Media Lens: Flagship Of Fearmongering: The Guardian, MI5 And State Propaganda

8 November 2016 — Media Lens

Readers of the Guardian woke up last Tuesday (November 1, 2016) to find that the newspaper and website had been given over to promoting MI5. To be more precise: the paper was trumpeting a fearmongering ‘exclusive’ with MI5 Director-General, Andrew Parker. It was billed as ‘the first interview of its kind’ and was conducted by the paper’s deputy editor, Paul Johnson, and the diplomatic editor, Ewen MacAskill. However, it quickly became clear that this ‘interview’ consisted largely of the two senior Guardian journalists listening to the MI5 chief and diligently writing down what he said with no discernible challenge or scrutiny.

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Media Lens: ‘We Just Publish The Position Of The British Government’ – Edward Snowden, The Sunday Times And The Death Of Journalism

17 June 2015 — Media Lens

In the wake of the greatest crime of the twenty-first century, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, you might have thought that the days of passing off unattributed government and intelligence pronouncements as ‘journalism’ would be over. Apparently not. On June 14, the Sunday Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published what has already become a classic of the genre (behind a paywall; full text here).

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National Security Archive: "The Battle for Iran," 1953: Re-Release of CIA Internal History Spotlights New Details about anti-Mosaddeq Coup

27 June 2014 — National Security Archive

U.S. Ambassador Loy Henderson and Some CIA Officials Initially Disagreed with Certain Premises of Coup Planners

Declassified History Implies British Ties to the Operation, Criticizes London’s Policies in Period Leading up to the Overthrow

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UK reneges on promised independent inquiry on rendition, torture By Paul Mitchell

21 December 2013 — WSWS

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has abandoned its promise to carry out an independent inquiry into Britain’s involvement in “extraordinary rendition”, detention”and torture carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Instead, the inquiry will be undertaken by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), whose record is one of covering up the activities of the intelligence services.

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Police State UK: ‘Press handling with talking heads’: Snowden files reveal enormous GCHQ efforts to escape legal challenge

26 October 2013 — RT

The UK’s spy agency GCHQ was doing whatever it could to avoid igniting a “damaging public debate” and a subsequent possibility of a legal threat over its surveillance practices and cooperation with telecoms, new Snowden papers reveal.

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“Intelligence Led Surveillance” and Britain’s Police State: The Manufacture of “Mass Surveillance by Consent” By Charles Farrier

16 October 2013 — Global Research

british empire

Is mass surveillance so bad if you can’t see it?

In the dark ages known as the twentieth century, mass surveillance of entire populations was a sport practised only by elitist totalitarian states . Those unlucky enough to live in what was then termed a “free country”, had to sit on the sidelines and simply imagine what it was like to be subject to constant state intrusion.

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Media Lens: Where Journalism Collides With State ‘Security’: BBC News, MI5 And The Mantra Of ‘Keeping People Safe’ By David Cromwell

14 October 2013 — Media Lens

In our May 13 media alert we highlighted how the state, and a compliant media, relentlessly raise fears of the ‘shadows and threats’ that supposedly assail us. We make no apology for again citing the American writer H. L. Mencken: Continue reading

GCHQ sells your information to big corporations

3 July 2013 — RT

Prism wartime sell secrets

Journalist Steve Boggan had gate-crashed ‘Secret Work in an Open Society’, an invite only gathering organized by MI5’s then Director General Stephen Lander. Britain’s domestic security service, he found, was quietly offering to sell secrets to companies such as Rolls-Royce, BP, Ernst & Young, arms firm BAe Systems and to a bank since proven to be a multi-billion dollar money launderer HSBC.  

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‘British police secretly operated outside democratic control for years’

1 July 2013 — RT

Peter Francis revealed that 20 years ago he had worked as an undercover cop in the Metropolitan Police Force’s secret Special Demonstrations Squad (SDS). Francis said he was tasked to dig up dirt which the Met could use to discredit the family of murdered black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, and thereby derail their campaign for a full and effective police investigation into his death.  The Lawrence family correctly believed the original investigation had been fumbled because of  institutional racism by the police at that time.

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UK pays price for MI5 courting terror By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

30 May 2013 — Asia Times Online

The brutal murder of an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight in the southeast London district of Woolwich raises new questions about the British government’s national security strategy, at home and abroad. Officials have highlighted the danger of “self-radicalizing” cells inspired by Internet extremism, but this ignores overwhelming evidence that major UK terror plots have been incubated by the banned al-Qaeda-linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun. 

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Freedom Rider: Chickens Roost in Woolwich By Margaret Kimberley

29 May 2013 — Black Agenda Report

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Two British-Nigerians frightened the great former colonial empire to death by nearly beheading a soldier, in London. Yet British and other western politicians have far more blood on their hands than the young Africans. “This killing was no more awful than those committed by the military from the U.S. or other NATO nations.” Continue reading