If 'Dirty Dossier' author
Christopher Steele deserves protection under the 1st Amendment but WikiLeaks’
Julian Assange doesn’t, then the concept of a free press is merely a distant
memory.
While it is all too easy to
become frustrated and annoyed by what passes for news in the legacy media these
days, this article in
the Daily Mail did arouse my particular ire earlier this week – and in this
instance no particular blame attaches to the newspaper, it is simply reporting
some unpalatable facts.
The gist of it is that former
British MI6 intelligence officer and current mercenary spy-for-hire,
Christopher Steele, author of the discredited ‘Dirty Dossier’ about Donald
Trump, has been accorded First Amendment rights in a court case in the USA.
You might wonder why this
article caused me so much spluttering annoyance over my breakfast? Steele’s
treatment is in marked contrast to that accorded to WikiLeaks Publisher and
Editor-in-Chief, Julian Assange, and the hypocrisy is breathtaking. Allow me to
expound.
Steele is a British
intelligence officer of pretty much my vintage. According to what is available publicly,
he worked for MI6, the British overseas intelligence gathering agency, for 22
years, serving in Russia in the early ’90s and in Paris at the end of that
decade – around the time that MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, was imprisoned in that city pending a failed
extradition case to the UK. It is probable that Steele would have been
monitoring us then.
After being outed as
an MI6 officer in 1999 by his former colleague, Richard Tomlinson, he was
pretty much desk-bound in London until he resigned in 2009 to set up, in the
inimitable way of so many former spooks, a private consultancy that can provide
plausibly deniable services to corporations and perhaps their former employers.
Steele established just such a
mercenary spy outfit, Orbis
Business Intelligence, with another ex-colleague Chris Burrows in 2009.
Orbis made its name in exposing corruption at the heart of FIFA in 2015 and was thereafter approached as an
out-sourced partner by Fusion GPS – the company initially hired to dig dirt on presidential candidate Trump in 2016
by one of his Republican rivals and which then went on to dig up dirt on behalf
of Hillary Clinton’s DNC.
The result is what has become
known as the ‘Dirty Dossier,’ a grubby collection of prurient gossip with
no real evidence or properly sourced information. As a former MI6 intelligence
officer, Steele should be hanging his head in shame at such a shoddy and
embarrassingly half-baked report.
On a slightly tangential note,
there has been some speculation, suppressed in the UK at least via the D Notice
censorship system, that MI6 informant and Russian traitor Sergei Skripal, the
victim of the alleged Novichok poisoning in the UK earlier this year, remained
in contact with his alleged handler Pablo Miller, who also is reported to work for Orbis Business Intelligence. If
this were indeed the case, then it would be a logical assumption that Orbis,
via Miller, might well have used Skripal as one of its “reliable sources” for
the Dossier.
UK government sent out a media
suppression instruction ("DMSA notice" aka "D notice") for
Skripal's MI6 handler living nearby according to UK's Channel 4. Skripal's
handler was historically reported to be "Pablo Miller"--more recently
connected to Orbis and Christopher Steele.
Despite all this, Steele has won a
legal case in the USA, where he had been sued by three Russian oligarchs who
claimed that the ‘Dirty Dossier’ traduced their reputations. And he won on the
basis that his report was protected by First Amendment rights under the
constitution of the USA, which guarantees US citizens the right to freedom of
expression. Despite the fact that Steele is British.
“But Judge Anthony Epstein
disagreed, writing in his judgment that “advocacy on issues of public interest
has the capacity to inform public debate, and thereby furthers the purposes of
the First Amendment, regardless of the citizenship or residency of the speakers.”
This is the nub of the issue:
Steele, a former official UK intelligence officer and current mercenary
spy-for-hire, is granted legal protection by the American courts for digging up
and subsequently leaking what appears to be controversial and defamatory
information about the current US president as well as various Russians, all
paid for by Trump’s political opponents. And Steele is given the full
protection of the US legal system.
On the other hand, we have an award-winning journalist and publisher, Assange,
whose organization WikiLeaks has never been found to report anything factually
incorrect in more than 10 years, being told that if he were to be extradited
from his current political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to face
the full wrath of a vengeful American establishment, he is not entitled to
claim the protection of the First Amendment because he is an Australian
citizen, not an American.
It has been an open secret for
years that the US government has installed a secret Grand Jury in Virginia (the home of the
CIA) to investigate Assange and bring him to “justice” for publishing
embarrassing US government documents as well as evidence of
war crimes. There have been callsfrom US politicians for the death sentence, life
in prison without parole, and even assassination. The US has been scrabbling
around for years to try to find any charge it could potentially throw at him –
hell, it will probably make up a new law just for him, so desperate as it is to
make an example of him.
However, the fake ‘Russiagate’
narrative gave the US deep state an additional spur – against all evidence and Assange’s own statements – it alleges that Russia hacked the
DNC and Podesta emails and Assange was the conduit to make them public. This is
seen as a win-win for the US establishment, apparently if erroneously proving that
Russia hacked the US presidential election and confirming that Assange runs a “non-state
hostile intelligence agency,” according to former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Except he does not. He is an
editor running a high-tech publishing outfit that has caused embarrassment to
governments and corporations around the world, not just America. If he can be
prosecuted for publishing information very much in the public interest, then
all the legacy media feeding off the WikiLeaks hydrant of information are equally vulnerable.
This being the case, surely
he, of all people, requires the protection of the First Amendment in the USA.
Otherwise the concept that free media can hold power to account is surely dead.
Annie Machon is a former intelligence
officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in the late 1990s to
blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes with her ex-partner,
David Shayler. Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a public
speaker, writer, media pundit, international tour and event organiser,
political campaigner, and PR consultant. She has a rare perspective both
on the inner workings of governments, intelligence agencies and the
media, as well as the wider implications for the need for increased openness
and accountability in both public and private sectors.
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