Ex-FBI counsel implicated in surveillance abuses nominated to crucial federal bench
RT | September 11, 2013
The former top lawyer at the FBI deeply implicated in surveillance abuses revealed before and by Edward Snowden’s leaks was confirmed as a federal judge in a top court for terrorism cases this week.
The US Senate voted 73-24 on Monday in approving Valerie Caproni, Federal Bureau of Investigation general counsel from 2003 to 2011, to the Southern District of New York, one of the country’s most important federal courts for terrorism cases.
Caproni has received bipartisan criticism for allowing and defending surveillance abuses both found to be overbroad during her tenure and those not disclosed when she was counsel but later revealed to be inappropriate or illegal. For example, the Snowden leaks showed Caproni mischaracterized the limits of the Patriot Act during her term.
A 2010 report by the Department of Justice revealed the FBI inappropriately used non-judicial subpoenas called “exigent letters” to gather phone numbers of over 5,550 Americans until 2006.
“The FBI broke the law on telephone records privacy and the general counsel’s office, headed by Valerie Caproni, sanctioned it and must face consequences,” said John Conyers in April 2010 as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
Conyers called for Caproni’s firing at the time over the use of the non-judicial subpoenas, according to the Guardian.
“It’s not in the Patriot Act. It never has been. And its use, perhaps coincidentally, began in the same month that Ms Valerie Caproni began her work as general counsel,” Conyers said in 2010.
Caproni told House lawmakers in 2008 if phone numbers — acquired from telephone companies by the FBI via the non-judicial subpoenas evidently sanctioned in the Patriot Act — were not related to a “currently open investigation, and there was no emergency at the time we received the records, the records are removed from our files and destroyed.”
Yet revelations found in documents supplied by Snowden outlined how the National Security Agency stores phone records on all Americans for up five years no matter if they are associated with an open investigation or not. In addition, it’s been found that the NSA has the capability to feed the FBI phone records if there is a “reasonable articulable suspicion” they are related to terrorism.
“Caproni knew that the Bush administration could use or was using the Section 215 provision in the Patriot Act to obtain Americans’ phone records on a broad scale, an issue that has recently been documented by the whistleblower material first printed in the Guardian,” Lisa Graves, a former deputy assistant attorney general who dealt with Caproni while working on national security issues for the ACLU, told the Guardian.
In 2007, DOJ’s Inspector General Glenn Fine found the FBI was serially abusing National Security Letters — a demand regarding national security independent of legal subpoenas– to obtain business records, including “unauthorized collection of telephone or internet email transactional records.” While the larger collection of phone records was still not exposed at the time, Caproni called the inappropriate collection a “colossal failure on our part.”
“Government officials that secretly approved of overbroad surveillance programs the public is only seeing now because of leaks, and whose testimony on the issue obscured rather than revealed these abuses, should be held to account for their actions in a public forum,” former FBI agent Mike German told the Guardian.
Caproni’s nomination to the federal bench had some bipartisan opposition, but not enough to block her appointment.
“She is a woman with impeccable credentials,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Monday. “This country needs more women like her.”
NSA, no way! Anti-spying sentiments on the rise amid steady stream of disclosures
RT | September 11, 2013
The National Security Agency isn’t making many friends, apparently: a new poll published this week suggests that a majority of Americans continue to have complaints with the NSA’s surveillance practices amid a myriad of recent disclosures.
According to the results of survey released this week by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, anti-NSA sentiment remains rampant in the United States more than three months after former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden first began disclosing top-secret documents exposing the inner-workings of a vast surveillance apparatus operated by America’s premier spy agency. Meanwhile, concerns regarding those practices are growing amid members of Congress and even independent coalitions.
Polling conducted by the AP and NORC last month and released on Tuesday suggest that 56 percent of Americans surveyed oppose the NSA’s collection of telephone records, and 54 percent said they were against the practices that put Internet metadata into the hands of federal investigators.
A confused poll earlier this year in July by the PEW Research Center found that 44 percent of Americans disapproved of the NSA program, with half of the country not opposing the surveillance methods.
Now only 34 percent — or roughly one-third of those polled — say they are okay with the dragnet collection of metadata, or raw information including information on the sender and recipient, time and location pertaining to emails and phone calls. Additionally, 53 percent of Americans polled from a group of 1,008 adults say the federal government is doing a good job of ensuring freedom, a drop in seven percentage points since 2011. That earlier study concluded that 40 percent of Americans thought the government was doing a good job of protecting privacy, and today that number is down to 34 percent.
The AP poll also concluded that an overwhelming 71 percent of those asked opposed US officials eavesdropping on calls without warrant, and 62 percent said they were against the monitoring of email content.
Results from the latest poll were published on Tuesday, one day before the UK’s Guardian newspaper published the latest top-secret document in a series of classified leaks attributed to Snowden since early June. On Wednesday morning, the Guardian published a NSA memo from 2009 in which it’s revealed how US intelligence officials have shared raw data collected from American persons with Israeli counterparts without domestic agents even analyzing that information before it changes hands.
Commenting to the AP, Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested the recent NSA disclosures undoubtedly have influenced the public’s perception of the US intelligence community and the way it conducts itself.
“For the first time, the public is able to see what’s going on behind closed doors and it’s changing minds,” Timm told the AP.
The EFF, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and more than two dozen other entities, are named as plaintiffs in a collection of lawsuits challenging the Obama administration’s surveillance programs. Attorneys for the EFF are representing plaintiffs in the matter of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, which grew in size this week when five new organizations signed on to sue the White House. The EFF announced on Tuesday this week that Acorn Active Media, the Charity and Security Network, the National Lawyers Guild, Patient Privacy Rights and The Shalom Center have all signed on to the suit, which attorneys say challenges the government’s surveillance alleged abuse of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect bulk telephone metadata — an activity first disclosed on June 5 after Snowden leaked documents to the Guardian and Washington Post.
“The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to associate and express political views as a group,” EFF legal director Cindy Cohn said in a statement. “The NSA undermines that right when it collects, without any particular target, the phone records of innocent Americans and the organizations in which they participate. In order to advocate effectively, these organizations must have the ability to protect the privacy of their employees and members.”
Also signing on in support of NSA reform is US Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), who only this week announced he’d be seeking changes in the way America conducts surveillance operations. Issa previously voted against a measure proposed by colleague Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan) which would have aimed to thwart the NSA’s now-infamous practices, but this week wrote a letter to Congress saying lawmakers on Capitol Hill should debate those policies once again as leaks continue to raise concerns.
“Now that it has been publicly acknowledged that the communications of Americans were included in the NSA’s data collection program, likely violating their Fourth Amendment rights, Congress must respond in a manner that both increases the transparency of the agency’s programs and reinforces the constitutional protections of our citizens,” Issa wrote in a letter first published by Politico.
“We’re very pleased that Chairman Issa supports our amendment,” Amash spokesman Will Adams told US News & World Report. “If the Amash amendment does get taken up by the House and it does pass this fall, it will put pressure on the committees to start passing comprehensive reforms.”
The Amash Amendment would have barred the NSA from using the PATRIOT Act provision at the center of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA to collect the phone records of all Americans. It was defeated in the House last month by a 12 vote margin.
Related articles
Another Reason The NSA Needs To Go: It’s Been Doing What It Explicitly Was Told Not To Do
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | September 10, 2013
One of the key things that people quickly realized after last week’s revelation about the NSA putting backdoors into encryption, was that this was exactly what the federal government had tried to do with the Clipper Chip back in the 90s, and after a public debate, it was rejected. The battle over the Clipper Chip was one of the key legal/tech battles of the 1990s.
And then the NSA went and did it anyway.
Jack Shafer, over at Reuters, points out that there’s this pattern of the NSA not taking no for an answer, discussing the attempts to stop PGP and also the infamous Total Information Awareness program:
Zimmerman and his allies eventually won the PGP showdown, as did privacy advocates in the mid-1990s, defeating the government’s proposal for the “Clipper chip,” which would allow easy surveillance of telephone and computer systems, and again after 9/11, when Congress cut funding for the Defense Department office in charge of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a massive surveillance database containing oceans of vital information about everybody in the United States.
But the journalistic record proves we can’t trust government’s white flag of surrender. In the case of TIA, the government abandoned the program’s name but preserved the operation, as Shane Harris and others reported seven years ago, giving it new code names and concealing it in places like the NSA. The documents Snowden stole from the NSA show the government capturing and analyzing much of what TIA sought in the first place.
Basically, this suggests that even if the NSA is told to stop doing the various things it’s doing, it’s only a matter of time until they do them anyway. One response to this — which many are taking seriously — is to look into re-architecting the internet to see what can be built, ground-up with security in mind, specifically making sure that the NSA can’t weasel its way in.
But there’s a separate issue as well. How do we stop basic government overreach after it’s been made clear that they don’t have a mandate to do what they’re doing? Yes, government officials and NSA defenders like to pretend that they did have a mandate here, and will point to the FISA Court or other aspects to argue that it’s perfectly fine — but when they’re explicitly doing exactly what they were denied a decade or more ago, those arguments ring hollow. But, if they’re allowed to get away with it, without any response, then they’ll never stop. No matter what they’re told not to do, they’ll just keep doing anyway, because what’s the worst that happens? People complain about it?
So it seems that there needs to be a very different system in place — on that involves real oversight, not the pathetic joke that is the Intelligence Committees of both houses of Congress and the FISA Court. And, frankly, it should be over a new organization. It seems clear at this point that you can’t reform the NSA. It’s rotten to its core. Yes, signals intelligence and other intelligence activities can be important and necessary, but it really seems like we need to breakup the NSA, and restructure the whole thing such that it can be built in a manner where there’s actual oversight, rather than having it do whatever it wants and pretending everything is fine any time anyone accuses them of anything.
The Most Awkward G20 Summit Ever
By Dan Beeton | CEPR Americas Blog | September 5, 2013
President Obama is in St. Petersburg, Russia to participate in the G20 Summit today and tomorrow, amidst a time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and several G20 member nations. Looming over the summit are the Obama administration’s plans for a possible military attack on Syria, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that a U.S. military response without U.N. Security Council approval “can only be interpreted as an aggression” and UNASUR – which includes G20 members Argentina and Brazil, issued a statement that “condemns external interventions that are inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.”
New revelations of NSA spying on other G20 member nation presidents – Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico – leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and first reported in Brazil’s O Globo, have also created new frictions. Rousseff is reportedly considering canceling a state visit to Washington next month over the espionage and the Obama administration’s response to the revelations, and reportedly has canceled a scheduled trip to D.C. next week by an advance team that was to have done preparations for her visit. The Brazilian government has demanded an apology from the Obama administration. In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, an anonymous senior Brazilian official underscored the gravity of the situation:
[T]he official, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the episode, said Rousseff feels “patronized” by the U.S. response so far to the Globo report. She is prepared to cancel the visit as well as take punitive action, including ruling out the purchase of F-18 Super Hornet fighters from Chicago-based Boeing Co, the official said.
“She is completely furious,” the official said.
“This is a major, major crisis …. There needs to be an apology. It needs to be public. Without that, it’s basically impossible for her to go to Washington in October,” the official said.
Other media reports suggest that Brazil may implement measures to channel its Internet communications through non-U.S. companies. But when asked in a press briefing aboard Air Force One this morning, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes did not suggest that such an apology would be forthcoming:
Q The Foreign Minister said he wanted an apology.
MR. RHODES: Well, I think — what we’re focused on is making sure the Brazilians understand exactly what the nature of our intelligence effort is. We carry out intelligence like just about every other country around the world. If there are concerns that we can address consistent with our national security requirements, we will aim to do so through our bilateral relationship.
Such responses are not likely to go far toward patching things up with Brazil. It is conspicuously dishonest to suggest that the U.S. government “carr[ies] out intelligence like just about every other country around the world,” as no other country is known to have the capacity for the level of global spying that the NSA and other agencies conduct, and few countries are likely to have the intelligence budgets enjoyed by U.S. agencies – currently totaling some $75.6 billion, according to documents leaked by Snowden and reported by the Washington Post.
There are also signs that the Washington foreign policy establishment is troubled by the Obama administration’s dismissive attitude toward Brazil’s understandable outrage. On Tuesday, McClatchy cited Peter Hakim of the Inter-American Dialogue – essentially the voice of the Latin America policy establishment in Washington:
Peter Hakim, the president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy group, noted that Secretary of State John Kerry had visited Brasilia last month to patch things up after the initial NSA leaks but “really did not do a very good job. He just brushed it off.”
Hakim said he believed the O Globo report, and he added that “snooping at presidents is disrespectful and offensive.”
Rousseff and Pena Nieto had to issue strong statements, Hakim said. “Both have to show they are not pushovers, that they can stand up to the U.S.,” he said.
The ongoing revelations made by Snowden have affected U.S. relations with other countries as well. As the Pan-American Post points out, Peña Nieto may continue to reduce intelligence sharing with the U.S.; he also said yesterday that “he may discuss the issue with President Barack Obama at the summit.” U.S.-Russian relations, of course, have also recently become tense following Russia’s granting of temporary political asylum to Snowden.
The G20 Summit also comes just after the IMF, at the direction of the U.S. Treasury Department, changed its plan to support the Argentine government in its legal battle with “vulture funds” – meaning that U.S.-Argentine relations may also be relatively cool.
Related article
Victory! Federal Court Recognizes Constitutional Rights of Americans on the No-Fly List
By Nusrat Choudhury | ACLU | August 29, 2013
A federal court took a critically important step late yesterday towards placing a check on the government’s secretive No-Fly List. In a 38-page ruling in Latif v. Holder, the ACLU’s challenge to the No-Fly List, U.S. District Court Judge Anna Brown recognized that the Constitution applies when the government bans Americans from the skies. She also asked for more information about the current process for getting off the list, to inform her decision on whether that procedure violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process.
We represent 13 Americans, including four military veterans, who are blacklisted from flying. At oral argument in June on motions for partial summary judgment, we asked the court to find that the government violated our clients’ Fifth Amendment right to due process by barring them from flying over U.S. airspace – and smearing them as suspected terrorists – without giving them any after-the-fact explanation or a hearing at which to clear their names.
The court’s opinion recognizes – for the first time – that inclusion on the No-Fly List is a draconian sanction that severely impacts peoples’ constitutionally-protected liberties. It rejected the government’s argument that No-Fly list placement was merely a restriction on the most “convenient” means of international travel.
Such an argument ignores the numerous reasons an individual may have for wanting or needing to travel overseas quickly such as for the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a business opportunity, or a religious obligation.
According to the court, placement on the No-Fly List is like the revocation of a passport because both actions severely burden the right to international travel and give rise to a constitutional right to procedural due process:
Here it is undisputed that inclusion on the No-Fly List completely bans listed persons from boarding commercial flights to or from the United States or over United States air space. Thus, Plaintiffs have shown their placement on the No-Fly List has in the past and will in the future severely restrict Plaintiffs’ ability to travel internationally. Moreover, the realistic implications of being on the No-Fly List are potentially far-reaching. For example, TSC [the Terrorist Screening Center] shares watchlist information with 22 foreign governments and United States Customs and Boarder [sic] Protection makes recommendations to ship captains as to whether a passenger poses a risk to transportation security, which can result in further interference with an individual’s ability to travel as evidenced by some Plaintiffs’ experiences as they attempted to travel abroad by boat and land and were either turned away or completed their journey only after an extraordinary amount of time, expense, and difficulty. Accordingly, the Court concludes on this record that Plaintiffs have a constitutionally-protected liberty interest in traveling internationally by air, which is affected by being placed on the list.
The court also found that the government’s inclusion of our clients on the No-Fly List smeared them as suspected terrorists and altered their ability to lawfully board planes, resulting in injury to another constitutionally-protected right: freedom from reputational harm.
The importance of these rulings is clear. Because inclusion on the No-Fly List harms our clients’ liberty interests in travel and reputation, due process requires the government to provide them an explanation and a hearing to correct the mistakes that led to their inclusion. But under the government’s “Glomar” policy, it refuses to provide any information confirming or denying that our clients are on the list, let alone an after-the-fact explanation and hearing.
The court has asked the ACLU and the government for more information about the No-Fly List redress procedure to help it decide the ultimate question of whether that system violates the Fifth Amendment right to due process. We are confident the court will recognize that the government’s “Glomar” policy of refusing even to confirm or deny our clients’ No-Fly List status (much less actually providing the reasons for their inclusion in the list) is fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional.
Palestinian schools in Jerusalem offered money to switch to Israeli curriculum
Al-Akhbar | August 28, 2013
Several Palestinian schools in Jerusalem will incorporate Israeli educational material in their curriculum after receiving financial incentives from Israeli officials, Ma’an news agency reported on Wednesday.
An education official told Ma’an that the Israeli municipality in Jerusalem had offered increased salaries for teachers and principals who implement Israeli course material in the classes, bringing an estimated $550 for each student enrolled in schools agreeing to the switch.
Some Palestinian and Israeli school principals and teachers met in Tel Aviv last week to discuss the change, the official added.
Jerusalem’s director of education Samir Jibril said at least five Palestinian schools in Jerusalem will switch from Palestinian Authority to Israeli education plans at certain grade levels.
“This step is very dangerous and touches the awareness of Palestinians in Jerusalem in an effort to brainwash them and control them, especially young generations,” a teacher identifying only as Jibril told Ma’an.
The Israeli curriculum purportedly includes maps marking the West Bank as part of Israel and identifying territories by their Jewish Biblical names.
The history material also identifies Jerusalem as the capital of Israel despite the fact that the United Nations and most states do not recognize Israel’s claim on the city.
The apartheid wall in the West Bank is also referred to as Israel’s security fence, and Israel is described as a bastion of human rights and democracy.
Another section depicts a conversation between Arab students who praise Israel’s development of Palestinian cities and decide to sing the Israeli national anthem.
(Al-Akhbar, Ma’an)
Honduras: Congress Resurrects Military Police Force
Weekly News Update on the Americas | August 25, 2013
Honduras’ National Congress voted on Aug. 21 to approve a law creating the Military Police of Public Order (PMOP), a new 5,000-member police unit composed of army reservists under the control of the military. This will be in addition to a 4,500-member “community police” force that the government is forming, according to an Aug. 12 announcement by Security Minister Arturo Corrales. Although he called the move a “change of course,” Corrales failed to explain the difference between the community police, which is to be operative by September, and the existing national police force.
The government’s plan to raise the number of police agents by 9,500 is clearly meant to respond to the dramatic increase in crime in Honduras; according to the United Nations, the country now has an annual murder rate of 84 for every 100,000 people, the highest in the world. Police corruption is a major problem, and police agents have been convicted of high-profile crimes [see Update #1187]. The current police force had 14,472 agents on the payroll as of May, but in a new police scandal, only 9,350 agents could be found at work during July.
The police changes come as candidates prepare for Nov. 24 general elections, which will choose a new president, the 128 members of Congress, the 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), and local mayors [Update #1162]. The main force behind the new military police is Juan Orlando Hernández, who has resigned from his post as president of the National Congress to run as the presidential candidate of the center-right National Party (PN)—the party of current president Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa, who has governed Honduras since January 2010 without being able to contain the crime wave.
Human rights activists strongly oppose the proposed military police unit. “In no part of the world have the soldiers resolved security problems,” Omar Rivera, who directs the Alliance for Peace and Justice (APJ), a coalition of civil society, organizations, told the French wire service AFP. He added that a serious fight against crime would require a fight against impunity. Bertha Oliva, the coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH), called the creation of the new force “a step backwards in the demilitarization of society and the democratization of the country.” “The soldiers in the streets have only left more death and mourning, because they aren’t prepared for being guarantors of security,” she said. The national police were removed from the military and put under civilian control in 1997. Death squads operated by the military and the police were implicated in the killings of 184 government opponents in the 1980s.
Critics also asked how the government would be able to pay for two new police units that would double the current number of active agents. José Simón Azcona, a legislative deputy from the centrist Liberal Party (PL) who supported the measure, suggested that the US would pay. The US government “offered collaboration… under the previous administration” for the conversion of four military battalions into police units, he said. (It is unclear whether he was referring to a previous administration in Honduras or in the US.) (El Nuevo Diario (Nicaragua) 8/12/13 from ACAN-EFE; Honduras Culture and Politics 8/22/13; El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 8/22/13; La Nación (Costa Rica) 8/23/13 from AFP, EFE; Prensa Latina 8/24/13)
Related articles
- Honduras: Expanding Palm Oil Empires In The Name Of ‘Green Energy’ And “Sustainable Development” (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Honduras: Army Kills Indigenous Leader at Dam Protest (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Honduran Union Leader Faces Death Threats (alethonews.wordpress.com)
U.S. spied on UN: German weekly
Xinhua | August 26, 2013
BERLIN — The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) bugged the video conferencing system at the UN headquarters in New York and cracked its encryption, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday.
The tapping scheme succeeded in the summer of 2012, the magazine said, citing secret documents disclosed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
The move offered the NSA “a dramatic improvement of data on video conferencing and the ability to decrypt that data,” a quoted document said, noting that the number of decrypted communications jumped from 12 to 458 within three weeks.
Der Spiegel also reported that the U.S. intelligence agency spied on the European Union mission after it moved to its new embassy in New York last September.
The new embassy’s plans, as well as its IT infrastructure and servers, were among the copies of relevant NSA documents provided Snowden.
According to the documents analyzed by the weekly, the NSA also ran a monitoring program covering more than 80 embassies and consulates worldwide.
The program was called “the Special Collection Service” and operated without the knowledge of the host country, said the magazine.
NSA documents urged to keep the existence of the program as a secret at all costs, as “relations with the host country would be seriously damaged” if it was leaked, Der Spiegel reported.
Revelations about PRISM and other surveillance programs that obtain personal information by hacking phone calls and emails have embarrassed Washington and triggered outrage around the world.
Some EU privacy watchdogs are demanding an independent investigation into the extent of PRISM as well as other platforms used by the NSA.
U.S. President Barack Obama defended the spying program as a “modest encroachment” on privacy necessary to prevent terror attacks, but pledged to overhaul U.S. surveillance and turn it more transparent.
Egyptian media outlet condemns government intimidation
MEMO | August 26, 2013
The Cairo-based Rassd News Network has condemned the latest intimidation by the coup government which has seen the killing and arbitrary arrests of journalists, including of five of its own correspondents. The network’s Executive Director, Samihi Mustafa, and founding member Dr Abdullah Al-Fakharani are among those detained by the authorities since the start of the bloody campaign against anti-coup demonstrators.
According to Rassd, neither Al-Fakharani nor Mustafa, the father of a new-born boy, were armed when they were arrested. “They were only armed with the truth about what is going on out there,” said a spokesperson. “Professional journalists are attempting to break the media blackout imposed by the coup authorities and government-controlled media on what is happening in Egypt.” Freedom of expression, it was pointed out, is a basic human right.
Describing a “savage and vengeful” campaign of arrests, the spokesperson said that the government is targeting Rassd journalists after killing photographer Musaab Al-Shami while he was covering the violent assault on Rabaa Al-Adawiyya Square. He was shot in the head and chest by soldiers. Rassd correspondents Mahmoud Abdul-Nabi and his brother Ibrahim, both professional journalists, were arrested in Alexandria at the start of the coup. Both men are on hunger strike in protest at the conditions under which they are being held by the authorities.
Rassd not only condemned the killing, arrest and harassment of its staff but also holds the Egyptian coup government fully responsible for the safety and well-being of those in detention. It demanded their immediate release.
“We will not give up in our efforts to protect human rights and the right of journalists to carry out their work unimpeded by the brutal acts of the security forces,” said the Rassd spokesperson. “We will use all legal means to defend them and to hold accountable those responsible for their illegal detention.”
The network insists that it remains committed to the professional ethics of journalism, including accuracy, balance, independence and integrity, to convey the truth as it is without any bias or distortion. Rassd appealed to all colleagues in the profession, international press associations and human rights organisations to stand by all detained journalists, to press for their release, and to ensure their right to work without threats or harassment.
Related articles
- Four journalists killed covering Egypt clashes (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- UNESCO head deplores deaths of Egyptian journalists (dailynewsegypt.com)
Featured Video
Armando Mema: Finland Used as New Frontline Against Russia
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
MI5 plotted assassination of Irish PM in 1985 – Ulster Volunteer Force
RT | December 29, 2017
Former Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey was warned by loyalist paramilitaries that they were once tasked with murdering him in an assassination plot purportedly dreamt up by the British secret service.
The sensational disclosure was sent in a letter to the Irish government, newly released under the Public Records Act, which requires documents of historical value to be published by the National Archives within 30 years.
Written on Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) signature paper, the warning claims the terrorist organization was asked by an MI5 operative about the prospect of carrying out an attack on Republic of Ireland leader Haughey in 1985.
At the time, Haughey would have been in opposition as head of political party Fianna Fáil, but details of the solicitation did not become known to Irish authorities until 1987.
“In 1985 we were approached by a M15 officer attached to the Northern Ireland Office and based in Lisburn, Alex Jones was his supposed name,” the letter reads, according to the Irish Times. “He asked us to execute you.”… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Armando Mema: Finland Used as New Frontline Against Russia
- Gestapo 2.0? Germany grants spy agencies sweeping new powers
- Franco-Palestinian group seeks court ban on Israeli real estate fair in Paris
- How British foreign policy is frozen in the ruins of empire
- EU risks investor exodus over Russian assets – Euroclear chief
- Moscow warns NATO over troop buildup
- EU leaders prolonging Ukraine conflict to stay in power – Swiss journalist
- Moscow car bombing injures former aide to Ukraine’s ex-PM Azarov
- Yemeni forces make major advances, complete Aden encirclement
- Trita Parsi: Trump’s Swiss Cheese Iran Plan & U.S. Break with Israel?
- If Americans Knew
- Israel Kills over 12, Injures Many Across Gaza
- ‘Every drawer was opened’: Palestinians report looting amid Israel’s Hebron siege
- Scoop: Israeli spy chief in D.C. as Netanyahu presses Trump to resume war
- Israel Issued More than 24,000 ‘Administrative Detention’ Orders in Three Years
- Israel Critic Van Hollen to Challenge Schumer for U.S. Senate Majority Leader
- Most violent olive harvest on record in the West Bank
- Too Awful For Even Bari’s Backers
- Disgraced neocons Feith & Libby: stop whining about ‘endless war’
- The 100-year-old Zionist plan to steal southern Lebanon
- Jeffries Refuses to Say If He Opposes US-Israeli Military Integration Measure
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Barents Sea Temperatures Were Warmer And Sea Ice Less Extensive In The 1700s Than Today
- German Authorities Start Initiative To Evaluate Public Register For Climate “Disinformation” Spreaders!
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
