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C.I.A

The Plot to Kill Julian Assange & Destroy Wikileaks
C.I.A, Media, United Kingdom, USA

The Plot to Kill Julian Assange & Destroy Wikileaks

The Socialist Program Download PDF flyer This interview is an episode of The Socialist Program with Brian Becker, a podcast providing news and views about the world for those who want to change it. You can follow the show on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. On today’s episode, Brian and Lee Camp discuss the latest revelations about the CIA’s attempts to take revenge on Wikileaks for exposing the secret crimes of the U.S. government. This went as far as planning to assassinate Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange, who was at that point confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Now in prison, the fight to free Assange continues. They also discuss the case of Steven Donzinger, an international environmental lawyer who took on Chevron and won — but ha...
The CIA, Empty Assurances and Assange’s Defence
C.I.A, Human Rights, United Kingdom, USA

The CIA, Empty Assurances and Assange’s Defence

BY BINOY KAMPMARK Photograph Source: Elekhh – CC BY-SA 3.0 The second day of appellate proceedings by the United States against Julian Assange saw the defence make their case against the overturning of District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s January ruling.  Any extradition to the US, she concluded, would be so oppressive to the publisher as to render it unjust under UK extradition law.  Before the UK High Court, both Edward Fitzgerald QC and Mark Summers QC sought to preserve the status quo. The morning session was focused on defending the action of the defence witness Michael Kopelman, whose initial psychiatric assessment of Assange’s wellbeing omitted reference to Stella Moris and the existence of their two children.  The prosecution had contended...
Heart of Darkness: Che Guevara’s Congo
C.I.A, USA

Heart of Darkness: Che Guevara’s Congo

BY JONAH RASKIN Photograph Source: DubRoss – CC BY 2.0 If Che Guevara were alive today he would be 93. Too old to be the kind of guerrilla he had been in Cuba, the Congo and Bolivia, where he was killed on 9 October 1967 by Mario Teran, a 27-year-old military officer who shot him 9 times, presumably not just to kill him but to inflict pain and suffering. Teran and the Bolivian military had the help of the CIA, which had been tracking and tracing Guevara’s movements for years, as he knew. There was no way Che could hide from the CIA. The agency kept track of flights and passengers and the kinds of purchases guerrillas would make to camp in a jungle and launch attacks on soldiers who were well trained and in the service of a repressive regime. Che didn’t blame the CIA. Instea...
The Trial Of Thomas Sankara’s Killers
Africa, C.I.A

The Trial Of Thomas Sankara’s Killers

BY KENNETH SURIN Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair I come here from a country whose seven million children, women, and men refuse to die from ignorance, hunger, and thirst any longer. My aspiration is to speak on behalf of my people, on behalf of the disinherited of the world. And to state the reasons for our revolt.– Thomas Sankara (speech at UN General Assembly 1984)  The renowned revolutionary and anti-imperialist leader Thomas Sankara was murdered on October 15, 1987, at the age of 37. Sankara took power in the landlocked West African state of Upper Volta after a coup in 1983, changing the name of the former French colony to Burkina Faso (“the land of upright people” in Mossi, the language of the country’s largest ethnic group) the following year. Sankara’s govern...
October 2 and the CIA in Mexico
C.I.A, Mexico, USA

October 2 and the CIA in Mexico

Both before and after the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2, 1968, the CIA organized intelligence operations on university campuses across Mexico. Soldiers gather in Mexico City on October 2, 1968. (Héctor Gallardo, Wikimedia Commons) This article was originally published in Spanish in Revista Común. Ayear ago, Revista Común published a section of Sergio Aguayo’s book reviewing the events of the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2 and how the CIA contributed to them. This text explores the CIA’s actions in various universities, especially the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), during the 1960s. Reviewing the CIA’s operations in the 1960s through Mexico offers a privileged point of observation for two reasons: first, the fact that Lee ...
Australia’s Intelligence Organizations Helped Overthrow the Allende Government in 1973
Australia, C.I.A, Chile

Australia’s Intelligence Organizations Helped Overthrow the Allende Government in 1973

Recently declassified documents confirm what researchers have long claimed: that Australian intelligence worked with the CIA to instigate a coup in Chile during the Cold War. President Salvador Allende in Rancagua, Chile in 1971. (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional Chile, Wikimedia Commons) On June 2, the Australian government conceded for the first time that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) supported CIA covert operations in Chile in the early 1970s. These operations created the climate for a coup against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity government. The National Security Archive (NSA) recently published some of the ASIS’ station reports in Santiago, and the story has drawn attention in the Australian&...
CIA Creates a Mission Center to Counter China
C.I.A, China

CIA Creates a Mission Center to Counter China

BY MELVIN GOODMAN Photograph Source: futureatlas.com – CC BY 2.0 CIA director William Burns has created a new center to focus exclusively on collecting intelligence about China and countering its espionage against the United States.  My first reaction was “really…what took so long?”  You have to wonder what in the world Burns’ mediocre predecessors (John Brennan and Mike Pompeo) were thinking in creating mission centers regarding Iran and North Korea which represented little threat to the United States.  But my second reaction is less facetious and more serious: why is the United States—its president, its politicians, its pundits—hell-bent on creating a Cold War environment and arms race with China?  Burns told his work force last week that Chi...
The CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange in London is a Story that is Being Mistakenly Ignored
C.I.A, Human Rights, United Kingdom, USA

The CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange in London is a Story that is Being Mistakenly Ignored

BY PATRICK COCKBURN Photograph Source: Jeanne Menjoulet – CC BY 2.0 Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 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 assassinate Julian 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...
New Report Says Trump’s CIA Considered Kidnapping or Assassinating Assange
C.I.A, United Kingdom, USA

New Report Says Trump’s CIA Considered Kidnapping or Assassinating Assange

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks to the media from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy on May 19, 2017, in London, England. BYJake Johnson, Common Dreams Under the leadership of then-Director Mike Pompeo, the CIA in 2017 reportedly plotted to kidnap — and discussed plans to assassinate — WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who is currently imprisoned in London as he fights the Biden administration’s efforts to extradite him to the United States. Citing conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials, Yahoo News reported Sunday that “discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration.” According to Yahoo: The conversations were part of an unprecede...
Could the CIA be behind the leak of the Pandora Papers, given their curious lack of focus on US nationals?
C.I.A, USA

Could the CIA be behind the leak of the Pandora Papers, given their curious lack of focus on US nationals?

By Kit Klarenberg | RT Hailed as shedding new light on the global elite’s complex financial arrangements, the Pandora Papers pose many questions – not least where are the Americans? Are the authors unwilling to bite the hidden hand that fed them? On October 3, the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) announced the leak of almost three terabytes of incriminating data on the use of offshore financial arrangements by celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members, and religious leaders the world over. The ICIJ led what it called “the world’s largest-ever journalistic collaboration,” involving over 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries, to comb through the trove of 12 million document...