CIA ‘discussed assassinating Assange’

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Written by northsouth

Category: Americas

Published: 28 September 2021

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NEW YORK - The CIA discussed abducting and assassinating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a US report citing former officials.

Yahoo News reported that the discussions on kidnapping or killing Assange took place in 2017, as the Australian activist was entering his fifth year sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”

A former Trump national security official said the senior CIA officials “were seeing blood.”

President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”

The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News.

Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials.

This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.

“As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information,” Barry Pollack, Assange’s U.S. lawyer, told Yahoo News.

“My hope and expectation is that the U.K. courts will consider this information and it will further bolster its decision not to extradite to the U.S.,” Pollack added.

There is no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved, in part because of objections from White House lawyers, but the agency’s WikiLeaks proposals so worried some administration officials that they quietly reached out to staffers and members of Congress on the House and Senate intelligence committees to alert them to what Pompeo was suggesting. “There were serious intel oversight concerns that were being raised through this escapade,” said a Trump national security official.

Some National Security Council officials worried that the CIA’s proposals to kidnap Assange would not only be illegal but also might jeopardize the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder. Concerned the CIA’s plans would derail a potential criminal case, the Justice Department expedited the drafting of charges against Assange to ensure that they were in place if he were brought to the United States.

In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over kidnapping and other extreme measures, the agency’s plans were upended when U.S. officials picked up what they viewed as alarming reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing to sneak Assange out of the United Kingdom and spirit him away to Moscow.

The intelligence reporting about a possible breakout was viewed as credible at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the time, Ecuadorian officials had begun efforts to grant Assange diplomatic status as part of a scheme to give him cover to leave the embassy and fly to Moscow to serve in the country’s Russian mission.

In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.)

“We had all sorts of reasons to believe he was contemplating getting the hell out of there,” said the former senior administration official, adding that one report said Assange might try to escape the embassy hidden in a laundry cart. “It was going to be like a prison break movie.”

The intrigue over a potential Assange escape set off a wild scramble among rival spy services in London. American, British and Russian agencies, among others, stationed undercover operatives around the Ecuadorian Embassy. In the Russians’ case, it was to facilitate a breakout. For the U.S. and allied services, it was to block such an escape. “It was beyond comical,” said the former senior official. “It got to the point where every human being in a three-block radius was working for one of the intelligence services — whether they were street sweepers or police officers or security guards.”

White House officials briefed Trump and warned him that the matter could provoke an international incident — or worse. “We told him, this is going to get ugly,” said the former official.

As the debate over WikiLeaks intensified, some in the White House worried that the campaign against the organization would end up “weakening America,” as one Trump national security official put it, by lowering barriers that prevent the government from targeting mainstream journalists and news organizations, said former officials.

The fear at the National Security Council, the former official said, could be summed up as, “Where does this stop?”

When WikiLeaks launched its website in December 2006, it was a nearly unprecedented model: Anyone anywhere could submit materials anonymously for publication. And they did, on topics ranging from secret fraternity rites to details of the U.S. government’s Guantánamo Bay detainee operations.

Yet Assange, the lanky Australian activist who led the organization, didn’t get much attention until 2010, when WikiLeaks released gun camera footage of a 2007 airstrike by U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad that killed at least a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two young children. The Pentagon had refused to release the dramatic video, but someone had provided it to WikiLeaks.

Later that year, WikiLeaks also published several caches of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange was hailed in some circles as a hero and in others as a villain. For U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the question was how to deal with the group, which operated differently than typical news outlets. “The problem posed by WikiLeaks was, there wasn’t anything like it,” said a former intelligence official.

How to define WikiLeaks has long confounded everyone from government officials to press advocates. Some view it as an independent journalistic institution, while others have asserted it is a handmaiden to foreign spy services.

“They’re not a journalistic organization, they’re nowhere near it,” William Evanina, who retired as the U.S.’s top counterintelligence official in early 2021, told Yahoo News in an interview. Evanina declined to discuss specific U.S. proposals regarding Assange or WikiLeaks.

Among the journalists some U.S. officials wanted to designate as “information brokers” were Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist for the Guardian, and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, who had both been instrumental in publishing documents provided by Snowden.

“Is WikiLeaks a journalistic outlet? Are Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald truly journalists?” the former official said. “We tried to change the definition of them, and I preached this to the White House, and got rejected.”

The Obama administration’s policy was, “If there’s published works out there, doesn’t matter the venue, then we have to treat them as First-Amendment-protected individuals,” the former senior counterintelligence official said. “There were some exceptions to that rule, but they were very, very, very few and far between.” WikiLeaks, the administration decided, did not fit that exception.

In a statement to Yahoo News, Poitras said reported attempts to classify herself, Greenwald and Assange as “information brokers” rather than journalists are “bone-chilling and a threat to journalists worldwide.”

“That the CIA also conspired to seek the rendition and extrajudicial assassination of Julian Assange is a state-sponsored crime against the press,” she added.

“I am not the least bit surprised that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts of aggression against journalists,” Greenwald told Yahoo News.

By 2015, WikiLeaks was the subject of an intense debate over whether the organization should be targeted by law enforcement or spy agencies. Some argued that the FBI should have sole responsibility for investigating WikiLeaks, with no role for the CIA or the NSA. The Justice Department, in particular, was “very protective” of its authorities over whether to charge Assange and whether to treat WikiLeaks “like a media outlet,” said Robert Litt, the intelligence community’s senior lawyer during the Obama administration.

Then, in the summer of 2016, at the height of the presidential election season, came a seismic episode in the U.S. government’s evolving approach to WikiLeaks, when the website began publishing Democratic Party emails. The U.S. intelligence community later concluded the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU had hacked the emails.

In response to the leak, the NSA began surveilling the Twitter accounts of the suspected Russian intelligence operatives who were disseminating the leaked Democratic Party emails, according to a former CIA official. This collection revealed direct messages between the operatives, who went by the moniker Guccifer 2.0, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account. Assange at the time steadfastly denied that the Russian government was the source for the emails, which were also published by mainstream news organizations.

Even so, Assange’s communication with the suspected operatives settled the matter for some U.S. officials. The events of 2016 “really crystallized” U.S. intelligence officials’ belief that the WikiLeaks founder “was acting in collusion with people who were using him to hurt the interests of the United States,” said Litt.

After the publication of the Democratic Party emails, there was “zero debate” on the issue of whether the CIA would increase its spying on WikiLeaks, said a former intelligence official. But there was still “sensitivity on how we would collect on them,” the former official added.

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, according to former intelligence officials.

The Obama administration’s view of WikiLeaks underwent what Evanina described as a “sea change” shortly before Donald Trump, helped in part by WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic campaign emails, won a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

On April 13, 2017, wearing a U.S. flag pin on the left lapel of his dark gray suit, Pompeo strode to the podium at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank, to deliver to a standing-room-only crowd his first public remarks as Trump’s CIA director.

Rather than use the platform to give an overview of global challenges or to lay out any bureaucratic changes he was planning to make at the agency, Pompeo devoted much of his speech to the threat posed by WikiLeaks.

“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,” he said.

“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he continued.

Julian Assange has been fighting extradition from the UK for more than a decade, during which time he has sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and endured the coronavirus pandemic in Belmarsh prison.

The case brought against the WikiLeaks founder by the US government could see him face a sentence of 175 years imprisonment, but he fears that if extradited to the US he will be detained in Guantanamo Bay and given the death penalty.

MPs in the UK and Australia, as well as journalists and human rights groups, have urged the US to drop the case. But President Joe Biden has “signaled that for now” he will continue Donald Trump’s attempt to prosecute him, The New York Times reports.

For more details, visit: https://news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-london-shoot-out-inside-the-ci-as-secret-war-plans-against-wiki-leaks-090057786.html?utm_source=WikiLeaks+Shop&utm_campaign=9f61c6126a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_5_11_2021_0_3_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94f18156c4-9f61c6126a-100146477&mc_cid=9f61c6126a&mc_eid=UNIQID

Many Haitian migrants are being released in US

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Written by northsouth

Category: Americas

Published: 22 September 2021

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By ELLIOT SPAGAT, MARIA VERZA and JUAN A. LOZANO

DEL RIO, Texas — Many Haitian migrants camped in a small Texas border town are being released in the United States, two U.S. officials said, undercutting the Biden administration’s public statements that the thousands in the camp faced immediate expulsion.

Haitians have been freed on a “very, very large scale” in recent days, according to one U.S. official who put the figure in the thousands. The official, with direct knowledge of operations who was not authorized to discuss the matter Tuesday and thus spoke on condition of anonymity.

Many have been released with notices to appear at an immigration office within 60 days, an outcome that requires less processing time from Border Patrol agents than ordering an appearance in immigration court and points to the speed at which authorities are moving, the official said.

The Homeland Security Department has been busing Haitians from Del Rio to El Paso, Laredo and Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border, and this week added flights to Tucson, Arizona, the official said. They are processed by the Border Patrol at those locations.

A second U.S. official, also with direct knowledge and speaking on the condition of anonymity, said large numbers of Haitians were being processed under immigration laws and not being placed on expulsion flights to Haiti that started Sunday. The official couldn’t be more specific about how many.

U.S. authorities scrambled in recent days for buses to Tucson but resorted to flights when they couldn’t find enough transportation contractors, both officials said. Coast Guard planes took Haitians from Del Rio to El Paso.

The releases in the U.S. were occurring despite the signaling of a massive effort to expel Haitians on flights to Haiti under pandemic-related authority that denies migrants an opportunity to seek asylum. A third U.S. official not authorized to discuss operations said there were seven daily flights to Haiti planned starting Wednesday.

Accounts of wide-scale releases — some observed at the Del Rio bus station by Associated Press journalists — are at odds with statements a day earlier by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who traveled to Del Rio to promise swift action.

“If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” he said at a Monday news conference.

The releases come amid a quick effort to empty the camp under a bridge that, according to some estimates, held more than 14,000 people over the weekend in a town of 35,000 people. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, during a visit Tuesday to Del Rio, said the county’s top official told him the most recent tally at the camp was about 8,600 migrants.

The criteria for deciding who is flown to Haiti and who is released in the U.S. was unclear, but two U.S. officials said single adults were the priority for expulsion flights.

The Homeland Security Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, Mexico has begun busing and flying Haitian migrants away from the U.S. border, authorities said Tuesday, signaling a new level of support for the United States as the camp presented President Joe Biden with a humanitarian and increasingly political challenge.

The White House is facing sharp bipartisan condemnation. Republicans say Biden administration policies led Haitians to believe they would get asylum. Democrats are expressing outrage after images went viral this week of Border Patrol agents on horseback using aggressive tactics against the migrants.

Mexico has helped at key moments before. It intensified patrols to stop unaccompanied Central American children from reaching the Texas border in 2014, allowed tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration courts in 2019 and, just last month, began deporting Central American migrants to Guatemala after the Biden administration flew them to southern Mexico.

Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s foreign relations secretary, said Tuesday he had spoken with his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, about the Haitians’ situation. Ebrard said most of the Haitians already had refugee status in Chile or Brazil and weren’t seeking it in Mexico.

“What they are asking for is to be allowed to pass freely through Mexico to the United States,” Ebrard said.

Two Mexican federal officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed Mexico’s actions.

One of the officials said three busloads of migrants left Acuña on Tuesday morning for Piedras Negras, about 55 miles (90 kilometers) down the border, where they boarded a flight to the southern city of Villahermosa in the state of Tabasco.

The other official said there was a flight Monday from the northern city of Monterrey to the southern city of Tapachula near the Guatemala border. Tapachula is home to the largest immigrant detention center in Latin America. The flight carried about 100 migrants who had been picked up around the bus station in Monterrey, a hub for various routes north to the U.S. border.

The second official said the plan was to move to Tapachula all Haitians who already solicited asylum in Mexico.

The Haitian migrants who are already in Mexico’s detention centers and have not requested asylum will be the first to be flown directly to Haiti once Mexico begins those flights, according to the official.

Around Ciudad Acuña, Mexican authorities were stepping up efforts to move migrants away from the border. There were detentions overnight by immigration agents and raids on hotels known to house migrants.

“All of a sudden they knocked on the door and (yelled) ‘immigration,’ ‘police,’ as if they were looking for drug traffickers,” said Freddy Registre, a 37-year-old Venezuelan staying at one hotel with his Haitian wife, Vedette Dollard. The couple was surprised at midnight.

Authorities took four people plus others who were outside the hotel, he said. “They took our telephones to investigate and took us to the immigration offices, took our photos,” Registre said. They were held overnight but finally were given their phones back and released. Authorities gave them two options: leave Mexico or return to Tapachula.

On Tuesday afternoon, they decided to leave town. They bought tickets for a bus ride to the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, planning to continue to Tapachula where they had already applied for asylum.

Others left without being told. Small groups arrived at Ciudad Acuña’s bus station to buy tickets to Veracruz, Monterrey and Mexico City. The same bus lines prohibited from selling them tickets for rides north through Mexico, sold them tickets to head south without issue.

In Haiti, dozens of migrants upset about being deported from the U.S. tried to rush back into a plane that landed Tuesday afternoon in Port-au-Prince as they yelled at authorities. A security guard closed the plane door in time as some deportees began throwing rocks and shoes at the plane. Several of them lost their belongings in the scuffle as police arrived. The group was disembarking from one of three flights scheduled for the day.

Gates, Rockefeller warn leaders about pandemic’s impact

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Written by northsouth

Category: Americas

Published: 15 September 2021

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By ALEX DANIELS of The Chronicle of Philanthropy

NEW YORK - Just ahead of the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly that opens on Tuesday, leaders of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations — grant makers that have committed billions of dollars to fight the coronavirus — are warning that without larger government and philanthropic investments in the manufacture and delivery of vaccines to people in poor nations, the pandemic could set back global progress on education, public health, and gender equality for years.

The calls from philanthropy leaders for more action from wealthy countries comes as President Biden plans to call for a “COVID Summit” to coincide with the meeting, according to news reports.

In an annual analysis of progress made toward development goals set by the United Nations on poverty, access to clean water, gender equality, and other indicators of well-being, the Gates Foundation found that the spread of the pandemic had significantly reversed progress made in recent years.

A big reason is that the disease disproportionately hit poor countries that did not have access to COVID vaccines. More than 80 percent of COVID vaccines have been administered to people in wealthy countries, according to the report. The entire continent of Africa, the report noted, has a population about 30 times that of California. But the number of people vaccinated was roughly the same through the first half of the year.

The health crisis cast a shadow over many measures of well-being. During the pandemic, childhood immunizations over all dropped 7%. Health officials last year predicted it was going to be even worse, but the decline still represents 10 million children who have fallen behind immunization schedules. While men’s employment is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels this year, 13 million fewer women will have jobs than in 2019, according to the report.

“The lack of equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines is a public-health tragedy,” said Bill Gates, in statement accompanying the report. “We face the very real risk that in the future, wealthy countries and communities will begin treating COVID-19 as yet another disease of poverty. We can’t put the pandemic behind us until everyone, regardless of where they live, has access to vaccines.”

While the Gates Foundation has been one of the biggest philanthropic supporters in the fight against COVID, pouring $1.8 billion into a range of global health efforts to curb the spread of the disease, it has also attracted significant criticism. For much of the first year of the pandemic, it so staunchly defended the intellectual property rights of the pharmaceutical companies that developed the vaccines that experts say it slowed the delivery of vaccines to people in need.

In May, the foundation seemed to reverse course and said it would back a “narrow waiver” of intellectual property rights to help get vaccines to poor countries. Writing on the foundation’s website, Mark Suzman, the CEO, wrote that “no barriers should stand in the way of equitable access to vaccines, including intellectual property.”

Rockefeller’s president, Rajiv Shah, has called for a “COVID Charter,” in which rich countries would peg international development and climate assistance to 1% of their gross domestic product and require middle- and low-income nations to devote more money to public health and climate-change mitigation. His plan would tap funds from emergency accounts held by the International Monetary Fund and enlist philanthropy to increase its support for international development.

Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, Shah identified the impact of climate change and COVID-19 on vulnerable populations as a “near-term” threat to global stability. Failure to address the inequitable impact of those crises could have a lasting effect, according to Shah.

“Without significant development interventions, increased poverty and suffering will be a decades-long problem,” wrote Shah, who was director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Obama administration.

The Rockefeller Foundation in October 2020 committed $1 billion over three years to respond to COVID and prevent future outbreaks.

The Gates Foundation is the largest private philanthropy, with nearly $50 billion in assets.

The nearly $2 billion the foundation has committed to fighting the pandemic has gone toward developing tests and vaccines, financing the procurement of medical supplies by poor countries, and softening the pandemic’s economic blow.

The report Gates released Monday did not include new commitments to COVID but called on other foundations and governments to make long-term, global investments in health care research and the logistics required to get a vaccine from a factory to a clinic and into a patient’s arm.

The damage caused by the pandemic has been somewhat mitigated by the speed with which researchers developed successful vaccines, said Suzman. The rapid development of protection against the virus, he said, was possible because of large investments over several years by the Gates fund and others.

“This is also now an opportunity for both responding to the current crisis, but making sure that we are building a ... set of national and regional infrastructures that make sure we never face this kind of crisis again,” Suzman told reporters on a conference call last week.

The Gates Foundation’s protection of pharmaceutical companies’ intellectual property rights during much of the first year of the pandemic attracted criticism from some public-health leaders.

When the vaccines became available, rich countries rushed to gather supplies for their own populations. One reason low-income countries weren’t able to procure their own supplies is that patents on the vaccines hampered the development of low-cost generic batches of the immunizations. In his announcement backing an intellectual property waiver, Suzman said the details of such a waiver should be negotiated at the World Trade Organization.

More than 100 countries favor such a waiver. The Biden administration announced its support in May, but agreement has been stalled because of opposition mainly from European nations. After a nearly two-month hiatus, talks on the issue resume Tuesday at the World Trade Organization.

The Gates Foundation’s Suzman stressed the bottlenecks in delivering vaccines at the country and local level.

“So much focus is on the vaccine procurement, which is critically important, that often we don’t focus as much on the need for the vaccine-delivery infrastructure,” he said.

Kyle Knight, a senior health researcher at the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said the focus on the local manufacturing and distribution capabilities is largely misplaced. He called the international response to COVID an inadequate “charity-based” response that put commercial interests before human rights obligations.

“When you have that much power, you also have a moral responsibility to pay attention to the power dynamics that are causing harm,” he said.

He called the Gates Foundation’s focus on expanding local vaccine-manufacturing plants and distribution to medical centers disingenuous. Health ministries around the world have no reason to make those investments, he said, as long as large companies hold patents on the vaccines.

“The idea that the problem is lack of infrastructure in poor countries is ridiculous,” he said. “The problem actually exists upstream. It exists at this debate on a global health crisis that is happening at a multilateral trade agency.”