Let us begin with the obvious. Amnesty International is an NGO. It is not a court, a judicial authority, or an intelligence service. Its reports reflect its own methods and analysis, and those can be wrong. Amnesty’s name does not turn a conclusion into the gospel truth, nor does it confer infallibility.
Its own record should be reminder enough. In 2022, Amnesty’s report on Ukrainian military tactics triggered a major controversy and the resignation of the head of Amnesty Ukraine. The episode demonstrated something that should never be controversial: Amnesty can get things wrong.
Now consider the so-called Pegasus affair. Here, Amnesty goes considerably further. It is no longer simply claiming that phones were targeted or infected with spyware. It purports to attribute clandestine intelligence operations to Morocco’s General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, the DGST.
That raises a straightforward question: Has Amnesty International become an intelligence agency?
Attributing a covert operation to a specific intelligence service is among the most difficult tasks in the intelligence world. Major powers devote enormous human, technical and cyber capabilities to precisely this work, and even they are often extremely cautious before publicly assigning responsibility. Finding Pegasus on a phone does not, by itself, identify who deployed it. Identifying a suspected operator does not establish who gave the order, the chain of command, or the purpose of the operation. An infection is not an attribution. And attribution requires proof.
Amnesty points to technical analysis, data connected to NSO Group and the testimony of a former DGST employee whom it identifies by the pseudonym “Safir.” It says it has corroborated parts of his account. But corroborating parts of an anonymous source’s story is not the same as proving the accusation as a whole. What does this source know firsthand? What can be independently verified? And, above all, what establishes his credibility?
Strip away the technical terminology and the question becomes brutally simple: Where is the evidence that gets us from Pegasus to the DGST with the degree of certainty Amnesty claims?
And this is where the story takes on another dimension. Behind the DGST, the same man is repeatedly placed at the center of the narrative: Abdellatif Hammouchi. His name appears with such regularity that the fixation is becoming an obsession.
Why Hammouchi? Perhaps the answer is much simpler than his critics would like: Hammouchi is a problem for them because he is effective.
That is not a Moroccan assessment manufactured for domestic consumption. The French have decorated him. The Spanish have decorated him. The Americans work with him. Major Western intelligence and security services continue to cooperate with his teams on some of their most sensitive security matters. Those are facts, however inconvenient they may be to some.
Meanwhile, Hammouchi is sought everywhere: behind a journalist, behind a phone, behind Pegasus — soon, perhaps, behind every digital misfortune on the planet. It would almost be amusing were the accusations not so serious. The harder some try to portray him as the mastermind of a vast and shadowy surveillance machine, the more visible the fixation itself becomes.
Amnesty or not, there is no reason to grant Amnesty amnesty for error — much less for going off the rails.
