Israel’s U.S.-supported massacres of Palestinians, Trump’s seizure of Mahmoud Khalil and the C.I.A. spying on Julian Assange all tie together.
President Donald Trump receives a menorah from Miriam and Sheldon Adelson at the Israeli American Council National Summit, Dec. 7, 2019, in Hollywood, Florida. (White House, Joyce N. Boghosian)
In addition to which Adelson is the second largest donor to AIPAC, which openly pays hundreds of other elected and potential U.S. politicians to be genocidally Zionist too.
This is Western democracy.
The argument – now used against Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student who led pro-Palestine campus demonstrations and who is detained by the Trump administration and threatened with deportation – that the First Amendment only applies to U.S. citizens, was also employed by the Biden administration in extradition proceedings against Julian Assange.
It surprises me how very often the Assange case proves revealing of the internal workings of power in the U.S.
When the C.I.A. wished to bug Julian Assange on Ecuadorian diplomatic premises in London, and to look into the possibility of kidnapping or murdering him there, they decided to operate through a cutout for such a diplomatically fraught move.
That C.I.A. cutout was Sheldon Adelson, multi-billionaire late husband of Miriam Adelson. Adelson’s fortune had come from a Las Vegas casino and property empire.
You are probably aware this is not, in general, the most respectable and free-from-organised-crime area of economic activity.
There is a lazy stereotype that the control over crime in Las Vegas lies with the Italian mafia.
In fact from the days of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, Las Vegas organised crime has had close ties to Israel from its very establishment as a state, and in recent times Israeli mobster gangs have controlled narcotic distribution in Las Vegas.
Allow me to point out that the first of those two links is to the official Catholic publication The Tablet, and the second is to Forward, the American Jewish magazine and not the British far-right publication of the same name.
Adelson hired a private security company named UC Global, headed by a former Spanish marine named David Morales, to conduct the illegal surveillance for the C.I.A. As one of subjects of the illegal surveillance, I gave evidence last year to the court case in Madrid in which Morales, head of U.C. Global, is criminally charged.
This case seems to ramble on forever, but last week there was a development as Morales was charged with forging documents in the case, for which a new trial is opening. He allegedly fabricated emails from the Ecuadorian ambassador commissioning the spying.
The C.I.A. commissioned the activity from Adelson during the first Trump presidency, but notably the Biden administration condoned this and defended it during the Assange extradition proceedings.
It is yet a further example of the meaningless nature of democracy in uniparty America, of the power and reach of the ultra-wealthy and of the fascist links between big business and secret state agencies.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
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