By Phil Miller and Mark Curtis, Declassified UK, 25 August 2021 Britain’s regime change operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria have been catastrophic. A key reason is that UK policy has no moral consistency — friends and enemies are interchangeable over time, based purely on short-term pragmatism and rarely on ethical concerns or the […]
Topic: Iraq
By Mark Curtis, Declassified UK, 4 February 2021 New research finds that dozens of senior UK defence, foreign office and intelligence officials find employment with oil, gas and mining corporations once they leave public office, rubber-stamped by a Whitehall committee which pays little attention to potential conflicts of interest. Such private profiting from energy companies […]
By Mark Curtis Declassified UK, 2 May 2020 The UK government’s failure to provide protective equipment to all health staff treating coronavirus victims prompts questions whether ministers are legally culpable for failing to prevent deaths. But UK ministers routinely act with impunity and every prime minister since 1945 has been complicit in deaths abroad. At […]
by Mark Curtis Declassified UK, 25 March 2020 Britain plans to spend hundreds of billions of pounds on extravagant military projects while the UK’s under-funded public health system struggles to address pandemics such as the coronavirus, new analysis shows. The British government will likely need to spend more than £200-billion over the next decade to […]
By Mark Curtis and Matt Kennard Declassified UK, 17 September 2019 The United Kingdom is fighting at least seven covert wars largely outside parliamentary or democratic oversight. The British government states that its policy on the covert wars it fights is “not to comment, and to dissuade others from commenting or speculating, about the operational […]
by Mark Curtis Published in Middle East Eye, 31 May 2019 The British government is refusing to release a 1941 file on Palestine, as it might “undermine the security” of Britain and its citizens. Why would a 78-year-old document be seen as so sensitive in 2019? One plausible reason is that it could embarrass the British government in […]
by Mark Curtis Published in Middle East Eye, 21 October 2018 Twelve years ago this month, WikiLeaks began publishing government secrets that the world public might otherwise never have known. What it has revealed about state duplicity, human rights abuses and corruption goes beyond anything published in the world’s “mainstream” media. On 14 October Ecuador partly restored […]
Published in Middle East Eye, 6 April 2018 by Mark Curtis In the current crisis with Moscow, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has written that “Russia cannot break international rules with impunity”. Britain, along with Russia, has a particular obligation to uphold international law since it is one of the five permanent members of the […]
Article published in Middle East Eye, 19 March 2018 March 20th marks the 15th anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq which plunged the country into a brutal occupation leading to sectarian civil war, terrorism and a death toll of hundreds of thousands. Yet in Britain the anniversary marks another year of impunity for the […]
These declassified files on Iraq highlight the propaganda campaign in 2003, government meetings with oil companies before the invasion as well as UK covert campaigns to help Baghdad regimes slaughter Kurds in the 1960s, among other policies. Documents 1960s coup and wars against the Kurds The 1963 coup (Mark Curtis files from the National Archives) […]