Tag: mi6

JULIAN ASSANGE JUDGE PREVIOUSLY ACTED FOR MI6

One of the two High Court judges who will rule on Julian Assange’s bid to stop his extradition to the US represented the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Ministry of Defence, Declassified has found.  

Justice Jeremy Johnson has also been a specially vetted barrister, cleared by the UK authorities to access top secret information.

Johnson will sit with Dame Victoria Sharp, his senior judge, to decide the fate of the WikiLeaks co-founder. If extradited, Assange faces a maximum sentence of 175 years.

His persecution by the US authorities has been at the behest of Washington’s intelligence and security services, with whom the UK has deep relations.

Assange’s journalistic career has been marked by exposing the dirty secrets of the US and UK national security establishments. He now faces a judge who has acted for, and received security clearance from, some of those same state agencies.

As with previous judges who have ruled on Assange’s case, this raises concerns about institutional conflicts of interest.

Exactly how much Johnson has been paid for his work for government departments is not clear. Records show he was paid twice by the Government Legal Department for his services in 2018. The sum was over £55,000. 

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Iran 1953: MI6 Plots with Islamists to Overthrow Democracy

In many accounts the C.I.A. is regarded as the prime mover behind the 1953 coup in Iran, yet Britain was in fact the initial instigator and provided considerable resources to the plot, which U.K. planners named “Operation Boot.”

In the early 1950s, the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), or BP as it is now known, was run from London and owned jointly by the British government and private citizens. It controlled Iran’s main source of income and oil, and by 1951 had become, according to one British official, “in effect an imperium in imperio [an empire within an empire] in Persia.”

Iranian nationalists objected to the fact that the AIOC’s revenues from oil were greater than the Iranian government’s. 

Britain’s ambassador in Tehran, Sir Francis Shepherd, had a typically colonialist take on the situation. The declassified files show his writing: “It is so important to prevent the Persians from destroying their main source of revenue…by trying to run it themselves.”

He added: “The need for Persia is not to run the oil industry for herself (which she cannot do) but to profit from the technical ability of the West.”

Of course, Iran was perfectly capable of running its own oil industry. In March 1951 the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalise oil operations, take control of the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company and expropriate its assets. 

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Green Enforcer: MI6 Spying on Nations to Ensure They Abide by Climate Change Pledges, Chief Admits

Foreign intelligence service MI6 will spy on other nations to check whether they are abiding by their climate change pledges, one of Britain’s top spy chiefs has said.

The head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Richard Moore, indicated that the agency’s “green spying” could target large industrial nations, claiming that alleged man-made climate change is “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet”.

Mr Moore, known as C, told Times Radio according to The Telegraph on Sunday: “Our job is to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone and so clearly we are going to support what is the foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet, which is around the climate emergency, and of course we have a role in that space.”

He added: “Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to,” he added.

The remarks come as Britain is set to host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.

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