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 Agency’s “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 2017—the largest leak in CIA history, which exposed how US and UK intelligence agencies could hack into household devices—the 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 espionage—FAIR.org, 11/13/20.)
Shortly after publication, former CIA director Mike Pompeo (Yahoo! News, 9/29/21) seemed to confirm the report’s findings, declaring that the former US intelligence officials who spoke with Yahoo! “should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the CIA.”
Ghoulish indifference
Patrick Cockburn (Independent, 10/1/21): “The scoop about the CIA’s 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 indifference—a 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 once—in 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 world’s 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 20–25, 2020. The same search for “Assange” between September 26–October 1, 2021, brings up a meager 29 results—one of which, a notable exception, was a Patrick Cockburn piece in the Independent (10/1/21).
Crucial relief
Aaron Maté (PushBack, 9/30/21) interviews Yahoo!‘s Michael Isikoff about the CIA’s 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 Grayzone’s Aaron Maté (YouTube, 9/30/21) conducting a rigorous interview with one of the report’s 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 didn’t 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 Justice’s 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 CIA’s spying operation against Assange (Grayzone, 5/1/21). Now, CNN’s website contains no reports on the agency’s 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 describes itself as “The Global Voice of Free Expression,” hasn’t responded to the story.
The establishment media’s dismissal of Assange supports Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s framework of “worthy” and “unworthy” political dissidents, with Assange situated firmly in the latter camp.
‘Only barrier is pride’
The present circumstances become even more deplorable upon consideration of the corporate journalists who arrogantly diminished, or even delighted in, Assange’s concerns for his own safety.
The Guardian’s James Ball (1/10/18) published a now infamous article headlined, “The Only Barrier to Julian Assange Leaving Ecuador’s 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 Ecuador’s embassy, and his hosts do not want him there. Their problem is that what’s 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 something on the latest revelations, but his article in the London Times (10/03/21) remains typically scornful of Assange’s persona.
The Guardian’s 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 Guantánamo,” 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 Moore—who had previously publicly mocked Assange on a number of occasions—wrote in the New Statesman (4/12/19) after Assange’s 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 Guardian‘s Nick Cohen (6/23/12) offered “supporters of Julian Assange” as a “definition of paranoia”:
Assange’s 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.”
Blinded by propaganda
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, it’s 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 WikiLeaks—and then said nothing as the right to a free press was removed in broad daylight.
Great GOOD thanks to John McEvoy and FAIR for telling the truth – as we expect the big media to do. Those who choose not to LOOK and NOT to SEE have only their cowardly selves to blame. I am reminded of that great soul, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who for so many years reminded us -” The World is too dangerous for anything but Truth, and too small for anything but Love.” Guess we know where their deficiency is!! Pity. And Shame on them. This could be any one of them in Assange’s shoes – well, maybe NOT, as they’d need a real conscience and courage, wouldn’t they? Grateful to FAIR and staff – and the
very few who have not lost their sight. Love/struggle, Elizabeth (now 90)
Well said Elizabeth✔
“Work is love made visible.” KG
79 here, short drive to 80
As Usual,
EA
The more I don’t read about Assange’s persecution by the US government and its puppy in Whitehall, the more embarrassed I become at what has become of my profession here in the US. There seem to be precious few journalists in the mainstream media these days willing to put careers on the line to tell the truth — something many of us who used to work in the corporate news world used to routinely do. Maybe it’s that there are so many fewer potential news shops these days to move to when a clash of principle calls for quitting, of fighting until fired. But it’s no excuse. There are other places to report for, even if they may pay far less. Thankfully there is FAIR to at least call out this outrageous sell-out of the profession!
In the early history of America, John Peter Zenger was attacked by “the powers, or perhaps it’s best to say, “The Liars that be in government.” Mr. Zenger had a trial, he was found not guilty and freed. One would hope that JUSTICE would reign today—-but apparently there are a lot of sore losers in the American government—and they appear to believe that LIES will set them free. FREE JULIAN ASSANGE, American government, as you get more and more perverse everyday—-WHEN THE FREE PRESS DIES—-so does America.
The treatment of Julian Assange only demonstrates that British and US leaders are not committed to the values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law and social justice.
This criticism also applies to Australian political leaders as well. The Australian Labour Party Opposition is as bad as the Liberal National Party Coalition Government that are too gutless to take a stand against US imperialism for a citizen who has committed no offence. In fact, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have done the world a great favour by exposing the crimes against humanity and the corruption committed by the the US, its client states and other
governments
If western leaders were committed to the rule of law, they would be loudly demanding Assange’s release. The main FBI witness against him – Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson – has not only admitted to lying in his statements about Assange , but has now been imprisoned for criminal activities in his homeland of Greenland.
Julian Assange has no case to answer and the true criminals in Washington and London should immediately drop all the spurious charges against him, release him from prison and compensate him for the inhumane way in which they have treated him.
Couldn’t agree more. This is such a shame. In the land of the free, you can have free speech, but only if you don’t expose dirty secrets. And if you’re so stupid that you do, you are so screwed, because it’s open season then.
Damn, and the Brits do disappoint once again. What kind of pressure is applied that they can’t find their balls?
I agree with you. Comments from ALP such as former prime minister Julia Gillard and Tanya Plibersek were despicable, useless and clueless. The latter being one of Australian Labor Party’s shining lights. Allegedly.
We used to talk in our regions of the chilling effect, but In the context of today’s frozen global media, and in the context of a confused and uninformed humanity concerning globalist agendas surrounding the unprecedented Covid pandemic whereby our species desperately needs a diligent, unfettered and unabashed #WikiLeaks and free press – in these contexts, which may well be deliberately coordinated, the tag #FreeAssange may well go down as the most critically important outcry in all of language history.
Mahalo FAIR and John McEvoy for your reporting.
@ Michael Daly artist
Right on Michael‼
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE
should be the clarian call of every person in the human arts.
As Usual,
EA
The Assange precedent has effectively kept the western media under the corporate governments control longer than over a decade ago when the successful smear campaign began against Assange. No one seems to notice and publish the increase of journalists who do report anything resembling truths being incarcerated at alarming rates since Assange’s incarceration began.
If anyone believes, rightly so, that the defamation of Assange began just since Madero was paid off over 3 Billion dollars in IMF loans to grant the UK Police to illegally grab Assange, they haven’t been following the facts in his plight. Assange has been defamed and sought after by the 5 states for over a decade now.
Thank you for attempting to get the western media to wake up to the urgency of the case and its implications for press freedoms around the globe.
As one of Assange’s supporters, it never fails to disgust me with every criminality used against Assange… masses remain silent and only believe the propaganda falsehoods used against him from years ago instead of the easily available ugly, evil, corrupt truths reported by independent journalists concerning the unjust, criminal facts surrounding his trial and treatment since the government changed hands in Ecuador.
Biden needs to drop the charges, there is no legal case and the 1st Amendment has eroded more everyday with this deplorable show trial and Assange unlawfully confined in Belmarsh.
Thank you for covering the media’s disdain for Assange. Now do the latest of the #DurhamIndictments which exposes how the world, including Fair.org, was gaslit on Trump Russia on behalf of the #DNCDeepStateMediaMafia and show the world the empire’s reigning modus operandi.
FAIR.org was never successfully gaslit on the Trump Russia affair. You’re lumping them in together because you’re also propagandized but don’t realize it.
The selective reporting also supports Herman and Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent.” It’s always good to remember Brendan Nyhan’s maxim to think about “how it would be reported on if it happened in another country?” vis a vis Navalny.
Seeking, then TELLING the truth has frequently been a capital crime (capitol, if the truth was inconvenient to your betters?) Media is by, for and exclusively about white, affluent, connected, credentialed and VISIBLE guys like Assange. I’m guessing, outing Hillary for her constant threats made him the penultimate “example” of Creative Class traitor? Look at how we’re casually banned, censored and disappeared for questioning ANY of ten thousand white lies, we’re gavaged by ALL media and echo chamber blog-aggregators? If I’d cite NEJM, Mayo or Cleveland Clinic, BMJ, Kaiser or USC about CDC’s flip-flop agitprop, I’d be…
https://originals.optout.news/app/
First, they came for the whistleblowers. We don’t KNOW what happened after that?
I’m not sure how former hacker Assange got the label “journalist,” but it does show the low denominator of what constitutes a journalist. I suppose publishing anything equals journalist, so every FB reposter is a journalist, which is how we got ourselves into the post-truth, “alt-fact” era. Anyway…
While governments are supposed to be accountable, there are things that should remain secret. The media isn’t willing to understand this. It says it does, then demonstrates the opposite. Gov’ts will certainly hide shady activity under the state secret mantle and exposing this is essential. However, exposing legitimate secrets, like the methods used to gather intelligence, active targets, the names of informants is immoral. But what are a few dead informants compared to the need for publishing prizes? They’re just names on a wiki page. Selling state secrets, like Snowden did, is not whistleblowing, it’s espionage. Somehow the media thinks they are synonymous. The media is so stupid it loves an underdog and buys the framing sold to it. Sadly, even here. I guess even the “unbiased” loves to wallow in it’s own “I’m not biased” bias.
Now that the that elephant has been revealed, I’ll move on. Regarding the main thrust of the article, it doesn’t surprise me that the CIA has drawn up plans. (Honestly, are you surprised?) This is already suspected and believed, even when it doesn’t draw up plans, but hey, conspiracy mythology loves good stories disregarding evidence. When the leader of a nation asks its services to produce something, it will produce it, ethics be damned. Plans. Wanting to kill someone is different than trying to kill someone. But it’s easier to ignore this.
The other elephant we like to ignore is Saint Assange skipped bail rather than face allegations of rape (which we all know is false since all rape victims are liars and brought it on themselves – sarcasm BTW). Rape culture is integral to the media. The fabrication that Sweden, a country that doesn’t have the death penalty (outlawed in 1973) would extradite to a death-penalty country is ludicrous. Yet, this didn’t stop the media from eating it up.
Some like to think Saint Assange is a whistleblower. If true, the definition and concept is so warped as to be useless. Every teen who spouts a trusted secret is also a whistleblower. Whistleblowers expose wrongdoing, not legitimate state secrets, the latter is espionage. But cognitive dissonance demands we ignore that.
Assange is not the saint the media paints him as, but the media is so ravenous for anything secret that it will ignore all ethical and professional standards in order to race sensationalism to publication and then laud awards upon itself. Newstainment reigns supreme, while facts and ethics slowly die in the gutter.
Assange shouldn’t be executed, despite how despicable he is, but he should be held accountable for his actions. He disagrees, and the media blindly supports him. Accountability is for everyone else, not the ingroup. Just look at the media support for fugitive and convicted pedophile Roman Polanski, turns out pedophilia is good. The media closes ranks just like the police (Serpico wasn’t just a movie). The media loves to call the police out on this, but not itself. How funny.
Is it ironic that the media will whine about the CIA making plans while ignoring actual assassinations by numerous other states? Hypocrisy? Selection bias? Blinded by propaganda?
This “article” is nothing more than a diatribe about “people don’t find important what I think is important.” That’s everyone’s problem. Get over yourself.
I came here to see what “challenging media bias” looked like only to be confronted with self-congratulatory, bias-laden clickbait. Truly a sad state of affairs.
But let’s not confuse the issue with the facts.
That wall of text and word salad sure does look an awful lot like over-compensation by someone who doesn’t know anything at all about a subject and is pretending to be an expert.
For a list of Assange and Wikileaks’ awards in the journalism field, something you clearly have no knowledge of, here’s a link. Remove the spaces.
https :// challengepower. info/assange_s_awards_and_recognition
Julian Assange personally went to great lengths to redact names of at risk persons. No one was put at risk by Assange or WikiLeaks.
Just because Sweden forbids capital punishment doesn’t mean they would not extradite a person to a country that provides for the death sentence. It was most likely that the Swedish authorities trumped up the rape charges, manipulating the two girls specifically for Assange’s extradition.
What is Mike H talking about? WikiLeaks and Snowden had published an array of serious state wrongdoings, as Mike H says: state secrets. Speaking of bias, Mike H obviously lives in a state of confusion with a patriotic mindset that blankets all state secrets, one way or another, as being of virtuous quality – and hidden for justifiable purposes. Only an accomplice to criminality could have such perspective. It’s a giant denial, an irrational and religious-type faith of self protection.
But classified documents, at least the ones exposed by WikiLeaks, are secrets of wrongdoing and shame. People have a right to know government wrongdoing and actions done in their name. Or is the US not a democracy?
I’ll point out that journalists have a freedom, right, incentive and responsibility to publish secrets for the greater good. They deliver us covered-up info on private individuals, public figures, people of interest and groups as a daily matter of course, so why is state cover-ups somehow crossing a red-line? It isn’t, it’s what democracy mandates.
The USA is constituted in gross global and domestic criminal violations and as such, acts within become to be classified as “STATE SECRETS” – made secret, if not to her subordinately maligned citizenry then certainly kept secret to the multitude of enemies she makes abroad. In gut wrenching and telling fashion it becomes of “”NATIONAL SECURITY”” or “” NATIONAL INTEREST”” to hide the shame least the truth cause an awakening, negative reaction, erosion, repercussions.
In an otherwise moral, rational and empathic state, cognitive of a global free press, an adhesion to the universal rights of free speech and the US First Amendment at home, these would create a situation whereby wrongdoing and the prospect of leaks would not only reach it’s own public but the world at large, and therefore be made a STATE INTELLIGENT PRIORITY to avoid such wrongdoing in the first place.
While the corporate government and people like Mike H consider the USA state as having an innate Christian-like moral purity and superiority, a wholesale US national interest at heart or otherwise immunity to public scrutiny and the law then life and truth tellers and the general public will be damned.
Regardless of Assange’s journalistic credentials, he inherently remains an Australian citizen, acting under universal laws of freedom, in uncovering and exposing criminal wrongdoing and he did so for the greater good. He’s in jail and suffers because he dared to intervene in the path of globalists who are grandiose, deranged, powerful gas lighters, mind controllers and who do so for the greater damage.
Excellent comment, thanks!
@ Michael Daly artist
Again Michael✔very well said‼
MH is an uninformed troll spitting disaffected nonsense into the virtual air with the sick intent of infecting others with his brand of crazy hyperbolic nonsense and ignorance.
As Usual,
EA
you accuse Snowden of “selling” state secrets.
first, what state secrets? evidence?? we didn’t know the NSA’s budget before his whistleblowing, for which he has paid a high price.
second, what sale? evidence?? what money has Snowden put in his pocket in exchange for what info?
scurrilous lies, that’s all
I’m surprised that so few journalists investigate in #FreePress and truthtelling. Corporate and MSM do not even pay attention!
Assange was different : He got the many rewards for real journalism.
The Guardian and NYT are even to blame cause of they published the classified papers without Assange agreement conditions. They betrayed trust. The whistleblowers to whom Assange promised confidentiality, were not kept secret in the publication by TheGuardian and NYT.
When a person of Secret Service came to Assange in the embassy with request of names of leakers/whistleblowers for his freedom of sentence Assange refused.
Let everyone know how strong and rewarded Assanges work was.
Remember all those ‘feminists’ who claimed that the sexual assault investigation in Sweden was a legitimate reason to put Assange on the Interpol red list?
The ones who scorned and laughed at those of us pointing out the investigation was manufactured to get him back to the US and had nothing to do with sex crimes?
You remember, the ones who said that we were all ‘Berniebros’, only pretending to be socially concerned whilst we abandoned women who were assaulted?
You don’t hear much from them these days either, do you?
The mainstream corporate media also have nothing to say about the plight of Steven Donziger, a human rights lawyer whose case has been covered by FAIR in the past.
https://www.salon.com/2021/10/13/the-corporate-state-came-for-human-rights-lawyer-steven-donziger–and-followed-orders/
Where’s the MSM on this?
“Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Preska, who had served on an advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a lavish donor, to hear the case. Kaplan had Preska demand that Donziger post an $800,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport, which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron. Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger’s bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger’s apartment in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and teenage son.
None of this would surprise those targeted by the tyrannies of the past. What would be surprising, perhaps, to many Americans is how advanced our own corporate tyranny has become. Donziger never stood a chance. Neither does Julian Assange. These judges are not, in the end, focused on Donziger or Assange, but on us. The show trials they preside over are meant to be transparently biased. They are designed to send a message. All who defy corporate power and the national security state will be lynched. There will be no reprieve because there is no justice.”