Declassified obtains papers exposing the UK covert military role in the African police-state of #Cameroon, run by Africa's oldest dictator.
The UK is training Cameroon’s special forces and intelligence service, which are accused of severe human rights abuses.
A UK special forces officer has drafted a 'crisis management' doctrine for Cameroon's dictator, who has ruled since 1982, now mostly from a luxury hotel in Switzerland.
A UK military adviser has close relations with Biya’s right hand man and spy chief.
First, he falsely says it didn't say Bellingcat is a Dutch NGO.
The article clearly states it is registered in the Netherlands. (Read our article here -- bit.ly/323X3bI)
Second, Higgins claims Bellingcat is "not a UK based organisation". In fact, Bellingcat is also registered at Companies House as a UK-incorporated limited company, with a registered office in Leicester.
Higgins has tweeted Bellingcat received funds from the US National Endowment for Democracy from at least 2017. This was before Bellingcat was registered in the Netherlands in 2018 and while it was a UK-incorporated company which it still is.
Moore said the MI6 chief giving a speech “is an important part of the way we hold ourselves to account”.
Far more important would be enabling the public to submit FOI requests on MI6, stop censoring MI6 records from national archives & being truly accountable to parliament.
Moore said what all security officials always say in every speech: threat to the UK are “growing” and our “adversaries” are “feeling emboldened”.
In other words, the security agencies need yet more public money. But the UK already has a deeply-embedded national security state.
THREAD. See our investigations into how the UK legal process has been conflicted from the start of the US attempt to prosecute Julian #Assange
The case has implications for media freedom and the US right to prosecute anyone in the world, but also for the independence of UK law
The husband of Lady Arbuthnot, Westminster chief magistrate who initially oversaw #Assange’s extradition case to the US, was shown to have financial links to the British military establishment, including institutions exposed by WikiLeaks.
Lady Arbuthnot had even received financial benefits from two partner organisations of the Foreign Office before her appointment - yet she failed to formally declare conflicts of interests in presiding over the #Assange case.
"There was overwhelming enthusiasm in the British media for the invasion of Iraq. In Afghanistan, it was only after mounting evidence emerged of fatalities that the media began to be critical", writes Richard @NortonTaylor, Guardian defence correspondent for 40 yrs
"The MoD knows how to seduce journalists, by showing off new weapons. This is something defence ministers and officials hope will also keep the military onside and stop them leaking about how bad their equipment is."
The British government welcomed the 2019 coup in Bolivia that overthrew democratically-elected president Evo Morales. It then strongly supported the resulting coup regime. Here's why. Thread.
On 19 December 2019 - the month after Morales fled the country - Britain’s Foreign Office appears to have paid Oxford-based company, Satellite Applications Catapult, £33,220 to optimise "exploitation" of Bolivia’s huge lithium deposits.
In March 2020, five months after democracy was overthrown, the UK embassy acted as a "strategic partner" to the coup regime, and organised an international mining event in Bolivia.
Said @BenJamalpsc of @PSCupdates: “This failure by the government to answer questions about arms exports to Israel is shamefully consistent with its systematic disregard of its own regulatory guidelines regarding arms exports". bit.ly/3w0S30w