Judge rules part of Patriot Act unconstitutional

Provisions allow search warrants issued without probable cause, she says

The Associated Press

Updated: 8:40 a.m. ET Sept 27, 2007

PORTLAND, Ore. - Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, "now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment."

Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield sought the ruling in a lawsuit against the federal government after he was mistakenly linked by the FBI to the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in 2004.

The federal government apologized and settled part of the lawsuit for $2 million after admitting a fingerprint was misread. But as part of the settlement, Mayfield retained the right to challenge parts of the Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the authority of law enforcers to investigate suspected acts of terrorism.

Mayfield claimed that secret searches of his house and office under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. Aiken agreed with Mayfield, repeatedly criticizing the government.

"For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law — with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised," she wrote.

By asking her to dismiss Mayfield's lawsuit, the judge said, the U.S. attorney general's office was "asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. This court declines to do so."

Elden Rosenthal, an attorney for Mayfield, issued a statement on his behalf praising the judge, saying she "has upheld both the tradition of judicial independence, and our nation's most cherished principle of the right to be secure in one's own home."

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said the agency was reviewing the decision, and he declined to comment further.

Received apology from FBI
Mayfield, a Muslim convert, was taken into custody on May 6, 2004, because of a fingerprint found on a detonator at the scene of the Madrid bombing. The FBI said the print matched Mayfield's. He was released about two weeks later, and the FBI admitted it had erred in saying the fingerprints were his and later apologized to him.

Before his arrest, the FBI put Mayfield under 24-hour surveillance, listened to his phone calls and surreptitiously searched his home and law office.

The Mayfield case has been an embarrassment for the federal government. Last year, the Justice Department's internal watchdog faulted the FBI for sloppy work in mistakenly linking Mayfield to the Madrid bombings. That report said federal prosecutors and FBI agents had made inaccurate and ambiguous statements to a federal judge to get arrest and criminal search warrants against Mayfield.

Alan Watt "Reality Check"

Wheelchair-Bound Woman Dies After Being Shocked With Taser 10 Times

Wed Sep 19, 9:38 AM ET

A Clay County woman's family said it's seeking justice after their loved one died shortly after being shocked 10 times with Taser guns during a confrontation with police.

The family of 56-year-old Emily Delafield said it would take the Green Cove Springs Police Department to court, according to a WJXT-TV report.

In April 2006, officers with the police department said they were called to a disturbance at a home in the 400 block of Harrison Street just before 5 p.m.

In a 911 call made to the Green Cove Springs, Delafield can be heard telling a dispatcher that she believed she was in danger:

Dispatcher: And what's the problem?

Delafield: My sister is waiting on my property.

Dispatcher: Your what?

Delafield: My sister (inaudible) is on my property trying to harm me.

Officers said they arrived to find Delafield in a wheelchair, armed with two knives and a hammer. Police said the woman was swinging the weapons at family members and police.

Within an hour of her call to 911, Delafield, a wheelchair-bound woman documented to have mental illness, was dead.

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield's death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

"One, she's in a wheelchair. Two, she's schizophrenic. Three, they're using a Taser on a person that's in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes," Alexander said.

According to a police report, one of the officers used her Taser gun nine times for a total of 160 seconds and the other officer discharged his Taser gun once for a total of no more than five seconds.

A medical examiner found Delafield died from hypertensive heart disease and cited the Taser gun shock as a contributing factor, the report said. On her death certificate, the medical examiner ruled Delafield's death a homicide.

The family said it plans to sue the Green Coves Springs Police Department now that it has all the reports regarding their loved one's death.

"We're going to try to compensate the estate and the family and try to get justice," Alexander said.

He said he believes the evidence weighs heavily in favor of Delafield's family and that justice will be served.

"I think that this evidence is going to show, along with some of the evidence we've collected outside of here, that there is no reason Emily Delafield should have died that day," Alexander said.

He said he plans to file a notice to sue sometime before the end of the year.

US security firm Blackwater banned from Iraq

Monday, 17 September 2007 14:36

US security contractor Blackwater has been banned from operating in Iraq, after eight civilians were killed in Baghdad yesterday.

Blackwater offers personal security to US officials working in Iraq, and is one of the better known firms involved in what critics call the privatisation of the war in Iraq.

Yesterday, a US diplomatic convoy came under fire in the Iraqi capital's western al-Yarmukh neighbourhood.

Blackwater members accompanying the convoy returned fire, leaving nine people dead, one of whom was an Iraqi police officer.

All of the other fatalities were civilian bystanders.

Iraqi Brigadier-General, Abdul-Karim Khalaf, confirmed that a mortar had landed close to the convoy and said the US firm had 'opened fire randomly at citizens'.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has strongly condemned the company's actions and denounced what he called the criminal response of the US contractors.

And today Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani issued an order to cancel Blackwater's licence and prohibit the company from operating anywhere in Iraq.

Mr Bolani also confirmed that a criminal investigation had been launched following the incident.

A US embassy official only said that security vehicles of the 'Department of State' were involved in an incident near al-Nissur Square.

Blackwater representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Thousands of private security contractors, many of them US and European, have worked in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.

Following a number of similar incidents in recent years, foreign private security firms have been accused of operating outside the law with little or no accountability either to the Iraqi government or US military forces.

Story from RTÉ News:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0917/iraq.html

A BURIED 60 Minutes INTERVIEW / INDICTMENT

Cunning, Conniving Mustachioed Madman Geraldo Falsly Claims 9/11 Activists are Homosexual Anarchists, shows true colors of FAUX News

Watch as the wildly effeminate mustachioed Geraldo puts his fist up and acts tough while threatening the activists with violence. Here he is, slandering a group of individuals who are speaking their minds in a supposed free and open society, and he wants to play the roll of Gestapo. Where have all the watchdogs gone? Are we to stand by and let the corporate media shill get away with defamation and disinformation?

Chip implants linked to animal tumors

By TODD LEWAN, AP National WriterSat Sep 8, 2:04 PM ET

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found "reasonable assurance" the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top "innovative technologies."

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.

"The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.

Leading cancer specialists reviewed the research for The Associated Press and, while cautioning that animal test results do not necessarily apply to humans, said the findings troubled them. Some said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged further research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in people.

To date, about 2,000 of the so-called radio frequency identification, or RFID, devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip Corp. The company, which sees a target market of 45 million Americans for its medical monitoring chips, insists the devices are safe, as does its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, of Delray Beach, Fla.

"We stand by our implantable products which have been approved by the FDA and/or other U.S. regulatory authorities," Scott Silverman, VeriChip Corp. chairman and chief executive officer, said in a written response to AP questions.

The company was "not aware of any studies that have resulted in malignant tumors in laboratory rats, mice and certainly not dogs or cats," but he added that millions of domestic pets have been implanted with microchips, without reports of significant problems.

"In fact, for more than 15 years we have used our encapsulated glass transponders with FDA approved anti-migration caps and received no complaints regarding malignant tumors caused by our product."

The FDA also stands by its approval of the technology.

Did the agency know of the tumor findings before approving the chip implants? The FDA declined repeated AP requests to specify what studies it reviewed.

The FDA is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which, at the time of VeriChip's approval, was headed by Tommy Thompson. Two weeks after the device's approval took effect on Jan. 10, 2005, Thompson left his Cabinet post, and within five months was a board member of VeriChip Corp. and Applied Digital Solutions. He was compensated in cash and stock options.

Thompson, until recently a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, says he had no personal relationship with the company as the VeriChip was being evaluated, nor did he play any role in FDA's approval process of the RFID tag.

"I didn't even know VeriChip before I stepped down from the Department of Health and Human Services," he said in a telephone interview.

Also making no mention of the findings on animal tumors was a June report by the ethics committee of the American Medical Association, which touted the benefits of implantable RFID devices.

Had committee members reviewed the literature on cancer in chipped animals?

No, said Dr. Steven Stack, an AMA board member with knowledge of the committee's review.

Was the AMA aware of the studies?

No, he said.

___

Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous "sarcomas" — malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.

• A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Conn., of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent — a result the researchers described as "surprising."

• A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors' cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, "These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence" of cancer.

• In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors "are clearly due to the implanted microchips," the authors wrote.

Caveats accompanied the findings. "Blind leaps from the detection of tumors to the prediction of human health risk should be avoided," one study cautioned. Also, because none of the studies had a control group of animals that did not get chips, the normal rate of tumors cannot be determined and compared to the rate with chips implanted.

Still, after reviewing the research, specialists at some pre-eminent cancer institutions said the findings raised red flags.

"There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members," said Dr. Robert Benezra, head of the Cancer Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Before microchips are implanted on a large scale in humans, he said, testing should be done on larger animals, such as dogs or monkeys. "I mean, these are bad diseases. They are life-threatening. And given the preliminary animal data, it looks to me that there's definitely cause for concern."

Dr. George Demetri, director of the Center for Sarcoma and Bone Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, agreed. Even though the tumor incidences were "reasonably small," in his view, the research underscored "certainly real risks" in RFID implants.

In humans, sarcomas, which strike connective tissues, can range from the highly curable to "tumors that are incredibly aggressive and can kill people in three to six months," he said.

At the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, a leader in mouse genetics research and the initiation of cancer, Dr. Oded Foreman, a forensic pathologist, also reviewed the studies at the AP's request.

At first he was skeptical, suggesting that chemicals administered in some of the studies could have caused the cancers and skewed the results. But he took a different view after seeing that control mice, which received no chemicals, also developed the cancers. "That might be a little hint that something real is happening here," he said. He, too, recommended further study, using mice, dogs or non-human primates.

Dr. Cheryl London, a veterinarian oncologist at Ohio State University, noted: "It's much easier to cause cancer in mice than it is in people. So it may be that what you're seeing in mice represents an exaggerated phenomenon of what may occur in people."

Tens of thousands of dogs have been chipped, she said, and veterinary pathologists haven't reported outbreaks of related sarcomas in the area of the neck, where canine implants are often done. (Published reports detailing malignant tumors in two chipped dogs turned up in AP's four-month examination of research on chips and health. In one dog, the researchers said cancer appeared linked to the presence of the embedded chip; in the other, the cancer's cause was uncertain.)

Nonetheless, London saw a need for a 20-year study of chipped canines "to see if you have a biological effect." Dr. Chand Khanna, a veterinary oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, also backed such a study, saying current evidence "does suggest some reason to be concerned about tumor formations."

Meanwhile, the animal study findings should be disclosed to anyone considering a chip implant, the cancer specialists agreed.

To date, however, that hasn't happened.

___

The product that VeriChip Corp. won approval for use in humans is an electronic capsule the size of two grains of rice. Generally, it is implanted with a syringe into an anesthetized portion of the upper arm.

When prompted by an electromagnetic scanner, the chip transmits a unique code. With the code, hospital staff can go on the Internet and access a patient's medical profile that is maintained in a database by VeriChip Corp. for an annual fee.

VeriChip Corp., whose parent company has been marketing radio tags for animals for more than a decade, sees an initial market of diabetics and people with heart conditions or Alzheimer's disease, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The company is spending millions to assemble a national network of hospitals equipped to scan chipped patients.

But in its SEC filings, product labels and press releases, VeriChip Corp. has not mentioned the existence of research linking embedded transponders to tumors in test animals.

When the FDA approved the device, it noted some Verichip risks: The capsules could migrate around the body, making them difficult to extract; they might interfere with defibrillators, or be incompatible with MRI scans, causing burns. While also warning that the chips could cause "adverse tissue reaction," FDA made no reference to malignant growths in animal studies.

Did the agency review literature on microchip implants and animal cancer?

Dr. Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate and RFID expert, asked shortly after VeriChip's approval what evidence the agency had reviewed. When FDA declined to provide information, she filed a Freedom of Information Act request. More than a year later, she received a letter stating there were no documents matching her request.

"The public relies on the FDA to evaluate all the data and make sure the devices it approves are safe," she says, "but if they're not doing that, who's covering our backs?"

Late last year, Albrecht unearthed at the Harvard medical library three studies noting cancerous tumors in some chipped mice and rats, plus a reference in another study to a chipped dog with a tumor. She forwarded them to the AP, which subsequently found three additional mice studies with similar findings, plus another report of a chipped dog with a tumor.

Asked if it had taken these studies into account, the FDA said VeriChip documents were being kept confidential to protect trade secrets. After AP filed a FOIA request, the FDA made available for a phone interview Anthony Watson, who was in charge of the VeriChip approval process.

"At the time we reviewed this, I don't remember seeing anything like that," he said of animal studies linking microchips to cancer. A literature search "didn't turn up anything that would be of concern."

In general, Watson said, companies are expected to provide safety-and-effectiveness data during the approval process, "even if it's adverse information."

Watson added: "The few articles from the literature that did discuss adverse tissue reactions similar to those in the articles you provided, describe the responses as foreign body reactions that are typical of other implantable devices. The balance of the data provided in the submission supported approval of the device."

Another implantable device could be a pacemaker, and indeed, tumors have in some cases attached to foreign bodies inside humans. But Dr. Neil Lipman, director of the Research Animal Resource Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, said it's not the same. The microchip isn't like a pacemaker that's vital to keeping someone alive, he added, "so at this stage, the payoff doesn't justify the risks."

Silverman, VeriChip Corp.'s chief executive, disagreed. "Each month pet microchips reunite over 8,000 dogs and cats with their owners," he said. "We believe the VeriMed Patient Identification System will provide similar positive benefits for at-risk patients who are unable to communicate for themselves in an emergency."

___

And what of former HHS secretary Thompson?

When asked what role, if any, he played in VeriChip's approval, Thompson replied: "I had nothing to do with it. And if you look back at my record, you will find that there has never been any improprieties whatsoever."

FDA's Watson said: "I have no recollection of him being involved in it at all." VeriChip Corp. declined comment.

Thompson vigorously campaigned for electronic medical records and healthcare technology both as governor of Wisconsin and at HHS. While in President Bush's Cabinet, he formed a "medical innovation" task force that worked to partner FDA with companies developing medical information technologies.

At a "Medical Innovation Summit" on Oct. 20, 2004, Lester Crawford, the FDA's acting commissioner, thanked the secretary for getting the agency "deeply involved in the use of new information technology to help prevent medication error." One notable example he cited: "the implantable chips and scanners of the VeriChip system our agency approved last week."

After leaving the Cabinet and joining the company board, Thompson received options on 166,667 shares of VeriChip Corp. stock, and options on an additional 100,000 shares of stock from its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, according to SEC records. He also received $40,000 in cash in 2005 and again in 2006, the filings show.

The Project on Government Oversight called Thompson's actions "unacceptable" even though they did not violate what the independent watchdog group calls weak conflict-of-interest laws.

"A decade ago, people would be embarrassed to cash in on their government connections. But now it's like the Wild West," said the group's executive director, Danielle Brian.

Thompson is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, a Washington law firm that was paid $1.2 million for legal services it provided the chip maker in 2005 and 2006, according to SEC filings.

He stepped down as a VeriChip Corp. director in March to seek the GOP presidential nomination, and records show that the company gave his campaign $7,400 before he bowed out of the race in August.

In a TV interview while still on the board, Thompson was explaining the benefits — and the ease — of being chipped when an interviewer interrupted:

"I'm sorry, sir. Did you just say you would get one implanted in your arm?"

"Absolutely," Thompson replied. "Without a doubt."

"No concerns at all?"

"No."

But to date, Thompson has yet to be chipped himself.

Staging Nukes for Iran?

By Larry Johnson on Sep 5, 2007 in Current Affairs

Why the hubbub over a B-52 taking off from a B-52 base in Minot, North Dakota and subsequently landing at a B-52 base in Barksdale, Louisiana? That’s like getting excited if you see a postal worker in uniform walking out of a post office. And how does someone watching a B-52 land identify the cruise missiles as nukes? It just does not make sense.

So I called a old friend and retired B-52 pilot and asked him. What he told me offers one compelling case of circumstantial evidence. My buddy, let’s call him Jack D. Ripper, reminded me that the only times you put weapons on a plane is when they are on alert or if you are tasked to move the weapons to a specific site.

Then he told me something I had not heard before.

Barksdale Air Force Base is being used as a jumping off point for Middle East operations. Gee, why would we want cruise missile nukes at Barksdale Air Force Base. Can’t imagine we would need to use them in Iraq. Why would we want to preposition nuclear weapons at a base conducting Middle East operations?

His final point was to observe that someone on the inside obviously leaked the info that the planes were carrying nukes. A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.

Now maybe there is an innocent explanation for this? I can’t think of one. What is certain is that the pilots of this plane did not just make a last minute decision to strap on some nukes and take them for a joy ride. We need some tough questions and clear answers. What the hell is going on? Did someone at Barksdale try to indirectly warn the American people that the Bush Administration is staging nukes for Iran? I don’t know, but it is a question worth asking.

Big Brother: How MI5 kept watch on Orwell

By Cahal Milmo
The Independent
Published: 04 September 2007

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment," wrote George Orwell in the opening pages of 1984. "How often, or on what system the Thought Police plugged in ... was guess work."

Winston Smith, the pallid and ill-fated hero of Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, is left under no illusions about the all-encompassing nature of Big Brother's surveillance society. Placed under the relentless scrutiny of the Thought Police, Smith's flirtation with free thought and sexual rebellion is ruthlessly expunged.

What Orwell, the Eton-educated author and passionate socialist, could not have known, however, was the uncanny parallel between his nightmarish vision of an all-seeing dictatorship and his own status for more than a decade as a target for the close scrutiny of the British security services.

The personal MI5 file of the literary standard bearer of the British Left, published today after being kept secret for nearly 60 years, reveals how Orwell was closely monitored for signs of treacherous or revolutionary political views by Scotland Yard's Special Branch from 1929 until the height of the Second World War. While toiling as a cash-starved foreign correspondent and a struggling author, detectives formed the view that Orwell was a louche "bohemian" who held "advanced communist views".

But while Winston Smith was ultimately crushed in the infamous Room 101, the documents show that Orwell was cleared of any "Thought crime" himself in a clash between the two organisations tracking his conduct. The documents make clear that, rather than condemning the writer as a out-and-out communist, the journalist and novelist was stoutly defended against the Special Branch allegations by his own MI5 case officer.

Released by the National Archives in Kew, west London, the slim Security Service file casts new light on the uneasy relationship between one of the 20th century's most influential writers and the institutions of the British state, which he frequently criticised as unwieldy and unjust.

Shortly before his death in 1950, Orwell handed a female friend working for an anti-communist propaganda unit in the Foreign Office a list of 35 names of people, including Charlie Chaplin and fellow author JB Priestley, who he considered "crypto-communists and fellow-travellers". The revelation in 1996 brought allegations that Orwell had betrayed left-wing friends and acquaintances while pandering to the Big Brother tendencies of an Establishment in the grip of what became the Cold War.

Little did Orwell know that his relationship with the more shadowy elements of the British state had begun more than 20 years earlier while he was scratching a living in Paris as a freelance correspondent for several British newspapers, including the Daily Express, after resigning from the colonial Indian Police Service.

The MI5 documents show the extent of the anti-communist surveillance network set up by the British to monitor Soviet influence by citing an unnamed informer in the French capital who warned Special Branch in 1929 that Orwell, at the time a complete unknown to the authorities, had offered his services to Workers' Life, later the Daily Worker, the official paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The informer sought to substantiate any suspicion by reporting that the author of Animal Farm and 1984, who was still using his birth name, Eric Blair, and only used Orwell as his literary pseudonym, was to be found in Parisian cafés reading left-wing newspapers and had, supposedly, not mixed with French communists to avoid attracting the attention of the Parisian authorities.

The file makes it clear that the interest in Orwell, who was the son of a senior civil servant in the Raj, was heightened because of his abrupt departure from his post in the Indian police. He had resigned his post a year earlier while on leave in London.

A subsequent Scotland Yard report hinted at his status as a suspected potential dissenter, stating: "Blair gave no official reason for terminating his appointment but is reported to have told his intimate friends he could not bring himself to arrest persons for committing acts which he did not think were wrong."

The episode, which came seven years earlier than any previously known surveillance of the author, was the beginning of a series of regular appearances by Orwell in the annals of anti-communist surveillance by Special Branch over 13 years. His passport application in 1936, carefully copied into his Security Service file, described him as: "6ft 2in, eyes grey, hair brown, tattoo marks on backs of hands." When asked to state why he needed the passport, Orwell wrote "for the purpose of amusement [and] gathering literary material".

But it was the arrival of the journalist in the less exotic climes of Wigan in February 1936 to research a book on the privations of the working classes in the North that next brought Orwell to the attention of Special Branch.

The Wigan chief constable wrote to Scotland Yard reporting that Orwell had attended a communist meeting in the town and been found accommodation by local party members while collecting information on matters from the number of churches to the state of the surrounding mines.

In return, the Yard sent a detailed account of its information on the "ex-Indian policeman/journalist", explaining how he had spent time researching "Down and Out in London and Paris, his account of life as a derelict, before returning to Britain to work as prep school teacher before becoming ill in 1933 "principally through his experiences as a 'down and out'".

The steady stream of memos from Special Branch, which included reports on Orwell's female acquaintances and his visits to a friend who owned a bookshop in Hampstead, continued until January 1942, when the author seems to have set alarm bells ringing by complaining about a security vetting process while working for the BBC.

Orwell, who used his experience of heading the unit responsible for wartime broadcasts in English to India as the basis for the Ministry of Truth and Room 101 in 1984, made clear his displeasure when the Indian Office turned down a friend and Marxist novelist, Mulk Raj Anand, for a post and vowed to challenge the decision.

On the basis of that and Orwell's attempts to recruit two more Indian intellectuals to his unit, a Yard detective reached some steadfast conclusions about the author's politics. A report from a Sergeant Ewing said: "This man [Orwell] has advanced communist views and several of his Indian friends say they have often seen him at communist meetings. He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours"

Orwell experts have long pointed out that while he was unapologetic in his embrace of socialism, at one point supporting the formation of a socialist government by "revolutionary means", he was deeply opposed to Soviet communism, not least due to his experiences while fighting in the Spanish Civil War, when he became deeply anti-Stalinist.

But the documents show that support for Orwell came from an unexpected source while he was still working for the BBC. Noting that his recent books had been printed by the avowedly anti-communist publisher Victor Gollancz, whose Left Book Club funded his visit to Wigan, MI5 flatly contradicted the findings of Sergeant Ewing and his superiors.

It was Orwell's case officer, named only as W Ogilvie, who was to play down the bulk of the speculation. Writing in February 1942, he said: "He has been a bit of an anarchist in his day and in touch with extremist elements. But he has lately thrown in his lot with Victor Gollancz who, as you probably know, has severed all connection with the Communist Party. Blair undoubtedly [has] strong left wing views but he is a long way from orthodox communism."

In a separate note, the Security Service officer ridiculed his Special Branch colleague's grasp on the subtleties of left-wing political theory. Ogilvie wrote: "Sgt Ewing described Blair as being 'an unorthodox communist' apparently holding many of their views but by no means subscribing fully to the party's policy.

"I gathered that the good Sergeant was rather at a loss as to how he could describe this rather individual line, hence the expression 'advanced communist views'. It is evident from [Orwell's] recent writings ... that he does not hold with the Communist Party, nor they with him."

The documents suggest that the rebuff was sufficient to curtail the Yard' s interest in Orwell, who was rapidly becoming an established author but was still to write his two best-known books, 1984 and the anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm. The only subsequent memos on the file relate to a routine security check on his wife, Eileen, who died during surgery in 1944, and a request for Orwell to be given press accreditation for a visit to Allied Forces headquarters in North Africa in 1943.

But students of Orwell believe he would have been astonished at the closeness and the extent of the scrutiny of his private life. His biographer, Bernard Crick, said: "It is clear from these documents that Orwell was being watched as early as the late 1920s, when he was a complete unknown. It says something about how worried, or indeed almost paranoid, the British state was about communism.

"Orwell made it clear he expected there would be a file on him but he also thought it would have contained little more than his service record with the Indian police. In my opinion, he would have had absolutely no idea that he was being watched to this extent."

Indeed, Orwell was close to the cloak and dagger world of espionage throughout his adventures. It emerged last year that the commander of his militia unit in Spain was an agent for MI5 and the Vichy regime that controlled southern France on behalf of the Nazis.

Georges Kopp, who was a close friend of Orwell and helped to save his life when he was shot in the throat by a Francoist sniper in 1937, worked for both the British and the French during the Second World War. It was also long thought he had an affair with Eileen Blair, who accompanied her husband to Spain but that was recently dispelled in a letter written by Eileen.

The revelations that MI5 believed Orwell was not seeking to undermine the British state after all will cast further light on his motivation for supplying his list of 38 names to Celia Kirwan, a glamorous friend working for the Information Research Department, a semi-clandestine Foreign Office unit set up to counter Soviet propaganda.

His death-bed classification of eminent figures such as the historian EH Carr as an "appeaser" or the actor Michael Redgrave as a suspected crypto-communist was widely held to blacken Orwell's name as an informer. His defenders point out that the literary "Cold Warrior" was acting to safeguard a democratic system against what he considered a potential Soviet insurgency.

Whether he would have changed his mind had he known the Big Brother tendencies of the country he ultimately sought to defend is unclear. Professor Crick said: "Orwell rather over-cooked his own image as the plain man who solely wrote about his own experience. He read everything he could on the Nazis and Communists. That was the basis for the world he describes in 1984. I think he would have been rather surprised to know he was being watched in Britain."