Declassified UK, June 2023

Posted: 3rd July 2023

June 2023

Hi everyone – this is Mark Curtis, Declassified’s director. I hope you’re all bearing up! Let me give highlights of our work this month.

The Ukraine war obviously still gives a lot of cause for concern. One article of ours by Richard Norton-Taylor showed how British ministers are fanning the flames of conflict in Ukraine, ratcheting up their aggressive rhetoric. While they’re doing so, some senior British military figures have been warning what the consequences of this bellicosity might be.

We’re not served well by having an unpopular, probably unelectable government in place that is trying to appeal to a minority of the domestic electorate.

One issue about the war has always concerned us – blowback. Phil Miller -AjyFAsureziI9upbI=&c=5Q4PaxEaj3o2pgTfjNd9p38XXzWBWM10LWFUeH8jNktk33Y6I9VyQg==&ch=3n3MnD7ldKXV3JR8FCM5Csz8zPkcNOfBc66n0wIjH6LfxY-MWoJlAw==”>

Julian Assange

We are exceedingly concerned about the fate of Julian Assange. Not only does his life lie in the balance, with all the implications his case has for the operation of free media to reveal the secrets of states, but there is another hugely important issue in the UK – whether we actually have an independent judiciary when it comes to “national security”.

We at Declassified have long documented the conflicts of interest surrounding Assange’s previous judges. This month I wrote about his current judge, Jonathan Swift, who rejected Assange’s attempt to halt his extradition to the US. It turns out that Swift is the UK government’s former top lawyer and previously defended the Defence and Home Secretaries. His “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies” while representing the government.

And Matt Kennard discovered something important about Keir Starmer’stime as head of the Crown Prosecution Service when he was in charge of Julian Assange’s earlier proposed extradition – to Sweden. The CPS told Matt it had destroyed all records of Starmer’s visits to the US at the time.

But US records show Starmer met with Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of American and British national security officials in Washington in 2011 and made other trips in 2012 and 2013. “During Starmer’s time in post, the CPS was marred by irregularities surrounding the case of the WikiLeaks founder”, Matt wrote.

We take no money from the government or corporations.

Our donors are critical to enabling us to report independently.

Please spare one hours wage, or as much as you can afford each month and sign up today.

Declassified Files

The UK’s military/spy outposts around the world get very little attention in the corporate media. Matt also visited Gibraltar to find out more about what military and intelligence sites the UK has there. The previous week, Spain renewed calls for Britain to withdraw its military installations from the territory. Matt counted 11 British military or intelligence sites on Gibraltar.

The UK government never discloses what spy facilities it has there. But Matt discovered a formerly secret UK military report from the 1970s revealing that Gibraltar’s “main value” to Britain during the Cold War was its role as a covert NATO military and intelligence outpost.

Indeed, we published three other stories from the declassified files this month. John McEvoy, one of our regular contributors, showed that 14 years before the Falklands war, British ministers planned to transfer sovereignty of the islands to Argentina. The files show they privately argued the territory could become costly, could not be defended and was a source of military tension with Buenos Aires.

Phil Miller also discovered that bodyguards for Kenya’s president Daniel arap Moi were trained by the SAS in 1985 amid a crackdown on dissent in the country. This came as Moi entrenched a one-party state by rigging elections and arresting opponents.

I looked into the declassified files on Pakistan and Afghanistan this month, for the period when the Taliban first took over Afghanistan in 1996. Those files show that UK officials knew Pakistan was directly aiding the Taliban, but continued to arm the government in Islamabad.

The British policy may have had significant consequences since Osama Bin Laden was then setting up his terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan at the time and was protected by the Taliban.

I’ve been increasingly frustrated reading the British media quote the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) – on anything from the war in Ukraine to UK military strategy – as though it’s an independent think-tank. This is misleading the public and I wanted to show this in an article. RUSI, which is based in Whitehall right next to the Ministry of Defence, is funded by the UK military, US government and arms corporations, and is a bastion of establishment interests. I could find no instances in over 300 press articles in the past two years where RUSI’s funders were mentioned.

You may have noticed that Leila Dougan, a terrific South African journalist now in the UK, is making short videos for us about some of our investigations. We’re posting them across all our social media platforms.

The video on Keir Starmer and the CPS is here on YouTube shorts, as is this video on the UK media quoting RUSI. And here is her video on the SAS training in Kenya on our Instagram platform.

By the way, if you’re on Instagram do follow us here. We’ve also ventured into TikTok, where you can follow us here.

We have some new initiatives coming up that we haven’t announced publicly yet. One is Declassified-Earth which will be a new, expanding focus of ours on how the UK is contributing to climate breakdown and what needs to change. Our plan is to launch this later this month and we have several revelations lined up. There is not enough focus on how the UK military, intelligence services and big corporations are undermining our global climate. We need to change that.

We’re also working on our annual Impact Report, which will also be out soon. This documents some of the influence we’ve had around the world over the past year – thanks to you, our supporters and members!

All our publications are free – because we see Declassified as a public service. So there’s no subscriptions and no paywall. We need our work to be read by as many people as possible. It is for this reason we ask you to voluntarily support us. If enough of you join us as members, we will transform public service journalism in the UK, and change how this country acts in the world.

This is a long term goal, but an achievable one. We know we can’t change everything overnight. We deliberately set regular contributions really low to make them affordable to all – beginning at just £3 a month.

Please do become a regular donor if you can. We need you!

Have a great month and summer.

Best wishes,

Mark