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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.

More than six months after the US government finally dropped all charges against Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the stateless Palestinian academic and activist was deported yesterday to Turkey. During his appearance on Democracy Now! today, Dr. Al-Arian expressed relief that his twelve-year-long persecution in the US, where he lived for forty years, had finally come to an end. “It feels like I’m free, finally really feeling freedom for the first time in twelve years,” Dr. Al-Arian said.

During the half-hour segment, Dr. Al-Arian revealed how he campaigned for George W. Bush, helping him win crucial votes from the Muslim community that would clinch his 2000 presidential election victory in the decisive state of Florida. Dr. Al-Arian was very active politically, and had visited the White House several times during both the Bush and Clinton administrations. Regarding his role in Bush’s election, Dr. Al-Arian said that he received a call “from someone who was very close to [Bush advisor] Karl Rove” asking how the campaign could win the endorsement of the Muslim American community. Dr. Al-Arian told this contact that Bush needed to declare his support for proposed legislation against secret evidence being used against Arab and Muslim Americans. During the second presidential candidate debate, Dr. Al-Arian told Democracy Now!, Bush did just that, securing the support of Muslim and Arab American leaders.

His administration had invited these leaders to the White House after Bush took office for a big announcement of good news regarding the legislation. “Unfortunately, it was on 9/11,” Dr. Al-Arian said, referring to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. “So that meeting never happened.” Instead, the country went in a very different direction. “At the time, we were protesting secret evidence,” Dr. Al-Arian added. “What happened after 9/11 is that they were arresting people with no evidence.”

A memo United Airlines leaked to the February 25 Wall Street Journal was presented as a “brutally honest” rebuke of its pilots, blaming their “lack of attention” to rules and regulations for the airline’s recent safety lapses. But the public lashing looks like a diversionary move by United to head off criticism after a federal probe of the company has received much recent attention.

The carrier is accused of scheduling special flights for David Samson, former chair of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, himself under investigation for his role in the “Bridgegate” scandal (where New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and others allegedly engineered traffic jams to punish political enemies.) If United realized it was offering flights “to curry favor with a public official, then United’s in the soup—it’s a bribe,” former federal prosecutor and Department of Transportation Inspector General Mary Schiavo told Bloomberg Business. Whatever United’s motives, union officers from Chicago-based Council 12 of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) were shocked, calling the letter “duplicitous” and even “offensive.” They fired back with a “brutally honest” safety examination of their own. Council 12 officers see a pattern of “threats, intimidation, and outright bullying” against those who raise safety considerations that conflict with on-time performance or the flight schedule.

A former air marshal who leaked information about agency cutbacks had a good day at the Supreme Court Tuesday, while the federal government he served had trouble convincing justices that he deserved to be fired.The result could turn out to be a rare court victory for government whistle-blowers who expose potential dangers to health or safety, even if the disclosures violate agency rules.Nearly all the justices appeared to agree that Robert MacLean was within his rights in 2003 when he leaked the fact that the Transportation Security Administration was taking air marshals off overnight flights. MacLean believed the action risked passengers' safety, and his leak to MSNBC prompted congressional criticism, leading the TSA to reverse itself.

The 9/11 trial judge abruptly recessed the first hearing in the case since August on Monday after some of the alleged Sept. 11 plotters said they recognized a war court linguist as a former secret CIA prison worker.Alleged plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, 42, made the revelation just moments into the hearing by informing the judge he had a problem with his courtroom translator. The interpreter, Bin al Shibh claimed, worked for the CIA during his 2002 through 2006 detention at a so-called “Black Site.”“The problem is I cannot trust him because he was working at the black site with the CIA, and we know him from there,” he said.This week’s is the first hearing for the five men accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania — since the public release of portions of a sweeping Senate Intelligence Committee study of the agency’s secret prisons known as “The Torture Report.”

Instead the issue became, apparently, a stony-faced translator who was sitting alongside Bin al Shibh in court when the hearing started. Lawyers for the alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 49, and his nephew, Ammar al Baluchi, 37, said they learned about the recognition just as court began. The judge ordered a quick recess, excused Campoamor-Sanchez and summoned the chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, for questioning.Court resumed briefly with the linguist missing. Martins sought, and got, a continuing recess until 9 a.m. Wednesday, to look into the issue and file a written pleading with the court. Pleadings are sealed for at least 15 days for intelligence agencies’ scrub of secret information.Mohammed’s attorney, David Nevin, asked Pohl to order the suspected CIA worker to not leave this remote base in southeast Cuba and to submit to defense questioning.

War court translators are provided by one of two Defense Department contractors paid by the Pentagon unit that runs the war court, called the Office of the Convening Authority for Military Commissions. It’s run by retired Marine Maj. Gen. Vaughn Ary, a former military lawyer. The contractors are Leidos and All World.Ary’s office provides a list of qualified translators to the Office of Military Commissions Defense unit, and, in the capital cases, each one gets a dedicated translator assigned to the team. Teams can object to the choice, and have done so in the past, as unsuitable, according to earlier war court sessions.The war court’s Chief Defense Counsel, Air Force Col. Karen Mayberry, said after the court session Monday that the translator sitting with Bin al Shibh in court was not permanently assigned to his team, or the 9/11 case. The Bin al Shibh team had lost its translator after an FBI investigation secretly questioned Sept. 11 defense team members. Monday’s translator, the one that Bin al Shibh said he recognized from a CIA prison, had worked for years on war court defense teams, but none with the Sept. 11 death-penalty case, according to Mayberry. Monday’s translator was filling in for this session because, although the Bin al Shibh team had chosen a new team translator, the new permanent translator had not yet gotten a security clearance, which can be a lengthy process.

Ehud Barak is being sued in the United States over his role in the 2010 slaying of Turkish American citizen Furkan Doğan by Israeli commandos who stormed a boat attempting to break the siege on Gaza. The former Israeli prime minister was served court documents when he was in Los Angeles, California, for a speaking event last month. Doğan, 19, was shot multiple times at point-blank range during the raid on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish boat in a flotilla sailing in international waters. His parents, Ahmet and Hikmet Doğan, filed the lawsuit against Barak.

Barak was defense minister when Israeli forces shot and killed eight Turkish nationals, in addition to Doğan. A tenth victim died from his injuries in May 2014.

Doğan’s family brings the case against Barak under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign nationals to use US courts in cases alleging violations of international law. “Ehud Barak is directly responsible for killing their son,” Hakan Camuz, a spokesperson for the family, told The Electronic Intifada. “Ehud Barak is responsible for killing [Doğan] when he was under the protection of international law when he was doing humanitarian work in the international high seas.”

There is a “high probability” that a bomb planted by an Islamic State supporter brought down the Russian airliner which crashed over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula just over a week ago, according to Britain’s foreign secretary. Drawing one of the most explicit links yet between Isis and the incident, Philip Hammond said that this did not necessarily mean that the attack was directed from the group’s headquarters in Syria. Rather, he said: “It may have been an individual who was inspired by Isis who was self-radicalised by looking at Isis propaganda and was acting in the name of Isis without necessarily being directed.” Hammond’s comments, made during an interview with CNN, came as US sources reportedly suggested that Russian communications intercepted by US intelligence agencies show Russia also believes the plane to have been brought down by a bomb.

The intercepts are among pieces of evidence leading US officials to suspect that a device planted on Metrojet Flight 9268 exploded shortly after the Airbus A321 took off from the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, according to a report by Reuters. All 224 passengers and crew were killed when the plane crashed in the desert on 31 October on the way to St Petersburg, Russia. Egypt and Russia have yet to formally announce the cause of the disaster although both have publicly dismissed as premature US and British assessments that a bomb likely was responsible.

Following in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, November 13 and Moscow’s conclusion that the Russian Airbus 321 that crashed in Egypt’s North Sinai province on October 31; and following recent talks on Syria in Vienna and talks on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey, the military dynamics pertaining Syria and the international fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State has changed, significantly. 

French President Francois Hollande and his administration responded to the attacks in Paris by declaring a three months state of emergency while deploying the French aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle to the Mediterranean to upscale French participation in the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a.k.a. Daesh, ISIS or ISIL. Hollande announced that the carrier would leave port on September 19., adding that: “This is going to triple our military power [as part of the operation against the Islamic State]. I am not talking about deterring the IS but about eliminating it totally.” On Tuesday the Chief of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, announced that the crash of the Russian Kogalmavia (Metrojet) Airbus 321 in Egypt’s North Sinai on October 31 had been caused by a bomb on board the plane.

The of Flight KGL9268 claimed the lives of all 224 passengers and crew on board. The plane was brought down about one month after Russia launched its airstrikes against Daesh, Jabhat al-Nusrah and other insurgencies in Syria. President Putin has briefed the Russian military command on the deployment of the French aircraft carrier and instructed the Russian naval forces in the Mediterranean and the Russian air forces in Syria to cooperate with the French military and to coordinate their military operations.

A lawsuit in the United States has been filed against former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak for his role in the 2010 Israeli commando attack upon the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in which 8 Turkish citizens and one American citizen were executed by Israeli forces and over fifty Turkish passengers were wounded.  The trial will be the first time a former Israeli Prime Minister will be put on trial for reasons of international terrorism. The family of Furkan Doğan, the American citizen who was assassinated in the attack, filed the lawsuit in the Central District Court of California and notice of the trial was handed to Barak last night, October 20, in Los Angeles when he spoke in the Distinguished Speaker series of Southern California  (http://speakersla.com/speakers/ehud-barak/).  According to a press release (http://mavi-marmara.ihh.org.tr/en/main/news/0/case-opened-against-former-israeli-pm-ehud-ba/2969) from the Turkish International Humanitarian organization that sponsored the Mavi Marmara ship,  charges against Barak include his planning and leadership in the murder of Furkan Doğan and others in international waters, Willful killing, attempted willful killing, intentionally causing serious injury to body or health, international terrorism, plundering, intentionally causing damage to property, restriction of people's freedom and instigating violent crimes. 

American attorneys Hydee Dijsktal and Dan Stormer, the British law firm, Stoke & White, British Professor Dr. Geoffrey Nice and UK attorney Rodney Dixon are the legal team for the Dogan family. Ehud Barak was almost arrested in France in 2010 when he went to a weapons expo. by hopping off the plane last minute with the trial opened against him by the wives of martyrs in France. Other legal proceedings against Barak and other senior members of the Israeli government are in the works.  In 2010 in France, the widows of Cevdet Kılıçlar and Necdet Yıldırım, two others executed by Israeli commandos, brought a lawsuit against Barak which he evaded when he was informed of the French lawsuit as he was about to deplane in Paris to attend a weapons expo in France. In the case brought in the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ICC prosecutor has ruled that the attack by Israeli commandos upon the Mavi Marmara in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a war crime. Additionally, the 7th High Criminal Court in Istanbul, Turkey has issued a “red notice” for the arrest of four senior Israeli government officials in a lawsuit filed in Turkey http://www.incanews.net/en/turkey/313/turkish-court-orders-arrest-of-4-israeli-officials . The Israeli officials named by the court are Israel's former Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, former navy chief Eliezer Marom, former military intelligence head Amos Yadlin and former air force intelligence chief Avishai Levy.

Due to political considerations dealing with the State of Israel, the Ministry of Justice of Turkey has delayed sending to Interpol the “red notice” much to the consternation of those seeking justice.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, it's analyzing videos provided by Dutch investigators on the MH17 downing."The Russian Defense Ministry is analyzing video materials presented on May 24 at a press conference of the Dutch Joint Investigation Team, which is engaged in the investigation of the passenger Boeing's crash in the Ukrainian skies in 2014," the ministry said. All missiles, whose engines were demonstrated by the Dutch team, were disposed of after 2011. "After 25 years of operation, all missiles of the Buk systems are subject to decommissioning and disposal, and further use of these products… poses a direct threat to the life of servicemen. The maximum lifetime of the missile, the engine from which was demonstrated by the Dutch commission last Thursday was 2011 (1986 + 25), after which all the missiles produced that year were seized, decommissioned and sent for disposal," the ministry said. No new anti-aircraft missiles were supplied to Ukraine, which has about 20 battalions of BUK missiles systems since 1991, the ministry said, adding that a special number of the missile allegedly used to down the aircraft shows that it was produced in the Soviet Union in 1986.

The ministry further says that the Dutch commission has hushed up information about where and when the engine of the Buk missile was found, as well as about those who handed it over to the investigators. The ministry noted that the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) used the remained casing of a Buk missile engine, which was showcased during Thursday's press conference, as one of the proofs of the Russian armed forces' alleged involvement in the tragedy. "However, the speakers preferred not to mention when and where the engine was found, who handed this item to the investigative commission," the ministry's statement read. The document stressed that the Dutch investigators could have glossed over the source of origin of the missile engine because it could belong to Ukraine's armed forces. "The only reason for the deliberate silencing of the source of origin of the showcased rocket engine, produced in 1986, by the Dutch investigative commission is that it probably belongs to the Ukrainian armed forces," the statement read.