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Barton Gellman: ‘The Assange precedent is dangerous’

On the 22nd May 2020, Andrew Anthony reports

The US journalist talks about being hacked by intelligence services, his dealings with whistleblower Edward Snowden, and why he loves detective fiction

Barton Gellman is an investigative journalist celebrated for his reports on 9/11, former US vice-president Dick Cheney and the surveillance state. He was the only mainstream journalist that Edward Snowden approached in 2013 to publish his revelations about far-ranging cyber surveillance by the US National Security Agency. His new book, Dark Mirror, is an account of his interactions with Snowden and the struggle to expose the US government’s assault on privacy.

The spectrum of opinion on Edward Snowden runs from heroic whistleblower to shameless traitor. What’s your own understanding of the man?
Those labels seem to me like cartoons. I see him as being quite sincere in his beliefs. I think he was motivated more or less exactly as he described. He has a very black and white sense of right and wrong. I described him in the book as sharing certain elements with other self-described whistleblowers: zealotry and certitude of their own beliefs. But I believe his ultimate choices were heartfelt. My own view is that he did more good than harm.

What was the greatest contravention of privacy exposed by the Snowden files?
One that made its way most clearly into public consciousness was the universal collection of telephone-call records of Americans. That had to do with who you called, when you talked to them and so forth, the so-called metadata, not the content of the telephone calls. In my own mind, the greater problem is the practice of bulk surveillance of content.

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You write that the crimes alleged against Julian Assange are “very hard to distinguish from what I did with Snowden’s NSA archive”. Are you worried about the possibility of future prosecution?
I am very much worried that the precedent that the present US administration is trying to set with Assange is dangerous, and quite new in the American legal tradition. Assange is charged with asking for information, with receiving information, and with publishing information. And I don’t mind saying that those are exactly the things that I do. And there has never been a prosecution for espionage based entirely on publication. If that’s allowed to stand, there’s absolutely no reason why it couldn’t be used against the Washington Post or the New York Times or CNN.

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Read whole article in The Guardian

Campaign Media Release 24th May 2020

Media Release: 

Assange must be released to his family
In the time of COVID, this is a matter of life and death

On the twelve-month anniversary of the release of the US superseding indictment, we call on the Australian government to make diplomatic representations to the US and UK and have Julian Assange released to his family. The US extradition hearing is set to commence on the 7 September 2020 due to the Covid epidemic, unreasonably extending Assange’s time in detention to 18 months. Assange is not serving time as a convicted prisoner.

Julian’s father, John Shipton, stated “Julian misses Stella and their kids. He just wants to come home and be with his family. These governments aren’t just punishing Julian for exposing their crimes against humanity, they are pushing us as a family. We are all suffering.”

Australian Assange Campaign adviser, Greg Barns SC said “Given his health conditions, it is reasonable for the family to request that the Australian government make diplomatic representations to ensure Julian is released and safe with his family. This is a matter of life and death and there is a duty of care for any detaining authority to ensure the safety of prisoners and access to adequate medical care – Belmarsh is unable to provide this.”

“Julian is not serving time as a convicted prisoner, there is no valid reason why he can’t be released to his family for the duration of the extradition hearing” Barns said.

Craig Tuck, head of LawAid International Chambers added “the due process violations in this case are extensive. This is not about applying the law. Julian is not being given a fair chance to defend himself.”

Assange’s legal representatives have confirmed that communications with their client have become even more difficult since commencement of the Covid epidemic. Speaking at a recent hearing, Edward Fitzgerald QC, said ‘We’ve had great difficulties in getting into Belmarsh to take instructions from Mr Assange and to discuss the evidence with him.’ Mr Fitzgerald continued: ‘We simply cannot get in as we require to see Mr Assange and to take his instruction.’

Julian Assange is facing 175 years in a US prison for allegedly publishing evidence of US war crimes. 

Media contact: 
Greg Barns SC +61419691846
Both Mr Barns SC and Mr John Shipton are available for interview.

A4A Teach in 1: Who is Julian Assange?

On the 21st May 2020 Action 4 Assange release this video

This is the first video Action 4 Assange is releasing as part of our on-going teach in series to help educate the public about Assange, his message, and his persecution.

Please help us by sharing these videos with everybody you know. We are in a race against time to bring as much awareness to his case as possible before the second half of his extradition hearings start in September.

Man Without A Country

On the 22nd May 2020, Dr Alison Broinowski writes

A decade ago, WikiLeaks shocked the world with revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. How Assange’s popular following was reversed, his reputation trashed, and his health ruined is a saga which is still playing out.

Publisher Julian Assange became an instant celebrity. In 2011 he received the popular vote for Time magazine’s Person of the Year, became Le Monde’s Man of the Year, and was repeatedly nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Robert Manne called him the most consequential Australian of the time, and “one of the best-known and most-respected human beings on earth.” Yet, successive Australian governments have refused to intervene on Assange’s behalf, making him, as the New Yorker reported, a man without a country. What happened to him could happen to anyone, and that’s apparently the point the three Anglo-allies want to make.

American politicians, without explaining how an Australian could commit treason against the US, called Assange a traitor and wanted him dead. Both Republicans and Democrats labelled Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” The US closed down internet donations to WikiLeaks. After allegations of rape against Assange by two Swedish women were reported, he offered to be interviewed in Stockholm and in London with no result. Both women withdrew their claims, and the Swedish prosecutors dropped the case, although their UK counterparts pressed them to pursue it.

The British Foreign Office minister, Sir Alan Duncan, called Assange a “miserable little worm” in Parliament. The British media weighed in, calling WikiLeaks a “disrupter” of everything the West held dear, and Assange a “nihilist.”. The title of Alex Gibney’s 2013 mockumentary film, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks sounded like an admission from Assange, but those words were spoken in the film by Michael Hayden, former NSA Director, about his own agency. In step with their American and British colleagues, Australian ministers and media were quick to join the pile-on against Assange, though Julia Gillard couldn’t name his crime. Tanya Plibersek said he had damaged “world security.”

Assange broke his bail in Britain, fearing extradition to the US, and for that he was called paranoid and a coward by his former collaborators in the media. But he knew a grand jury was investigating him – something American authorities denied until charges were filed in Alexandria in December 2017, and a court error revealed it was true. With Assange in diplomatic asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador, the CIA used UC Global, a Spanish security firm, to surveil what he did there, everything he said to his friends and his lawyers, and connections to their phones. As British police dragged him out in April 2019, Assange mouthed to the cameras “I told you so.” Since then, he has been in solitary confinement in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where at least one murder has recently occurred and at least two inmates have contracted COVID-19.

In July 2019, Assange was briskly dealt with in court by British judge Emma Arbuthnot  ̶  whose husband chaired the UK Parliament’s Defence Select Committee, and whose son works for a security intelligence company. Lady Arbuthnot, having already branded Assange a “narcissist,” informed him that “nobody is above the law,” and although his bail sentence had ended, refused to release him. Her junior judge, Vanessa Baraitser, dismissed Assange’s lawyers’ complaints about limited access to their client, his physical and mental condition, and the confiscation of his legal notes.

The extradition process in March 2020 prolonged this legal farce, with the British prosecutor briefing the media in advance of the hearing on what they should report for the evening deadline. US representatives bizarrely argued to Baraitser that Assange was subject to the US Espionage Act but was not entitled to the protection of the US Constitution, and that the UK Treaties Act applied to him but not the US/UK Extradition Treaty. Whatever produces the desired outcome is what the Americans and their British sycophants will predictably continue to say is legal.

The next hearing, expected to last three weeks, has been postponed from May to September, and will be in another Crown Court because of COVID-19 restrictions. No matter how long it takes, legal representations are unlikely to prevent his extradition: the motivation, and the solution, remain political. The slower the process, the worse the prospects for Assange’s health. If he survives, there is some hope a new US president, should the outcome of the pandemic-affected election favour Joe Biden, may abandon the case. But Biden may be worse than Trump: in 2010 the senator wanted Assange executed.

In the decade since Chelsea Manning passed the cache of 740,000 US documents to Assange, she has been jailed twice and released twice. A brigadier-general in the Pentagon has admitted that no one is known to have died as a result of the cables’ publication, names redacted or not, and Australian authorities have made similar statements. For invigilation of Assange in the Embassy by UC Global, Spanish authorities are investigating apparent breaches of the Vienna Convention. Ecuador’s President Evo Morales reportedly discussed having Assange executed. All this should undermine the US case for his extradition, but it may not.

The US is determined to charge Assange with 18 counts of conspiracy and computer intrusion, obtaining and disclosing national defence information without authorisation, and espionage. The trial will be in West Virginia, where most jury members are likely to have ties to defence industries, and the judge, who will come from the same constituency, can impose a total of 175 years imprisonment. This, effectively, is capital punishment.

As the years have dragged on, Assange has been defended by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, PEN International, the UK Foreign Journalists’ Association, and British journalists including Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, and recently Peter Oborne, who wrote that the British Foreign Secretary should be “resisting the US attempt to get its hands on Assange with every bone in his body.”

In Australia in late 2019, Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen formed Bring Assange Home, a Parliamentary Friendship Group. Phillip Adams has collected more than 400,000 signatures to a petition for him. Prominent Australian supporters across a wide range of opinion include Bob Carr, Dick Smith, Barnaby Joyce, Alan Jones, Mary Kostakidis, James Ricketson, and Greg Barns.

What is lacking is Australian political intervention for Assange in London and Washington, particularly of the kind that produced the release of David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. Australia often makes representations for its detained citizens in other countries, and Assange, who has been found guilty of nothing, deserves no less. But he has revealed crimes the US is guilty of, for which the UK treats him as if he’s guilty, and Australia presumes he’s guilty of whatever they say. The Assange case is a test of the values and the rule of law which Australian leaders claim is shared with Anglo-allies. The probity of the political and justice systems of the three countries is what’s on trial, and that affects us all.

Read original article on the Australian Institute of International Affairs Web Site and other articles:

An Illusion Of Protection: The Pandemic, The ‘Criminal’ (UK) Government And Public Distrust of The Media

On the 18th May 2020, David Cromwell of Media Lens wrote

Editors Note: This article suggests that a strong independent Journalism would have averted the mishandling of the UK coronavirus pandemic by the UK Government.

Any notion that the UK government actually considers that its primary responsibility is to protect the health and security of the country’s population ought to have been demolished in 2020. The appalling death toll that continues to mount during the coronavirus pandemic is largely rooted, not merely in government ‘incompetence’, but in criminal dereliction of its core duties in a supposedly democratic society.

The UK has the highest death toll in Europe, and the second highest in the world (the US has the highest). On May 12, the death toll from official UK figures exceeded 40,000 for the first time, including almost 10,000 care home residents. A study by academics at the London School of Economics estimates that the actual death toll in care homes is, in fact, double the official figure: more than 22,000.

Government ministers have been scrambling to protect themselves from such damaging facts by spouting empty rhetoric. Health Secretary Matt Hancock actually declared on May 15:

‘Right from the start we’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes. We set out our first advice in February… we’ve made sure care homes have the resources they need.’

Palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke, author of the bestselling book ‘Dear Life, Your Life In My Hands’,  rejected his deceptive claim:

‘This is categorically untrue. Care homes were left without testing. Without contract tracing. Without PPE [personal protective equipment]. Without support. You can deny it all you like, Matt Hancock, but we were witnesses – we ARE witnesses – and believe me you will be held to account.’

It is important to note that the coronavirus death toll is even higher than official figures because people are dying from heart disease, cancer, strokes and other illnesses that would otherwise have been treated had there been no ongoing pandemic. Chris Giles, the Financial Times economics editor, has been tracking the number of total excess deaths, issuing regular updates via Twitter. He noted that ‘a cautious estimate’ of excess deaths linked to coronavirus up to May 15 was an appalling 61,200. The FT has published an extensive analysis here with regular updates.

University of Edinburgh researchers have estimated that at least 2,000 lives would have been saved in Scotland – a staggering 80 per cent of the total – if the government had introduced the lockdown two weeks earlier. Rowland Kao, professor of epidemiology and lead author of the study, said there had ‘definitely’ been enough information about the coming pandemic in mid-February. If the lockdown had been imposed across the whole of the UK on March 9, rather than March 23:

‘you would expect a similar effect to the one seen in our research on Scotland.’

In other words, there would have been an 80 per cent reduction in the death toll across the whole of the UK: around 26,000 lives saved (assuming the official undercount by May 3 of 32,490 fatalities). This is a truly shocking statistic and a damning indictment of the Tory government.

Countries outside the UK have looked on aghast while the pandemic death toll here rose quickly, given the advance warnings of what was happening abroad, notably in Italy and Spain. Continental newspapers have been highly critical of the UK government’s response to the pandemic. The German newspaper Die Zeit noted that:

‘the infection has spread unchecked longer than it should have. The wave of infections also spread from the hospitals to the old people’s homes, which could also have been avoided. The government is now trying to pretend to the public that it has the situation under control.’

The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant told its readers:

‘the British were insufficiently prepared for the pandemic, despite the presence of expertise in this area. The country has been catching up in recent weeks. Much of the harm has already been done.’

In France, Le Monde said:

‘Despite Europe’s worst mortality, probably too late entry into confinement and a blatant lack of preparation, the British have so far supported Johnson.’

Here in the UK, honest and responsible journalism would have made it clear, regularly and prominently, that many deaths were avoidable and a consequence of damaging government policies including:

  • the imposition of ‘austerity’ in past years
  • the deliberate corporate-driven break-up of the National Health Service
  • the government’s lack of preparedness for a pandemic
  • the belated move to lockdown and the present rush to ‘open up the economy’ and send children back to school

If we had an actual functioning ‘mainstream’ media, it would be holding this disgraceful government to account, properly and comprehensively. BBC News, as the country’s well-funded ‘public service’ broadcaster, would be to the fore of critical and forensic journalism. In a piece published on the progressive ZNet website, Felix Collins dissected the government-friendly propaganda campaign in the UK media, including the BBC:

‘On April 10, as UK daily deaths became higher than any recorded in Italy or Spain, media coverage led with Boris’ recovery [after being in intensive care], while BBC News’ main headline was about the “herculean effort” of the Government to provide NHS with PPE. Subsequent headlines featured nurses describing treating Johnson as “surreal”, something they’d “never forget” and that he was “like everybody else”; orchestrated artificial grassroots support to boost public opinion about Boris and his government seem likely. The notions of supporting the country and supporting its leader are being conflated.’

In a small concession to the damning truth, BBC News aired Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician from the University of Cambridge, who was granted a moment on the Andrew Marr Sunday programme to call the government’s daily press briefings ‘completely embarrassing’. They are ‘not trustworthy communication of statistics’ and no more than ‘number theatre’. But this was a deviation from the broadcasting norm which has regularly seen BBC correspondents, notably political editor Laura Kuenssberg, serving up meek accounts of the crisis on prime-time BBC News at Six and Ten. An article in the Economist was actually titled, ‘The BBC is having a good pandemic’, even as it quoted one unnamed senior BBC journalist who let slip that:

‘the [BBC] bosses are keen that we come out of this with the sense that we looked after the interest of the nation, not just our journalistic values.’

In effect, there should not even be the pretence of ‘impartiality’, but a shoring-up of state propaganda by the BBC on behalf of the government. In fact, this has long been the reality of BBC performance ever since BBC founder John Reith wrote in his diary during the 1926 General Strike that ‘they [the government] know that they can trust us not to be really impartial.’

One welcome exception was the Panorama programme investigating the appalling lack of preparation for the pandemic; not least the inadequate provision of PPE for NHS staff and workers in care homes. But, in yet another sign that any dissent will not be tolerated, Tory Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden then attacked the BBC for straying momentarily from the state-approved script.

‘You Dropped The Ball Prime Minister. That Was Criminal’

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Suppressing Evidence Of Public Distrust Of UK Press

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Read whole article in Media Lens

Authoritarianism is Shoddy

On the 21st May, Craig Murray blogs

Editors Note: This article is on Press Freedom and not immediately associated with Julians plight. Craig has been covering Julian’s hearings as Our Man in the Gallery, all of which have been reposted on this site. He asks for your help in this article.

Well, it is really happening. It is something of a shock to see yourself listed as a criminal for writing the truth. I have a tiny extra glimpse now into the way my friend Julian has been feeling.

Three appeal court judges even at the procedural hearing – though not unheard of, that is not normal. The state is sparing no resources on this; in a sense I am flattered.

There will be no jury at the eventual trial, and this worries me. Not least because the indictment (called a “petition”) contains within itself evidence that this process is a stitch up. Please help me here, and read paras 49 to 56 of the indictment after reading this explanation.

Para 49 of the indictment is an utter garble. It states that I sent a twitter message beginning “It is respectfully submitted…”. 

I sent no such twitter message. Para 50 is missing. This is not a misnumbering, para 50 really is missing. I assume my twitter message, intended to be quoted at para 49, and whatever led in to the Crown’s argument beginning “it is respectively submitted” were in the missing section.

At para 53 the same thing happens again. It explicitly states that I published another tweet starting: “it is respectfully submitted that”.

I published no such tweet. Again the indictment does not give the actual text of the tweet complained of, even though it claims to do so. This time two paragraphs are clearly missing, and again this is not just a misnumbering, because of the missing material. It jumps from 53 to 56.

In short, the indictment from paras 49 to 56 is an inoperable jumble, with three paras missing from two different locations and which does not even contain – though it states it does – the very tweets which form part of the alleged offence with which I am charged.

You may argue this does not matter, and clerical errors are easily corrected. But that is to miss the point. I used to prepare official documents in my 20 year diplomatic career, from ministerial replies to members of the public to fully fledged international treaties. 

A Diplomatic Note to a foreign government, which has a legal status, might be the best comparator from my work to this indictment or petition. I always scrupulously proof read every one I sent before signing. It is unthinkable that a Diplomatic Note would be sent containing not one but a series of major, material errors.

Is this document any less solemn? It is an indictment on which they are attempting to brand me a criminal and potentially send me to prison for up to two years. It is signed by Alex Prentice, Depute Advocate General on behalf of the Lord Advocate, and by the senior judge, Lord Turnbull. 

But one thing is abundantly clear. Neither Alex Prentice nor Lord Turnbull can have carefully read through the document before they signed it. I do not believe for one moment that they would knowingly sign off a document containing such major errors. The judge, in particular, is meant to weigh carefully the matter to see if there really is a case to answer before he signs the Crown’s “petition”. But, I say it again, plainly Lord Turnbull has not actually read through it; or he would never have signed this garbled mess.

I am advised that it may be “contempt of court” for me to point out that Lord Turnbull signed this without reading it. But when a law makes it illegal to point out a blindingly obvious fact, then the law is an ass. 

If Lord Turnbull does not wish to be criticised, he should try doing his job properly and actually paying attention to what he signs.

Contempt is the right word. I have a great deal of contempt for anybody who would send me such a portentous legal document rotten through with utterly careless error which would have been spotted by even a cursory reading of the document.

They did not read it. The judge who approved it did not read it. 

Neither of them bothered to read the indictment or petition because it had already been decided to “get” Craig Murray and it therefore did not matter what the document actually said. The content of the charges is immaterial to them. Otherwise, they would have read them before signing. There can only be two reasons for that failure. The first is incompetence. The second is corruption. In a sense, it does not matter which it is in this case. 

A state which is turning to authoritarianism to crush dissent does not need to be very careful about matters of process.

The failure of both Prentice and Turnbull to read before signing is not important for the mistakes in the document, which can be remedied by a new document. It is important because of the clear indication of attitude. This prosecution is abuse of process, a clear Article Six violation under the European Convention on Human Rights. 

A series of facts make this abundantly plain. The abuse of process lies in this combined with the extraordinary selectivity in prosecuting me, when others who can be objectively proven to have much more effectively produced “jigsaw identification” are not prosecuted. There is a very clear political motivation behind the selection of who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.

When you put together the facts that there is overwhelming evidence that mainstream media journalists were more guilty of “jigsaw identification” than I, that systematic police action is being taken to harass only supporters of Alex Salmond, and that they don’t even care what the indictment to be used against me actually says, the overall picture becomes very, very clear.

Authoritarianism doesn’t have to worry about mistakes in the indictment, because it can just smash you in the face with the jackboot. That is what is happening here.

My own view is that they were so keen to “get” Craig Murray they just signed without any proper scrutiny whatsoever. I don’t see any other conclusion. Do you?

They do not have the excuse that this is routine. Major prosecutions for contempt in Scotland are extremely rare – the last one was Aamer Anwar about a decade ago (it failed).

So why could the state be so keen to prosecute Craig Murray, that is doesn’t even care what is in the indictment, or even if it is drawn up with the most basic level of competence? Well, I refer you to this excellent letter setting out the fact that the state is only acting against those who defended the innocent Alex Salmond, even though his detractors were much more in contempt of court. And I refer you to the Panelbase opinion poll which showed that very substantially more people who know the identities of the accusers, learnt them from the mainstream media. 

I remain clear that I identified nobody. If I had wanted to, I would have done so openly. I have never been noted for cowardice. 

The other accusation, that I wrote articles stating that the prosecution of Alex Salmond was a fit-up, is something I state again here. It is a proper exercise of my freedom of speech under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Actually, you don’t have to go past the very first sentence of the indictment to understand what is happening here. It reads “On 23 January 2019, Alexander Elliott Anderson Salmond was arrested by police officers in relation to a number of incidents that had taken place in Scotland.”

“That had taken place”.
Not “alleged to have taken place”.
“That had taken place”.
And Prentice wrote this, and Turnbull signed it off, after the acquittal.

After independent witnesses gave eye witness accounts that several of the incidents had not taken place at all. After it was demonstrated in court that the accuser of the most serious offence was not even present when she claimed the offence took place.

After the jury threw out the pile of ordure that the very same Alex Prentice as prosecuting counsel presented to them. 

“That had taken place”. No, most of the incidents had not taken place at all, and none in the form alleged. 

Right at the start, this wording gives away the motivation. The conspirators have still not psychologically processed the fact their attack on Alex Salmond was foiled by the jury. The Crown is now coming at Mark Hirst and at me in an effort to get some kind of victory from this massive waste of public resources. The conspirators seek to assuage their massive humiliation in the failure of a prosecution that stank and quite obviously ought never to have been brought.

I am not going to pipe down under this abuse of process and attack on freedom of speech. On the contrary, this will be a reasoned, forceful and very public resistance.

TWO WAYS YOU CAN HELP

The hearing on 10 June is supposed to be public, but it will be virtual because of coronavirus. While it is a case management hearing, I shall nevertheless be grateful if you are able to “attend” virtually, as I am very keen indeed that I am not stitched up out of the public eye. Please send an email requesting access to the virtual hearing on 10 June to judicialcomms@scotcourts.gov.uk. I am very keen as many people do this as possible. Journalists please in addition copy in communications@scotcourts.gov.uk for accreditation. 

Secondly, many people come to this blog through social media and I am currently suffering a very high level of suppression, on Facebook and especially on Twitter. Rather than just retweet and share any soical media post that brought you here, (which may appear on the face to have worked but the dissemination will be suppressed), I would be very grateful if you could also write your own new posting and put a link. If you have your own blog or access to one, a commendation of this post with a link would be very welcome, even if it is not your normal policy. And finally of course, the entire post is free as always to copy, republish and translate as you wish.

Read original post at Craig Murray’s Blog

Worldwide mass surveillance by Germany’s intelligence service declared unconstitutional in landmark ruling on press freedom in the digital age

On 19th May 2020, Reporters Without Borders reports

Editor’s Note: Whilst not directly related to Julian’s plight, Julian’s plight is all about Press Freedom . This article has been included to show that Press Freedom can be won back through directed and diligent hard work by the many

In a much-anticipated verdict issued this morning, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has put an end to the groundless mass surveillance of global internet traffic by Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). The ruling, the most far-reaching in this field in the past 20 years, sends an important signal for the protection of press freedom in the digital age.

The court ruled that the BND law disregards both the freedom of the press guaranteed in article 5 and the freedom of telecommunications guaranteed in Article 10 of the Basic Law as it does not recognise that foreign surveillance must be conducted in conformity with the Basic Law. When revising the BND law, the legislature will have to take into account that foreign surveillance without cause is only possible in very few cases. Vulnerable groups of persons such as journalists must be granted special protection. Tighter criteria must also apply to the targeted surveillance of individuals. Furthermore, international surveillance must be controlled much more effectively by independent bodies with their own budgetary sovereignty. The ruling thus sets new standards in international human rights protection and for freedom of the press.

“The Federal Constitutional Court has once again underlined the importance of press freedom,  said Christian Mihr, Executive Director of RSF Germany. We are delighted that Karlsruhe is putting a stop to the escalating surveillance practices of the Federal Intelligence Service abroad”, Mihr added.

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Read complete article in Reporters Without Boarders Web Site
and many other papers
The Insider

New Court Files expose Sheldon Adelson’s security team in US Spy operation

On the 14th May 2020, Max Blumenthal reports

“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole.” 
–Mike Pompeo, College Station, TX, April 15, 2019

An exclusive investigation by The Grayzone reveals new details on the critical role Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands played in an apparent CIA spying operation targeting Julian Assange, and exposes the Sands security staff who helped coordinate the malicious campaign.

As the co-founder of a small security consulting firm called UC Global, David Morales spent years slogging through the minor leagues of the private mercenary world. A former Spanish special forces officer, Morales yearned to be the next Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder who leveraged his army-for-hire into high-level political connections across the globe. But by 2016, he had secured just one significant contract, to guard the children of Ecuador’s then-President Rafael Correa and his country’s embassy in the UK.

The London embassy contract proved especially valuable to Morales, however. Inside the diplomatic compound, his men guarded Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, a top target of the US government who had been living in the building since Correa granted him asylum in 2012. It was not long before Morales realized he had a big league opportunity on his hands.

In 2016, Morales rushed off alone to a security fair in Las Vegas, hoping to rustle up lucrative new gigs by touting his role as the guardian of Assange. Days later, he returned to his company’s headquarters in Jerez de Frontera, Spain with exciting news. 

“From now on, we’re going to be playing in the first division,” Morales announced to his employees. When a co-owner of UC Global asked what Morales meant, he responded that he had turned to the “dark side” – an apparent reference to US intelligence services. “The Americans will find us contracts around the world,” Morales assured his business partner.

Morales had just signed on to guard Queen Miri, the $70 million yacht belonging to one of the most high profile casino tycoons in Vegas: ultra-Zionist billionaire and Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. Given that Adelson already had a substantial security team assigned to guard him and his family at all times, the contract between UC Global and Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands was clearly the cover for a devious espionage campaign apparently overseen by the CIA. 

Unfortunately for Morales, the Spanish security consultant charged with leading the spying operation, what happened in Vegas did not stay there. 

Following Assange’s imprisonment, several disgruntled former employees eventually approached Assange’s legal team to inform them about the misconduct and arguably illegal activity they participated in at UC Global. One former business partner said they came forward after realizing that “David Morales decided to sell all the information to the enemy, the US.” A criminal complaint was submitted in a Spanish court and a secret operation that resulted in the arrest of Morales was set into motion by the judge. 

Morales was charged by a Spanish High Court in October 2019 with violating the privacy of Assange and abusing the publisher’s attorney-client privileges, as well as money laundering and bribery. The documents revealed in court, which were primarily backups from company computers, exposed the disturbing reality of his activities on “the dark side.”

Obtained by media outlets including The Grayzone, the UC Global files detail an elaborate and apparently illegal US surveillance operation in which the security firm spied on Assange, his legal team, his American friends, US journalists, and an American member of Congress who had been allegedly dispatched to the Ecuadorian embassy by President Donald Trump. Even the Ecuadorian diplomats whom UC Global was hired to protect were targeted by the spy ring. 

The ongoing investigation detailed black operations ranging from snooping on the Wikileaks founder’s  private conversations to fishing a diaper from an embassy trash can in order to determine if the feces inside it belonged to his son. 

According to witness statements obtained by The Grayzone, weeks after Morales proposed breaking into the office of Assange’s lead counsel, the office was burglarized. The witnesses also detailed a proposal to kidnap or poison Assange. A police raid at the home of Morales netted two handgunswith their serial numbers filed off, along with stacks of cash. 

One source close to the investigation told The Grayzone that an Ecuadorian official was robbed at gunpoint while carrying private information pertaining to a plan to secure diplomatic immunity for Assange.

Throughout the black operations campaign, US intelligence appears to have worked through Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands, a company that had previously served as an alleged front for a CIA blackmail operation several years earlier. The operations formally began once Adelson’s hand-picked presidential candidate, Donald Trump, entered the White House in January 2017.

In its coverage of the alleged relationship between the CIA, UC Global, and Adelson’s Sands, the New York Times claimed it was “unclear whether it was the Americans who were behind bugging the embassy.” Though he outlined work for an “American client” in company emails, Morales insisted before a Spanish judge that the spying he conducted in the embassy was performed entirely on behalf of Ecuador’s SENAIN security services. He has even claimed to CNN Español that he was merely seeking to motivate his employees when he boasted about “playing in the first division” after returning from his fateful trip to Las Vegas.

This investigation will further establish the US government’s role in guiding UC Global’s espionage campaign, shedding new light on the apparent relationship between the CIA and Adelson’s Sands, and expose how UC Global deceived the Ecuadorian government on behalf of the client Morales referred to as the “American friends.” 

Thanks to new court disclosures, The Grayzone is also able to reveal the identity of Sands security staff who presumably liaised between Morales, Adelson’s company, and US intelligence.

According to court documents and testimony by a former business associate and employees of Morales, it was Adelson’s top bodyguard, an Israeli-American named Zohar Lahav, who personally recruited Morales, then managed the relationship between the Spanish security contractor and Sands on a routine basis. After their first meeting in Vegas, the two security professionals became close friends, visiting each other overseas and speaking frequently.

During the spying operation, Lahav worked directly under Brian Nagel, the director of global security for Las Vegas Sands. A former associate director of the US Secret Service and cyber-security expert, Nagel was officially commended by the CIA following successful collaborations with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. At Sands, he seemed to be an ideal middleman between the company and the US national security state, as well as a potential guide for the complex surveillance tasks assigned to Morales. 

When Adelson’s favored candidate, Donald Trump, moved into the Oval Office, the CIA came under the control of Mike Pompeo, another Adelson ally who seemed to relish the opportunity to carry out illegal acts, including spying on American citizens, in the name of national security. 

Pompeo outlines the attack on Assange

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Journey to “the dark side”

Pompeo’s first public speech as CIA Director, hosted at the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank on April 13, 2017, was one of the most paranoid and resentful addresses ever delivered by an agency chief.
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One camera feed for Ecuador, another for “the American client” 

On February 26, 2017, Wikileaks announced the forthcoming release of a major tranche of CIA files revealing details of the agency’s hacking and electronic surveillance tools. One such spying application called “Marble” allowed agency spies to implant code that obfuscated their identity on computers they had hacked. Other files contained evidence of programs that allowed hackers to break into encrypted messaging applications like Signal and Telegram, and to turn Samsung smart TVs into listening devices. 
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From top US cyber-crime investigator to Adelson’s security chief

During his lengthy career in the US Secret Service, Nagel worked at the nexus of federal law enforcement and US intelligence. In the 1990s, Nagel not only served on the personal protection detail of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; he was assigned to “work with two foreign protective services after the assassination and attempted assassination of their respective heads of state,” he said in sworn testimony in a US District Court in 2011. Nagel also stated that he later protected the director and deputy director of a federal agency that he neglected to name
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Adelson’s Israeli-American bodyman turns spying middleman

When Nagel joined Las Vegas Sands as its global security director, he was placed in charge of securing an international financial and political empire that spanned from the US to Israel to Macau in the People’s Republic of China. Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson possessed a fortune valued at around $30 billion that placed him consistently in the top 10 of Forbes’ list of the wealthiest Americans. 
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A CIA front in Chinese territory?

By the time of the lawsuit, Adelson’s company appeared to have been working closely with the CIA. A confidential 2010 report by a private investigator contracted by the gambling industry pinpointed Adelson’s casino in Macau as a front for Agency operations against China.
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“I sense that this person offered him to collaborate with American intelligence authorities”

A 2016 security industry fair in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo provided the occasion for Adelson’s company – and presumably the CIA – to enlist David Morales. His personal recruiter, according to witness testimony, was Lahav.
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Spying, stealing diapers, and burglary plans

Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist who visited Assange regularly at the embassy in London, remembered relaxed encounters with minimal security and friendly interactions with embassy staff for the first five years of the Wikileaks founder’s stay. It was in December 2017 that everything changed.
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Sabotaging Assange’s exit strategy, robbery and assassination plots

Throughout December 2017, Assange and his lawyers were formulating a plan to exit the embassy under the protections granted to diplomats under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. One proposal called for appointing Assange as a diplomat for a friendly government like Bolivia or Serbia, thus guaranteeing him diplomatic immunity. The final component of the plan relied on cooperation from the head of Ecuador’s SENAIN, Rommy Vallejo, who was technically the boss of Morales. Vallejo arrived at the embassy on December 20, 2017 – just five days before Assange planned to leave the embassy.
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According to a source involved in the plan to grant Assange diplomatic immunity, the US ambassador to Ecuador, Todd Chapman, informed Ecuadorian authorities that he had learned of the initiative, and warned them against executing it.

The source also told The Grayzone that when one of the Ecuadorian officials involved in conceiving the strategy to free Assange from the embassy returned to Quito, his official government vehicle was stopped on a road by masked gunmen on a motorcycle who robbed him of his laptop. The computer contained detailed information about the plan to legally allow Assange to leave the embassy.
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The alleged robbery of an Ecuadorian official in Quito was consistent with another violent plan divulged by a former UC Global employee in the Spanish court. 

The ex-staffer recalled Morales mentioning that “the Americans were desperate” to end Assange’s presence in the embassy. Thus they were “proposing to activate more extreme measures against him,” including “the possibility of leaving one diplomatic mission door open, arguing that it was an accidental mistake, to allow the entrance and kidnapping of the asylum seeker; or even the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange.” 

The staffers were shocked when they learned of the proposal and protested to Morales that the direction he was taking “was starting to get dangerous.”

After a campaign of espionage, an Espionage Act prosecution

On April 11, 2019, British police raided the Ecuadorian embassy in London and dragged Assange into a waiting van. It was the first time in history a government had allowed a foreign law enforcement agency to enter its sovereign territory to arrest one of its citizens.

That same day, Ola Bini – the Swedish computer programmer branded as a “hacker” by Morales and placed under apparent US  surveillance – was arrested in Ecuador and detained for months without charges. Accused of collaborating with Assange and various cyber-crimes, Bini has been held in Ecuador’s El Inca prison, where US authorities have reportedly requested to interrogate him. Amnesty International has labeled Bini a “digital defender” and condemned “undue government interference” as well as the intimidation of his legal defense team.
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During the first extradition hearing this February 24, Assange was confined to a glass box that prevented him from directly conferring with his lawyers. Observers including former British diplomat Craig Murray said they noticed US agents conferring outside the courtroom with UK prosecutors.

One witness to the extradition hearing provided The Grayzone with photographs of several attendees they claimed were US Department of Justice officials who sat directly behind British prosecutors throughout the proceedings.
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After the hearing began, according to Assange’s lawyer, Martinez, a female British barrister arrived and demanded permission to observe. She was representing Las Vegas Sands, a clear indication that Adelson was deeply concerned about the outcome of the proceedings. 

Having been promoted from CIA director to secretary of state, Mike Pompeo has reportedly laid the groundwork to run for US senate in Kansas. The first step in Pompeo’s fledgling campaign, according to a raft of articles, was outreach to Sheldon Adelson to “gauge interest” in financing the Senate bid.

By the end of 2019, following the exposure of Sands’ relationship with UC Global, former employees of Morales revealed a rumor that Adelson’s bodyguard, Zohar Lahav, had been fired by Las Vegas Sands. When Morales was asked during an appearance before the Spanish court this February if the rumor was true, he confirmed it, stating that Lahav was terminated because of the “mess” that he helped create.
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Read whole article in the Grayzone (includes pictures of various players and evidence presented in the Spanish spying case)

There Is No Evidence Russia Hacked the DNC and Gave Emails to WikiLeaks

On the 16th May 2020, Joe Hoft  writes

Jesse Watters at Watters’ World confirmed tonight what we have been reporting for years and we were absolutely correct. Deep State participant Crowdstrike had no information that Russia hacked the DNC and then forwarded hacked emails to WikiLeaks. This was a lie!

The release of documents from the Intel Community that were held up by corrupt liar, Rep. Adam Schiff, show incredible information that destroys the Deep State’s many lies. The biggest lie which the Russia collusion sham was based on was the tale that Russia hacked the DNC and then gave the hacked emails to WikiLeaks, who in turn released them before the 2016 election.

The whole story was a lie!

Aaron Mate from The Gray Zone joined Jesse Watters to discuss the Russian “hacking” scandal and Crowdstrike.

Aaron Mate analysis from twitter

On March 8, 2020 and before on June 16, 2019, we presented arguments against the Mueller gang’s assertion that the DNC was hacked by Russians. 

Cyber expert Yaacov Apelbaum posted an incredible report with information basically proving that the DNC was not hacked by the Russians.

Read whole article at The Gateway Pundit