.” “He has cooperated fully…I remain baffled that it should not be possible to make public the charges and the basis for his detention.” “I think there would be a considerable debate if we actually [understood] what is going on here,” Kieldsen told reporters.

Kjeldsen is not allowed to comment on the substance of the case for fear of violating the same Criminal Code §109. Media headlines in recent days have spoken of this case as an “Unprecedented Scandal,” “Spectacular,” “Violent,” “Internal Chaos” and “Something’s Rotten in Denmark”!

The right-wing daily, Jyllands-Posten, editorialized that “Denmark’s security and credibility stand to become the big loser” no matter how the case ends, and that it “undoubtedly must trigger the question: What is rotten in Denmark?”

Several of these silver-coated metal boxes containing prosecution documents were carried into court. [Source: dr.dk]

Bonnichsen wrote that Findsen made “the largest turnaround process in PET’s history. We created a modern organization with greater openness about the work of the service, with a website, annual report; meetings were held with the press and interviews were given. I find it infinitely difficult to see that such a profile has a motive for national harm, but let the process determine this.”

Five days after Findsen and the other three were arrested, the three-judge government commission delivered its year-long report on the FE whistleblower case: “Acquitted: There is no basis for criticism of either FE or its employees in this case.” No more details were forthcoming. [Kommission frikender Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste | avisendanmark.dk]

“There are no grounds for critique,” informed Minister Trine Bramsen. “I am very satisfied with that conclusion.” Nevertheless, Findsen is not back on the job as FE chief but in prison.

Apparently, that has had no effect on the government’s prosecution or the judge concerned. We do not know if it has even been brought out in court, as lawyers are forbidden to speak about the proceedings. Nevertheless, anyone following this grave matter must wonder why the government’s investigation by judges cleared Findsen (maybe the others as well), but the police (PET) investigation resulted in arrest with the severest of charges against intelligence officers.

To confound matters all the more, the Ministry of Justice has also charged Claus Hjort Frederiksen, a leading hawk member of Parliament and defense minister (2016-19), with the same law leveled against Findsen. Hjort revealed this in mid-January; the Justice ministry has been silent.

“I can confirm that I have been charged under Section 109 of the Penal Code for violating the limits of my freedom of expression. I have expressed myself as a member of parliament on a political matter and I have nothing further to add at this stage. But I could never dream of doing anything that could harm Denmark or Denmark’s interests.”

Former Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen (Venstre Party) observing tank war games in Denmark, 2017. [Source: oifi.dk]

“I came home after a massage on December 20 last year. Two policemen came to my door and handed me a citation that I was charged with Criminal Code §109. I was shocked. I have not been charged with any criminal offense in my life. This charge is about nationally harmful activities with a sentence of up to 12 years in prison.” The charge does not explain what he is supposed to have done.

Hjort has not been jailed, as members of Parliament have certain immunity rights that can be removed by parliament only in exceptional cases. That could be forthcoming; however, the Ministry of Justice has made no comment on the matter. Hjort was recently sent material that he had violated required silence about “state secrets,” which he says is not the case.

Hjort believes the claim has to do with a television interview and newspaper articles he participated in more than a year ago. He said he did not state anything that had not already come out in the media. A former head of FE, Thomas Ahrenkiel, had been one of four leading FE men suspended in August 2020 after a whistleblower informed Danish media about what he considered to be constitutionally illegal surveillance of all Danish citizens and other residents, which is sent to NSA. Denmark has also spied upon its closest European leaders. [See below.]

Edward Snowden first revealed in 2013 some of this spying, XKEYSCORE, which also involves spying within the “international community.”

Hjort had also stated that Denmark is part of the U.S.’s 9 Eyes: UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand—5 Eyes—plus the Netherlands, Norway and France. There is also “14 Eyes,” which includes Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and Spain. The U.S. and UK started the first Eyes just after WWII to exchange “security secrets.”

The first 2 eyes, U.S.-UK, signed an agreement on March 5, 1946, to spy upon the Soviet Union.

Already the year before—at the close of the war in Europe—Winston Churchill had devised Operation Unthinkable—a surprise attack on Soviet forces in Europe, with the possible use of atomic weapons against Moscow, Stalingrad and Kiev. It did not happen because he lost the July 1945 election to Labour Party leader Clement Attlee. Additionally, President Harry Truman did not have enough atomic bombs. The few he had were used the next month against Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The only official restrictions set upon the Eyes is that they must not spy on their own citizens. However, Edward Snowden proved that the U.S. does so. While U.S. authorities have lied about the fact that they spy upon everyone in the U.S., Britain passed a law—the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016—granting the state the power to record anyone’s browsing history, text messages and connection logs.

The USA PATRIOT Act, following 9/11, allows the government to force social media to turn over any information they have on customers—that means all of us.

Hjort’s former political party leader and PM, Lars Loekke Rasmussen (Venstre Party) called charges against him an “over-reaction…which could have been avoided…here lies the germ of a political scandal.”

What has been unraveling for 18 months seems to show that Denmark is the U.S.’s lead Eye into spying on other European allies. The Nordic countries share the same original language and cultural roots, including having been the warring slave-trading Vikings. Sweden and especially Norway were also under Danish colonial control for centuries.

Spying on them and their own citizens has nothing to do with spying upon the U.S./Denmark’s new “Cold War enemies”: Russia, China and Iran.

Background on FE-NSA Spying Since 1990s Eyes, and Since 2008 Through Fiber Cables

In August 2020, I wrote the first of several CAM pieces about this unprecedented exposure of rampant spying on all Danes and other residents, and other Europeans, all to please the United States of America’s self-purported interests in managing the world’s affairs.

A military whistleblower first reported on illegal espionage to the military leadership in 2015. His superiors ignored his reports. Four years later, he revealed illegal spying to the new Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee (TET), and later to Danish media.

Some information about what appears to be long-standing illegalities in the Defense Intelligence Service, which TET presented on August 24, includes:

1. Withholding “key and crucial information to government authorities” and the oversight committee between 2014 and today;
2. Illegal activities even before 2014;
3. Telling “lies” to policymakers;
4. Illegal surveillance on Danish citizens, including a member of the oversight committee. [Some of this illegal spying had been shared with unnamed sources (perhaps the U.S.?)];
5. Unauthorized activities have been shelved; and
6. The FE failed to follow up on indications of espionage within areas of the Ministry of Defense.

TET was created in 2014 with five civilian members, experts in the rule of law, chief judges and professors. It has eight employees and a budget of only $1.3 million. TET told the media that, in November 2019, it received from unnamed whistleblower(s) four thick ring binders of classified material showing FE illegalities. When TET delivered its report to the government, it asked Parliament to create a whistleblower scheme for the FE, which it has not done.

Operation Dunhammer is the code name for an FE internal investigation, begun in 2012, concerning NSA sucking all surveillance out of Denmark. Who knew about that? Was it sanctioned by top Danish leaders over decades? Those questions are at the heart of the current growing scandal.

“Four leading Defense Intelligence Service personnel were suspended on Monday, August 24, pending an independent investigation into serious charges of illegalities—amounting to what the liberal Danish daily Politiken is calling the greatest ‘life scandal in its history’.”

Lars Findsen, his predecessor, Thomas Ahrenkiel, and two other current intelligence officers, were temporarily suspended. A fifth was suspended later. After Bramsen was bombarded with protests from opposition politicians, they were placed in military positions other than intelligence until a three-judge commission investigated the matter for more than a year, until December 2021. The government would not explain what it would and would not look into.

“We cannot expect that most of the possible illegalities committed will be made public,” Bramsen said. “Denmark’s intelligence services are connected to and dependent upon foreign powers [i.e., the U.S.]. Denmark could be compromised if secrets were revealed.”

Claus Hjort speculated for the daily Ekstra Bladet that he might be in trouble with the Ministry of Justice, because he had told the media that then-Defense Minister Bramsen should have handled the sensitive information about FE/NSA spying much better. She should have prevented TET from sending out a news release with its critique of FE, and that she should not have suspended the four leading FE figures.

For several months, DR worked with journalists from Sweden (SVT), Norway, Germany (Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, WDR) and France (Le Monde) on these developments. Their work forced some of the 35 national leaders, known to be spied upon to come forward.

“We demand to be fully informed about matters concerning Swedish citizens, companies and interests,” Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told national broadcaster SVT.

The leaders of Germany and France said that spying on them is “unacceptable among allies.”

PM Merete Frederiksen’s Social Democrat (SD) government neither confirmed nor denied the assertions, simply stating that such spying is “unacceptable among allies.”

Macron and Merkel. [Source: a2news.com]

This was one of the key questions for Defense Minister Bramsen and Justice Minister Nick Haekkerup when they were in consultation with the Folketing [Parliament] Defense Committee. They would not reply “for fear there are major risks if confidential information from the intelligence services comes out publicly” said Minister Bramsen. Apparently, the committee did not ask if the government would continue spying on its own citizens.

NSA and FE signed an agreement in 2008 that enables NSA to tap huge amounts of data sourced from Danish fiber-optic communication cables passing through Denmark. This metadata is stored by the Danish Defense Intelligence Service in a center called Sandagergãrd built with NSA guidance and technical assistance on the small Danish island of Amager to which the NSA has access.

Sandagergãrd is one of three Danish military-intelligence “listening posts” which trawl through and analyze global internet data seeking information, for example, on what Terma, Denmark’s largest weapons firm, has. This is clearly an intrusion on capitalism’s basic principle and need for free-market competition.

Danish military base’s data center at Sandagergãrd close to Copenhagen, on the island of Amager, to which NSA has access. [Source: datacenterdynamics.com]

In 2013, XKEYSCORE was NSA’s most advanced electronic surveillance program, which Edward Snowden exposed. Another NSA whistleblower, William Binney, had designed a program prior to XKEYSCORE, which could be used for extensive surveillance. He opposed using it to spy on entire populations, and resigned in 2001 after 30 years’ service. When XKEYSCORE was designed, it had greater capabilities than ECHELON in that it could access all users’ emails, all computer communications, and even spy on us from our computer screens that have cameras.

[Source: covertactionmagazine.com]

In 2016, the government decided to buy 27 F-35s to replace F-16s. The price today is around $10 billion, which is double the country’s annual defense budget. After years of technical problems, the first F-35s for Denmark were to have arrived two years ago. Not one is yet in sight, fortunately.

Besides land-based electronic surveillance, there are hundreds of transoceanic submarine cables carrying information between many countries. For decades, Denmark has had a key cable connected to the U.S., which NSA taps into. In addition, there are new submarine commercial cables.

Denmark and Iraq

The first and last serious case of illegalities connected to the government and its military intelligence service took place in 2004. Major Frank Grevil was an analyst at FE. He led a report that concluded there was no solid evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction.

This information was forwarded to then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen who lied to the public, stating he was “absolutely certain” Iraq had such weapons.

Rasmussen convinced a majority in parliament to declare war on Iraq because it had such weapons—as though that is a global crime in itself but not for the West. Hundreds of Danish soldiers and mercenaries were sent to Iraq to murder thousands. Military aircraft and ships were also later sent to Afghanistan and Libya. Some 50 Danish warriors were killed in a 15-year period.

Grevil’s conscience bothered him so he let the media know the prime minister had lied. He was identified and charged under Criminal Code §152 for violating a secrecy obligation. Since it was only an internal report to the PM, the more severe §109 provision was not used. He received the maximum sentence of six months’ imprisonment, serving four months, and lost his job. The prime minister, on the other hand, served two terms and the U.S. then rewarded him with the top NATO post.

Major Grevil speaks to the media about the case. [Source: alchetron.com]

PM Rasmussen doused in “red blood.” The activists were jailed for four months (serving 70 days in isolation), fined $40,000 plus court and damage costs of approximately $200,000. [Source: BT]

[Source: twitter.com]

Danish Journalists Could Be Imprisoned in U.S. for Whistleblower Revelations

Denmark’s Constitution (Grundlov) from 1849, Chapter 8, §72, is as close as Denmark’s fundamental law comes to the U.S.’s First Amendment guarantee of free press and speech, and the right to privacy.

“The home is inviolable. House investigations, seizures and examinations of letters and other papers, as well as breaches of postal, telegraph and telephone secrecy, where no law confers a special exemption, may be carried out solely on the form of a court order.”

When that law speaks of the “home” it also means the people living in that home, and “other papers” includes today’s e-mails and internet searches. Has any subsequent law changed that guarantee? CAM asked an expert in constitutional law who responded that it would take many hours to determine the answer. Unfortunately, he did not have the time (or, apparently, the interest) to do so.

Is Criminal Code §109 such a possibility? I asked a former member of TET, political science professor Joergen Groennegaard Christensen. He had written in Weekend Avisen that the laws governing state secrets are “very broadly formulated,” “really problematic” and that, in recent years, “intelligence services have been freed from restrictions they were earlier subject to.”

Christensen spoke cautiously due to his “sealed lips duty,” and the fact that he is not an attorney, but he indicated that the constitution is “not absolute”—that one or more laws could be interpreted as making exceptions to civil liberties guarantees.

Given these circumstances, it is certainly ironic that Denmark’s media have not covered England’s extradition trial of the Australian Julian Assange, nor do they openly support him. The U.S. government had long denied that Assange is a publisher but changed course midway in the extradition trial. The U.S. now contends that he is a publisher, thereby asserting that journalists worldwide can be prosecuted in the U.S. for reporting the “U.S.’s national security secrets.”

In December 2020, DR foreign news editor Niels Kvale and I communicated concerning press freedoms and why DR does not cover Julian Assange’s extradition trial.

Kvale responded to my complaint of suppression of this important news. He wrote that “importance is the most important criterion” in making DR’s determination of what to cover.

Extraditing an Australian publisher to the U.S.—which could imprison Assange for 175 years for 17 alleged violations of its Espionage Act—is apparently not important enough. By not covering this trial, let alone not coming out in support of Assange and WikiLeaks, DR may not yet realize that its reporters and editors can also be prosecuted for violating the 1917 Espionage Act. In 1961, the U.S. Congress removed language that restricted the Act’s application to U.S. territory and its inhabitants. Importantly, the motivations for revealing war crimes are not allowed as a defense in U.S. courts. That is a clear warning to all that the U.S. does not abide by basic democratic rights of free press and free speech.

I spoke by telephone with DR editor Kvale about the U.S. government threat. He replied: “I was not aware of that. This sounds interesting. Send me your article and I will inform our journalists.”

Well, a year later, Danish journalists must now realize that the Assange matter is of concern to them. Yet they still do not incorporate Julian’s punishment for publishing factual documentation of state war crimes into their reports. In these months that the media have been reporting what a Danish whistleblower(s) has revealed, and now with the government desperate to worm its way out of a chaotic mess it feels is damaging its cozy relationship with Big Daddy, reporters still refuse to make any association with the legitimate Assange/WikiLeaks work for real democracy: transparency.

Denmark’s’ temporary FE chief, Svend Larsen, and PET chief Finn Borch Andersen personally admonished two dailies, Politiken and Extra Bladet, for suggesting that those arrested on December 9 had divulged information to Danish media about those agencies, that they had committed illegalities to please the U.S.

The spy chiefs also warned other daily newspapers that they have a duty to be “silent” about such secrets. They also threatened to use Criminal Code §109 with 12 years’ imprisonment against them, the same law now being used against FE Chief Findsen.

The Communist Party’s website article on this matter maintains that, since FE and PET warned the media not to reveal any more leaks, at least one article has been stopped from publication.

No doubt, Denmark’s government is emboldened by the British aristocratic “high court” decision to help the U.S. silence all journalists about “national security secrets” by deciding to extradite publisher Julian Assange to a U.S. torture prison.

Edward Snowden told Politiken (January 22) that this is a “democratic scandal.”

By charging whistleblowers with high crimes, the Danish state is “moving in an authoritarian course—punishing people for telling the truth to a population that needs to know,” says the activist-whistleblower. “This should be a screaming red alarm for everybody that something is all wrong.”

Snowden says that Danish and American laws about national security secrets have to do with handing over national secrets to enemies, especially in times of war—that is classic espionage—and should not be spying on their own citizens and friendly neighbors.

Interviewer Sebastian Stryhn Kjekdtoft speculated that whoever the FE whistleblower is who passed on secrets to the oversight committee TET, may have been inspired by Snowden’s 2013 revelations. Snowden says he does not know who he is, but he feels “inspired by that person’s courage and ability to do it. He has captured them [those responsible] breaking the law and the civil rights of everybody in Denmark and the whole world.”

The former CIA/NSA employee turned people’s activist hopes that Danes will be inspired to demand answers from the government instead of allowing a blackout. “I think the Danish society has a duty to support that person [the whistleblower]…and see to it that the situation is changed.”

A. When you have such enormous surveillance with all of internet…some slips through…NSA is indifferent…Not because Denmark is an enemy, rather that NSA is part of the American state, which seeks to maximize its power and influence in all corners of the world.

Q: The Danish government considers partnership with NSA vital. Justice Minister Nick Hækkerup recently spoke of a paradox, “the secret that lays in the intelligence service, is part of the foundation so that we can preserve our freedom.”

A: That is silly, really silly…The idea that Denmark finds itself in a threatened situation, such that, in desperation, you reduce yourself to some kind of colony in USA’s foreign policy department is hopeless…And when you gather communication on everybody outside Denmark, treating them as second-class citizens, you create enemies.

Snowden told the reporter that he has seen the most secret documents about Danish-American cooperation. Each prime minister and president signs an agreement (which permits massive surveillance), which is shown to and signed by each successor. “A form of written handshake…There is no public debate allowed, nothing must be known. How can that be considered democratic?”

“Just because an official comes out and says that something is secret and cannot by law be disclosed doesn’t make it so. If a government does something illegal but calls it ‘secret,’ and any who discloses this is a ‘traitor,’ so raises the question: Who is the real enemy? In that case, the enemy is the people. The media is an intelligence service for a free society.”

Snowden furthermore explained that the U.S.-Danish government heads’ agreement sets in motion the technological problem that effective filtering is “impossible.” He adds that spies think they “need as much data as possible.”

Q. Kjekdtoft ended the interview by asking Snowden what he thought about intelligence

chiefs’ threat to at least eight journalists, himself included, that they must testify in an eventual court case that could run the course of several years.

A. “This is really extortion. If the government mixes in press freedom there should be civil opposition…If the government is stupid enough to demand that journalists [serve as] witness in this case, so it is the government that is in the dock and not the journalists or their sources.”

That is basically what several national and international civil liberties and press freedom organizations conclude as well. Nevertheless, neither those that I have seen nor Politiken’s interviewer, is willing to point out that the precedent for this is the case against WikiLeaks/Julian Assange. (And, of course, the case against Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which we won.)

The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) is one of several such organizations, which has condemned Danish authorities for threatening journalists with imprisonment.

“The overly broad application of national security laws to criminalize the press, combined with attempts to stifle publication of public interest journalism designed to hold authorities to account, is of growing concern globally. It is a favored tactic of oppressive, authoritarian regimes and we sincerely hope this is not a direction that Denmark is choosing to go towards.”

“This is nothing short of intimidation by the authorities in an attempt to impose pre-publication censorship,” said WAN-IFRA CEO Vincent Peyrègne.

WAN-IFRA spokespeople refused to answer CAM’s question about why the association refuses to take a stand on Assange.

Mads Brandstrup, chief executive officer of Danske Medier, the Danish Media Association, said: “The intelligence services must subject themselves to public scrutiny just as any other part of government. I find this kind of approach deeply concerning and it should have no place in a democratic society.”

“Can the government guarantee that the Danish Defense Intelligence Service does not allow the U.S. secret service NSA to spy on Denmark’s neighboring countries?” wrote DR, September 26, 2021. 

This was one of the key questions for then-Defense Minister Bramsen and Justice Minister Haekkerup when they were consulting with the Folketing [Parliament] Defense Committee. They could not reply “for fear there are major risks if confidential information from the intelligence services comes out publicly” said Minister Bramsen. Apparently, the Defense Committee did not ask if the government would continue spying on its own citizens.

1. “Winner of Pulitzer Prize, 2015, and NYT bestseller involves a Parisian father and daughter fleeing invading Nazis with “invaluable secrets.” The novel is a study in how people against all odds try to find out what is right and good. Besides being framed for “treason”—perhaps a whistleblower for democracy—Findsen must also be an avid reader of Graham Greene, John le Carré and Kafka.”↑
2. Criminal Code §109 : Anyone who reveals or transmits secret notifications, sub-actions, consultations or decisions of the State in cases in which the security or rights of the State in relation to foreign States, or which relate to significant socio-economic interests abroad, is punishable by imprisonment up to 12 years. [Author’s translation] The only other time this statute was applied was in 1980 when a man named Jorg received six years’ imprisonment for smuggling Danish state secrets concerning atomic and oil energy for East Germany’s Stasi. His lover, Karen Vinter, who photographed secret documents, received 18 months’ imprisonment. ↑

covertactionmagazine.com

The surveillance activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Portland and other American cities earlier this year is reminiscent of FBI-CIA-NSA efforts to disrupt anti-Vietnam protest groups in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2021, FBI agents, dressed in plainclothes,  were embedded in Portland’s racial justice protests.  Agents alerted local police to potential arrests. The Department of Justice and its Office of the Inspector General must investigate these activities closely because they replicate the illegal activities of the FBI’s counterintelligence program during the Cold War.

The FBI has been conducting domestic surveillance operations since its inception in the 1920s, marking nearly a hundred years of violating the First Amendment of the Constitution.  Very few of these operations involved the investigation and gathering of evidence of a serious crime, the only justification for FBI surveillance.  J. Edgar Hoover, appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in1924, amassed illegal powers of surveillance that enabled him to conduct extra-legal tracking of activists, collect compromising information, and even to threaten and intimidate sitting presidents.

Hoover created the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1950s to counter the activities of the Communist Party in the United States, but it morphed into a program of covert and illegal activities to disrupt numerous political organizations, particularly the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights organizations of the 1960s and 1970s.  He exaggerated the threat of communism to ensure financial and public support for the FBI.  (The Pentagon similarly exaggerates the Russian and Chinese threats to elicit greater defense spending, such as the record-setting budget that President Biden signed on Monday.)  When Supreme Court decisions made it more difficult to prosecute individuals for their political opinions, Hoover formalized a covert “dirty tricks” program that included illegal wiretaps, forged documents, and burglaries.

The FBI programs were ostensibly designed to protect U.S. national security, but targets were typically nonviolent and had no connections with foreign powers.  Martin Luther King Jr. became a major target when he emerged as the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement. Hoover authorized an anonymous blackmail letter to King in 1964, urging him to commit suicide.  The FBI worked to widen the rift between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, which ultimately led to Malcolm’s assassination in 1965.

COINTELPRO soon expanded to include the illegal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense.  From the Church Committee hearings in 1975, we learned that NSA worked with Western Union to collect copies of telegrams that entered and left the United States.  The FBI worked with AT&T to eavesdrop on domestic political opponents and civil rights advocates.  The CIA program, aptly named Operation Chaos, was late to the game in 1967, cooperating with the White House to investigate the anti-war movement and to find evidence of Soviet control.  There was none.  In any event, the CIA charter prevents any involvement in domestic operations for any reason.

The Congress developed a law to regulate surveillance for national security purposes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which led to the creation of a secret court that approved nearly every U.S. request for secret surveillance against U.S. citizens.  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ultimately expanded secret powers that allowed warrantless surveillance on domestic soil.  A top-secret FISA Court order required a subsidiary of Verizon to provide a daily, on-going feed to domestic calls to NSA.

The NSA’s involvement in massive surveillance against U.S. citizens was exposed by the revelations of Edward Snowden ten years ago.  Snowden leaked an internal NSA directive that told its employees to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities.  It noted, “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”  Snowden has been vilified, although his public service alerted the entire country to the dangers of massive surveillance.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice has a full slate of possible investigations regarding the January 6 insurrection, but the role of the FBI in Portland and other U.S. cities must not be ignored. (It is noteworthy that there was no FBI presence on the Hill on January 6.)  FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress in September 2020 that the domestic terrorist investigations were “properly predicated” regarding “violent anarchist extremists.”  He provided no evidence to support the surveillance of political gatherings, which demands a high bar to allow such activities.  Unfortunately, we know a great deal more about the surveillance activities of Russia and China against its own citizens than we know about the role of the FBI in “spying” on democracy at home.

Following a request from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the DoJ’s Office of the Inspector General has begun an investigation of the FBI’s role in Portland.  The Portland protests were consistent with free speech activities that didn’t require a FBI presence.  The FBI is authorized to conduct surveillance when there is a threat of federal crimes or a risk to national security.  The Department of Homeland also took part in the surveillance, compiling intelligence reports on protesters without any legal justification.  DHS did its best to conceal identities and affiliations of its officials.

George Orwell’s “1984” represented the all-seeing state with a two-way television set installed in every home.  Today’s location-tracking cell phones provide actual access and too much power over our lives.  There is far too much unmonitored federal surveillance and unregulated cyber-surveillance.  The combination of modern technology; a seemingly unlimited budget for intelligence operations; and the secret accumulation of a surveillance bureaucracy has created an unacceptable degree of “spying on democracy.”

Unfortunately, the American public has ignored policies and political actions that in fact weaken U.S. stature abroad and our democracy at home.  The anti-war movement and the arms control lobby are endangered institutions. According to the New York Times, U.S. bombings since 2014 have consistently killed civilians with virtually no effort from the Pentagon to discern how many were killed and what went wrong.  According to Airwars, a nonprofit organization, the United States has conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes in seven major conflict zones since 2001, with at least 22,00 civilian deaths.

The Pentagon and the CIA used sadistic torture and abuse, but faced no accountability.  CIA Director John Brennan even tried to block the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation of these programs, but suffered no consequences despite the obvious violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.  Meanwhile, President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex have been ignored.  As a result, our bloated defense spending has limited opportunities to expand needed domestic programs and to rebuild infrastructure.

It takes physical courage to fight our wars, but it takes moral courage to expose the illegalities of our military involvement.  We need more dissidents and whistleblowers to expose the secrecy and lies that often accompany our national security decision making.  The overuse of secrecy limits our debate on foreign policy and deprives citizens of information needed to debate life-and-death issues. A culture of openness is needed to remedy the decision making of the past 20 years that resulted in so much harm to our governance and democracy.

counterpunch.org

Two former or current secret surveillance officers for Denmark’s Military Intelligence Service (Forsvars Efterretningstjeneste FE) and two current or former Police Secret Service (Politiets Efterretningstjeneste PET) were arrested for leaking “deeply confidential information”. Three of them appeared before Copenhagen’s City Court yesterday. To fængslet i hemmeligt grundlovsforhør: Medarbejdere anholdt for lækager fra FE og PET | Indland | DR

The court forbad media coverage in court. The nine-hour indictment hearing was held behind double locked doors. Denmarks Radio (DR), the public service radio-television-online medium, learned only that three of the four were heard in court, one was released and two remanded in custody. There is no information about the fourth person arrested.

FE is the equivalent to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. While the FE jurisdiction also covers military intelligence, they must not spy on Danish people—only foreigners and those in other countries. The Police Intelligence Service (PET) surveils Danes, as the FBI surveils people within the U.S. The constitution forbids blanket spying on any Danish resident without court approval.

Trine Maria Ilsoee, DR legal reporter, wrote that there is “nearly no precedence” that there is an “internal investigation in PET and FE.” If found guilty they could end up in prison for 12 years. (1)

As of now, the public does not know what the leaking is about. Ilsoee mentions two possibilities. One of those is Denmark’s biggest spying scandal to date.

Last May, Denmarks Radio (DR) published information provided by at least one FE whistleblower exposing how Danish governments (right and so-called left) have been violating its own constitution by spying upon all its inhabitants and upon its closest neighbor leaders. Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste lod USA spionere mod Angela Merkel, franske, norske og svenske toppolitikere gennem danske internetkabler | Indland | DR (2) (See France and Germany ‘seeking full clarity’ from US and Denmark on spying report – CNN )

Ironically, it may be that the state prosecutor in the current case is contending that those charged have violated Denmark’s constitution by revealing secrets. This may well be associated with the US’s Espionage Act, and Britain’s Official Secrets Act.

FE has been illegally and systematically spying upon its own citizens for United States economic profit and political interests. This has nothing to do with spying upon their “enemies” (Russia, China, Iran, et al.).

Operation Dunhammer is the codename for a FE internal investigation of how the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) was sucking all surveillance out of its spy network with the Danish military secret service.

For several months DR has been working with journalists from Sweden (SVT), Norway, Germany (Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, WDR) and France (Le Monde) on these new developments. Their work forced some of 35 national leaders known to be spied upon by the U.S. to come forth.

“We demand to be fully informed about matters concerning Swedish citizens, companies and interests. And then we have to see how the answer sounds from the political side in Denmark,” Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told national broadcaster SVT.

Norway, Sweden Demand Answers on Espionage After Report of Denmark Helping NSA Spy on EU Politicians – Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

PM Emmanuel Macron said such behavior is “unacceptable among allies”.

Danish Defense Minister Trine Bramsen said the government “cannot and will not enter into speculation about intelligence matters”, yet she emphasized that she views the systematic wiretapping of close allies as “unacceptable”.

The information of long-standing illegalities, which the understaffed and weak Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee (TET) presented to the public last August, includes:

1. Withholding “key and crucial information to government authorities” and the oversight committee between 2014 and today;
2. Illegal activities even before 2014;
3. Telling “lies” to policy makers;
4. Illegal surveillance on Danish citizens, including a member of the oversight committee. (Some of this illegal spying had been shared with unnamed sources [perhaps the U.S.?]);
5. Unauthorized activities have been shelved and;
6. The FE failed to follow up on indications of espionage within areas of the Ministry of Defense.

When DR first exposed some of this spying, Defense Minister Bramsen suspended five FE leaders responsible. Under pressure from several political parties, and most likely the U.S., she reinstated them in different jobs.

Bramsen said that a secret internal investigation into the reports by TET would begin in December and last one year. Results will be shown only to a select few in government and to only five parliamentarians, who must not share information with anyone else.

What is to be and not be investigated will not be revealed either. That was made clear by the government to DR when it first published the whistleblower’s revelations. Reporter Trine Marie Ilsøee wrote:

“We cannot expect that most of the possible illegalities committed will be made public.” She added that Denmark’s intelligence services are connected to and dependent upon foreign powers [i.e. U.S. and not Europe]. Denmark could be compromised if secrets were revealed. “After all, intelligence services operate in secrecy.”

Edward Snowden first revealed some of this spying, XKEYSCORE, in 2013, which also involves spying within the “international community”. XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications (theintercept.com) and Portrait of the NSA: no detail too small in quest for total surveillance | NSA | The Guardian.

Denmark is one of the US’s closest Eyes, part of “9 Eyes” (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand—5 Eyes—plus the Netherlands, Norway and France, and “14 Eyes”, which includes Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and Spain).

What is unravelling seems to show that Denmark is US’s lead Eye into spying on other European allies. The Nordic countries share the same original language and cultural roots, including having been the warring Vikings. Sweden and especially Norway were also under Danish colonial control for centuries. Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine.

Notes

(1) FE Major Frank Grevil revealed in 2004 that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen knew that Iraq did not have “massive weapons of destruction” when he convinced the parliament to declare war on that country. This was the first time Denmark had declared war since 1864 when it did so against Germany. Rasmussen was rewarded by being named head of NATO. Grevil went to prison for four months. This was Denmark’s Julian Assange case, albeit the Yankees and British aristocratic state seek Julian’s death.

(2) The headline reads in English: FE (Military Secret Service) let USA Spy against Angela Merkel, French, Norwegian and Swedish top politicians through Danish internet cables. (The US had helped provide the technology.)

By Kit KLARENBERG

Was the government of Australia aware of the US Central Intelligence Agency plot to assassinate Julian Assange, an Australian citizen and journalist arrested and now imprisoned under unrelentingly bleak, harsh conditions in the UK?

Why have the country’s elected leaders refused to publicly advocate for one of its citizens, who has been held on dubious charges and subjected to torture by a foreign power, according to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer? What does Canberra know about Julian’s fate and when did it know it?

The Grayzone has obtained documents revealing that the Australian government has since day one been well-aware of Julian’s cruel treatment inside London’s maximum security Belmarsh Prison, and has done little to nothing about it. It has, in fact, turned a cold shoulder to the jailed journalist despite hearing his testimony of conditions “so bad that his mind was shutting down.”

Not only has Canberra failed to effectively challenge the US and UK governments overseeing Assange’s imprisonment and prosecution; as these documents expose in stark detail, it appears to have colluded with them in the flagrant violation of an Australian citizen’s human rights, while doing its best to obscure the reality of his situation from the public.

On knowledge of CIA plot against Assange, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs issues snide non-denial denial

In the wake of Yahoo News’ startling September revelations of CIA plans to surveil, kidnap, and even kill WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which confirmed and built upon a May 2020 exposé by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, officials in the NATO-oriented ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network struggled to get their stories straight.

William Evanina, Washington’s top counterintelligence officer until his retirement in early 2021, told Yahoo the Five Eyes alliance was “critical” to Langley’s dastardly plot, and “we were very confident” that Julian’s potential escape from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London could be prevented, by hook or by crook.

When asked whether the US had ever briefed or consulted the government of Julian’s native Australia on the operation, however, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) dodged the question. For his part, Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Prime Minister at the time of these deadly deliberations, claimed, “the first I heard about this was in today’s media.”

It is certainly possible that elected officials in Canberra were kept in the dark about the CIA’s proposals. Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was unaware of the very existence of Five Eyes until 1973, 17 years after his country became a signatory to the network’s underpinning UKUSA agreement, following police raids on the offices of domestic spying agency the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, due to its withholding of information from the government.

Whether or not Turnbull was aware of the operation, DFAT’s response when a member of Julian’s family contacted the Department demanding Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne ask the Biden administration to drop the charges against him, and seeking comment on the Yahoo article, was disturbingly flippant.

“Just because it’s written in a newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true…the CIA has been accused of a lot of things, including faking the Moon landing,” a DFAT official quipped in a classic non-denial denial.

These crude remarks were recorded in a letter sent to Payne by John Shipton, Julian’s father. The missive is just one of many documents provided exclusively to Grayzone by Kellie Tranter, Julian’s legal authority in Australia.

For years, Tranter has filed freedom of information requests with the Australian government in a campaign to uncover its true position on Julian, and to what extent its intimate alliance with Washington has limited its ability or willingness to push for his freedom.

The documents acquired by Tranter expose Canberra as anything but an advocate for Assange, the Australian citizen. Instead, throughout Julian’s time in the Ecuadorian Embassy, and imprisonment at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Belmarsh high security prison – “Britain’s Gitmo” – the Australian government has been determinedly committed to seeing, hearing, and speaking no evil in his regard, despite possessing clear evidence of his dramatically waning physical and mental health, and the torturous conditions of his confinement.

Assange informs Canberra of US violations of his rights: ‘This action was illegal’

The records of a brief visit by Australian consulate officers to Belmarsh on May 17th 2019, one month after Assange’s dramatic expulsion from the Embassy, are especially illustrative of Canberra’s attitude. Over the course of that meeting, Assange spoke in detail about prison conditions and his 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.

“He remains in his cell most of the day, with 40 minutes allocated each day for ‘associations’,” the Australian consular officials noted. “He is allowed outside for 30 minutes each day, although he said at times this does not happen,” for reasons unstated. Unable to eat at all “for a long period,” he was now ingesting “small amounts”, collecting meals from the kitchen and returning to his cell.

Permitted just two personal visits each month, plus legal consultations, Assange mentioned his recent meeting with Nils Melzer and two medical experts specialized in examining potential victims of torture and other ill-treatment, and that he had so far been unable to speak to his family.

The WikiLeaks co-founder eschewed work programs “which would afford him the opportunity to get out of his cell more often,” according to the diplomats, on the grounds that he refused to engage in “slave labour” and needed time to prepare his legal case. Prisoners in British jails earn an average of $13 per week for hard, thankless toil on behalf of big business, which in turn profits immensely from their rank exploitation.

While mercifully prescribed antibiotics and codeine by prison doctors for an infected root canal, which can be life-threatening in the event the infection spreads, Assange was still waiting on reading glasses and had yet to see an optometrist. The jailed journalist went on to describe how one senior officer “has it in for me,” showing his visitors a charge sheet indicating that a search of his cell uncovered a razor blade, and he’d failed to tidy it after an inspection.

A third infraction of any sort “would result in exercise privileges being withdrawn,” the document states. Possibly fearing reprisal, Assange asked that officials not raise these matters with prison authorities. Evidently, what might typically be considered an unambiguous indication of suicidal intentions was instead logged as a simple disciplinary matter.

Adding to his psychological toll, Assange reported that he had undergone blood tests, and been advised he was HIV-positive, a shocking diagnosis. However, subsequent examinations confirmed the test result to be a false positive, forcing Assange to wonder if the misdiagnosis was a mere error, or “something else.” It could well have been a grotesquely sick mind game, perhaps alluding to the bogus sexual assault allegations he had faced in Sweden, and intended to drive him toward madness.

Assange also presented the Australian consular officials with a recently-published UK Home Office deportation notice, informing him then-Secretary of State Sajid Javid had determined under the 1971 UK Immigration Act that his presence in the UK “was not conducive to the public interest, and he would be removed from the UK without delay,” with no chance of appealing the decision.

“Mr. Assange expressed concern about surviving the current process and fears he would die if taken to the US. He claimed the US was going through his possessions that had remained at the Ecuadorian Embassy. He said that this action was illegal,” the officers wrote. “He stated that his possessions included two valuable artworks he planned to sell to raise funds for his legal defence, the manuscripts of two books, and legal papers. He expressed concern his legal material would be used against him by the US.”

Assange was correct that sensitive documents were stolen by US authorities. Immediately following his arrest, his attorney Gareth Peirce contacted the Ecuadorian Embassy regarding this privileged material, demanding it be handed over as a matter of urgency. When at last his property was collected, all legal papers were missing save for two volumes of Supreme Court files “and a number of pages of loose correspondence,” making his extradition defense an even greater challenge than it already was.

Over the course of Julian’s initial extradition hearings in early 2020, assistant US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg implausibly pledged a “taint team” would excise material from these files so it would not be used in any resultant trial. Similarly feeble “assurances” of this ilk were offered during the recent appeal proceedings.

Conversely, there has so far been no unconvincing public guarantee against the abuse of any information illicitly obtained by UC Global, a CIA contractor, from its extensive surveillance of the Embassy. The Spanish private security firm went as far as bugging the building’s female bathroom, where the WikiLeaks founder conducted discussions with his lawyers, away from prying ears and eyes – or so he hoped.

Despite his situation, Julian somehow retained a vague shred of optimism about the future in discussions with consular officials, suggesting that the result of Australia’s federal election, which was held the very next day, “may present a window for a new government to do something supportive for his case,” asking that Marise Payne be briefed on developments.

As it was, Scott Morrison’s Liberal National Coalition retained its grip on power – and no alarm was publicly raised about anything learned over the course of the consular visit. Indeed, remaining tight-lipped on Julian’s suffering, no matter how horrendous, was to be a matter of dedicated policy.

Australia’s DFAT denies any role in “progressively severe abuse” of Assange

On May 30th that year, WikiLeaks’ made the shock announcement that Julian had been moved to Belmarsh’s medical ward, expressing “grave concerns” about the state of his health. Almost immediately, DFAT’s Global Watch Office fired off an internal email drawing attention to the post.

The following day, ​​UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Nils Melzer proclaimed “the collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!” The international legal veteran added that, “in 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution,” he had “never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

Next, Melzer fulminated against a “relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation” by the US, UK, Sweden and Ecuador, which had subjected him to “persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy.”

In response, Australia’s DFAT issued a statement rejecting any suggestion Canberra was “complicit in psychological torture or has shown a lack of consular support” in Assange’s regard, claiming to be “a staunch defender of human rights and strong advocate for humane treatment in the course of judicial processes,” and expressing confidence that he was “being treated appropriately.”

Due to “privacy considerations” allegedly extended to all consular clients, the Department declined to divulge any further details related to his physical or mental state.

It added that the Australian High Commission in London “previously raised any health concerns identified with Belmarsh prison authorities and these have been addressed,” with further inquiries made following Julian’s move to the health ward.

The documents provided to The Grayzone indicate Canberra did indeed make repeated enquiries to Belmarsh by phone and mail in the wake of Wikileaks’ announcement, all of which went unanswered for six straight days. So why did Australia’s High Commissioner not intervene, and demand immediate clarity on an issue of literal life-and-death urgency?

Whatever the reason for the Australian government’s foot-dragging, a consular file dated August 8th that year records how Shipton wrote to advise that Julian had been readmitted to Belmarsh’s sick bay, and a lawyer was drafting a letter to Marise Payne, requesting DFAT “use its diplomatic sources to seek an independent medical assessment (ie outside the prison).”

Then, 11 days later, Shipton mentioned that Julian’s brother, Gabriel, had recently visited the prison and was distressed by Assange’s “deteriorating condition,” leading him to write letters to both Australian Governor General David Hurley and Morrison raising his fears.

On October 21st, Assange appeared in court for a pre-trial hearing in his extradition case. As was widely reported in the mainstream media, he appeared frail and discombobulated, struggling to recall his own name and date of birth when asked by the judge. When the presiding justice enquired whether he even knew what was happening, Assange responded, “not exactly,” indicating conditions in Belmarsh left him unable to “think properly.”

“I don’t understand how this is equitable,” the imprisoned journalist stated. “I can’t research anything, I can’t access any of my writing. It’s very difficult where I am.”

Assange’s attorney, Mark Summers, argued that his initial extradition hearing, scheduled for February 2020, should be delayed by three months due to the complexity of the case – “the evidence…would test the limits of most lawyers,” he said, and discussed the immense difficulty of communicating with his client in the jail, given he lacked access to a computer.

The judge denied the request. As a result, Julian would be deprived of “the most basic of access to the bare minimum needs for proper representation” until just weeks prior to the hearing.

Assange attorney warns Australia’s DFAT of “impending crisis”

Three days later, Assange attorney Gareth Peirce wrote to the High Commission, asserting that if consular representatives had attended court, “they will have undoubtedly noted what was clear for everyone present in court to observe” – that his client was “in shockingly poor condition…struggling not only to cope but to articulate what he wishes to articulate.”

Unbelievably, a DFAT report on the proceedings unearthed by Tranter made no mention whatsoever of Julian’s disheveled appearance, or his clearly frayed mental state.

Peirce went on to argue that under the circumstances, it was unsurprising Julian had not authorized prison officials to provide the Australian government with information regarding his medical treatment, which had been “been grossly and unlawfully compromised over some time, including, disturbingly, even whilst he has been in Belmarsh prison, false information on at least one occasion having been provided to the press by very obviously internal sources.”

“We hope that what we are able to say…will be accepted by you as having been based on close observation, including by independent professional clinicians..Every professional warning provided to the prison, including by at least one independent doctor called in by Belmarsh, has been ignored,” she wrote. “We would be pleased to meet with you at any stage if by intervention in what is now an impending crisis [emphasis added], you can contribute to its amelioration and avoidance.”

And so it was that consular officials visited Belmarsh November 1st. In their exchange, Assange criticized false statements made to the media by DFAT which suggested he had rejected offers of their support.

Next, he revealed that a prison doctor was “concerned” about his condition. In fact, Assange said his psychological state was “so bad that his mind was shutting down,” almost permanent isolation making it impossible for him “to think or to prepare his defence.”

He did not even have a pen with which to write, was unable to do any research, could not receive documents during legal visits, and all his mail was read by prison officials before it was given to him.

The next month, Professor Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, prepared a report on Julian’s psychiatric state based on meetings throughout his first six months in Belmarsh, conversations with his parents, friends, colleagues and Stella Morris, his partner and mother of his two children.

As was revealed in Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s January ruling on the US extradition request, Kopelman diagnosed Julian with a severe recurrent depressive disorder, which was occasionally accompanied by psychotic features such as hallucinations, and frequent suicidal thoughts.

His symptoms furthermore included loss of sleep and weight, impaired concentration, a persistent feeling of being on the verge of tears, and state of acute agitation in which he paced his cell until exhausted, punching his head or banging it against the wall.

Assange commented to Kopelman that he believed his life was not worth living, he thought about suicide “hundreds of times a day,” and had a “constant desire” to self-harm or commit suicide, describing plans to kill himself that the professor considered “highly plausible.”

Calls to The Samaritans, a UK charity helpline providing emotional support to those in emotional distress, struggling to cope, or at risk of suicide, were “virtually” a nightly occurrence, and on occasions when he had not been able to reach them, Assange had slashed his thigh and abdomen to distract from his sense of isolation.

Kopelman concluded that, if Assange was held in solitary confinement in the US for a prolonged period, his mental health would “deteriorate substantially resulting in persistently severe clinical depression and the severe exacerbation of his anxiety disorder, PTSD and suicidal ideas,” not least because various “protective factors” available to him in the UK would be absent Stateside.

“For example, he speaks to his partner by telephone nearly every day and, before lockdown, was visited by her and his children, various friends, his father, and other relatives…[Kopelman] considered there to be an abundance of known risk factors indicating a very high risk of suicide,” Baraitser recorded. “He stated, ‘I am as confident as a psychiatrist ever can be that, if extradition to the US were to become imminent, Mr. Assange will find a way of suiciding.’”

The professor’s reports were fundamental to the extradition order’s rejection – a surprising outcome, given Baraitser previously approved extradition in 96% of cases upon which she has ruled.

Nonetheless, she accepted every other argument and charge put forward by the Department of Justice, in effect criminalizing a great many entirely legitimate journalistic activities, and setting the chilling precedent that citizens of any country can be extradited to the US for alleged breaches of its national laws, therefore implying Washington’s legal jurisdiction is global in scale.

Files on Australia’s DFAT discussions with US Secretary of State redacted in full

In response to the ruling, Australia’s Shadow Attorney General Mark Dreyfus issued a forceful statement, declaring the opposition Labor party believed “this has dragged on for long enough,” particularly given Julian’s “ill-health,” and demanding the Morrison administration “do what it can to draw a line under this matter and encourage the US government to bring this matter to a close.”

Conversely, DFAT published a characteristically laconic, soulless note, stating merely that Australia was “not a party to the case and will continue to respect the ongoing legal process,” and rehashing previous false claims that Julian had rejected multiple offers of consular assistance.

Canberra was simply silent when in June, the Icelandic publication Stundin revealed in detail how a “superseding indictment” levelled against Assange in September 2020, which charged that he and others at WikiLeaks “recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions,” was based largely on the admittedly false testimony of fraudster, diagnosed sociopath and convicted pedophile Siggi Thordarson, who had previously embezzled vast sums from WikiLeaks and been recruited by the FBI to undermine its founder from within.

There is good reason to believe the Australian government knew the indictment was coming. In July that year, Foreign Minister Payne met with CIA director Mike Pompeo at an Australia–US Ministerial Consultations convention, “the principal forum for bilateral consultations” between the country and the US.

Tranter submitted freedom of information requests for details of that rendezvous, but the documents she received in return were fully redacted. As were files released to her relating to the Foreign Minister’s summit with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May 2021.

It was almost certain that Assange was a subject of these meetings. DFAT claims Payne “raised the situation” when she met Blinken again in September, and the minister herself alleges she specifically discussed Australia’s “expectations” regarding Assange’s treatment with UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab when he visited Canberra in February 2020. Tranter requested records related to this meeting too, but was told none existed.

Upon Julian’s arrest, Prime Minister Morrison alleged he would receive “the same treatment that any other Australian would get.”

“When Australians travel overseas and then find themselves in difficulties with the law, they face the judicial systems of those countries,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t matter what particular crime it is that they’re alleged to have committed, that’s the way the system works.”

However, an internal email dated April 5th 2019 secured by Tranter from the Australian Attorney General’s office was shot through with contempt for the Wikileaks co-founder. The note asserted, “FYI – Assange might be evicted. Not sure if his lawyers will make any (not very convincing) [emphasis added] arguments about Australia’s responsibilities to him but thought it was worth flagging.”

As usual, Australian officials said nothing in public about Assange’s imminent abduction.

Assange’s treatment, and the total lack of outrage over his incarceration, prison conditions, blatant procedural abuses engaged in by Washington in their relentless pursuit of him, and CIA plans to kidnap and/or murder the WikiLeaks founder, diverges starkly from Australia’s approach to Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic jailed in Iran for 10 years on questionable charges of espionage in September 2018.

Behind the scenes, Australian diplomats struggled for almost two years to secure her release, eventually brokering a prisoner swap, under which she was traded for three Iranian inmates in Thailand – two of whom were convicted in connection with a 2012 bombing plot in Bangkok. In a statement, Foreign Minister Payne expressed relief that Moore-Gilbert was finally free as a result of “professional and determined work,” noting Canberra had “consistently rejected” the grounds on which she was detained.

Meanwhile, the Australian government has consistently reinforced Washington’s position on Assange. In fact, officials have on occasion gone even further than their US counterparts in publicly condemning him and his actions.

In December 2010, then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard declared WikiLeaks’ release of US diplomatic cables meant Assange was “guilty of illegality,” and that Federal Police were investigating, to offer “advice about potential criminal conduct of the individual involved.” To be fair to Canberra though, elected representatives there may effectively have no choice in the matter.

According to investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, each Five Eyes member theoretically has the right to veto a request for signals intelligence collected on an individual, group or organization collected by another. However, Campbells explained, “when you’re a junior ally like Australia or New Zealand, you never refuse,” even in situations when there are concerns about what ostensible allies may do with that sensitive information.

The documents obtained by Tranter and provided to The Grayzone provide an unobstructed view of the Australian junior ally’s betrayal of one of its citizens to the imperial power that has hunted him for years. As Julian Assange’s rights were violated at every turn, Canberra appears to have been complicit.

thegrayzone.com

An intriguing though fragmentary espionage story made headlines eleven days ago and then disappeared abruptly, suggesting that some folks in high places in the government and media were fearing that the full tale would prove to be embarrassing to someone. I am referring to the report of the arrest made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service of an American government employee who worked in nuclear engineering. Jonathan Toebbe and his wife Diana apparently had stolen highly sensitive information on nuclear propulsion systems and the stealth hull designs of the next generation U.S. Navy Virginia class attack submarine fleet and had been caught after several times seeking to sell their wares to what they thought to be a foreign power.

Two days after the arrest, the Toebbes appeared in court in Martinsburg West Virginia and were ordered to remain in jail as they were considered a flight risk. So far, so good but the interesting part of the story is that the intended purchaser was apparently not obvious adversaries like Russia and China, but rather an ostensibly friendly country, which was not identified. The Toebbes clearly thought they were offering their technology to a foreign country’s intelligence service, one presumes, but they were in fact in contact with the FBI, which allowed them to arrange dead drops in Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia and paid them to continue providing new material on small digital computer cards before closing the trap and making the arrest.

And how the FBI learned about the Toebbes is another interesting part of the story. Apparently in April 2020 the couple had mailed a package containing manuals and other material relating to the propulsion systems to a foreign country, together with an offer to establish a covert relationship in return for payment in cryptocurrency. The package somehow wound up in someone’s hands in the foreign postal system or government and eventually made its way anonymously eight months later to the FBI legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy. It included a note that read “Please forward this letter to your military intelligence agency. I believe this information will be of great value to your nation. This is not a hoax.”

One has to suspect that the material actually had reached the foreign intelligence agency that it had been sent to where it was considered too hot to handle, so it was forwarded on to the U.S. officials anonymously to get rid of it.

The documents involved relating to the arrest and the alleged crimes committed by the Toebbes are heavily redacted, far beyond the identity of the foreign country involved, so it is somewhat difficult to reconstruct exactly what happened. Toebbe, a former naval officer, has held senior positions in the Navy bureaucracy, up to and including serving on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations, which would have given him access to beyond top secret codeworded details of next level submarine technology. It is information that is only shared with Great Britain and, in a recent policy move, with Australia, both U.S. allies that will deploy nuclear powered submarines in the Pacific to deter China. The documents the Toebbes reportedly stole and tried to sell were produced by a little-known U.S. government facility the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin Pennsylvania.

One of the most interesting aspects of the case is the question of who might have been the potential buyer of the stolen technology. Building nuclear submarines is not exactly high on the priority list of any but a small handful of countries that have global or regional pretensions that might be supported by having cruise missile nuclear weapons capable ships that can stay under water for months at a time. Germany could conceivably build such vessels but has no defensive needs that require such an expedient. So could France, presumably. Japan and South Korea are perhaps more plausible recipients, particularly as they have the industrial and scientific bases that could benefit from and use the technology if they chose to go that route, and both are threatened by China.

And, of course, there is always Israel, which frequently tends to come up when there are stories of espionage committed by a friendly country against the United States. In this case, of course, the Israelis, if targeted by the Toebbes, apparently did not seek the approach and that may be why the information sent in the package possibly to Mossad was sat on for over six months. Nevertheless, there is a definite resemblance to what the Toebbes set out to do with the Jonathan Pollard case of the 1980s. Pollard, a non-practicing Jew and Navy analyst, stole a whole roomful of top-secret defense materials. He was in it for the money and tried to sell the intelligence to several foreign governments before he “got religion” and found a buyer in Israel. He became the most damaging spy in the history of the United States. After being caught, tried, convicted and spending twenty-eight years in federal prison, he was released on parole but not allowed to travel. The Donald Trump administration did not renew the parole in 2020 and he moved to Israel, where he was met at the airport by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who presented him with his citizenship papers. He is regarded as a hero in Israel and he has a city square named after him. So, the question becomes, was history repeating itself with the Toebbes?

Against that speculation is the fact that Israel already has an established nuclear deterrent more than capable of eliminating its regional enemies if needs be. It has no use for an expensive submarine with abilities that are not required in the goldfish bowl of the Middle East, unless of course if the United States were to gift Jerusalem with such a new military bauble. It would also have no need to get involved in something that might ultimately have tremendous blowback if exposed, potentially severely damaging the relationship with Washington.

My own theory is that Israel was indeed the target of the Toebbes’ scheme. It is widely known that the Jewish state is the most aggressive and successful “friendly” nation spying on Washington and it is backed up by a host of wealthy and powerful co-religionists who work hard to both “help” it and cover-up for its crimes. I suspect that if Israeli intelligence were interested in collecting on the submarine technology they would eschew potential screwballs like the Toebbes and instead work their other sources in Washington to collect the information independently, accounting for the time lag between the mailing of the package and the forwarding of it to the FBI. When Pollard was active, his Israeli Embassy handler would sometimes ask him for specific files by number, indicating they had other high level agents at work, and it must be assumed that that is still the case. Far too many in Congress and the Pentagon are very happy to have a lunch with that nice young man or woman from the Israeli Embassy and maybe share a secret or two.

But, that speculation aside, perhaps the strongest indicator that Israel was the planned recipient of what the Toebbe’s stole is the silence over who the target might have been. When the media and the federal government are silent on a foreign policy or national security issue it often means that Israel is involved, directly or indirectly. Will we the American public ever learn “who was it?” Probably not. Just one more secret.

One wonders if Britain’s MI5 chief, Ken McCallum is a real person or some banal technical creation of the boffins of the UK’s home security service. His recent comments about the Taliban giving rogue winnable terrorists around the world a moral boost after the calamity of the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan not only smacks of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ but also of paternal baloney nefariously designed to distract the UK’s public attention away from the real issues.

Is McCallum actually the real boss of MI5 or the nerdy, hapless fake chief who is there merely to generate fake news in the UK press?

Writing in the God-awful woke Guardian, he harps on about preventing over thirty UK terror attacks which he admits span over four years, but spectacularly fails to make his assertions stand up. His unsubstantiated article was really just a rant which probably only served his own interests rather than the country’s; it also neatly took a pot shot at Biden without naming the U.S. president which might give us all a hint about the so-called special relationship between the UK and the U.S. being really just a farce, or a cliché used by both sides on special occasions.

But in a period where people are reflecting about Afghanistan and trying to look for lessons learnt, the article was way off the mark for a intelligence chief and raised a number of red flags.

The Americans and the British who followed them got the intel really wrong in Afghanistan as indeed was the case in Iraq. So should we really expect anything from the security services in terms of looking back – and then looking forward? And is there a dark game being played here by the spooks in Britain, using a cavernous and inept media machine to create a smoke screen to the real issues?

How could anyone with any real intellect and understanding of international politics be so stupid? The oversimplification is stunning.

In reality, some pundits might speculate that such media stunts are all about guiding a gullible public away from the difficult-to-chew truth towards the easier-to-swallow perceived truth about U.S. interventionism and the link to homegrown terrorism.

America has failed spectacularly in its military ventures for decades, going back to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam. It has a short blip in the 90s with the NATO-led air strikes against Serbia and later some success in Kosovo; but a small cabal of foreign hacks have always pointed to the faked attacks on Muslims in Sarajevo which paved the way for NATO getting the green light for the campaign pushed by the odious Madeleine Albright. And in the same period, a U.S.-led UN mission in Somalia in 1993 led to the bungling of a raid supposed to bring a recalcitrant warlord in, but led to the catastrophe of ‘Black Hawk Down’ – which singularly led to Bill Clinton failing to intervene in the Rwandan genocide a year later.

In the 90s there was a false sense of righteousness brought about largely by the Russian withdrawal of Afghanistan. And this has prevailed leading to 2001 when George W Bush sent troops to Afghanistan – by far the biggest failure of U.S. military-led foreign policy ever leading to thousands of lost lives, trillions of dollars of debt and most European leaders scratching their heads in recent weeks wondering if Europe can ever be beguiled into blindly following the U.S. into an intervention ever again, regardless of how shocking the events are which preceded it.

America just can’t help itself in using its force to resolve the illogical outcomes of its befuddled policies. Madeleine Albright once commented in 1998 when she was Secretary of State that “If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

And Britain can’t seem to help itself but to follow Washington wherever it goes. But what the UK spy chief failed, curiously, to point out in his link with the Taliban and UK terror attacks is that it is London which has supported the U.S. in its dirty wars in Syria and Libya which has overwhelmingly led to nearly all of the attacks he claims he is foiling. It was Britain after all who even assisted Libyans living there to get on planes and go to Libya to fight with Al Qaeda to overthrow Gaddafi, before returning only to be welcomed at Heathrow airport by spooks who gave them the nod and the wink. It was also Britain who stood side by side with the U.S. in its sponsoring of Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria who were hilariously called ‘moderates’ just to help British journalists who were camped in Beirut but who ventured into Northern Syria to ‘embed’ with them. There are no moderates anymore in Syria, in case you were wondering. The West has given up its obsession with Assad so the need to blur the lines is no longer necessary. Dirty wars though, which involve terrorists being paid hard cash by the U.S. and UK, will no doubt continue as long as a naïve public laps up all those terribly insightful articles in the Guardian and assumes them to be genuine. And how is it that the home security boss seems to be an expert on Afghanistan, to the point where he is almost preparing the British public for British soldiers to return there at some point?

I find as a general rule that sweeping generalizations coming out of the media and punditry about anything are frequently wrong. As a former intelligence officer, I find it amusing to read articles in the mainstream media that blithely report how the latest international outrages are undoubtedly the work of CIA and the rest of the U.S. government’s national security alphabet soup. The recurring claim that the CIA is somehow running the world by virtue of a vast conspiracy that includes the secret intelligence agencies of a number of countries, while using blackmail and other inducements to corrupt vulnerable politicians and opinion makers, has entered into the DNA of journalists worldwide, frequently without any evidence that the current crop of spies which includes an increasing number of not-trained-as-spies paramilitary officers is capable or even interested in doing anything that complicated.

One might reasonably object that running the entire world, particularly on a coercive fashion, is a big job and nobody has the resources to address hundreds of “problems” simultaneously. But, nevertheless, any way you slice it, the myth of the Agency being all-powerful and also uniquely malevolent is pervasive, to include the tale that it and the other national security elements conspire to effectively control both American presidents and the mainstream media.

Non-Americans, if anything, are even more persuaded that America’s intelligence community knows all and is in a certain sense directly or indirectly responsible for whatever occurs worldwide. A highly educated Turkish diplomat who became a close friend insisted to me that there was a big computer located in Washington that had complete information on everyone in the world included in its files. Ironically, that observation was somewhat humorous in 1988, but it is closer to today’s reality of total government control and massive cyber intrusion conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency.

To be sure, one can and certainly should oppose the policies enabling regime change that the Agency has been associated with worldwide but there is a context to all the mayhem that must be understood. First of all, de facto regime change is now practiced openly by the U.S. government under the direction of the President of the United States and his close associates. Witness, for example, what took place in Ukraine and what is being attempted in Syria. State Department and USAID manipulations, unleashing of the allegedly non-governmental National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and direct military intervention are the preferred tools since 2001 and they all take place relatively transparently. One might say that what the CIA used to do is now being done out in the open.

Indeed, the various iterations of the Authorization to Use Military Force and also the Patriot and Military Commissions acts give the government a free hand in terms of how it responds to the rest of the world and also to its errant U.S. citizens, to include assassinations of names on lists prepared in the White House and death by drones in response to “profiling,” which overwhelmingly kills mostly innocent civilians. Recall for a moment how Senator John McCain and neocon State Department officer Victoria Nuland passed out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev as part of a $5 billion dollar successful subversion program to overthrow Ukraine’s pro-Russian government. And Syria was a direct military intervention with the openly stated intention of replacing the Al-Assad government. It should also be noted that both interventions took place under the smooth talking Barack Obama, as well as the disastrous overthrow of Libya’s government, which turned one of Africa’s few prosperous regimes into a hell hole. And the exercises in regime change occurred even though none of those countries threatened the United States in any way.

Those policies and others are set by this country’s civilian leadership to include the president, secretary of state and national security council and, when necessary, they are imposed on CIA and other national security related government agencies by their own political leadership as most recent directors have been political appointees, not professional intelligence or law enforcement officers. The Agency, which bureaucratically speaking works for the president, does not hold stop to hold referenda among its employees to determine which foreign policy option they prefer any more than soldiers in the 101^st Airborne are consulted when they receive orders to deploy. Nearly all current and former intelligence officers that I know are, in fact, opposed to the politics of U.S. global dominance that have been pretty much in place since 9/11.

Based on my own experience, the often-cited fundamental evil of the intelligence community was seldom visible, though that appears to have changed somewhat since 9/11, to include the enhancement of the organization’s paramilitary role, the creation of secret prisons and the use of torture. Given the CIA’s presumed invincibility and the taint surrounding how it operates, it has frequently become low hanging fruit for those in government and the media who want to find someone to blame when things go wrong. The problem with the criticism often being levelled is that it is far too sweeping and generic. In reality, there are two distinct CIAs. The first is the place where something approaching 20,000 intelligence collectors and agent handlers, analysts, technical officers and other support personnel work. They are career employees who collect and analyze the information which is then passed on to the consumers, most important of whom is the president and his foreign policy plus national security staff. Professional intelligence officers work hard to be objective, but those people surrounding the top officials are highly political and serve as filters for the information. They frequently ignore or otherwise reject intelligence if it does not fit their idea of what is important. It is that rejection that creates Vietnams, Afghanistans and Iraqs. Consequently, it is the divide between producer and consumer where there is most often a problem and when there is real corruption of the system it usually comes down to a few individuals who are politically motivated.

Ironically, much of the damage comes when officials with access to intelligence and security resources go rogue. Recent claims of national security state interference in U.S. elections should be taken very seriously indeed, as they threaten the very basis of democratic elections, an issue that it unfortunately under siege coming from many directions. The recent coordinated attempt by John Brennan of the CIA that included the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence amounted to an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the top officials in the U.S. intelligence and national security community to defeat the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump. Clapper, Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have all played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the Clinton campaign and also by the then serving President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his national security team.

It is now known that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan had created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. This Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with Clapper, Brennan fabricated the narrative that “Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.” Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell supported the effort with a New York Times op-ed which described Trump as a Russian agent, a claim that was supported by zero evidence and which was given credibility only by Morell’s headline boast that “I ran the CIA.” In other words, Morell was using his CIA credentials to validate a narrative that he surely knew to be a lie.

As a result, Trump and his staff were on the receiving end of a number of conspiracies, first to deny him the GOP nomination, then to ensure that he be defeated in the presidential election, and subsequently to completely delegitimize his presidency. Brennan even illegally approached foreign intelligence services in Europe to obtain dirt on Trump and the conspirators did not stop there, even paying for and disseminating a scandalous report by a former British intelligence officer referred to as the Steele Dossier after Trump was elected. The truly most devastating aspect of the entire affair is the likelihood that if President Obama actually was knowledgeable of what was going on it meant that an incumbent president was using his national security resources to destroy a political opponent.

It is important to recognize that it was not the CIA that sought to destroy Trump. It was one individual named John Brennan and a circle of other security service chiefs around and loyal to the president. That Obama himself and Brennan have never been questioned by the FBI over possible abuse of office is shameful, but more often than not, it is the intelligence agencies that are on the victimization end of political manipulation. The Afghanistan evacuation problems recently experienced are perfect examples of how intelligence can be abused or twisted. There is growing politically motivated commentary expressing the view that there was an intelligence failure, in that the White House and Defense Department did not know about the weakness of the Afghan Army and the strong possibility that the country’s government would fall quickly under Taliban pressure. Those allegations are a lie and everyone at a senior point in the system knows it, just as the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction and was threatening the United States was a elaborate lie fabricated by the neoconservatives in 2002-3.

There is overwhelming evidence that the intelligence provided by the Agency, State Department and even the Pentagon, as well as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was unanimous when it arrived at the desks of the senior policy makers in Washington: the Afghan Army was riddled with corruption that no training could compensate for. It was plagued by desertions, with officers stealing payrolls, and by ghost battalions that had no soldiers but drew salaries for them. The government in Kabul was equally corrupt and had little popular support.

This message was delivered by the intelligence agencies regularly for the past fifteen or more years, but when it reached the level of the White House it was turned on its head. The press spokesmen told the media and the American people that everything was fine, progress was being made and the Afghan Army was being trained by NATO to become a fighting force that would defeat the Taliban. The national security and intelligence agencies were telling the truth but it was all converted into a lie to deceive the public. Indeed, it is now being reported that President Biden was himself intimately involved in the lie, having called Afghan president Ashraf Ghani and insisted that he say publicly that the fight against the Taliban was going well “whether it is true or not.”

So now the White House is again claiming “Mission Accomplished” on the evacuation from Kabul, something long overdue but which was executed disastrously, seemingly unplanned and unanticipated by a tone-deaf White House. It did not even get all Americans out of Afghanistan and any return by U.S. forces to take control of the airport again is unimaginable as the Taliban are substantially in control and thanks to Washington well-armed with heavy weapons.

So why do the government and media strut around suggesting how the CIA controls the world while at the same time accusing it of intelligence failures whenever something goes wrong even when the information provided was accurate? It is because the intelligence community can serve as a convenient punching bag since it does so much of its work in secret and is required by law to protect its sources, which means it cannot strike back when it is attacked. To blame it for the failures of others is plausible and doing so means that no one else is to blame, which appears to be the guiding principle of American government. No one important is ever to blame. Whistleblowers who reveal crimes are the only ones who are ever tried and convicted. When it becomes a crime to reveal a crime, you know that it is the criminals who are actually in charge.

Few Americans are aware of the fact that no U.S. government official, to include congressmen, can in any way mention or discuss Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated by some observers to consist of as many as 200 tactical nuclear weapons which can be delivered on target by air, land or sea. The prohibition is spelled out in a Department of Energy “classification bulletin” graded Secret, which was issued on September 6, 2012 and bears the file number WPN-136. The subject line reads “Guidance on Release of information Relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability.” It would be interesting to learn exactly how the text of the memo reads, but in spite of repeated attempts to obtain a copy under the Freedom of Information Act, the entire body of the document is completely blacked out.

What is known in that the memo is basically a gag order, presumably issued by the Barack Obama Administration to block any official from making a comment that might be interpreted to mean that the federal government recognizes that Israel has nuclear weapons. The silence over the Israeli arsenal dates back to an agreement made by President Richard Nixon with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. In its most recent manifestation, President Barack Obama, when asked if he knew of “any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,” responded “I don’t want to speculate.” He was, of course, lying.

The bulletin’s first known victim was Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear policy specialist James Doyle who in 2013 wrote a sentence suggesting that Israel had a nuclear arsenal. It appeared in an article entitled “Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons?” which had been security cleared by Los Alamos and appeared in the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. An unknown congressional staffer demanded a review and Doyle had his home computer searched before being fired.

Israel, as is so often the case, gets a free pass on what is for others criminal behavior. Its nuclear program was created by stealing American uranium and weapons technology. Preventing nuclear proliferation was in fact a major objective of the U.S. government when in the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy learned that Tel Aviv was developing a nuclear weapon from a CIA report. He told the Israelis to terminate their program or risk losing American political and economic support but was killed before any steps were taken to end the project.

Israel accelerated its nuclear program after the death of President Kennedy. By 1965, it had obtained the raw material for a bomb consisting of U.S. government owned highly enriched weapons grade uranium obtained from a company in Pennsylvania called NUMEC, which was founded in 1956 and owned by Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, head of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. NUMEC was a supplier of enriched uranium for government projects but it was also from the start a front for the Israeli nuclear program, with its chief funder David Lowenthal, a leading Zionist, traveling to Israel at least once a month where he would meet with an old friend Meir Amit, who headed Israeli intelligence. NUMEC covered the shipment of enriched uranium to Israel by claiming the metal was “lost,” losses that totaled nearly six hundred pounds, enough to produce dozens of weapons. Such was the importance of the operation that in 1968 NUMEC even received a private incognito visit from a top Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan who later ran the spy Jonathan Pollard.

Also there was physical evidence relating to the diversion of the uranium. Refined uranium has a technical signature that permit identification of its source. Traces of uranium from NUMEC were identified by Department of Energy inspectors in Israel in 1978. The Central Intelligence Agency has also looked into the diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant and concluded that it was part of a broader program to obtain the technology and raw materials for a nuclear device for Israel.

With the uranium in hand, the stealing of the advanced technology needed to make a nuclear weapon, which is where Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan comes into the story. Milchan was born in Israel but moved to the United States and eventually wound up as the founder-owner of New Regency Films. In a November 25, 2013 interview on Israeli television Milchan admitted that he had spent his many years in Hollywood as an agent for Israeli intelligence, helping obtain embargoed technologies and materials that enabled Israel to develop a nuclear weapon. He worked for Israel’s Bureau of Science and Liaison acquisition division of Mossad, referred to as the LAKAM spy agency.

Milchan admitted in the interview that “I did it for my country and I’m proud of it.” He was not referring to the United States. He also said that “other big Hollywood names were connected to [his] covert affairs.” Among other successes, he obtained through his company Heli Trading 800 krytons, the sophisticated triggers for nuclear weapons. The devices were acquired from the California top secret defense contractor MILCO International. Milchan personally recruited MILCO’s president Richard Kelly Smyth as an agent before turning him over to another Heli Trading employee, future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for handling. Smyth was eventually arrested in 1985 but insofar as is known neither Milchan nor Netanyahu has ever been questioned by the FBI regarding the thefts.

Israel’s nukes are now in the news because of an Op-Ed that surprisingly appeared in the New York Times on August 11^th written by Peter Beinart entitled “America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes.” Beinart wrote that “Israel already has nuclear weapons. You’d just never know it from America’s leaders, who have spent the last half-century feigning ignorance. This deceit undercuts America’s supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and it distorts the American debate over Iran. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell the truth.”

Beinart points out that the American public can hardly make an informed judgement regarding what should be done in the Middle East if it is uncertain whether Israel is a nuclear power or not, but one issue he does not discuss is the issue of money. IRMEP’s Grant Smith, who has been challenging the secrecy surrounding the Israeli arsenal, recently observed that “The Symington & Glenn provisions of the Arms Export Control Act (22 USC §2799aa-1: Nuclear reprocessing transfers, illegal exports for nuclear explosive devices, transfers of nuclear explosive devices, and nuclear detonations) forbid U.S. foreign aid to countries with nuclear weapons programs that are not signatories to the Treaty on the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, absent required special procedures… But no member of Congress has taken up this issue — or even mentioned Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal.”

Smith is frustrated by the reluctance of progressives in Congress, who have opposed recent additional $735 million in military aid to Israel permitting it to rearm after its assault on the Gazans, to ignore the gag order and raise the issue of the nuclear arsenal. He writes “It seems as though even these members of Congress, as well as the rest of the U.S. government, are abiding by this secret gag order when they could take action which would challenge the administration’s refusal to acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons and possibly stop $3.8 billion in taxpayer money from going to Israel.”

That the Energy Department document exists at all is recognition of the astonishing power of the Israeli Lobby over the U.S. government at all levels, particularly as it is intended to ignore or even negate other legislation passed by congress to combat nuclear proliferation. And the denial of what everyone knows to be true, i.e. that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, appears to all come down to the ability of the United States government to continue to reward a wealthy Israel with billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year. To suggest that the arrangement is nefarious would be to put it mildly, but it is more that that. It is criminal. Israel has been allowed to get away with massive espionage directed against the United States and the theft of material and technology while also since the 1970s being engaged in a conspiracy with the U.S. government that distorts America’s foreign policy, largely done to keep getting the billions of dollars that it is not entitled to receive under existing American law. It is shameful. Beyond that, it might be construed as treason.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lost a high court decision Wednesday, which now allows the U.S. government to expand the grounds for its appeal of a January ruling of Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser. She had at that time denied extradition to the United States to face charges of espionage in a Virginia court, a jurisdiction where whistleblowers never win and cannot use the “public interest” or any reason for motivation to reveal “national security secrets.” Assange’s mental and physical health has been steadily deteriorating after being holed up for nearly seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and subsequently spending 28 months and counting incarcerated in isolation in Britain’s most Middle Ages prison, Bellmarsh. Nevertheless, neither Baraitser nor this high court will allow him to be freed while awaiting the final appeal ruling, which could take another two or more years to happen.

Julian is held in a windowless cell 23 hours a day. Allowed nearly no visitors; his lawyers must write to him or he must call them from a hallway telephone; he cannot use a computer or acquire materials necessary for his defense. Bellmarsh is commonly known as “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay”.

Last month, the high court granted the U.S. the right to appeal Baraitser’s decision barring extradition on minor points but not on the grounds of Assange’s health. The court reversed that decision yesterday based on the prosecution’s argument that the key defense expert witness on suicide, Professor Michael Kopelman—one of four psychiatrists for the defense who testified—did not tell the court that he knew that Assange had fathered two children with his partner, Stella Moris.

So, when the key hearing on appeal takes place, October 27-8, the U.S. will be able to argue that Assange’s health is stable enough that he wouldn’t commit suicide if extradited to U.S. “torture chambers”, so known by any who been imprisoned in them, as well as by internationally renowned experts in torture practices. One of them is the UN rapporteur on Torture, Nils Meltzer. «A murderous system is being created before our very eyes» – Republik

There is no law forcing Kopelman to state such, and he did not for admittedly “human” reasons, as even Baraitser admitted. When Kopelman prepared a preliminary report in December 2019, long before the court hearing, Assange’s relationship with Moris or the fact that they had two young children together, was not public knowledge. Moris feared for her safety and privacy and that of their children if this was disclosed.

Yet this “high court” determined that by withholding that information, Kopelman was not a credible witness.

No matter that defense lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, reminded the court that the Spanish security firm, UC Global, constantly spied on Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy for the CIA. It even stole for the CIA a diaper of Assange’s first child to obtain DNA. CIA agents also discussed poisoning or kidnapping Assange. Baraitser heard this testimony. Julian Assange spying: Spanish firm that spied on Julian Assange tried to find out if he fathered a child at Ecuadorian embassy | International | EL PAÍS in English (elpais.com)

All of the judges who have sat above Julian with gothic wigs and heavy robes look and act condescending towards him and his team of lawyers and witnesses. As reported by Joe Lauria, Judge Holyrode (no forename given), was no different. Holyrode “gave full attention to Dobbin but fiddled with his pen and looked around the room when Fitzgerald spoke”. US Wins Right to Appeal Health Grounds on Assange Extradition – Consortiumnews

Clair Dobbin, British lawyer for the U.S., said the U.S. government would show that Assange’s mental health problems did not meet the threshold required in law to prevent extradition. Furthermore, Judge Baraitser erred when she did not consider the fact that witness Kopelman had not informed her that Assange had a lover, the mother of his two children, as important.

Edward Fitzgerald told the court that Judge Baraitser, having heard all of the evidence in the case, was in the best position to assess it and reach her decision, including concerning the “human predicament” in which Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, found herself at the time.

Judge Holyrode ruled that Kopelman’s testimony had been misleading, even if the expert’s actions had been deemed an “understandable human response” designed to protect the privacy of Assange’s partner and children.

The judge said that, in those circumstances, it was “at least arguable” that Baraitser erred in basing her conclusions on the professor’s evidence. Julian Assange loses court battle to stop US expanding extradition appeal | Julian Assange | The Guardian

Jacobin’s reporter Chip Gibbons summarized:

“The United States has sought the extradition of the Australian journalist for seventeen counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of ‘conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.’ The Espionage Act charges stem from WikiLeaks’ publishing of State Department Cables, the Iraq Rules of Engagement, and Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs. It marks the first time a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act.

“The case is made all the more troubling by the fact that Assange is an Australian national who operates outside the United States. The United States is not only asserting it can prosecute journalists for exposing its war crimes, but that it can prosecute any journalist anywhere in the world for doing so.” Julian Assange Could Be Extradited to the US (jacobinmag.com)

The day before this hearing, Amnesty International spoke out for Assange’s freedom.

“This attempt by the US government to get the court to reverse its decision not to allow Julian Assange’s extradition on the basis of new diplomatic assurances is a blatant legal sleight of hand. Given that the US government has reserved the right to keep Julian Assange in a maximum security facility and subject him to Special Administrative Measures, these assurances are inherently unreliable.

“This disingenuous appeal should be dismissed by the court and President Biden should take the opportunity to drop these politically motivated charges which have put media freedom and freedom of expression in the dock.

“President Obama opened the investigation into Julian Assange. President Trump brought the charges against him. It is now time for President Biden to do the right thing and help end this farcical prosecution which should never have been brought in the first place. USA/UK: US authorities must drop politically motivated charges against Assange | Amnesty International

Many important facts in the case will not be allowed for Julian’s defense during upcoming appeals. The fact that a key witness for the FBI and U.S. prosecution, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, confessed to lying profusely to please them, and was paid $5000 for his lies, will not be allowed. Nor does it matter to British judges that the CIA illegally surveilled Julian, his lawyers and doctors, his love-making, and planned to murder or kidnap him. All that is irrelevant.
Key Witness Admits Lying about Julian Assange in Major US Extradition Case Setback – This Can’t Be Happening! (thiscantbehappening.net); and UC Global Employees Testify On US Spying Operation Against Assange (shadowproof.com); and US Reportedly Hinders Spanish Probe Into Alleged CIA Ties to Firm Accused of Spying on Assange – Sputnik International (sputniknews.com).

More than a hundred people demonstrated outside the High Court during the hearing. Former Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was among them. Protesters’ shouted till they were hoarse: “There is only one decision: No Extradition”.

Assange appeared at the hearing via video link. It was reported that although Assange remained in prison, his mate was able to see him and for the first time in his 28 months in the prison they were allowed to embrace.

During the days of Julian’s extradition trial before Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, I read every word that England’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan (2002-4), Craig Murray, 63, wrote about the trial from the courtroom. Murray described what he saw unfold before him objectively and passionately.

On August 1, Murray was imprisoned for eight months for blogging information about a trial that could lead to “jigsaw identification”, that is, witnesses against an accused could possibly be inadvertently identified. The judge Dorrian (no forename), acts as part of a government plan to abolish jury trials in sexual assault cases by the Scottish government.

Murry writes: “We will then have a situation where, as establishment by my imprisonment, no information at all on the defense case may be published in case it contributes to ‘jigsaw identification’, and where conviction will rest purely on the view of the judge.

“That is plainly no ‘open justice’, it is not justice at all. And it is even worse than that, because the openly stated aim of abolishing juries is to increase conviction rates. So people will have their lives decided not by a jury of their peers, but by a judge who is acting under specific instruction to increase conviction rates.” Keeping Freedom Alive – Craig Murray

Murray attended the “Alex Salmond’s trial in 2020 and wrote about the court proceedings on his blog and on Twitter. He alleged that the Scottish National Party leadership, the Scottish government, the Crown Office and police conspired to convict Salmond on charges of sexual harassment and attempted rape.

“The judge in the case, Lady Dorrian, had issued an order forbidding the publication of the names of the women who testified against Salmond, or other information that might identify them. In March 2021, she found Murray to be in contempt of court after he published information that in her view could potentially lead to identifying some of the complainants, and sentenced him to eight months’ imprisonment.” Craig Murray – Wikipedia

Murray wrote that in Uzbekistan, “conviction rates in rape trials were 100%. In fact, very high conviction rates are a standard feature of all highly authoritarian regimes…The wishes of the state in such systems vastly outweigh the liberty of the individual.”

Alternative media, dissent in general, were not allowed in Uzbekistan, and Murray fears the same is occurring in the UK.

“The dreadful doctrine [of] Lady Dorrian [is] now enshrined in law, that bloggers should be held to a different (by implication higher) standard in law than the mainstream media (the judgement uses exactly those terms), because the mainstream media is self-regulating.

“This doctrine is used to justify jailing me when mainstream media journalists have not been jailed for media contempt for over half a century…. The very notion of liberty is slipping from out political culture… That Scotland has a governing party which actively supports the right of the Crown to exercise unrestrained censorship is extremely worrying, and I think a sign both of the lack of respect in modern political culture for liberties which were won by people being tortured to death, and of the sheer intellectual paucity of the current governing class.”

This governing class is now revising the authoritarian Official Secrets Act to place it fully in accord with the U.S. Espionage Act. Any future whistleblower, journalist and publisher will be subject to long incarceration for revealing alleged “national secrets”, as if they were foreign spies during war time. And, as with the Espionage Act, defendants cannot use “public interest” as a motivation or for mitigating circumstances. Official Secrets Act: home secretary’s planned reform will make criminals out of journalists (theconversation.com)

Since Murray was fired from the Foreign Office after 20 years of service, he has become a human rights and peace activist, author and journalist.

“Murder in Samarkand” is one of Murray’s four books. It deals with his time in Uzbekistan before he was dismissed by the British government for telling the truth about the U.S.-funded regime of human rights abuser President Islam Karimov—criticisms that included torture by his government and the CIA. The U.S. and UK supported Uzbekistan while demolishing the country of Iraq, whose president Saddam Hussein, was not nearly as brutal as Karimov, Murray writes in his opposition to their hypocritical “War on Terror”. Murder in Samarkand – Craig Murray

It is perhaps not necessary to point out how the mainstream media in the United States as well as in Europe and Oceania persist in ignoring or otherwise covering up stories that make the Israelis look bad. Recent accounts of the slaughter of children and mostly civilians in Gaza by Israeli planes, missiles and artillery consistently try to depict the conflict as warfare between two comparable opponents, ignoring the enormous disparity in the military force available to the two sides. Israel has a modern army, air force and navy while Hamas has nothing but some small arms as well as improvised rockets and incendiary balloons.

The reluctance to criticize Israeli behavior is largely attributable to the power of the Zionist lobbies in the respective countries but it is also at least in part due to the complicity of Western governments in conniving at the Jewish state’s actions in its own region. The persistence in Israeli demands for war against Iran, preferable fought by the United States, was clear again this past week when the new government in Jerusalem declared that it would be increasing its military budget in anticipation of war with the Islamic Republic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. Congress also has several bills pending that would increase military assistance to Israel by a factor of three.

Aside from their overwhelming affection for the Jewish state, politicians and talking heads in Washington have always sought to have an enemy to explain why the foreign and national security policies have been such failures. Russia was so designated during the long years of the Cold War and more recently both the White House and Congress have begun to warn that it is China that is seeking to confront democratic norms and “export its authoritarian model.”

Given all of that, there must have been shock in a number of newsrooms when it turned out that the guilty party behind an explosive spy story that was revealed recently appears to be none other than America’s “closest ally and best friend.” It seems that a private Israeli surveillance plus security firm consisting of former cyberwarfare military and intelligence officers and having close ties to the Benjamin Netanyahu government has been selling advanced spyware to at least 45 governments. The sales are in theory restricted for use only in terrorism and criminal cases, but somehow the resource has instead been routinely used against journalists, political activists, business executives, and politicians. Saudi Arabia, for example, used the spyware to track dissident journal Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018.

And even though the software has been regularly used against U.S. government officials and journalists, it appears that the Biden Administration has been aware of its capabilities and has done nothing to stop it. In its own defense, the Israeli company NSO that developed the spyware has claimed, implausibly, that it can no longer be used to hack U.S. phones. That assertion was debunked by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who tweeted “NSO’s claim that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to spy on American phone numbers is a bald-faced lie: a exploit that works against Macron’s iPhone will work the same on Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit targeting a country can also be unwritten. It’s a fig leaf.”

The surprise revelation of the Israeli activity came not from a government counter-intelligence agency, but rather from a group of 17 international media organizations that formed a consortium to investigate a data leak relating to hacked telephones. The group included major news outlets that had apparently been targeted using the Pegasus hacking spyware developed by the NSO Group, which was primarily designed to penetrate the security features of smartphones. One former cybersecurity engineer from the U.S. intelligence community described Pegasus as an “eloquently nasty” tool that could be used to “spy on almost the entire world population.” The spyware “can be installed remotely on a targeted person’s smartphone without requiring them to take any action such as clicking on a link or answering a call. Once installed, it allows clients to take complete control of the device, including accessing messages from encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal, and turning on the microphone and camera.” It can also reveal the phone’s location.

The software was designed with a backdoor which allowed NSO to monitor the surveillances and it is presumed that the information was also shared with Israeli intelligence. By one estimate 50,000 smartphones were accessed worldwide, including 10 prime ministers, three presidents including Emmanuel Macron of France, a king, foreign ministers and assorted journalists and government officials both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A more cautious estimate from the Washington Post, which participated in the investigation, states only that “1,000 people spread across 50 different countries were identified as having numbers on the list, among them are ‘several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials.’ This includes Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s lead Iran negotiator, and journalists for CNN, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.” Other news agencies that were hacked by Pegasus include Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El País, the Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, the Economist, Reuters and Voice of America.

Some are inevitably wondering why the Biden White House has been silent about NSO. It has not identified the Israeli firm as a threat to national security and made demands to the Israeli government that it intercede with NSO and shut down the use of Pegasus until some international regulation of the use of hacking software can be developed. Part of the explanation for the reluctance might be that Biden’s senior adviser Anita Dunn’s consulting firm SKDKickerbocker was hired by NSO in 2019 to provide “public relations” advice to improve the company’s image.

The reluctance, of course, also derives from the fact that Israel is involved, but those with longer memories of the Jewish state’s record in stealing American secrets should not be surprised by this latest venture. Israeli-recruited U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was, for example, the most damaging spy in U.S. history. And Israel has, in fact, a long history of stealing U.S. technology and military secrets to include sharing them with countries that Washington has regarded as enemies, including China and Russia.

Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage. The 2005 report states: “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States, these collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizeable armaments industry.” It adds that: “Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.” A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that: “Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon.” It says: “Placing Israeli nationals in key industries is a technique utilized with great success.” A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how: “Israeli citizens residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtain classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and pass sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users.” The GAO concluded that: “Israel conducts,” and this is a quote, “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” More recently, FBI counterintelligence officer John Cole has reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department. He has provided a conservative estimate of 125 viable investigations into Israeli espionage — involving both American citizens and Israelis — that were stopped due to political pressure.

So Israel gets yet another pass on its spying against the United States. Indeed, the Biden Administration has yet to definitively comment on the latest impropriety. One wonders when the penny will drop and the American people will rise up and say “enough is enough.”