[News] Amnesty International’s Troubling Collaboration with UK & US Intelligence
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Thu Jan 17 12:30:32 EST 2019
https://www.mintpressnews.com/amnesty-international-troubling-collaboration-with-uk-us-intelligence/253939/
Amnesty International’s Troubling Collaboration with UK & US Intelligence
by Alexander Rubinstein - January 17th, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*LONDON —*Amnesty International, the eminent human-rights
non-governmental organization, is widely known for its advocacy in that
realm. It produces reports critical of the Israeli occupation in
Palestine and the Saudi-led war on Yemen. But it also publishes a steady
flow of indictments against countries that don’t play ball with
Washington — countries like Iran, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North
Korea and more. Those reports amplify the drumbeat for a “humanitarian”
intervention in those nations.
Amnesty’s stellar image as a global defender of human rights runs
counter to its early days when the British Foreign Office was believed
to be censoring reports critical of the British empire. Peter Benenson,
the co-founder of Amnesty, had deep ties to the British Foreign Office
and Colonial Office while another co-founder, Luis Kutner, informed the
FBI of a gun cache at Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s home weeks
before he was killed by the Bureau in a gun raid.
These troubling connections contradict Amnesty’s image as a benevolent
defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization
during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and more
concerned with the dignity of the United States and United Kingdom’s
image in the world.
*A conflicted beginning*
Amnesty’s Benenson
<https://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/userfiles/people/kirstensellars/6_CHAPTER_K_Sellars_Peter_Benenson.pdf>,
an avowed anti-communist, hailed from a military intelligence
background. He pledged that Amnesty would be independent of government
influence and would represent prisoners in the East, West, and global
South alike.
But during the 1960s the U.K. was withdrawing from its colonies and the
Foreign Office and Colonial Office were hungry for information from
human-rights activists about the situations on the ground. In 1963, the
Foreign Office instructed its operatives abroad to provide “discreet
support” for Amnesty’s campaigns.
Also that year, Benenson wrote to Colonial Office Minister Lord
Lansdowne a proposal to prop up a “refugee counsellor” on the border of
present-day Botswana and apartheid South Africa. That counsel was to
assist refugees only, and explicitly avoid aiding anti-apartheid
activists. “Communist influence should not be allowed to spread in this
part of Africa, and in the present delicate situation, Amnesty
International would wish to support Her Majesty’s Government in any such
policy,” Benenson wrote. The next year, Amnesty ceased its support for
anti-apartheid icon and the first president of a free South Africa,
Nelson Mandela.
The following year, in 1964, Benenson enlisted the Foreign Office’s
assistance in obtaining a visa to Haiti. The Foreign Office secured the
visa and wrote to its Haiti representative Alan Elgar saying it
“support[ed] the aims of Amnesty International.” There, Benenson went
undercover as a painter, as Minister of State Walter Padley told him
prior to his departure that “We shall have to be a little careful not to
give the Haitians the impression that your visit is actually sponsored
by Her Majesty’s Government.”
The /New York Times /exposed the ruse, leading some officials to claim
ignorance; Elgar, for example, said he was “shocked by Benenson’s
antics.” Benenson apologized to Minister Padley, saying “I really do not
know why the /New York Times,/which is generally a responsible
newspaper, should be doing this sort of thing over Haiti.”
Amnesty International’s new ‘[Regime] Change is Possible’ video
calls for solidarity with right-wing insurrection in Venezuela
https://t.co/Co6OVL7xRV pic.twitter.com/MJtG7wyevz
<https://t.co/MJtG7wyevz>
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) October 6, 2018
<https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1048623429270863872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
*Letting politics creep into mission*
In 1966, an Amnesty report on the British colony of Aden, a port city in
present-day Yemen, detailed the British government’s torture of
detainees at the Ras Morbut interrogation center. Prisoners there were
stripped naked during interrogations, were forced to sit on poles that
entered their anus, had their genitals twisted, cigarettes burned on
their face, and were kept in cells where feces and urine covered the floor.
The report was never released, however. Benenson said that Amnesty
general secretary Robert Swann had censored it to please the Foreign
Office, but Amnesty co-founder Eric Baker said Benenson and Swann had
met with the Foreign Office and agreed to keep the report under wraps in
exchange for reforms. At the time, Lord Chancellor Gerald Gardiner wrote
to Prime Minister Harold Wilson that “Amnesty held the [report] as long
as they could simply because Peter Benenson did not want to do anything
to hurt a Labour government.”
Then something changed. Benenson went to Aden and was horrified by what
he found, writing “I never came upon an uglier picture than that which
met my eyes in Aden,” despite his “many years spent in the personal
investigation of repression.”
*A tangled web*
As all of this was unfolding, a similar funding scandal was developing
that would rock Amnesty to its core. Polly Toynbee, a 20-year-old
Amnesty volunteer, was in Nigeria and Southern Rhodesia, the British
colony in Zimbabwe, which was at the time ruled by the white settler
minority. There, Toynbee delivered funds to prisoner families with a
seemingly endless supply of cash. Toynbee said that Benenson met with
her there and admitted that the money was coming from the British
government.
Toynbee and others were forced to leave Rhodesia in March 1966. On her
way out, she grabbed documents from an abandoned safe including letters
from Benenson to senior Amnesty officials working in the country that
detailed Benenson’s request to Prime Minister Wilson for money, which
had been received months prior.
In 1967 it was revealed that the CIA had established and was covertly
funding another human rights organization founded in the early 1960s,
the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) through an American
affiliate, the American Fund for Free Jurists Inc.
Benenson had founded, alongside Amnesty, the U.K. branch of the ICJ,
called Justice. Amnesty international secretariat, Sean MacBride, was
also the secretary-general of ICJ.
Then, the “Harry letters” hit the press. Officially, Amnesty denied
knowledge of the payments from Wilson’s government. But Benenson
admitted that their work in Rhodesia had been funded by the government,
and returned the funds out of his own pocket. He wrote to Lord
Chancellor Gardiner that he did it so as not to “jeopardize the
political reputation” of those involved. Benenson then returned unspent
funds from his two other human-rights organizations, Justice (the U.K.
branch of the CIA-founded ICJ) and the Human Rights Advisory Service.
Benenson’s behavior in the wake of the revelations about the “Harry
letters” infuriated his Amnesty colleagues. Some of them would go on to
claim that he suffered from mental illness. One staffer wrote:
Peter Benenson has been levelling accusations, which can only have
the result of discrediting the organisation which he has founded and
to which he dedicated himself. …All this began after soon after he
came back from Aden, and it seems likely that the nervous shock
which he felt at the brutality shown by some elements of the British
army there had some unbalancing effect on his judgment.”
Even former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was on
Amnesty's board of directors for a time. He was the architect of the
'Afghan trap' and bragged about giving the Soviets their own Vietnam
quagmire by training, funding & equipping Mujahedeen
https://t.co/Rpb2XqkuXt
— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) October 9, 2018
<https://twitter.com/RealAlexRubi/status/1049790290721148929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
Later that year, Benenson stepped down as president of Amnesty in
protest of its London office being surveilled and infiltrated by British
intelligence — at least according to him. Later that month, Sean
MacBride, the Amnesty official and ICJ operative, submitted a report to
an Amnesty conference that denounced Benenson’s “erratic actions.”
Benenson boycotted the conference, opting to submit a resolution
demanding MacBride’s resignation over the CIA funding of ICJ.
Amnesty and the British government then suspended ties. The rights group
then promised to “not only be independent and impartial but must not be
put into a position where anything else could even be alleged” about its
collusion with governments in 1967.
*Amnesty’s role in the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton*
But two years later, senior Amnesty officials engaged in far more
troubling coordination with Western intelligence agencies.
FBI documents
<https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32989646.pdf#page=192>,
released by the Bureau in the spring of 2018 as a part of a series of
disclosures of documents pertaining to the assassination of President
John Kennedy, detail Amnesty International’s role in the killing of
Black Panther Party (BPP) Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old
up-and-coming black liberation icon — a killing that was widely believed
to be an assassination but was ruled officially as a justifiable homicide.
Amnesty International co-founder Luis Kutner attended a November 23,
1969 speech of Hampton’s delivered at the University of Illinois.
During the speech, Hampton described the BPP “as a revolutionary party”
and “indicated that the party has guns to be used for peace and
self-defense, and these guns are at the Hampton residence as well as BPP
headquarters,” according to the FBI document.
“Kutner has reached the point where he would like to take legal action
to silence the BPP,” the FBI wrote. “Kutner concluded by stating that he
believed speakers like Hampton were psychotic, and it is only when they
are faced with a court action that they stop their “rantings and ravings.”
The FBI internal report on Kutner’s testimony cited above was issued on
December 1, 1969. Two days later, the FBI, alongside the Chicago Police
Department, conducted a firearms raid on Hampton’s residence. When
Hampton came home for the day, FBI informant William O’Neal slipped a
barbiturate sleeping pill into his drink before leaving.
At 4:00 a.m. on December 4, police and FBI stormed into the apartment,
instantly shooting a BPP guard. Due to reflexive convulsions related to
death, the guard convulsed and pulled the trigger on a shotgun he was
carrying – the only time a Black Panther member fired a gun during the
raid. Authorities then opened fire on Hampton, who was in bed sleeping
with his nine-month pregnant fiancee. Hampton is believed to have
survived until two shots were fired at point-blank range towards his head.
Kutner was also deeply involved with the Taiwan Independence
Movement, which attempted to assassinate the son of Chiang Kai-shek
in 1970.
A worthy goal or not, I don't know, but just by looking at Wikipedia
it appears the CIA was at work there again.https://t.co/BDYRJMwVen
pic.twitter.com/LbQW5GRxF5 <https://t.co/LbQW5GRxF5>
— Our Hidden History (@OurHiddenHistry) October 6, 2018
<https://twitter.com/OurHiddenHistry/status/1048601672921075712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>
Kutner would go on to form
<https://twitter.com/OurHiddenHistry/status/1048596836402061313/photo/1>the
“Friends of the FBI” group, an organization “formed to combat criticism
of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” according to the /New York
Times/
<https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/21/archives/friends-of-fbi-in-a-fund-appeal-gets-excellent-response-to-wide.html>,
after its covert campaign to disrupt leftists movements — COINTELPRO —
was revealed. He also went on to operate in a number of theaters that
saw heavy involvement from the CIA — including work Kutner did to
undermine Congolese Prime Minister and staunch anti-imperialist Patrice
Lumumba — and represented the Dalai Lama
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Kutner>, who was provided $1.7
million a year by the CIA
<https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/02/world/world-news-briefs-dalai-lama-group-says-it-got-money-from-cia.html>in
the 1960s.
While Amnesty International’s shady operations in the 1960s might seem
like ancient history at this point, they serve as an important reminder
of the role that non-governmental organizations often play in furthering
the objectives of governments of the nations where they are based.
Top Photo | Peter Benenson, left, with George Ivan Smith at a 1966
Nordic Africa Institute Seminar. Uppsala-Bild | Creative Commons
/*Alexander Rubinstein* is a staff writer for MintPress News based in
Washington, DC. He reports on police, prisons and protests in the United
States and the United States’ policing of the world. He previously
reported for RT and Sputnik News./
*Republish our stories! * MintPress News is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
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