The sordid story on the CIA-backed operation against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange during his time cramped in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy continues to froth and thicken. US officials have persisted in their reticent attitude, refusing to cooperate with Spain’s national high court, the Audiencia Nacional, regarding its investigation into theAgency’s espionage operations against the publisher, spearheaded by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global.
Since 2019, requests for assistance regarding the matter, including querying public statements by former CIA director Mike Pompeo and former head of counterintelligence, William Evanina, along with information mustered by the relevant Senate Intelligence Committee, have been made to US authorities by judges José de la Mata and Santiago Pedraz. These have been treated with a glacial silence.
On December 12, 2023, the General Subdirectorate of International Legal Cooperation furnished the US authorities “an express announcement” whether such judicial assistance would be denied.
Spain’s liaison magistrate in the US, María de las Heras García, duly revealed that the tardiness to engage had been occasioned by ongoing legal proceedings being conducted before the US District Court of the Southern District of New York. As Courtney E. Lee, trial attorney at the US Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs explained, supplying Spain’s national high court with such information would “interfere” with “ongoing US litigation”. Hardly a satisfactory response, given requests made prior to the putative litigation.
The litigation in question involved a legal suit filed in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York by civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler, media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass.
In their August 2022 action, the complainants alleged that they had been the subject of surveillance during visits to Assange during his embassy tenure, conduct said to be in breach of the Fourth Amendment. The plaintiffs accordingly argued that this entitled them to money damages and injunctive relief from former CIA director Mike Pompeo, the director of the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) GlobalDavid Morales, and UC Global itself.
On December 19, 2023 District Judge John G. Koeltl granted, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss while denying other portions of it. The judge accepted the record of hostility shown by Pompeo to WikiLeaks openly expressed by his April 2017 speech and acknowledged that “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”
The litigants found themselves on solid ground with Koeltl in the finding that they had standing to sue the intelligence organisation. “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.” The plaintiffs would “have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling” if the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices were found to be unlawful.
The plaintiffs also convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.” But they failed to convince Koeltl that they had a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with Assange, given the rather odd reasoning that they were aware the publisher was already being “surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.” Nor could such an expectation arise given the acceptance of video surveillance of government buildings. Problematically, the judge also held that those surrendering devices and passports at an Embassy reception desk “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”
Sadly, Pompeo was spared the legal lash and could not be held personally accountable for violating the constitutional rightsof US citizens. “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”
In February this year, US Attorney Damian Williams and Assistant US Attorney Jean-David Barnea clarified the Agency’s line of response in a submission to Judge Koeltl. “Any factual inquiry into these allegations – whether they are true or not – would implicate classified information, as it would require the CIA to reveal what intelligence-gathering activities it did or did not engage in, among other things.” As the agency could not “publicly reveal the very facts over which it is seeking authorization to assert the State Secrets Privilege, it is not able to respond to the relevant allegations in the complaint or to respond to any discovery requests pertaining to those allegations.”
Richard Roth, an attorney representing the four litigants, found this reasoning bemusing in remarks made to The Dissenter. “From our vantage point, we cannot imagine how there is any privilege at all that relates to proprietary information of American citizens who visited the Ecuadorian embassy.”
In April, CIA director William J. Burns sought to further draw the veil in submitting a “classified declaration” defining “the scope of the information” concerning the case, claiming it satisfactorily explained “the harm that reasonably could be expected to result from the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.” For those in such lines of work, alleged harm has no quantum or sense of proportion.
Again, Roth was unimpressed, issuing a reminder that this case had nothing to do with “terroristic threats to destroy America that were uncovered through technology or a program that must never be disclosed or else the threat will succeed.” The case, importantly, concerned the CIA’s search and seizure of cell phone and laptop devices in the possession of “respected American lawyers and journalists, who committed no crime, and who have now stood up against the loss of liberties and the government’s intrusion into their private lives by copying the contents of their cell phones and laptops.”
As long as the Agency stifles and drags out proceedings on the grounds of this misused privilege, the Justice Department is bound to remain inert in the face of the Spanish investigation.
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I would give more trust to the KGB than I would to any of the Divided States’ “intelligence” agencies. Now that’s a doozy of an oxymoron; American Intelligence! The record of what these agencies have done over the decades is totally despicable. How the American government thinks it can take the moral high ground on issues like; foreign affairs, human rights, and even their own domestic affairs, when these agencies are a law unto themselves beholden to none, or so it often times seems. Using and abusing the powers they have to pretty much write the book on deceit, trickery, double-dealing, duping and many other underhanded acts that never see the light of day because they are sealed from view because of “national security”. As Assange proved, the hundreds of thousands of secrets that the Yanks hide about what they have done to the world over a long period of time they don’t want anyone to know about. And as we’ve seen, they will do whatever they deem ‘necessary’ to keep their dirty secrets from being revealed to those they are usually about, including false and illegal arrests and detentions.
Over in the Corrupted Scene of Stupidity, a certain D, Trump, the pickled pillock of putrid politics, was heard yelling, stomping, lying, insulting and Tan-Trump-ing about race, of which he is the blotched orange type. Incapable of policy positions, drenched in shitty hubris, leached of human goodness, empty of empathy, incapable of imtelligence, the Dingey Dog has a positioning of appeal to naked greed. Who could vote for the crushing of civilisation, of humanity? Meanwhile, the usual agencies of government there remain secretive, Hunlike, Goebbelsian, evil, unaccountable, utterly irresponsible.
Any person who thinks that the USA (United States of Apartheid) cares for anything except corporate profits needs to read their history again. The so-called ”security forces” have been responsible for WMD (Words of Mass Deception) in Iraq, double dealing with Saddam Hussein, and about 80 admitted other political interventions including Chile installing the PInochet regime that sold off public assets to US corporations.
The persecution of Julian Assange by US security agencies is another example of exceptionalism that too many American citizens believe is their right. Assange was alleged responsible for exposing the duplicity US policies plus disregard for foreign civilian populations that ”offended” many politicians and security agency bosses.
WE wait for these American ”heroes” to be held accountable for the many deaths of foreign civilians and the destruction of foreign economies by US armed forces for the financial benefit of the US NE Military Industrial Complex.
As much of the modern world seeks to cleanse its soul of religious barbarism and death dealing through the application and assurances of science and technology leaving the possibility of universal care and kindness, it seems not to be so in murky Murika. On the contrary, the hegemon’s ‘rules based order’ remains an exceptionalism of incursions, inquisitional barbarism, coercion, kidnap, rendition, torture, theft and destruction of resources and economy, judicial adventurism, industrialized murder and militarism – a return to Salem and all such inquisitions, trials Draconian law. All predicated by fear. uncertainty, and paranoid covert surveillance of everyone and everything. And most frequently now at the behest of its corporate expansionism. All revealed by the likes of Assange et al.
Murky Murika founded by medieval remnants operating by scourge, never enlightened, but entrenched by the likes of The Star-Spangled Banner in the designing of their god and making of their paradise, becomes their people’s anthem adored whilst blinded by bling. They care not about lies and deceptions as long as it adds to their entertainment – a must, towards which, heedless they are all brought to strive – not free but entrapped and afraid.
As they now crumble by the wiles of their own ethos, they exposed, fight amongst themselves, seeking to cast blame, and make corrections by wreaking revenge, internal and external via a scattergun of obliteration. Their entertainment being overtaken by fear, confusion, hubris, their own god(s), money, guns, bombs and drugs, and dignity removed by foul mouths and prestidigitation – what a demise as the rest of the world looks on askance.
Will their corrupting corporations and beholden politicians ever allow them to move on?
From treatment of whistleblowers, to the horrors of Gaza, is but a very short step it seems.
They set up preconditions for Gaza by ignoring the basic tenets of Justice in the persecution of whistle blowers…sort of a trial run.
I hope some watched Paul Keating and the dreadful Ferguson discussing China and AUKUS this evening.
Keating has aged but still a smart enough fella, but Ferguson gives the lie to any REAL attempt to get ABC back to reporting on objective rather than in ideological terms.
Keating belled the cat on AUKUS, China and and where we might end up if some of the people in government and the PS can’t start thinking outside the box as to what AUKUS is actually about as well as some of the overseas rubbish that the government seems to have got caught up with.
Paul
David E. Sanger, White House and National Security Correspondent for The New York Times, addressed the National Press Club of Australia the other day.
He was quite outspoken on the AUKUS issue and expressed the view that the era of massive submarines with hundreds of crew were over and that new technology and AI could easily replace all of the functions of these submarines with unmanned underwater drones, at a fraction of the cost.
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2411C028S00
Yes, Terence Mills. That is what Keating was saying.
I fear that we have been bitten by an ASPI. Seems a massive amount of “sales” in it but I hope we are not being sold a pup.