Noord-Koreaans 'bedrog met nucleaire deal' is fake news o.a. gebracht door de New York Times

In een artikel op The Nation bericht Tim Shorrock over een artikel in de New York Times, geschreven door David Sanger, éen 'journalist die in het verleden vaak als bron fungeerde voor lekken over het VS buitenlandbeleid t.a.v. Noord-Korea (ofwel men lekte officiële documenten naar Sanger).

Deze Sanger bracht dat artikel in de NYT en daarin wordt gesteld dat Pyongyang zich niet aan de afspraken houdt die met Trump zijn gemaakt en waarin voorts wordt gesteld dat Noord-Korea nog steeds raketten ontwikkeld. Een en ander n.a.v. een door de rechtse denktank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) opgesteld rapport

Uitvoerig legt Shorrock uit dat het rapport van een enorm 'fake news' (nepnieuws) niveau is. Zo zijn de getoonde foto's van de sites in Noord-Korea, van 2 maanden voor de gesprekken tussen Trump en Kim Yung-un.........

Bovendien zo stelt Shorrock, zijn er geen verdragen getekend over het raketprogramma van Noord-Korea en zoals het in de dagelijkse praktijk gaat: totdat er zaken zijn getekend gaat men door waar men mee bezig was, of het nu om de strijd over het bezit van een gebied gaat, of zoals in dit geval het werken aan middellange- en langeafstandsraketten.......

Lees het volgende verhaal en intussen een cliché op deze plek: geeft het ajb door, laat je niet langer besodemieteren door instituten als CSIS of het Haagse Centrum voor Strategische Studies (HCSS) met hun oorlogshitserij op basis van leugens en halve en verdraaide waarheden...... Instituten die fungeren als grootlobbyist van het militair-industrieel complex, de NAVO en het uiterst gewelddadige, terroristische buitenlandbeleid van de VS in het groot..... (waar de NAVO onder opperbevel staat van de VS.....)

NUCLEAR ARMS AND PROLIFERATION NORTH KOREA MEDIA BIAS

How ‘The New York Times’ Deceived the Public on North Korea

Stretching the findings of a think-tank report on Pyongyang’s missile bases is a reminder of the paper’s role in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

By Tim Shorrock

NOVEMBER 16, 2018

(Photo by Haxorjoe at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The New York Times may still have a Judith Miller problem—only now it’s a David Sanger problem.

Miller, of course, is the former Times reporter who helped build the case for the 2003 US invasion of Iraqwith a series of reports based on highly questionable sources bent on regime change. The newspaper eventually admitted its errors but didn’t specifically blame Miller, who left the paper soon after the mea culpa and is now a commentator on Fox News.

Now, Sanger, who over the years has been the recipient of dozens of leaks from US intelligence on North Korea’s weapons program and the US attempts to stop it, has come out with his own doozy of a story that raises serious questions about his style of deep-state journalism.

The article may not involve the employment of sleazy sources with an ax to grind, but it does stretch the findings of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank that is deeply integrated with the military-industrial complex and plays an instrumental role in US media coverage on Korea.

“Controversy is raging,” South Korea’s progressive Hankyoreh newspaper declared on Wednesday about the Times report, which it called “riddled with holes and errors.”

Sanger’s story, which appeared on Monday underneath the ominous headline “In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception,” focused on a new study from CSIS’s “Beyond Parallel” projectabout the Sakkanmol Missile Operating Base, one of 13 North Korean missile sites, out of a total of 20, that it has identified and analyzed from overhead imagery provided by Digital Globe, a private satellite contractor.

None of the 20 sites has been officially acknowledged by Pyongyang, but the network is “long known to American intelligence agencies,” wrote Sanger.

Sakkanmol, according to CSIS, “is an undeclared operational missile base for short-range ballistic missiles” a little over 50 miles (85 kilometers) north of the border and therefore “one of the closest to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and Seoul.” Pyongyang’s highly publicized decommissioning last summer of the Sohae satellite launch facility “obscures the military threat to U.S. forces and South Korea from this and other undeclared ballistic missile bases.”

Its authors added a huge caveat at the end: “Some of the information used in the preparation of this study may eventually prove to be incomplete or incorrect.”

But the Times ignored the warning and took the report several steps further. According to Sanger, that analysis of the missile base shows that North Korea is “moving ahead with its ballistic missile program” despite pledges made by Kim Jong-Un to President Trump at their Singapore summit on June 12 to eliminate his nuclear and missile programs if the United States ends its “hostile policy” and agrees to forge a new relationship with North Korea.

The “new commercial satellite images” of the undeclared missile sites, Sanger concluded darkly, suggest that North Korea “has been engaged in a great deception.”

While North Korea has offered to dismantle a major launching site, he asserted, it continues “to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.” That finding “contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination” of the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles, Sanger concluded.

The implication was that North Korea, by continuing to build missiles after the Singapore summit, is lying to the United States and is therefore untrustworthy as a negotiating partner—and that Trump, by proclaiming that he has neutralized Kim’s threats, has been deceived. The Times-CSIS report was immediately picked up by major media outlets and repeated almost verbatim on NBC Nightly News and NPR, with little additional reporting.

A leading Democrat, Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, seized on the report to argue that President Trump is “getting played” by North Korea. “We cannot have another summit with North Korea—not with President Trump, not with the Secretary of State—unless and until the Kim regime takes concrete, tangible actions to halt and roll back its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs,” he said in the statement.

But even a cursory analysis of the imagery should have raised questions. On Monday night, a Korean news outlet pointed out that all the photos analyzed in the CSIS report are dated March 29, 2018—almost two and a half months before Trump and Kim met in Singapore on June 12.

The dates make Sanger’s claim that North Korea is “moving ahead” on missile production after its pledges to Trump laughable; indeed, they make his story look like a serious attempt to deceive the American public about the real progress that has been made in ending the standoff.

In fact, as discussion swirled on Twitter, it became clear that Sanger was exaggerating the report. Arms-control experts immediately questioned his assertions, arguing that he had ignored the fact that North Korea and the United States have yet to sign any agreement under which the North would give up its nuclear weapons and missiles. And in the absence of an agreement, it’s status quo for both North Korea and the United States.

North Korea’s missile program “is NOT deception,” Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, posted soon after the story was published. Narang, who writes occasionally for the Times editorial pageon North Korea, pointed out that Kim Jong-un has never offered to stop producing ballistic missiles and in fact had ordered more to be produced in January 2018.

“Unless and until there is a deal” with Trump, he wrote, “Kim would be a fool to eliminate and stop improving [them].… So the characterization of ‘deception’ is highly misleading. There’s no deal to violate.” (Like other US analysts, Narang did not question the CSIS report itself, calling it “excellent.”)

The CSIS report was denounced by the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in as “nothing new,” and Kim Eui-kyeom, its chief spokesperson, took particular exception to the Times’ use of the term “deception.” To his credit, Sanger acknowledged the criticism and quoted the statement in full.

“North Korea has never promised to dismantle its missile bases, nor has it ever joined any treaty that obligates it to dismantle them,” said Kim. “So calling this a ‘deception’ is not appropriate. If anything, the existence of these missile bases highlights the need for negotiation and dialogue, including those between the North and the United States, to eliminate the North Korean threat.”

Hankyoreh, in its analysis, objected to Sanger’s claim that Sakkanmol and other missile bases are “hidden.” It reported that South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had identified the base as the source for a short-range missile launched by North Korea on March 10, 2016.

“South Korean and overseas news outlets at the time dedicated significant coverage to the launch, noting the presence of an underground Scud missile base in the Sakkanmol area.”

Leon Sigal, the author of a book about North Korea and a former member of the New York Times editorial board, sharply disagreed with Sanger’s assertion that North Korea is now “moving ahead with its ballistic missile program.” Writing Tuesday in 38 North, Sigal said the CSIS report notes that “only minor infrastructure changes were observed” at the missile site since Kim came to power in December 2011. That’s hardly progress.

Sigal also noted the absence of a US–North Korea agreement inhibiting the “deployment of missiles by Pyongyang, never mind requiring their dismantlement. Nor has Washington yet offered the necessary reciprocal steps that might make such a deal possible.”

In a biting comment on his former employer, he added that “substituting tendentious hyperbole for sound reporting may convince editors to feature a story on page one, but it is a disservice to readers.”

Taking note of the response from the Moon government and arms-control experts, Christine Ahn, the founder of Women Cross DMZ and a strong advocate for engagement with the North, called on the newspaper to correct the story. “The @nytimes should write a retraction,” she said. “They just made real Trump’s allegations of #fakenews.”

On Tuesday, as she predicted, Trump used the story to launch another attack on the media. “The story in the New York Times concerning North Korea developing missile bases is inaccurate,” he tweeted. “We fully know about the sites being discussed, nothing new—and nothing happening out of the normal. Just more Fake News. I will be the first to let you know if things go bad!”

Less than two hours later, the Times communications office put a short statement out on Twitter defending Sanger’s reporting. “The New York Times stands by our story, which is based on satellite imagery analyzed by experts,” it stated in a post that linked to Trump’s earlier blast.

Sanger, who is interviewed frequently for national security conferences and documentaries on North Korea, did not respond to e-mails asking for comment on his story.

Like many of his North Korea stories over the years, Sanger’s account of what he basically described as a betrayal by Kim Jong-un seemed perfectly timed to interject public skepticism of the North at a crucial moment for the US negotiations with both Koreas to resolve the nuclear standoff and pave the way for a final peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula.

Over the past month, while the two Koreas have made spectacular leaps in reducing military tensions along their border, the US dialogue with North Korea has stalled. The primary issues dividing them are Trump’s insistence on keeping his pressure campaign of economic sanctions in place until the North denuclearizes, and the North’s demand that Trump join the two Koreas in publicly declaring an end to the Korean War.

South Korea has also pushed for such a declaration, saying that it would assure the North that it can eventually disarm without fear of attack or invasion from the United States (its position on the end-of-war declaration has been harshly criticized in Washington, including by CSIS analysts).

The differences came into stark relief last week, when North Korea abruptly canceled a planned meeting in New York between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and North Korean Workers’ Party Vice Chairman Kim Yong-chol. In a bid to get them back on track, President Moon this week sent his unification minister, Cho Myoung-gyon, to Washington, where he is meeting with Pompeo, congressional leaders, and, according to Yonhap News, top officials at CSIS.

South Korean officials are confident the US–North Korea talks will resume, and point to the steps Pyongyang has taken since the Singapore summit. They include North Korea’s decommissioning of a major satellite launch facility; its destruction of the tunnels where its nuclear weapons were tested; its return of American dead from the Korean War; and its unprecedented cooperation with South Korea and the US-controlled UN Command to remove guard posts and firearms in the DMZ.

On Tuesday, John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national-security adviser, toldreporters in Asia that Trump “is prepared to have a second summit” with Kim in early 2019. And on Thursday, in a brief meeting in Singapore with President Moon, Vice President Mike Pence asked that South Korea “communicate and talk more closely with North Korea” to help bring this about, Moon’s spokesman told reporters.

The most glaring problem with the Times story was Sanger’s characterization of CSIS as a neutral organization (“a major think tank”) and his failure to disclose that it receives enormous funding from the US government as well major military contractors. Nor did he mention that CSIS and its key analysts provide a kind of anchor to the Times’ coverage of Korea; they often appear near the lead of a story to explain its political significance. That is particularly true of Victor Cha, one of the authors of the report.

Cha, the director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council in the George W. Bush White House, was briefly considered last year by President Trump for US ambassador to Seoul (apparently his hawkish views weren’t enough to get him the job).

In his interview with Sanger for the Times article, Cha seemed to be pushing for a more aggressive stance against North Korea. “It’s not like these bases have been frozen,” he said. “Work is continuing. What everybody is worried about is that Trump is going to accept a bad deal—they give us a single test site and dismantle a few other things, and in return they get a peace agreement” that formally ends the Korean War.

Cha continued to defend the report as the criticism intensified, and took special umbrage at South Korea’s response. “How can [South Korea] defend NK’s undisclosed operational missile bases?” he asked in a heated exchange on Twitter that caught the attention of Charles Knight, an analyst with the Project on Defense Alternatives. “Seriously, how contorted can these rationalizations for NK weapons possession get??”

Knight, in an e-mail, said he had concluded that Cha has been “enabled” by Sanger and the editors of the Times to “be the agent of the opening salvo of an offensive by the most reactionary elements of the US national security and foreign policy establishment against the Korean diplomacy of both the Trump administration and South Korea.”

Here’s where the contractor money that pours into CSIS comes in: Providing the justification for a tougher policy of sanctions and military threats would be very much in tune with the defense and intelligence companies that support the think tank.

According to the CSIS page for “corporation and trade association donors,”they include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3, Rockwell, General Atomics, and Booz Allen Hamilton. CSIS is also funded by several Asian defense giants, including Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Korea Aerospace Industries.

All of these companies have a stake in US military options focused on North Korea, including monitoring its military activities, building missile-defense systems and providing weapons, ships, drones, and aircraft for offensive military operations when they become necessary.

As I reported in 2017 for Newstapa/The Korea Center for Investigative Journalism, “As the South Korean and US militaries have become more integrated in the face of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, CSIS has become an important forum where military collaboration—especially on the industrial side—is thrashed out and decided.”

In 2016, for example, CSIS sponsored a conference on “U.S.-Korea Defense Acquisition Policy and the International Security Environment” that drew high-ranking officials from the South Korean government and its military industry. In opening the conference, CSIS’s CEO John Hamre, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, declared, “We’ve been military partners for 70 years but we are now going to be business partners in a very new way.”

Digital Globe, the satellite company that supplied the imagery for the CSIS report, is not a donor to the think tank. But it has a special relationship with US intelligence as an important contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, one of the primary collection agencies for the US government. According to CSIS report, Joseph Bermudez Jr., its primary author, is a former “senior all-source analyst for DigitalGlobe’s Analysis Center.”

The Moon government, while a donor to CSIS, did not seem impressed with the Digital Globe imagery. In his critique of the Times story, Moon’s spokesperson Kim Eui-kyeom pointed out that the source for the CSIS analysis is a “commercial satellite” vendor. “The intelligence authorities of South Korea and the U.S. have far more detailed information from military satellites and are closely monitoring [it],” he said.

In the end, the Sanger story was widely derided in the circle of people who closely follow North Korea. Once these doubts were voiced, both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post avoided the Times’ claim of deception and played down its dire conclusions that North Korea is cheating on the agreement it reached with Trump last June.

That’s a good development, indicating that Sanger’s questionable scoop probably won’t mushroom out of control and add fuel to a conflict, as Judith Miller’s phony reporting did at the advent of the Iraq War. And Sanger’s role as a leading expert on North Korea and US intelligence may take a hit.

“In an age of baseless allegations of fake news devaluing the work of journalists worldwide, it’s extremely lamentable that the New York Times—which is meant to be a nuanced and quality outlet—spun the CSIS story in the egregious way it did,” Chad O’Carroll, the CEO of Korea Risk Group, a Seoul-based organization that analyzes North Korea, tweeted on Tuesday.

Correction: The passage discussing a Twitter exchange involving Victor Cha and Charles Knight was garbled in the editing process; it has now been corrected.

Tim Shorrock TWITTER Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

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Zie ook:
'Haags Centrum voor Strategische Studies (HCSS): stelt dat Noord-Korea nog steeds raketten bouwt'

WikiLeaks toont aan dat VS en GB een gezamenlijke gewelddadige en bedrieglijke buitenlandpolitiek voeren

WikiLeaks, deze maand 12 jaar oud, wordt door overheden en door steeds meer journalisten belasterd voor haar openbaringen, inclusief het openbaar maken van de speciale relatie tussen de VS en Groot-Brittannië in het voeren van een gezamenlijke buitenlandpolitiek van geweld en bedrog, een beleid in het belang van de machthebbers in Washington en Londen (Whitehall).......

Mark Curtis publiceerde op Middle East Eye een artikel over deze zaak en toont aan middels meerdere voorbeelden die op WikiLeaks zijn te vinden (officiële documenten en berichten) hoe smerig overheidshandelen in elkaar steekt. Zoals GB dat in geheime onderhandelingen met Saoedi-Arabië over stemming in de VN, ervoor zorgde dat zowel GB als S-A werden verkozen in de VN Mensenrechtenraad (UNHRC), zo bleek uit een officieel bericht uit 2013......

Uit een ander bericht blijkt dat William Hague in 2008, toen hij schaduwminister van buitenlandse zaken was voor de conservatieven, de VS ambassade in Londen liet weten dat de Britten een VS vriendelijk regime wensen, 'we hebben een pro-VS regering nodig, de wereld heeft het nodig', aldus plork Hague........

De speciale relatie tussen de VS en GB wordt door Whitehall op alle mogelijke manieren beschermd tegen openbaarmakingen, zo bleek uit een officieel bericht van Whitehall aan Washington, dit bericht werd gestuurd n.a.v. het Chilcot onderzoek naar de oorlog tegen Irak, waarbij Whitehall Washington verzekerde dat er maatregelen waren genomen die de belangen van de VS zouden beschermen......

Wat die bescherming precies inhoudt is niet bekend, echter wel dat er nooit ook maar één VS beambte werd gevraagd te getuigen voor de Chilcot commissie, voorts was het de commissie verboden een briefwisseling in te zien tussen Tony Blair, destijds de premier-oplichter voor GB en George W. Bush, destijds de president-idioot van de VS........

Berichten ('cables') op WikiLeaks uit 2016 tonen verder aan dat in tegenstelling tot de leugens van GB in aanloop van de illegale bombardementen op Libië (in maart 2011), dat het niet de opzet was Khadaffi af te zetten, maar te voorkomen dat de bevolking werd aangevallen........ Dit terwijl niet alleen die bevolking wel met bombardementen werd aangevallen (door o.a. GB en de VS) en het wel degelijk de opzet was Khadaffi af te zetten, zo blijkt uit documenten van Hillary Clinton uit het Wikileaks archief.....

In het artikel ook aandacht voor een smerig spel met clusterbommen, GB mocht deze niet meer op haar bodem hebben, maar via een omweg via de militaire VS bases bleef dit moorddadig tuig toch in GB...... Uit andere berichten bleek al dat via deze VS bases clusterbommen werden geleverd aan Saoedi-Arabië, die ze inzet in Jemen, waar deze reli-fascistische terreurstaat een genocide uitvoert....

Dan nog de zaak van Diego Garcia, dit grootste eiland van de Chagosarchipel (Indische Oceaan), waar de bevolking door de Britten werd verjaagd in de 60er jaren, dit t.b.v. de VS die een grote basis heeft ingericht op dat eiland, een basis die een grote rol speelt in de illegale oorlogen die de VS en haar bondgenoten in het Midden-Oosten uitvechten tegen landen als Syrië, Irak en Afghanistan (en als 'het meezit' straks tegen Iran, wat 'god' verhoedde......)

De Britten hebben alles op alles gezet om de terugkeer van de bevolking van Diego Garcia tegen te gaan, o.a. door het zeegebied rond het eiland tot zeereservaat te verklaren...... In een bericht van een hooggeplaatste Britse ambtenaar aan de VS staat te lezen dat GB met het verklaren van een zeereservaat, de bewoners wil frustreren terug te keren naar hun geboortegrond, of de grond van hun ouders/voorouders......

Nogmaals wordt in dit artikel gewezen op de bewezen feiten van VS spionage, waar zelfs haar trouwste partner GB werd bespioneerd (zoals eerder ook de Duitse regering overkwam, zelfs de telefoon van Merkel werd gehackt door de VS...).... Je weet wel, een zaak waar de VS zonder ophouden Rusland en andere haar niet welgevallige landen van beschuldigt, neem de hele Russiagate hysterie, waar nog steeds niet een flinter aan bewijs voor werd geleverd, terwijl er meer dan voldoende bewijzen zijn dat dit niet is gebeurt......

Gezien het voorgaande is het dan ook uitermate smerig om te lezen hoe men stelt dat voorkomen moet worden dat onderzoeksjournalisten, hackers en 'buitenlandse spionnen' zaken naar het publiek kunnen lekken (hoeveel bewijs wil je nog hebben voor het uitvoeren van smerige zaken door de VS en GB??) Onderzoeksjournalisten worden zelfs als bedreiging neergezet en vergeleken met terroristen...... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! 

Ik lach wel, maar intussen slaat de censuur toe op het internet, censuur die juist de krachten treffen die terecht grote kritiek hebben op oorlogsvoering en het organiseren van opstanden in landen waar de VS noch de rest van het westen wat te zoeken hebben....... Of wat dacht je van alle in het hieronder opgenomen bericht genoemde zaken, die niet uit mochten lekken......

Wat betreft de reguliere media is het wel duidelijk dat de regeringen van de VS en GB deze al lang in de zak hebben... En dan durft men in die media nog te spreken over 'fake news en manipulatie....' (hetzelfde geldt voor het grootste deel van de westerse politici, ook in ons land, neem wat betreft hare D66 leeghoofdigheid Ollongren en haar gezwatel over Russische inmenging, waarvoor ze niet één bewijs heeft geleverd) 

Aan het eind van het hieronder opgenomen artikel van Mark Curtis, schrijft hij nog over Julian Assange en hoe GB Assange zal oppakken en uitleveren aan de VS, zo gauw hij de ambassade van Ecuador zal verlaten...... (toevallig hoorde ik vanmorgen dat Assange door een rechter in Ecuador via Skype wordt gehoord, het gaat hier m.n. om het feit dat Assange geen contact mag hebben met de buitenwereld, al zou de ambassade dit 'regime' t.a.v. Assange wat versoepeld hebben >> de rechter wilde een nieuwe vertaler die Australisch sprak..... Dit daar de gebruikte vertaler het Engels slecht beheerste.... ha! ha! ha! ha!)

BRITAIN, FOREIGN POLICY, HUMAN RIGHTS, INTELLIGENCE, MEDIA, U.S.

WikiLeaks’ Legacy of Exposing US-UK Complicity

October 27, 2018 

WikiLeaks is vilified by governments (and increasingly by journalists) for its exposures, including of the U.S.-UK “special relationship” in running a joint foreign policy of deception and violence that serves London and Washington’s elite interests, says Mark Curtis.

By Mark CurtisMiddle East Eye

Twelve years ago this month, WikiLeaks began publishing government secrets that the world public might otherwise never have known. What it has revealed about state duplicity, human rights abuses and corruption goes beyond anything published in the world’s “mainstream” media. 

After over six months of being cut off from outside world, on 14 October 14 Ecuador has partly restored Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s communications with the outside world from its London embassy where the founder has been living for over six years. (Assange, however, later rejected Ecuador’s restrictions imposed on him.)

The treatment – real and threatened – meted out to Assange by the U.S. and UK governments contrasts sharply with the service Wikileaks has done their publics in revealing the nature of elite power, as shown in the following snapshot of Wikileaks’ revelations about British foreign policy in the Middle East. 

Conniving with the Saudis

Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008 cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”

Hague: ‘World needs pro-American regime’ in Britain. (Chatham House)

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.

American Influence

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war. 

Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the

number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government “would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and UK.” The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him. 

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s. 

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”

A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year. 

A B-1B Lancer unleashes cluster munitions. The B-1B uses radar and inertial navigation equipment enabling aircrews to operate without the need for ground-based navigation aids. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.    

Spying on the UK

Cables show the US spying on the Foreign Office and collecting information on British ministers. Soon after the appointment of Ivan Lewis as a junior foreign minister in 2009, U.S. officials were briefing the office of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about rumors that he was depressed and had a reputation as a bully, and on “the state of his marriage.”

Washington was also shown to have been spying on the UK mission to the UN, along with other members of the Security Council and the UN Secretary General.  

In addition, Wikileaks cables reveal that journalists and the public are considered legitimate targets of UK intelligence operations. In October 2009, Joint Services Publication 440, a 2,400-page restricted document written in 2001 by the Ministry of Defence, was leaked. Somewhat ironically, it contained instructions for the security services on to avid leaks of information by hackers, journalists and foreign spies.

The document refers to investigative journalists as “threats” alongside subversive and terrorist organizations, noting that “the ‘enemy’ is unwelcome publicity of any kind, and through any medium.”

Britain’s GCHQ* is also revealed to have spied on Wikileaks itself – and its readers. One classified GCHQ document from 2012 shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly collect the IP addresses of visitors to the Wikileaks site in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines such as Google. 

Championing Free Nedua

The British government is punishing Assange for the service that Wikileaks has performed. It is ignoring a UN ruling that he is being held in “arbitrary detention” at the Ecuadorian embassy, while failing, illegally, to ensure his health needs are met. Whitehall is also refusing to offer diplomatic assurances that Assange will not be extradited to the US – the only reason he remains in the embassy. 

Millions worldwide are demanding the release of Wikileaks founder Assange after six years of what the UN calls “arbitrary detention.” (New Media Days / Peter Erichsen)

Smear campaigns have portrayed Assange as a sexual predator or a Russian agent, often in the same media that have benefitted from covering Wikileaks’ releases.

Many journalists and activists who are perfectly aware of the fake news in some Western media outlets, and of the smear campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, are ignoring or even colluding in the more vicious smearing of Assange.  

More journalists need to champion the service Wikileaks performs and argue for what is at stake for a free media in the right to expose state secrets.

This article originally appeared on Middle East Eye.

Mark Curtis is an historian and analyst of UK foreign policy and international development and the author of six books, the latest being an updated edition of Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.

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Tags: Arms Sales cluster bombs espionage Foreign Policy GCHQ Human Rights Julian Assange Mark Curtis WikiLeaks

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* GCHQ: Government Communications Headquarters

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