Five Eyes, Lies and Spies
A TRT (Turkish Radio & Television) debate about Embassy locations in London and Beijing, showcasing the hypocrisy of American Exceptionalism and British Stockholm Syndrome capture.
Five Eyes, Lies, and Spies
The Hypocrisy of Containment: A Chinese View of Western Intelligence efforts
See the TRT Nexus show in the link below
From Beijing's perspective, the drumbeat of "aggressive anti-China narratives and actions" emanating from the West, particularly from America and Britain and the other Five Eyes allies, is not merely a diplomatic spat; it is a calculated and coordinated campaign of containment. The recent brouhaha over China's embassy at Royal Mint Court, far from being an isolated incident, is just one more hypocritical sideshow in a concerted effort to distract from and undermine China's economic growth and global influence.
The West, particularly the United States and Britain, has a long and undeniable history of expansive surveillance, covert operations, and even abduction and torture. To paper over their transgressions the favorite response is to accuse others of doing what they are in fact doing. Poignant examples that the sophistication of these “intelligence” services resembles the behavior of 11 year olds on a playground.
The revelations from ECHELON in 2000 and the subsequent Snowden leaks in 2013 laid bare the immense scale of global surveillance conducted by the Five Eyes alliance. These disclosures confirmed what many already suspected: the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have built the most sophisticated intelligence network in history, routinely engaging in the mass interception of global communications, including those of supposed allies and their own civilians.
Britain's GCHQ and MI6 have been deeply embedded in this network, conducting covert operations abroad for decades, with China as a primary target. While public acknowledgments are scarce, the recent admission by MI6 chief Richard Moore in July 2023 that his agency is channeling more resources to China than anywhere else speaks volumes about their priorities.
Consider the recently unveiled recruitment campaigns. The CIA has openly launched Mandarin-language recruitment initiatives, actively seeking "Chinese insiders" to betray their nation. This public declaration of intent, alongside the MI6, MI5, and GCHQ's own campaign to recruit Chinses Mandarin speakers in 2020, demonstrates an overt and unapologetic commitment to espionage against China. "Our Mandarin linguists use their language skills to provide intelligence insights and deliver clear analysis," the GCHQ ad proudly proclaimed, effectively admitting to their intelligence-gathering intentions.
This aggressive online recruitment signals a new, brazen phase of intelligence rivalry, particularly after the CIA itself admitted its networks in China were severely hampered in 2010.
The "Two Michaels" case, where Canada accused China of "hostage diplomacy" after they arrested two Canadians, following the interception of Huawei's CFO, Ms. Meng Wanzhou, serves as a stark illustration of this geopolitical friction. Despite blanket denials of spying, subsequent legal proceedings exposed one "Michael" as a handler and the other as an asset due to his access to Kim Jong Un. This incident, spun by Western media as Chinese aggression, highlights the readiness of Western powers to use such cases to demonize China and justify their own intrusive intelligence activities.
This Western narrative of China as an "adversary" is not a recent phenomenon. For years, the U.S. has openly declared its intention to "contain" China, viewing our rise as a direct threat to their hegemony. This strategy manifests in various forms, from economic restrictions and disinformation campaigns, to military posturing in the South China Sea, and of course, aggressive intelligence operations.
The recent arrest of two alleged Chinese spies in Westminster and the blockage of China’s embassy at Royal Mint Court are not isolated events but rather integral parts of this larger, coordinated containment strategy.
Indeed, the Royal Mint Court embassy issue is a classic example of Western hypocrisy. While the Five Eyes nations engage in mass surveillance and aggressive intelligence recruitment, they simultaneously raise alarm over China's diplomatic presence, framing it as a threat. This selective outrage ignores their own extensive history of intelligence failures and questionable ethics, including the egregious practice of "extraordinary rendition" and the use of torture.
One cannot ignore the chilling history of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, where individuals were abducted from foreign soil and transferred to "black sites" for brutal interrogation, often involving torture. A prime example, and one that deeply resonates, is the Abu Omar case in Italy. In February 2003, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian cleric with recognized refugee status in Italy, was kidnapped off the streets of Milan in a joint operation by the CIA and Italian military intelligence. He was then flown to Aviano Air Base, a joint Italian-U.S. facility, and subsequently rendered to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years without charge, subjected to horrific torture including beatings and electric shocks. Italian courts later convicted numerous U.S. and Italian agents in absentia for their roles in this illegal abduction, a rare instance of judicial accountability for the CIA's program. This incident, among many others across the globe, including cases in Macedonia and Pakistan, reveals a disturbing pattern of the U.S. brazenly violating the sovereignty of other nations and the fundamental human rights of individuals in its pursuit of intelligence.
These "black sites," located in various countries like Afghanistan, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Thailand, operated outside the bounds of law, where detainees suffered "enhanced interrogation techniques" – a euphemism for torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and rectal feeding.
Domestically, Britain's intelligence agencies have been caught in a web of criminal activity, covering crimes by MI5 agents, the Cambridge Five, the Venlo incident, the infamous "Spycatcher" revelations, the Iraq War disinformation campaign, and the bugging of Prime Minister Wilson's residence at 10 Downing Street, underscoring a pattern of deceit and questionable conduct within their own ranks.
These historical precedents, coupled with the U.S.'s documented use of abduction and torture, make their current moralizing against China expose their tactics of accusing others if their own criminality and incompetency.
It is crucial to recognize that disinformation and media capture are significant features of the Five Eyes' intelligence efforts. They manipulate narratives, amplify certain stories, and suppress others to shape public opinion and justify their containment policies. The constant barrage of accusations regarding Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet, while presented as genuine human rights concerns, are often amplified and distorted as part of this broader intelligence strategy aimed at weakening China and distracting from their own domestic failings.
China's response has been defensive. They have little choice other than to respond to the West's containment strategies. The notion that China would not expand its own intelligence efforts in the face of such flagrant and openly declared hostility from the Five Eyes alliance, replete with its history of illegal abductions and torture, is, frankly, naive.
The so-called "threat" posed by China's intelligence activities is a convenient narrative crafted to justify the West's own aggressive and hypocritical actions. The Royal Mint Court dispute is not about an embassy; it is a thinly veiled attempt to further harass and stigmatize China as part of a concerted, multifaceted campaign of containment.
About the show
A pity some of the most damming sequences about US violations of international laws were cut, but that is the nature of shows today.
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