Here’s Proof That the U.K. Has Helped America’s National Security Agency With Its Targeted Killings

“The UK flamboyantly touts its death penalty opposition, yet uses [a] (previously) secret base with the US to target people for due-process-free assassinations,” wrote journalist Glenn Greenwald in a Facebook post linking to a groundbreaking Intercept investigation by Ryan Gallagher.

The base in question is Menwith Hill, the “National Security Agency’s largest overseas spying base,” which is in Northern England. While the base has been hidden behind a veil of secrecy for years, The Intercept was able to get an intimate look into its workings, thanks to a leak of top-secret documents. What Gallagher discovered is, as Greenwald put it, that while the U.K. has seemingly washed its hands clean of drone strikes and other unsavory things the U.S. spying agency is involved with, it’s actually far more complicit in what some would consider war crimes than British government officials would have us and its own citizens believe.

From The Intercept:

Over the past decade, the documents show, the NSA has pioneered groundbreaking new spying programs at Menwith Hill to pinpoint the locations of suspected terrorists accessing the internet in remote parts of the world. The programs — with names such as GHOSTHUNTER and GHOSTWOLF — have provided support for conventional British and American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they have also aided covert missions in countries where the U.S. has not declared war. NSA employees at Menwith Hill have collaborated on a project to help “eliminate” terrorism targets in Yemen, for example, where the U.S. has waged a controversial drone bombing campaign that has resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.

The disclosures about Menwith Hill raise new questions about the extent of British complicity in U.S. drone strikes and other so-called targeted killing missions, which may in some cases have violated international laws or constituted war crimes. Successive U.K. governments have publicly stated that all activities at the base are carried out with the “full knowledge and consent” of British officials.

The revelations are “yet another example of the unacceptable level of secrecy that surrounds U.K. involvement in the U.S. ‘targeted killing’ program,” Kat Craig, legal director of London-based human rights group Reprieve, told The Intercept.

“It is now imperative that the prime minister comes clean about U.K. involvement in targeted killing,” Craig said, “to ensure that British personnel and resources are not implicated in illegal and immoral activities.”

— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata