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So after more than four years of Scotland Yard investigations, and months of agonising within the Crown Prosecution Service, ministers and MI6 are getting off scot-free over the abduction and subsequent torture of two suspected Islamists. Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi were enemies of Muammar Gaddafi delivered to Tripoli, courtesy of MI6 and the CIA, in 2004 when Tony Blair’s government was cuddling up to the Libyan dictator. Gaddafi had promised to abandon his nuclear and chemical weapons programme and as a reward for British friendship – including the secret rendition of his opponents – he agreed to huge and lucrative oil deals for BP.

In one of the deepest ironies in the history of British intelligence, clear evidence of British involvement in the rendition of Belhaj, Saadi and their families to Tripoli’s jails emerged in 2001. They were spelled out in a letter from Sir Mark Allen, then head of MI6 counter-terrorism operations, to Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, written in March 2004. In it, Allen trumpeted MI6’s role in the operation. The letter was found among documents in Moussa’s office destroyed by Nato bombs. Saadi accepted £2.2m compensation from the British government. Belhaj chose to fight on, demanding an apology. The supreme court is soon due to deliver judgment on his claim that Britain must take responsibility for his abduction. Lawyers for the government argue that British courts have no right to hear the case since the agents of foreign intelligence agencies – notably the CIA – were also involved in the operation. Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of MI5 – MI6’s sister service responsible for British security as opposed to spying abroad – was so angry with what MI6 had been up to, that, as the Guardian reported last week, she fired off a letter to Blair complaining about it, saying its actions may have compromised the security and safety of MI5 officers and their informants. Such was her fury that she ejected MI6 staff from MI5’s headquarters, Thames House.

After the Allen letter came to light, Blair said he had “no recollection at all” of the Libyan rendition. Jack Straw, then foreign secretary responsible for MI6, told MPs in 2005 – a year after the Libyan abductions – that “there is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop.” After the Allen letter emerged, Straw said: “No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time.” Government officials have insisted that the operation was in response to “ministerially authorised government policy”. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time, has said: “It was a political decision, having very significantly disarmed Libya, for the government to cooperate with Libya on Islamist terrorism.” Referring to MI6’s links with Gaddafi, Manningham-Buller has stated: “There are clearly questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.” Section 7 of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, sometimes described as the “James Bond clause”, protects MI6 officers from prosecution for actions anywhere in the world that would otherwise be illegal. They would be protected as long as their actions were authorised in writing by the secretary of state.

Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them. The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities. One cable details how the Pakistani militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks, used a Saudi-based front company to fund its activities in 2005. Meanwhile officials with the LeT’s charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, travelled to Saudi Arabia seeking donations for new schools at vastly inflated costs – then siphoned off the excess money to fund militant operations. Militants seeking donations often come during the hajj pilgrimage – “a major security loophole since pilgrims often travel with large amounts of cash and the Saudis cannot refuse them entry into Saudi Arabia”. Even a small donation can go far: LeT operates on a budget of just $5.25m (£3.25m) a year, according to American estimates.

Saudi officials are often painted as reluctant partners. Clinton complained of the “ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist funds emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority”. Washington is critical of the Saudi refusal to ban three charities classified as terrorist entities in the US. “Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas,” she said. There has been some progress. This year US officials reported that al-Qaida’s fundraising ability had “deteriorated substantially” since a government crackdown. As a result Bin Laden’s group was “in its weakest state since 9/11” in Saudi Arabia. Any criticisms are generally offered in private. The cables show that when it comes to powerful oil-rich allies US diplomats save their concerns for closed-door talks, in stark contrast to the often pointed criticism meted out to allies inPakistan and Afghanistan. Instead, officials at the Riyadh embassy worry about protecting Saudi oilfields from al-Qaida attacks. The other major headache for the US in the Gulf region is the United Arab Emirates. The Afghan Taliban and their militant partners the Haqqani network earn “significant funds” through UAE-based businesses, according to one report. The Taliban extort money from the large Pashtun community in the UAE, which is home to 1 million Pakistanis and 150,000 Afghans. They also fundraise by kidnapping Pashtun businessmen based in Dubai or their relatives.

For Mitt Romney, it's one scary Halloween.  The Presidential candidate has just learned that tomorrow afternoon (November 1) he will be charged by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and other public interest groups with violating the federal ethics in government law by improperly concealing his multi-million dollar windfall from the auto industry bailout. At a press conference in Toledo, Bob King, President of the United Automobile Workers, will announce that his union and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)  have filed a formal complaint with the US Office of Government Ethics in Washington stating that Gov. Romney improperly hid a profit of $15.3 million to $115.0 million in Ann Romney's so-called "blind" trust. The union chief says, "The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue. It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.” “While Romney was opposing the rescue of one of the nation’s most important manufacturing sectors, he was building his fortunes with his Delphi investor group, making his fortunes off the misfortunes of others,” King added.

The Romneys' gigantic windfall was hidden inside an offshore corporation inside a limited partnership inside a trust which both concealed the gain and reduces taxes on it.   The Romneys' windfall was originally exposed in Nation Magazine (and reposted on Truthout,) Mitt Romney's Bail-out Bonanza after a worldwide investigation by our crew at The Guardian, the Nation Institute and the Palast Investigative Fund.  

According to ethics law expert Dr. Craig Holman of Public Citizen -- who serves as an advisor on the charge -- Ann Romney does not have a federally-approved blind trust.  An approved "blind" trust may not be used to hide a major investment which could be affected by Romney if he were to be elected President.

Julian Assange will be questioned by Swedish prosecutors inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, in a possible breakthrough to end the impasse over his case. The Ecuadorian attorney general delivered a document agreeing to a request by the Swedish prosecutor to question the founder of WikiLeaks. He is wanted for questioning over a rape allegation, which he denies. If he goes to Sweden he believes he will be taken to the US because of the activities of WikiLeaks. Assange has been living inside the embassy for more than four years and has been granted political asylum by Ecuador.

He has offered to be questioned inside the embassy but Swedish prosecutors have only recently agreed. A statement issued in Ecuador said: “In the coming weeks a date will be established for the proceedings to be held at the embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom.

The statement said the proceedings did not affect the recent opinion of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the United Nations, which found that Assange was being arbitrarily detained. The working group called for Assange to be released and given compensation for violation of his rights. The Ecuador statement added: “Ecuador’s foreign ministry reiterates its commitment to the asylum granted to Julian Assange in August 2012, and reaffirms that the protection afforded by the Ecuadorian state shall continue while the circumstances persist that led to the granting of asylum, namely fears of political persecution.”

Barack Obama has called Japan’s leader to express regret over recent WikiLeaks allegations that the US had spied on senior Japanese officials. Obama told prime minister Shinzo Abe that he thought the trouble the revelations caused Abe and his government was regrettable, a Japanese government spokesman told reporters. The 40-minute call took place Wednesday morning Japan time. Japanese officials faced questioning from the media and in parliament after WikiLeaks posted online what appeared to be five US National Security Agency reports on Japanese positions on international trade and climate change. They date from 2007 to 2009. WikiLeaks also posted what it says was an NSA list of 35 Japanese targets for telephone intercepts.

Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories have been convulsed by a wave of escalating violence in recent days. The lethal tensions ratcheted up sharply last Thursday when a married couple, Jewish settlers from Neria in the northern West Bank, were shot and killed in a car in front of their four children near Beit Furik, allegedly by members of a five-man Hamas cell who were subsequently arrested. Two more Israelis were stabbed and killed in Jerusalem’s Old City on Saturday by a Palestinian youth, who was shot dead at the scene. On Sunday, an 18-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces in clashes near the West Bank town of Tulkarem. The mounting friction has seen attacks by settlers on Palestinians, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces and attempted attacks continue. On Wednesday. there were incidents in Jerusalem, where a Palestinian woman stabbed an Israeli man who then shot and seriously wounded her in the Old City, the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, where a Palestinian was killed after reportedly trying to seize a gun from a soldier and stabbing him, and when a female Israeli settler’s car was stoned near Beit Sahour, which adjoins Bethlehem, in an incident in which it appears other settlers fired on Palestinians, seriously injuring a youth.

On the Palestinian side, anger escalated earlier this week after a 13-year-old boy in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper in an incident the Israeli military has claimed was “unintentional” as soldiers were aiming at another individual.

Jerusalem has remained tense now for almost a year. Most analysts blame the recent heightened tension on several factors. Key among them has been the issue of the religious site in Jerusalem known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews as the Temple Mount. A long-running campaign by some fundamentalist Jews and their supporters for expanding their rights to worship in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount, supported by rightwing members of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s own cabinet, has raised the suspicion – despite repeated Israeli denials – that Israel intends to change the precarious status quo for the site, which has been governed under the auspices of the Jordanian monarchy since 1967.

A large majority of Russia’s military strikes in Syria have not been aimed at the Islamic State group or jihadists tied to al-Qaida, and have instead targeted the moderate Syrian opposition, the US State Department said on Wednesday. “Greater than 90% of the strikes that we’ve seen them take to date have not been against Isil or al-Qaida-affiliated terrorists,” said spokesman John Kirby.

“They’ve been largely against opposition groups that want a better future for Syria and don’t want to see the Assad regime stay in power.” It was the first time that American authorities have offered any specific figures about the impact of Russian airstrikes in the war-torn country.

Washington, which supports the moderate Syrian opposition, has consistently said that the Russian action will only add more fuel to the fire and will benefit the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. “So whether they’re hit by a cruise missile from the sea or a bomb from a Russian military aircraft, the result is the same, that Assad continues to get support from Russia,” added Kirby. “Assad continues to be able to have at his, you know, at his hands the capability of striking his own people, including those who are opposed to his regime. “And that’s not a good future for Syria. It’s also, as we’ve said before, we believe a mistake for Russia, because not only are they going to be exacerbating sectarian tensions there in Syria, but they’re potentially exacerbating sectarian tensions in Russia itself. “They’re putting themselves at greater risk.”

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown. Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

Unable to find support from its US allies, Israel is turning to France to help head off what it sees as a bad and dangerous nuclear deal with Iran.

In an interview with the Associated Press in Paris, the Israeli intelligence minister, Yuval Steinitz, said on Monday that dialogue with France over Iran’s nuclear program “has proven in the past that it was productive” and makes this week’s last-minute diplomatic mission to Paris worthwhile. France played a key role strengthening an interim agreement with Iran in late 2013 that froze important parts of the Islamic republic’s nuclear program in exchange for some relief from western sanctions. The so-called P5+1 group – Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany – is attempting to reach a final nuclear deal with Iran before a deadline expires at the end of the month.

The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said on Saturday that “achieving a deal is possible” by the target date. A preliminary accord then is meant to lead to a final deal by the end of June that would permanently crimp Tehran’s nuclear programs in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Iran claims that its program is only aimed at generating power, but other nations fear it is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

The US and Russia agreed a tentative ceasefire deal for Syria late on Friday night, intended to lead the way to a joint US-Russian air campaign against Islamic State and other extremist groups and new negotiations on the country’s political future.

Lavrov described the situation in Syria as a “quagmire” with multiple warring parties, some of whom would seek to undermine the US-Russian deal. For that reason, he added, much of the deal would remain secret to prevent efforts at sabotage. But the Russian foreign minister said Russia had secured the agreement of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus.

As part of the complex agreement, a seven-day pause in the fighting would begin on Monday evening, the beginning of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. During that time, the Syrian army would relax its stranglehold on rebel held areas of Aleppo allowing for the delivery of humanitarian aid to the starving city, while rebels would stop fighting around government areas. The Syrian regime would suspend airstrikes on rebel-held areas around the country, the main source of civilian casualties. If the ceasefire holds, the Russian and US military would start planning joint air operations against extremist groups, including Isis and al-Nusra Front (also referred to as the Front for the Conquest of Syria). The Syrian air force would stay out of zones being targeted by the US and Russia. The US is also aiming to convince other rebel groups to separate themselves from the Nusra Front where they have been fighting the regime together.

The Syrian White Helmets rescue group has urged international organisations to protect its volunteers in rebel-held parts of eastern Aleppo, warning that they face torture and execution. The rescue group said it believed it had less than 48 hours before the Syrian army, backed by Iranian militia, reached the districts in which it has been operating.

“If we are not evacuated, our volunteers face torture and execution in the regime’s detention centres,” the group said. “We have good reason to fear for our lives.”

The White Helmets in Aleppo fear they will be “be treated as terrorists” and could face detention or execution by advancing regime troops. “We hold the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross], the United Nations and the [UN] security council responsible for our lives and we call on you to secure safe passage,” a statement added. Western sources said there were credible reports of people being arbitrarily arrested and executed in Aleppo, though there was a lack of firm information. The White Helmets operate in rebel-held territory throughout Syria and have won international acclaim for their work in the aftermaths of attacks. The Bashar al-Assad regime has always described the group as a western propaganda tool, but it contends it has no political affiliation, working only to save civilian lives in highly dangerous circumstances. It was nominated for the Nobel peace prize this year and is backed by UK funds.

Angela Merkel’s reputation as an unassailable chancellor is under threat amid mounting pressure for her to reveal how much she knew about a German-supported US spying operation on European companies and officials. The onus on her government to deliver answers over the spying scandal has only increased with the Austrian government’s announcement that it has filed a legal complaint against an unnamed party over “covert intelligence to the detriment of Austria”. EADS, now Airbus, one of the companies known to have been spied on by the BND – Germany’s foreign intelligence agency – is also taking legal action, saying it will file a complaint with prosecutors in Germany. The BND stands accused of spying on behalf of America’s NSA on European companies such as EADS, as well as the French presidency and the EU commission. There are also suspicions that German government workers and journalists were spied on.

The scandal has already strained relations within Merkel’s grand coalition, with many observers commenting that Gabriel was seeing the affair as a chance to make political gains. Political observers were lining up to remark that the crisis is the single most critical of Merkel’s decade in government and could even lead to her and her government’s downfall.

While Merkel appeared to have remained relatively unscathed by the scandal until now, an opinion poll showed that most Germans believed the trustworthiness of the three-times chancellor was now seriously at stake. 62% of Germans said her credibility was in doubt, according to the poll, carried out by the Insa institute, while 18% said it was not. Merkel told Radio Bremen in an interview that she was prepared to speak out over the allegations to a parliamentary committee. “I will testify there and justify myself to them where it is required,” she told the broadcaster.

The US National Security Agency tapped phone calls involving German chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors, according to WikiLeaks. A report released by the group on Wednesday suggested NSA spying on Merkel and her staff had gone on far longer and more widely than previously realised. WikiLeaks said the NSA targeted 125 phone numbers of top German officials for long-term surveillance . The release risks renewing tensions between Germany and the US a month after they sought to put a row over spying behind them, with Barack Obama declaring in Bavaria that the two nations were “inseparable allies”. WikiLeaks published what it said were three NSA intercepts of Merkel’s conversations, and data it said listed telephone numbers for the chancellor, her aides, her office and even her fax machine. “The names associated with some of the targets indicate that spying on the Chancellery predates Angela Merkel as it includes staff of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (in office 1998-2002), and his predecessor Helmut Kohl,” WikiLeaks added in a statement.

Binyamin Netanyahu has cancelled a trip to Germany amid continuing violence between Palestinians and Israelis. A number of incidents on Wednesday scotched hopes the situation might be calming, after almost a week in which tensions have spiked amid clashes and lethal attacks. The postponement of Thursday’s summit, which was to mark 50 years of diplomatic ties between Israel and Germany, came as Netanyahu convened his top security advisers to discuss the worsening situation. Wednesday saw three separate serious incidents: in Jerusalem, outside Bethlehem, and in the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, where a Palestinian reportedly stabbed an Israeli soldier and tried to take his weapon before fleeing into a building where he was shot dead.

Video footage showed armed police and soldiers running towards a building, and then in a room standing over a body lying in a pool of blood. According to police, the suspect had approached an armed Israel Defence Forces soldier after stepping off a bus and attempted to snatch his weapon. The Kiryat Gat incident will be especially worrying for Israelis, suggesting that the recent tensions – which had been largely confined to Jerusalem and the occupied territories – may be spreading to other parts of Israel. It followed clashes on Tuesday night at a demonstration in support of the al-Aqsa mosque in the seaside town of Jaffa by Israelis of Palestinian origin. The Kiryat Gat incident followed an alleged attempted stabbing by an 18-year-old Palestinian woman who was shot by an Israeli man during the incident, which took place in Jerusalem’s Old City, close to where two Israelis were stabbed to death at the weekend. In the third incident, a female Israeli settler’s car was stoned near Beit Sahour, which adjoins Bethlehem, and other settlers apparently fired on Palestinians, seriously injuring a youth. The settler attacked in her car said that a group of Palestinian youths had tried to pull her from the vehicle at the time the shooting took place. According to the Ma’an news agency, which interviewed locals, the youth who was shot was a student involved in the attack on the car. German government sources disclosed the cancellation of Netanyahu’s trip, which had already been heavily curtailed because of the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. An Israeli official confirmed the cancellation. Elsewhere, clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli security forces across the West Bank led to dozens of injuries among Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution. The exhaustive study of the papers from the Libyan government archives shows the links between MI5, MI6 and Gaddafi’s security agencies were far more extensive than previously thought and involved a number of joint operations in which Libyan dissidents were unlawfully detained and allegedly tortured. At one point, Libyan intelligence agents were invited to operate on British soil, where they worked alongside MI5 and allegedly intimidated a number of Gaddafi opponents who had been granted asylum in the UK.

the research suggests that the fruits of a series of joint clandestine operations also underpinned a significant number of court hearings in London between 2002 and 2007, during which the last Labour government unsuccessfully sought to deport Gaddafi’s opponents on the basis of information extracted from people who had been “rendered” to his jails. In addition, the documents show that four men were subjected to control orders in the UK – a form of curfew – on the basis of information extracted from victims of rendition who had been handed over to the Gaddafi regime.

Gaddafi’s agents recorded MI5 as warning in September 2006 that the two countries’ agencies should take steps to ensure that their joint operations would never be “discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. In fact, papers that detail the joint UK-Libyan rendition operations were discovered by the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch in September 2011, at the height of the Libyan revolution, in an abandoned government office building in Tripoli. Since then, hundreds more documents have been discovered in government files in Tripoli. A team of London-based lawyers has assembled them into an archive that is forming the basis of a claim for damages on behalf of 12 men who were allegedly kidnapped, tortured, subject to control orders or tricked into travelling to Libya where they were detained and mistreated.

A secret US cybersecurity report warned that government and private computers were being left vulnerable to online attacks from Russia, China and criminal gangs because encryption technologies were not being implemented fast enough. The advice, in a newly uncovered five-year forecast written in 2009, contrasts with the pledge made by David Cameron this week to crack down on encryption use by technology companies.

In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, the prime minister said there should be no “safe spaces for terrorists to communicate” or that British authorites could not access. Cameron, who landed in the US on Thursday night, is expected to urge Barack Obama to apply more pressure to tech giants, such as Apple, Google and Facebook, which have been expanding encrypted messaging for their millions of users since the revelations of mass NSA surveillance by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Cameron said the companies “need to work with us. They need also to demonstrate, which they do, that they have a social responsibility to fight the battle against terrorism. We shouldn’t allow safe spaces for terrorists to communicate. That’s a huge challenge but that’s certainly the right principle”. But the document from the US National Intelligence Council, which reports directly to the US director of national intelligence, made clear that encryption was the “best defence” for computer users to protect private data. Part of the cache given to the Guardian by Snowden was published in 2009 and gives a five-year forecast on the “global cyber threat to the US information infrastructure”. It covers communications, commercial and financial networks, and government and critical infrastructure systems. It was shared with GCHQ and made available to the agency’s staff through its intranet.

It is a rare thing to bring truth to bear on the most powerful and secretive arm of the state. Never before has the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – the British court tasked with reviewing complaints against the security services – ruled against the government. Not once have the spooks been taken to task for overstepping the lawful boundaries of their conduct. Not a single British spy has been held accountable for mass surveillance, unlawful spying or snooping on private emails and phone calls. Until today. Privacy International has spent the past 25 years fighting back against the ever-expanding British surveillance state. Together with our allies, we’ve resisted the snooper’s charter (multiple times), mandatory ID cards and the provision of passenger name records. Yet in June 2013 we were as shocked as everyone else to learn that GCHQ, in collaboration with the NSA, had acquired the capabilities to completely control, monitor, copy, read and analyse the world’s private communications. It was, until that point, unfathomable that the security services could have so audaciously stretched the boundaries of democratic legitimacy – and could have so severely violated the civil liberties and human rights of not only Britons, but of hundreds of millions of innocent people across the globe.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we learned that GCHQ has access to emails and messages that the NSA siphons off directly and en masse from Google, Skype and Facebook. We discovered that the NSA collects 194m text messages and 5bn location records every day – and GCHQ can read them too. And, of course, we learned that GCHQ is operating a mass surveillance system that, combined with its access to the NSA’s own mass surveillance architecture, means it can read almost anyone’s communications, at any time, without judicial authorisation or any meaningful oversight. In July 2013, the Intelligence and Security Committee assured us that GCHQ access to NSA surveillance material, in particular through the Prism programme, was entirely lawful. Unsurprisingly, we did not find the reassurances of a body that has consistently and blindly backed the services that it is meant to scrutinise comforting.

That’s why we decided to take GCHQ to court. Alongside Liberty, Amnesty International and human rights organisations from around the world, we argued that mass surveillance is not an acceptable activity of a democratic government, and that the cosy dealings between GCHQ and the NSA, conducted under a veil of secrecy that was only lifted by a whistleblower’s bravery, had to be brought within public control and scrutiny. The evidence was overwhelming and the history of human rights law was in our favour, but the tribunal – which at that point had never before found that the surveillance activities of GCHQ broke the law – disagreed. Mass surveillance, it found in its decision of December 2014, was legitimate under British law. GCHQ’s access to NSA mass surveillance was also acceptable, it said, given that the government had disclosed details of its relationship with the US during the course of our case.

The new Greek government has picked its first fight with the European Union, delaying agreement on further EU sanctions against Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. The move raised European and Nato fears that Moscow might seek to exploit the hard left and extreme right coalition under Alexis Tsipras as a Trojan horse within the key western alliances.

Before the foreign ministers’ meeting, the 28 EU ambassadors in Brussels met to draft the decisions to be discussed by the ministers. The Greek ambassador refused to agree to the key passage on sanctions – prolonging the blacklisting of 132 individuals and 28 “entities”, mainly in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Nikos Kotzias, the new Greek foreign minister, said Greece wanted to “prevent a rift” between Russia and the EU, although both sides have been in acute conflict for the past 10 months over Moscow’s assault on Ukraine. Kotzias was later quoted by Reuters as telling the meeting: “We are not against every sanction. We are in the mainstream, we are not the bad boys.”

Read the leaked document here

South Africa’s intelligence service relied on a spy “with direct access to the Russian government” to find out details of its own government’s involvement in a $100m (£65m) joint satellite surveillance programme with Russia, the leaked spy cables obtained by al-Jazeera and shared with the Guardian reveal. The satellite system, known as Project Condor, which was launched into orbit by Russia in December last year, provides surveillance coverage of the entire African continent. The project has been shrouded in secrecy, with Russia originally refusing to reveal who its client was. Those in the dark appear to have included South Africa’s intelligence agency. But a South African agent with access to Russian military intelligence was able to help, according to a leaked espionage report marked “top secret” and dated 28 August 2012.

The intelligence report records a briefing from an agent codenamed “Agent Africanist”, who is identified as having direct links with the government in Moscow and Russian intelligence officers, including those closely involved in the joint satellite project. Project Condor would, the agent reported, place “South Africa in a position to conduct its own aerial surveillance in Africa, potentially right up to Israel for strategic military purposes”. The satellite system, which is reported to be costing Pretoria $100m, has been the focus of criticism in South Africa since some details emerged in local media. The scheme, first proposed eight years ago, has been reported as being the pet project of General Moretti Motau, former head of South African military intelligence, who has now retired and sits on the board of the weapons firm Armscorp.

Senior UN officials in Jerusalem have been accused of caving in to Israeli pressure to abandon moves to include the state’s armed forces on a UN list of serious violators of children’s rights. UN officials backed away from recommending that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) be included on the list following telephone calls from senior Israeli officials. The Israelis allegedly warned of serious consequences if a meeting of UN agencies and NGOs based in Jerusalem to ratify the recommendation went ahead. Within hours, the meeting was cancelled. “Top officials have buckled under political pressure,” said a UN source. “As a result, a clear message has been given that Israel will not be listed.”

Organisations pressing for the IDF’s inclusion on the list since the war in Gaza last summer – which left more than 500 children dead and more than 3,300 injured – include Save the Children and War Child as well as at least a dozen Palestinian human rights organisations, the Israeli rights organisation B’Tselem and UN bodies such as the children’s agency Unicef. “These organisations are in uproar over what has happened,” said the UN source

The IDF’s inclusion on the UN’s list of grave violators of children’s rights would place it alongside non-state armed forces such as Islamic State, Boko Haram and the Taliban. There are no other state armies on the list. It would propel Israel further towards pariah status within international bodies and could lead to UN sanctions.