Yahoo! News (9/26/21) reported that discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred at the highest levels of the Trump administration.

Yahoo! News (9/26/21) published a bombshell report detailing the US Central Intelligence Agencys secret war plans against WikiLeaks, including clandestine plots to kill or kidnap publisher Julian Assange while he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Following WikiLeaks publication of the Vault 7 files in 2017the largest leak in CIA history, which exposed how US and UK intelligence agencies could hack into household devicesthe US government designated WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service (The Hill, 4/13/17), providing legal cover to target the organization as if it were an adversarial spy agency.

Within this context, the Donald Trump administration reportedly requested sketches or options for how to kill Assange, according to the Yahoo! expose (written by Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff), while the CIA drew up plans to kidnap him. (Assange was expelled from the embassy in 2019 and has since then been in British prison, fighting a demand that he be extradited to the US to face charges of espionageFAIR.org, 11/13/20.)

Shortly after publication, former CIA director Mike Pompeo (Yahoo! News, 9/29/21) seemed to confirm the reports findings, declaring that the former US intelligence officials who spoke with Yahoo! should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the CIA.

Patrick Cockburn (Independent, 10/1/21): The scoop about the CIAs plot to kidnap or kill Assange has been largely ignored or downplayed.

It would seem that covert plans for the state-sanctioned murder on British soil of an award-winning journalist should attract sustained, wall-to-wall media coverage.

The news, however, has been met by Western establishment media with ghoulish indifferencea damning indictment of an industry that feverishly condemns attacks on press freedom in Official Enemy states.

BBC News, one of the most-read news outlets in the world, appears to have covered the story just oncein the Somali-language section of the BBC website (Media Lens on Twitter, 9/30/21).

Neither the New York Times or Washington Post, two of the worlds leading corporate news organizations, have published any articles about Assange since July 2021.

To its credit, since the story first broke on September 26, the Guardian has reported twice on the CIA-led conspiracy to kill or kidnap Assange. But to offer perspective, during the week after Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was reported to have been poisoned by the Russian government, the Guardian published 16 separate pieces on the issue, including video reports and opinion pieces.

Similarly, a Nexis search of British newspapers for the word Navalny brings up 288 results from August 2025, 2020. The same search for Assange between September 26October 1, 2021, brings up a meager 29 resultsone of which, a notable exception, was a Patrick Cockburn piece in the Independent (10/1/21).

Aaron Mat (PushBack, 9/30/21) interviews Yahoo!s Michael Isikoff about the CIAs plans to assassinate Assange.

As is typical of stories that embarrass the Western intelligence services, independent media provided crucial relief to the backdrop of chilling indifference, with the Grayzones Aaron Mat (YouTube, 9/30/21) conducting a rigorous interview with one of the reports authors, Michael Isikoff.

Indeed, the Grayzone (5/14/20) was the first outlet to provide evidence of a CIA-linked proposal to kidnap or poison Assange in May 2020. The story, however, was almost universally ignored, suggesting that, as Joe Lauria wrote in Consortium News (10/2/21), until something appears in the mainstream media, it didnt happen.

One thing the corporate media cannot be accused of with regards to Assange, however, is inconsistency. After a key witness in the Department of Justices case against the publisher admitted to providing the US prosecution with false testimony, a detail that should ordinarily turn a case to dust, the corporate media responded by ignoring the story almost entirely. As Alan MacLeod wrote for FAIR.org (7/2/21):

The complete uniformity with which corporate media have treated this latest bombshell news raises even more concerns about how fundamentally intertwined and aligned they are with the interests of the US government.

Even after it was revealed that the UC Global security firm that targeted Assange had also spied on journalists at the Washington Post and New York Times, neither outlet mounted any protest (Grayzone, 9/18/20).

Perhaps most remarkably, UK judge Vanessa Baraitser relied on a falsified CNN report (7/15/19) to justify the CIAs spying operation against Assange (Grayzone, 5/1/21). Now, CNNs website contains no reports on the agencys plans to kill or kidnap Assange.

The prevailing silence has extended into the NGO industry. Amnesty International, which refused in 2019 to consider Assange a prisoner of conscience, has said nothing about the latest revelations. Likewise, Index on Censorship, which describesitself as The Global Voice of Free Expression, hasnt responded to the story.

The establishment medias dismissal of Assange supports Edward Herman and Noam Chomskys framework of worthy and unworthy political dissidents, with Assange situated firmly in the latter camp.

This James Ball column (Guardian, 1/10/18) has not aged well.

The present circumstances become even more deplorable upon consideration of the corporate journalists who arrogantly diminished, or even delighted in, Assanges concerns for his own safety.

The Guardians James Ball (1/10/18) published a now infamous article headlined, The Only Barrier to Julian Assange Leaving Ecuadors Embassy Is Pride. The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US, the subhead confidently asserted. The column concluded:

Assange does not want to be trapped in Ecuadors embassy, and his hosts do not want him there. Their problem is that whats keeping him trapped there is not so much the iniquitous actions of world powers, but pride.

In a later article (3/29/18), Ball insisted that Assange should hold his hands up and leave the embassy.

Ball, at least, has written somethingon the latest revelations, but his article in the London Times (10/03/21) remains typically scornful of Assanges persona.

The Guardians Marina Hyde (5/19/17) took a similar angle. Under the headline The Moral of the Assange Story? Wait Long Enough, and Bad Stuff Goes Away, Hyde wrote that Captain WikiLeaks will get out of pretend-jail eventually. More than four years later, Assange is in Belmarsh prison, the closest comparison in the United Kingdom to Guantnamo, according to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Hyde has said nothing of the very real plans to murder or kidnap him.

In the same vein, journalist Suzanne Moorewho had previously publicly mocked Assange on a number of occasionswrote in the New Statesman (4/12/19) after Assanges arrest:

We are all bored out of our minds with Brexit when a demented-looking gnome is pulled out of the Ecuadorian embassy by the secret police of the deep state. Or the met, as normal people call them.

Moore, winner of the Orwell Prize for journalism in 2019, was not the first of her colleagues to ridicule WikiLeaks and its supporters as paranoid about an increasingly powerful state security apparatus. A column by the Guardians Nick Cohen (6/23/12) offered supporters of Julian Assange as a definition of paranoia:

Assanges supporters do not tell us how the Americans could prosecute the incontinent leaker. American democracy is guilty of many crimes and corruptions. But the First Amendment to the US constitution is the finest defense of freedom of speech yet written. The American Civil Liberties Union thinks it would be unconstitutional for a judge to punish Assange.

And, in any case, Britain has a notoriously lax extradition treaty with the United States.

Nils Melzer (Medium, 6/26/19): Once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course.

It is of little surprise, then, that the Guardian, among other news outlets, refused to publish the words of UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer, who wrote in June 2019:

In the end, it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide.

The Assange case once again demonstrates that when erroneous reporting falls on the right side of the US and UK foreign policy establishment, editorial standards are set aside, and journalistic failures are met with zero accountability.

As such, its important to remember those journalists who watched on, pointing, laughing, comfortable in the knowledge that their work would never produce the impact nor risk of WikiLeaksand then said nothing as the right to a free press was removed in broad daylight.

FAIRs work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.

Originally posted here:
Deathly Silence: Journalists Who Mocked Assange Have Nothing to Say About CIA Plans to Kill Him - FAIR

Of the estimated 1.4 million top security clearance U.S. personnel employed by one or another of the governments 18 braches of its $81 billion annually budgeted U.S. Intelligence Community, perhaps one or two individuals each year are designated as whistleblowers and persecuted to the high heavens. These include heroes like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning today and Daniel Ellsberg, the renowned Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers defendant of yesteryear, whose revelations educated millions about the U.S. horrors committed against the Vietnamese people. Four million Vietnamese were murdered in this ten-year genocide, begun with the CIAs lie that a U.S. destroyer was attacked in Vietnams Tonkin Bay by the equivalent of a Vietnamese sampan or small fishing boat.

Another handful of heroes, like WikiLeaks founder and journalist/publisher Julian Assange, are similarly persecuted when they exercise their right to publish what the whistleblowers have revealed about U.S. war crimes around the world. In addition to the 1.4 million top secret U.S. government spies, another 4.25 million Intelligence Community employees have some type of special clearance but dont necessarily work in secure and undisclosed locations. Thats a total approaching some six million people in the U.S. spy business, not to mention the tiny proportion in the business of directly ordering and planning assassinations, kidnappings, death squad wars, covert and overt wars, drone wars, regime change military coups, cyber wars, media disinformation wars, industrial spying wars and all the rest.

Jim Laffertys October 5 Los Angeles Progressive article entitled, With Military Actions in 159 Countries, America is Now the Worlds Police Force, adds yet another dimension to the U.S. national and international war crimes horrors. (See socialistaction.org). Lafferty is the recently retired 30+ year Los Angeles director of the National Lawyers Guild, a present board member of the LA area ACLU and a founder/steering committee member of Assangedefense.org.

The recent article by Yahoo News journalists, Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff entitled, Kidnapping, Assassination and a London Shoot-Out: Inside the CIAs Secret War Plans Against WikiLeaks similarly reveals the deadly deeds routinely practiced in the U.S. spy system. (See Yahoo News, 26 September 2021 Inside the CIAs secret war plans against WikiLeaks.)

The governments six million usually well-paid spies, along with its annual $1 trillion war budget including the CIAs estimated secret, or non-reported expenditures and its admitted cyber surveillance of literally everyone in the U.S. as Edward Snowden definitively revealed are justified in the name of defending U.S. national security interests. Citing the sanctity of these interests U.S. courts imprison with impunity and as a warning to all no matter how monstrous the governments crimes all truthtellers. In the case of Julian Assange CIA spies and government officials contemplated assassination but settled for bringing charges that would incarcerate him for 175 years.

Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Daniel Ellsberg are a rare breed indeed. They are among a precious few who appear, perhaps once in every generation, to reveal in microcosm, the abject horror of the daily functioning of the U.S. national security state. President Obama broke all records in prosecuting whistleblowers but their numbers were still limited to a handful. Fear takes a terrible toll in a society that aims at instilling conformity and obedience. Constituted to defend and advance U.S. imperialisms interests in all its national and international manifestations, the state power rarely recognizes any right to dissent to expose its war crimes, unless, that is, the dissent is backed by millions in the streets who increasingly understand that the U.S. government does not represent their interests and who set out to seriously explore political alternatives to the two-party system of rule. The ruling elite fear nothing more than organized mass movements that fight for the interests of the vast majority and are led by deeply-rooted conscious working class fighters intent on challenging the system itself.

Julian Assange, according to the Yahoo News expos, had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, but their plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as Vault 7, which the agency ultimately concluded represented the largest data loss in CIA history.

Hacking tools refers to the CIAs capacity to use cyber war against any perceived enemy anywhere in the world. Indeed, as Edward Snowden revealed, the tools were used against enemies and allies alike, including surveillance in place against the entire U.S. population as well as heads of state like Germanys former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The CIAs spying on WikiLeaks, according to Yahoo News, aimed at sowing discord among the groups members, and stealing their electronic devices. Then President Trumps CIA Director, Mike Pompeo in 2017 had designated WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service.

Yahoo News investigations were based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials eight of whom described details of the CIAs proposals to abduct Assange. The CIAs campaign spearheaded by Pompeo bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardize[ing] the Justice Departments work toward prosecuting Assange, and risk[ing] a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States closest ally. The Yahoo reporters did not generally reveal the names of their sources and took pains to add codicils that many of the internal CIA discussions were mere proposals to be considered rather than implemented.

Assanges revelations of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, including some 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world, were particularly vexing to U.S. imperialisms hierarchy while winning wide acclaim from social justice and antiwar activists everywhere who aimed to contest the right of the U.S. imperialist behemoth to wage war against poor and oppressed people and nations.

Yahoo News reported that The CIA now considered people affiliated with WikiLeaks valid targets for various types of spying, including close-in technical collection such as bugs sometimes enabled by in-person espionage, and remote operations, meaning, among other things, the hacking of WikiLeaks members devices from afar.

WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence, said Director Pompeo. Imagine that! A news agency infiltrating the CIA! In truth, isnt it the other way around? The record demonstrates that CIA operatives, as a matter of course, regularly provide stories and/or other material to the nations corporate media to promote the governments views. That was no doubt the case with regard to the 2003 Iraq War, when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was charged in headline news reports across the U.S. with possessing weapons of mass destruction nuclear, biological and chemical weapons intended for use against the U.S. None were ever found! Years later in the run up to the 2020 elections candidate Joe Biden stated that his vote for war against Iraq was a mistake. Said Biden, "I didnt believe [Hussein] had those nuclear weapons. I didnt believe he had weapons of mass destruction."

Yet Iraq was bombed to smithereens via an essentially bi-partisan vote; 1.5 million Iraqis were murdered and cities leveled with real U.S. weapons of mass destruction and subsequently from deadly sanctions. Indeed, in most every instance when a major media outlet receives classified material from a rare whistleblower, they invariably submit this material to the government for pre-publication editing, if it is published at all.

Pompeos designation non-state hostile intelligence service allowed the CIAs work to proceed against WikiLeaks from a target of collection to a target of disruption according to the Yahoo News reporters sources. [Emphasis added]. One might ask, operating on the nave presumption that we live in a free society with a free press with journalists free to pursue the truth about government functioning, why any media, WikiLeaks included, should ever be any target.

In the case of WikiLeaks, the core offensive counterintelligence actions considered against it included paralyzing its digital infrastructure, disrupting its communications, provoking internal disputes within the organization by planting damaging information, and stealing WikiLeaks members electronic devices.

Yahoo News added: Agency executives requested and received sketches of plans for killing Assange and other Europe-based WikiLeaks members who had access to Vault 7 materials, said a former intelligence official. There were discussions on whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal, a former official said.

Yahoo News asked Trump directly if his government had contemplated assassinating Assange. Needless to say, Trump emphatically said No. Presidents are not in the business of publicly admitting to government atrocities! Indeed, since WikiLeaks was central to revealing the Democratic Partys internal emails exposing how the Hillary Clinton team manipulated the partys finances to promote her presidential campaign against Bernie Sanders, Trump is assessed by the Yahoo News reporters as perhaps having a favorable attitude to WikiLeaks. Honor among thieves is indeed a rarity in capitalist politics.

Time and space do not allow a thorough accounting of the governments voluminous efforts, actual or contemplated, to punish Assange and WikiLeaks for revealing the truth about the governments modus operandi in the U.S. and around the world.

In truth, however, the governments assault on WikiLeaks notwithstanding, we increasingly live in a Truman Show [Jim Carrey movie. Editor] or Potemkin Village world an Orwellian-like society saturated every minute by a kept corporate media in all its manifestations that manufactures and perpetuates the myth of an egalitarian democracy where the people rule and truth is forever prized. Tragically, the truth lies elsewhere. The U.S. is ruled by an elite few billionaires and their corporate entities whose twin parties periodically spend countless $billions in rigged elections between themselves, from which working people are excluded.

The U.S. war machine rains death and destruction everywhere its economic and political interests are challenged. Its corporate media monopoly operates to burnish or prettify and deflect capitalisms horrors, or to ignore or justify them outright.

Capitalisms endless wars are inseparable from its fossil fuel-induced climate catastrophes and its inherent racism, sexism and LGBTQI discrimination; all exist and are promoted to divide its natural working class opponents, who have zero interest in aligning with their oppressors.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are among the precious and special few who have exposed in incredible detail the daily operations of the imperialist war machine and its major corporate party players. That the U.S. today seeks his extradition from the UK to stand trial on spurious charges under the reactionary witch hunting wartime Espionage Act of 1917[1] is a legal and political atrocity. Assanges defense and freedom today must stand before us as a priority issue.

Read more:
Julian Assange and the CIA-USA Daily Wars Against Humanity - International Viewpoint

Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalistJamal Khashoggiin the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a foreign power.

It was revealed this week that a year before the Khashoggi killing in 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinateJulian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed at the highest levels of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal quoted ina 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo Newsinto the CIA campaign against Assange.

The plan was to break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want, recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide options about how this could be done. Trump has denied that he did so.

The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, saidpublicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of a hostile intelligence service.

The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, saidpublicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of a hostile intelligence service. Apologists for the CIA say that freedom of the press was not under threat because Assange and the WikiLeaks activists were not real journalists. Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselveswho is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as information brokers, who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power.

Among those against whom the CIA reportedly wanted to take action were Glenn Greenwald, a founder of theInterceptmagazine and a formerGuardiancolumnist, and Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. The arguments for doing so were similar to those employed by the Chinese government for suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, which has been much criticised in the West. Imprisoning journalists as spies has always been the norm in authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, while denouncingthe free press as unpatriotic is a more recent hallmark of nationalist populist governments that have taken power all over the world.

It is possible to give only a brief precis ofthe extraordinary story exposed by Yahoo News, but the journalists who wrote it Zach Dorfman, Sean D Naylor and Michael Isikoff ought to scoop every journalistic prize. Their disclosures should be of particular interestin Britain because it was in the streets of central London that the CIA was planning an extra-judicial assault on an embassy, the abduction of a foreign national, and his secret rendition to the US, with the alternative option of killing him. These were not the crackpot ideas of low-level intelligence officials, but were reportedly operations that Pompeo and the agency fully intended to carry out.

This riveting and important story based on multiple sources might be expected to attract extensive coverage and widespread editorial comment in the British media, not to mention in parliament. Many newspapers have dutifully carried summaries of the investigation, but there has been no furor. Striking gaps in the coverage include the BBC, which only reported it, so far as I can see, as part of its Somali service. Channel 4, normally so swift to defend freedom of expression, apparently did not mention the story at all.

In the event, the embassy attack never took place, despite the advanced planning. There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition, said a former senior US counter-intelligence official, who added that the British had refused to allow the operation to take place.

But the British government did carry out its own less melodramatic, but more effective measure against Assange, removing him from the embassy on 11 April 2019 after a new Ecuador government had revoked his asylum. He remains in Belmarsh top security prison two-and-a-half years later while the US appeals a judicial decision not to extradite him to the US on the grounds that he would be a suicide risk.

If he were to be extradited, he would face 175 years in prison. It is important, however, to understand, that only five of these would be under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, while the other 170 potential years are under the Espionage Act of 1917, passed during the height of the patriotic war fever as the US entered the First World War.

Only a single minor charge against Assange relates to the WikiLeaks disclosure in 2010 of a trove of US diplomatic cables and army reports relating to the Iraq and Afghan wars. The other 17 charges are to do with labeling normal journalistic investigation as the equivalent of spying.

Pompeos determination to conflate journalistic inquiry with espionage has particular relevance in Britain, because the home secretary, Priti Patel, wants to do much the same thing. She proposes updating the Official Secrets Act so that journalists, whistle-blowers and leakers could face sentences of up to 14 years in prison. A consultative paper issued in May titledLegislation to Counter State Threats (Hostile State Activity)redefines espionage as the covert process of obtaining sensitive confidential information that is not normally publicly available.

The true reason the scoop about the CIAs plot to kidnap or kill Assange has been largely ignored or downplayed is rather that he is unfairly shunned as a pariah by all political persuasions: left, right and centre.

To give but two examples, the US government has gone on claiming that the disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010 put the lives of US agents in danger. Yet the US Army admitted in a court hearing in 2013 that a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers had failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks. As regards the rape allegations in Sweden, many feel that these alone should deny Assange any claim to be a martyr in the cause of press freedom. Yet the Swedish prosecutor only carried out a preliminary investigation and no charges were brought.

Assange is a classic victim of cancel culture, so demonized that he can no longer get a hearing,even when a government plots to kidnap or murder him.

In reality, Khashoggi and Assange were pursued relentlessly by the state because they fulfilled the primary duty of journalists: finding out important information that the government would like to keep secret and disclosing it to the public.

Patrick CockburnCounterpunch

View post:
Why Is CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange Routinely Ignored? - LA Progressive

The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a foreign power.

It was revealed this week that a year before the Khashoggi killing in 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinateJulian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed at the highest levels of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal quoted ina 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo Newsinto the CIA campaign against Assange.

The plan was to break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want, recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide options about how this could be done. Trump has denied that he did so.

The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, saidpublicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of a hostile intelligence service. Apologists for the CIA say that freedom of the press was not under threat because Assange and the WikiLeaks activists were not real journalists. Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselveswho is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as information brokers, who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power.

Among those against whom the CIA reportedly wanted to take action were Glenn Greenwald, a founder of theInterceptmagazine and a formerGuardiancolumnist, and Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. The arguments for doing so were similar to those employed by the Chinese government for suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, which has been much criticised in the West. Imprisoning journalists as spies has always been the norm in authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, while denouncingthe free press as unpatriotic is a more recent hallmark of nationalist populist governments that have taken power all over the world.

It is possible to give only a brief precis ofthe extraordinary story exposed by Yahoo News, but the journalists who wrote it Zach Dorfman, Sean D Naylor and Michael Isikoff ought to scoop every journalistic prize. Their disclosures should be of particular interestin Britain because it was in the streets of central London that the CIA was planning an extra-judicial assault on an embassy, the abduction of a foreign national, and his secret rendition to the US, with the alternative option of killing him. These were not the crackpot ideas of low-level intelligence officials, but were reportedly operations that Pompeo and the agency fully intended to carry out.

This riveting and important story based on multiple sources might be expected to attract extensive coverage and widespread editorial comment in the British media, not to mention in parliament. Many newspapers have dutifully carried summaries of the investigation, but there has been no furor. Striking gaps in the coverage include the BBC, which only reported it, so far as I can see, as part of its Somali service. Channel 4, normally so swift to defend freedom of expression, apparently did not mention the story at all.

In the event, the embassy attack never took place, despite the advanced planning. There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition, said a former senior US counter-intelligence official, who added that the British had refused to allow the operation to take place.

But the British government did carry out its own less melodramatic, but more effective measure against Assange, removing him from the embassy on 11 April 2019 after a new Ecuador government had revoked his asylum. He remains in Belmarsh top security prison two-and-a-half years later while the US appeals a judicial decision not to extradite him to the US on the grounds that he would be a suicide risk.

If he were to be extradited, he would face 175 years in prison. It is important, however, to understand, that only five of these would be under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, while the other 170 potential years are under the Espionage Act of 1917, passed during the height of the patriotic war fever as the US entered the First World War.

Only a single minor charge against Assange relates to the WikiLeaks disclosure in 2010 of a trove of US diplomatic cables and army reports relating to the Iraq and Afghan wars. The other 17 charges are to do with labeling normal journalistic investigation as the equivalent of spying.

Pompeos determination to conflate journalistic inquiry with espionage has particular relevance in Britain, because the home secretary, Priti Patel, wants to do much the same thing. She proposes updating the Official Secrets Act so that journalists, whistle-blowers and leakers could face sentences of up to 14 years in prison. A consultative paper issued in May titledLegislation to Counter State Threats (Hostile State Activity)redefines espionage as the covert process of obtaining sensitive confidential information that is not normally publicly available.

The true reason the scoop about the CIAs plot to kidnap or kill Assange has been largely ignored or downplayed is rather that he is unfairly shunned as a pariah by all political persuasions: left, right and centre.

To give but two examples, the US government has gone on claiming that the disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010 put the lives of US agents in danger. Yet the US Army admitted in a court hearing in 2013 that a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers had failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks. As regards the rape allegations in Sweden, many feel that these alone should deny Assange any claim to be a martyr in the cause of press freedom. Yet the Swedish prosecutor only carried out a preliminary investigation and no charges were brought.

Assange is a classic victim of cancel culture, so demonised that he can no longer get a hearing,even when a government plots to kidnap or murder him.

In reality, Khashoggi and Assange were pursued relentlessly by the state because they fulfilled the primary duty of journalists: finding out important information that the government would like to keep secret and disclosing it to the public.

Patrick Cockburnis the author ofWar in the Age of Trump(Verso).

Read more:
The CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange in London is a Story that is Being Mistakenly Ignored - City Watch

More News05 Oct 2021 | 10:38 PM

Colombo/New Delhi, Oct 5 (UNI) Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla, during his meeting with Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Tuesday thanked the president for his guidance and close cooperation in the defence and security spheres.

Washington, Oct 5 (UNI/Sputnik) Dozens of Afghans who made it onto Ukraines evacuation list and traveled long distances with their families to Kabul for flights out of Afghanistan remain in the country amid deteriorating, life-threatening conditions, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday.

Dhaka, Oct 5 (UNI) Bangladeshs Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen has said that firing will be done along the border, if necessary, to halt smuggling of illegal arms, drugs and human trafficking from neighboring Myanmar.

Bucharest, Oct 5 (UNI/Xinhua) The Romanian coalition government led by Prime Minister Florin Citu collapsed on Tuesday, losing a censure motion initiated by main opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD) and supported by all oppositions in the parliament plus the second largest party in the newly-split ruling coalition.

Washington, Oct 5 (UNI/Sputnik) A protracted pandemic could cost the global economy some $5.3 trillion over the next five years if the gap in access to vaccines and health care remains unequal across the globe, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Tuesday.

See the original post here:

WikiLeaks turns 15 with founder Assange behind bars as threat to powers that be - United News of India

Former CIA Director and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday called for the criminal prosecution of sources who spoke to Yahoo News for a story detailing proposals by the intelligence agency in 2017 to abduct WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and discussions within the Trump administration and CIA to possibly even assassinate him.

Pompeo, appearing on Megyn Kellys podcast, was asked to respond to the Yahoo News story, which was based on interviews with 30 former U.S. intelligence and national security officials with knowledge of the U.S. governments efforts against WikiLeaks.

I cant say much about this other than whoever those 30 people who allegedly spoke to one of these [Yahoo News] reporters they should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency, Pompeo said.

At the same time, Pompeo declined to respond to many of the details in the Yahoo News account and confirmed that pieces of it are true, including the existence of an aggressive CIA campaign to target WikiLeaks in the aftermath of the organizations publication of highly sensitive so-called Vault 7 documents revealing some of the CIAs hacking tools and methods.

When bad guys steal those secrets we have a responsibility to go after them, to prevent [that] from happening, Pompeo said. We absolutely have a responsibility to respond. ... We desperately wanted to hold accountable those individuals that had violated U.S. law, that had violated requirements to protect information and had tried to steal it. There is a deep legal framework to do that. And we took actions consistent with U.S. law to try to achieve that.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Pompeos comments came as some human rights activists, civil liberties groups and supporters of Assange said the revelations by Yahoo News should be investigated and were grounds to drop the Justice Departments efforts to extradite Assange from a British prison in order to face criminal charges in the U.S. for publishing classified government secrets in violation of the World War I-era Espionage Act as well for allegedly conspiring to hack into a classified U.S. government network.

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We now know that this unprecedented criminal case was launched in part because of the genuinely dangerous plans that the CIA was considering, said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Unions Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. This provides all the more reason for the Biden Justice Department to find a quiet way to end this case.

Also weighing in about the Yahoo News story was Nils Melzner, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.This is not about the law. It is about intimidating journalism; its about suppressing press freedom; its about protecting immunity for state officials, he said in a video he posted on Twitter. Assanges case has become impossible to ignore, he added. And I would encourage journalists from all media outlets to look deeply into this case, assemble all the evidence and expose misconduct, because the public deserves to know the truth.

Although the Justice Department under two attorneys general appointed by President Trump brought indictments against Assange, federal prosecutors under President Bidens attorney general, Merrick Garland, are continuing to pursue the case. They have filed appeals of a British judges ruling earlier this year that Assange should not be turned over to the U.S. government because he would pose a risk of suicide in a U.S. prison.

Assanges lawyers were due on Wednesday to file responses to the Justice Departments arguments and are actively considering ways to raise issues of government misconduct based in part on many of the details in the Yahoo News story. Among them is the revelation that in the aftermath of the Vault 7 leak, viewed at the time as the largest data loss in the CIAs history, Pompeo was enraged and demanded a multi-pronged campaign to dismantle WikiLeaks. Publicly, he described the group as a non-state hostile intelligence service. But privately, he pushed for aggressive action at meetings with top Trump administration officials, including a snatch operation to abduct Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

Sources told Yahoo News that at the White House and CIA there were also discussions regarding a possible assassination, although former officials said the idea of killing Assange was not taken seriously. But when White House lawyers learned about some of the agencys plans targeting Assange, particularly Pompeos rendition proposals, they raised objections, resulting in one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holding a news conference at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, August 2014. (John Stillwell/Pool via Reuters)

Pompeos comments on Kellys podcast came the day after he appeared on Glenn Becks podcast and asserted, Im all about a big, bold, strong First Amendment. But his call Wednesday for the criminal prosecution of sources who spoke to Yahoo News drew a strong rebuke from a member of Assanges legal team.

I find it highly disturbing that his reaction is to try to prevent information about misconduct from being known by the American people, said Barry Pollack, Assanges U.S. lawyer.

Wizner, the ACLU lawyer, said Pompeos comments effectively just verified the truth of the [Yahoo News] story. Because the only reason to prosecute someone is that they revealed legitimate classified information. ... This was public interest journalism of the first order and the question is whether the public has a right to know that the government is engaged in this kind of conduct.

When first asked about the Yahoo News story by Kelly, Pompeo responded, It makes for pretty good fiction. But when pressed by the host whether that meant he was denying what Yahoo News reported, he acknowledged there are pieces of it that are true.

Were we trying to protect American information from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? Absolutely, yes. Did our Justice Department believe it had a valid claim that would result in the extradition of Julian Assange to stand trial? Yes. I supported that effort, for sure. Did we ever engage in activity that was inconsistent with U.S. law? We are not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations. We never acted in a way that was inconsistent with that. ... We never conducted planning to violate U.S. law not once in my time.

He did not address any of the details about other actions the CIA was contemplating, such as Assanges possible abduction, or steps U.S. intelligence actually took, including conducting audio and visual surveillance of Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy or monitoring the communications and travels of his associates throughout Europe.

But Pompeo did take issue with a statement made by Trump, who had embraced WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign after it published Democratic Party emails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton. Asked for comment in the Yahoo News story, Trump said that Assange was being treated very badly.

Pressed by Kelly if he agreed with that assessment, Pompeo said: No. Assange treated the U.S. and its people very badly.

____

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Pompeo: Sources for Yahoo News WikiLeaks report 'should all be prosecuted' - Yahoo News

The UFO cover-up is quite simply the most incompetent government cover-up of all time.

There are countless reports of sightings both by civilians and military personnel, and leaks of government documents reveal decades of contact between the US government and alien visitors.

But theres a growing body of evidence that the UFO cover-up is in fact not a cover-up at all, but an expert piece of misinformation.

In 1979, an electronics entrepreneur named Paul Bennewitz reported seeing unexplained lights in the sky near his New Mexico home, and picking up eerie coded messages on his ham radio setup.

As time went on, he became convinced that aliens were establishing a base camp nearby and mutilating the local ranchers cattle.

The extraterrestrials were drawn to the area, Bennewitz believed, because of the presence nearby of both Kirtland Air Force Base and the Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility and Coyote Canyon Test Area.

But, claims former Air Force special investigations officer Richard Doty, Bennewitz had simply stumbled on tests of experimental military aircraft.

While UFO devotees speak of The Men In Black forcing to them to remain silent about their discoveries, Doty says he was a real Man In Black who went around helping people to believe in the phenomenon.

Rather than shutting down Bennewitzs UFO investigation, Doty claims, the USAF encouraged his beliefs and even gave him computer equipment that "translated" the alien transmissions.

In the documentary film Mirage Men, Doty reveals that he had even placed fake UFO debris in the desert for Bennewitz to discover.

He claims he was ordered to fool Bennewitz into believing in an imminent alien invasion in order to prevent the UFO investigator talking about the secret USAF projects.

For more incredible stories from the Daily Star, make sure you sign up to one of our newsletters here.

In Mirage Men, the pilots of the US militarys experimental stealth helicopters also say they hung flashing lights from their machines to confuse witnesses.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that that "many weirdos email us about UFOs but he had never found any proof of extraterrestrial contact among the countless secret government documents he had seen.

However, when former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaked a series of highly classified documents, one of them was a slideshow called The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations, which was apparently made inside the UKs intelligence hub GCHQ .

Detailing various techniques for distributing misinformation to confuse enemy operatives, it advised "Swap the real for the false and vice versa.

Three illustrations in the slideshow were faked UFO images.

Hollywood veteran Robert Emenegger claims that in 1971 he was shown film of a real UFO landing by US government insiders, and asked to prepare a feature-length documentary outlining fevering the Pentagon knew about the visitors.

In his final film, entitled UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, the real film is missing and is replaced with a re-enactment.

Narrator Rod Serling described the moment: "Stepping forward, are one, then two, and a third of what appear to be men, dressed in tight-fitting jumpsuits.

Perhaps short, by our standards, with an odd blue-grey complexion. Eyes set far apart, a large pronounced nose, they wear a headpiece that resembles a rope-like design."

The commander and two scientists step forward to greet the visitors," the narrator continues. "Arrangements are made by some sort of communication, and the group quickly retires to an inner office in the 'King 1' area. Left behind stand a stunned group of military personnel.

Who the visitors are, and where they're from, and what they want, is unknown.

Now almost forgotten, Emeneggers film was nominated for Best Documentary Film at the 1976 Golden Globe Awards. He claims he gave the "lost" original footage of the 1964 alien landing to Steven Spielberg, inspiring the climax of the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Washington Observer reported in November 1974 that evidence would be drip-fed to the public over a period of years that would establish the truth about alien contact and mentioned Emeneggers film as a key part of the program.

Is the gradual exposure of more and more UFO evidence still preparing us for the shocking truth?

Or, as former Man In Black Richard Doty claims, is the whole UFO phenomenon a deception to conceal various top secret military projects such as the stealth fighter and silent helicopter?

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Real Men In Black: Wikileaks, silent 'copters and lost documentary given to Spielberg - Daily Star

Published On 04 October,202106:16 pm

Fazl said a strange game is being in the name of WikiLeaks, Panama and Pandora Leaks

PESHAWAR (Dunya News) Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief and Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) chairman Moulana Fazlur Rehman on Monday said that back in 2018 general elections, the government led by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) made false promises with the countrys youth and now promises were being made with the overseas Pakistanis.

Talking to media in Peshawar on Monday, he said that Pakistanis are being trapped but our position is clear we will not give the government the right to electoral reforms.

The PDM chairman said that a strange game of WikiLeaks, Panama and Pandora Leaks was being played in the world adding that so many names came up in the Panama scandal but action was taken only against former Prime Minister and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) supremo Nawaz Sharif.

Fazlur Rehman went on to say that many names of Prime Minister Imran Khans kitchen cabinet were exposed in Pandora Leaks, adding that Pandora Papers leaks has exposed those who raised slogans of Chor Chor.

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Won't give right of electoral reforms to govt: Fazl - Dunya News

A sensational Wikileaks disclosure has revealed that Sweden Armed Forces wanted to use the Afghanistan war to market their fighter jets across the world.

According to a Wikileaks cable, some of the member countries of the International Security Assistance Force(ISAF), aNATO-led military mission inAfghanistan against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, used the war to demonstrate the capabilities of their high-tech weapons and fighter aircraft.

Wikileaks has published a confidential cable by the US Ambassador to Sweden, Robert Silverman, to the NATO forces in Afghanistan asking them to urge Sweden to contribute more to the US-led war against the Jihadist organisation in Afghanistan.

In his classified letter, Charge daffaires of the US Embassy in Sweden, Robert Silverman, wrote to the NATO forces in Afghanistan asking them to put pressure on Sweden to provide more to its ISAF operation in Afghanistan with additional manpower and resources, possibly including medevac helicopters, JAS Gripen fighters, and Operational Mentor and Liaison (OMLT) teams.

Sweden makes a substantial contribution to ISAF efforts in Afghanistan, leading the PRT in Mazar-e-Sharif with 365 Swedish troops. Noting shortfalls in ISAF contributions from NATO allies (ref A), we should ask the Swedes, the leading NATO Partner for Cooperation, what additional contributions they may be able to make in Afghanistan, the Wikileaks cable said.

Citing the statements from Swedens Armed Forces, the US acting Ambassador to Sweden further pitches for the deployment of Swedish weapons and aircraft for a possible role in operations and suggests that Sweden could possibly deploy its other potential assets such as newly acquired HKP 10 Super Puma Medevac Helicopter or JAS Gripen fighters in Afghanistan.

Robert Silverman argued that Swedens Armed Forces has publicly suggested sending JAS Gripen fighter aircraft to Afghanistan, thus revealing that the Swedish military lobbied for the deployment for a possible combat experience, which could be good for the Swedish Air Force to market the Gripen fighter aircraft.

Essentially, Robert Silverman was hinting that Swedish Air Force wanted utilise the Afghan war to demonstrate its fighter aircraft Saab JAS 39 Gripen, alightsingle-enginemultirole fighter aircraftmanufactured by the Swedish aerospace companySaab AB. As combat experience for any military platform enhances the marketability of the product, Sweden intended to use the Afghan wars to further their economic interest.

As the terror groups operating in Afghanistan do not have any Air Force, the question of air-to-air combat did not arise, and the combat experience that the Sweden Air Forces was referring to essentially meant surgical strikes operations against the Jihadi outfits.

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Sweden Armed Forces wanted to use Afghanistan War to increase marketability of their fighter aircraft, reveals Wikileaks - OpIndia

The US war campaign in Afghanistan was a great 20-year lie that only benefited the US military industrial complex and private contractors. he claimed this Wednesday to MRT the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Kristinn Hrafnsson. As the journalist pointed out, what is currently surprising is not the ongoing withdrawal of US troops and their allies from Afghan territory, but the fact that the mainstream media will not notice the lies that prolonged the conflict.

WikiLeaks published a set of documents that painted a true picture of what was happening in Afghanistan 11 years agoHrafnsson recalled, referring to the so-called Afghanistan War Diaries, a collection of internal US military records, diplomatic cables and CIA documents spanning the period between January 2004 and December 2009.

The leak, which included more than 91,000 documents, was considered one of the largest in US military history and led to the arrest and prosecution of Bradley Manning (later Chelsea Manning) a former intelligence analyst who provided the classified information and put the organization and its founder, Julian Assange, in the crosshairs of Washington.

However, despite the release of the documents, somehow the general perception of the Afghan war did not change and the lies continued, said the editor-in-chief, calling the situation staggering. It is extremely surprising how long this lastedhe opined, adding that the conflict became a forgotten war, overshadowed by another US military campaign: the Iraq War.

He explained that the debates about what was really happening in the Afghan territory were largely avoided until The Washington Post revealed it again. to post in 2019 The Afghanistan Papers. Those key person interviews and unpublished memos painted a picture of a sustained effort by various US administrations to mislead the public about engagement in Afghanistanadded. Hrafnsson accused the Western media, which did not pay attention to reality, of being complicit in hiding this truth and of allowing it. In my opinion, journalists have to do a great soul-searching, he said.

The WikiLeaks editor said that ultimately it was the US military industrial complex that benefited from what appears to be a tremendous waste of money. More than a trillion dollars went into the pockets of the US military industrial complex and from private contractors who were supposedly training the Afghan Police, he explained, adding that the largest arms manufacturers saw tenfold the value of their shares during the nearly 20-year war.

According to Hrafnsson, the truth about the war has today been laid bare for the whole world to see, as Washington and its allies are frantically withdrawing from Afghanistan, which fell into the hands of the Taliban.* in just a few weeks. However, this is unlikely to change the political course of Western elites, who they still prefer to punish those who tell the truth instead of drawing lessons from his own mistakes, he said.

The war that is now is the war against journalism and a war against Julian Assange, who has yet to spend time in jail in London, he declared, adding that Assanges prosecution is political. It is no longer about the law Will the truth matter there? I doubt it, he concluded.

* The Taliban movement, designated as a terrorist organization by the UN Security Council, is declared a terrorist group and prohibited in Russia.

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