How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper. By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis
Another major focus of
The Guardian’s energies under Viner’s editorship has been to attack the leader
of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The context is that Corbyn appears to
have recently been a target of the security services. In 2015, soon after he
was elected Labour leader, the Sunday Times reported a serving general warning that “there would
be a direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became
prime minister”. … On 20 May 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 General
Election, the Daily Telegraph was fed the story that “MI5 opened a file on Corbyn
amid concerns over his links to the IRA”. It formed part of a Telegraph
investigation claiming to reveal “Mr Corbyn’s full links to the IRA” and was
sourced to an individual “close to” the MI5 investigation, who said “a file had
been opened on him by the early nineties”.
Then, on the very eve of the General Election, the Telegraph gave space
to an article from the former director
of MI6, under a headline: “Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation..."
Analysis of YouGov
surveys in 2015 and 2017 shows that anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters
declined substantially in the first two years of Corbyn’s tenure and that such
views were significantly more common among Conservative voters. Despite this, since
January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and
anti-Semitism, an average of around one per day
The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists. The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden’s bombshell
revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified
material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters.
They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies. According to minutes of
meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the
revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of
Defence.
“This event was very
concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the
[committee] before publishing the first tranche of information,” state minutes of a 7 November 2013 meeting at the MOD. The DSMA Committee,
more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it
meets every six months. A small number of journalists are also invited to sit
on the committee. Its statedpurpose is to “prevent inadvertent public disclosure
of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations”.
It can issue “notices” to the media to encourage them not to publish certain
information.
The committee is
currently chaired by the MOD’s director-general of security policy Dominic
Wilson, who was previously director
of security and intelligence in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is
Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who describes himself
as an “accomplished, senior ex-military commander with extensive experience of
operational level leadership”. The D-Notice system describes
itself as voluntary,
placing no obligations on the media to comply with any notice issued.
This
means there should have been no need for the Guardian to consult the MOD before
publishing the Snowden documents. Yet committee
minutes note the secretary saying: “The Guardian was obliged
to seek … advice under the terms of the DA notice code.” The minutes add: “This
failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had
been made to address it.” These “considerable
efforts” included a D-Notice sent out by the committee on 7 June 2013 – the day
after The Guardian published the first documents – to all major UK media
editors, saying they should refrain from publishing information that would
“jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel”. It was marked “private
and confidential.. read more:
see also
Nitin Sethi resigns from Business Standard:
Here is a link to more than a 100 stories, over a hundred thousand words of investigations, deep dives, analysis, exclusives, long form and opinion by him
US-Russian surveillance wars
Posts about Kafka: https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.
Jacques Camatte: The Wandering of Humanity
