Join on WhatsApp
Join on Telegram
Rabat – Having previously accused Morocco of using the Pegasus spyware to spy on Spanish politicians, the Spanish media is coming under fire for its failure to correct its reporting after it came out that the spying was actually done by the Spanish government.
The Guardian reported on May 3 that the mobile phones of several Spanish politicians and public figures had been infected with spyware “by an NSO Group client believed to be Morocco.”
Following the report, there was an avalanche of similar unevidenced accusations in the Spanish media. As they again fixated on calling out Morocco, the Spanish coverage of the spying allegations cited no evidence other than the similar accusations by the Guardian.
In fact, some went as far as to suggest that the recent improvement in Morocco-Spain diplomatic relations, especially Madrid’s endorsement of the Moroccan Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara, was due to Morocco having some sort of blackmail on the Spanish government.
Experts had called for independent investigations into the matter as the news of the spying scandal broke.
“We are absolutely certain that it was an external attack … because in Spain, in a democracy like ours, all such interventions are carried out by official bodies and with judicial authorisation,” the Minister of the Presidency Felix Bolanos said at the time.
Earlier this week, however, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez spoke to Spain’s Congress about the use of the spyware by Spanish intelligence services to spy on politicians and Catalonian separatists.
While Sanchez claimed to have been unaware of the espionage by the Spanish intelligence, he did not disapprove of it, saying that riots in Catalonia posed a threat to national security justifying the espionage.
Despite the emergence of the new details about the government itself being behind the spying, Spanish media outlets have failed to correct their Morocco-blaming narrative.
Read also: The Pegasus Project Affair Becomes a Question of Ethics
Political analyst Samir Bennis said on Twitter that those journalists who are always quick to blame Morocco should “admit their mea culpa” and confess to having made a mistake by blaming Morocco.
“As soon as the news came out almost a month ago about an alleged espionage case through the Israeli program Pegasus, many Spanish journalists rushed to accuse Morocco without having the slightest proof that the country was behind it,” Bennis noted in a Twitter thread.
“And now news has come out about the existence of a large-scale espionage program by the Spanish government, no one dares to say that the accusations against Morocco were unjust and gratuitous,” he went on to say. “They have turned the page as if nothing happened at all.”
He also commented on how the scandal will affect Sanchez’s government’s chances at the next election and exacerbate tensions in an already tense political atmosphere in the country.
“There was a deliberate attempt by the Spanish [media], perhaps with the collusion of some members of the government – to suggest that Morocco was behind the attack, thus taking heat off the Spanish government and deviating the attention of the public opinion from large-scale spying scandal against Spanish politicians,” Bennis pointed out.
As it turned out, however, he added, “the Spanish government undertook the spying operation without seeking judicial authorization from the competent authorities.”
According to Bennis, reinforcing the notion of the Spanish media’s anti-Morocco bias is “that there have been voices inside the Spanish government itself that raised their concern about the fact that the Centro National de Inteligencia, Spanish intelligence services are very secretive and escape the control of the government.”
This, he argued, begs the question of whether Spanish intelligence services have made the decision to spy not only on the Catalan independentists but also on some members of the government.
Accusations of the use of the spyware go back to last year, after reports from Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories asserted the usage of the software by Morocco and other nations to spy on political rivals.
Morocco had answered by filing defamation lawsuits in Spain, asserting that it does not own or use the software.
Amnesty, the organization that originally accused Morocco, also condemned the espionage by Spain’s government, saying that intelligence services acted “with total impunity.”
