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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://www.mintpressnews.com/amnesty-international-troubling-collaboration-with-uk-us-intelligence/253939/">https://www.mintpressnews.com/amnesty-international-troubling-collaboration-with-uk-us-intelligence/253939/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Amnesty International’s Troubling
Collaboration with UK & US Intelligence</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">by Alexander Rubinstein -
January 17th, 2019</div>
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<p><b><span>L</span>ONDON —</b><span> 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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<h2><b>A conflicted beginning</b></h2>
<p><a
href="https://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/userfiles/people/kirstensellars/6_CHAPTER_K_Sellars_Peter_Benenson.pdf"
target="_blank"><span>Amnesty’s Benenson</span></a><span>,
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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>The </span><i><span>New York Times </span></i><span>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 </span><i><span>New
York Times,</span></i><span> which is generally a
responsible newspaper, should be doing this sort of
thing over Haiti.”</span></p>
<blockquote data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Amnesty International’s new
‘[Regime] Change is Possible’ video calls for
solidarity with right-wing insurrection in Venezuela <a
href="https://t.co/Co6OVL7xRV" target="_blank">https://t.co/Co6OVL7xRV</a>
<a href="https://t.co/MJtG7wyevz" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/MJtG7wyevz</a></p>
<p>— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) <a
href="https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1048623429270863872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"
target="_blank">October 6, 2018</a></p>
</blockquote>
<h2><b>Letting politics creep into mission</b></h2>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<h2><b>A tangled web</b></h2>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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: </span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">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 <a
href="https://t.co/Rpb2XqkuXt" target="_blank">https://t.co/Rpb2XqkuXt</a></p>
<p>— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) <a
href="https://twitter.com/RealAlexRubi/status/1049790290721148929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"
target="_blank">October 9, 2018</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<h2><b>Amnesty’s role in the death of Black Panther Fred
Hampton</b></h2>
<p><span>But two years later, senior Amnesty officials
engaged in far more troubling coordination with
Western intelligence agencies.</span></p>
<p><a
href="https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32989646.pdf#page=192"
target="_blank"><span>FBI documents</span></a><span>,
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.</span></p>
<p><span>Amnesty International co-founder Luis Kutner
attended a November 23, 1969 speech of Hampton’s
delivered at the University of Illinois. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>“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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<blockquote data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Kutner was also deeply involved
with the Taiwan Independence Movement, which attempted
to assassinate the son of Chiang Kai-shek in 1970.</p>
<p>A worthy goal or not, I don't know, but just by
looking at Wikipedia it appears the CIA was at work
there again.<a href="https://t.co/BDYRJMwVen"
target="_blank">https://t.co/BDYRJMwVen</a> <a
href="https://t.co/LbQW5GRxF5" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/LbQW5GRxF5</a></p>
<p>— Our Hidden History (@OurHiddenHistry) <a
href="https://twitter.com/OurHiddenHistry/status/1048601672921075712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"
target="_blank">October 6, 2018</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span>Kutner </span><a
href="https://twitter.com/OurHiddenHistry/status/1048596836402061313/photo/1"
target="_blank"><span>would go on to form</span></a><span>
the “Friends of the FBI” group, an organization
“formed to combat criticism of the Federal Bureau of
Investigations,” </span><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/21/archives/friends-of-fbi-in-a-fund-appeal-gets-excellent-response-to-wide.html"
target="_blank"><span>according to the </span><i><span>New
York Times</span></i></a><span>, 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 </span><a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Kutner"
target="_blank"><span>represented the Dalai Lama</span></a><span>,
who was provided </span><a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/02/world/world-news-briefs-dalai-lama-group-says-it-got-money-from-cia.html"
target="_blank"><span>$1.7 million a year by the CIA</span></a><span>
in the 1960s.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p>Top Photo | Peter Benenson, left, with George Ivan
Smith at a 1966 Nordic Africa Institute Seminar.
Uppsala-Bild | Creative Commons</p>
<p><em><strong>Alexander Rubinstein</strong> 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.</em></p>
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