The Yahoo! report provides important new details of facts reported a year ago, but contains several errors, including a fabricated story about Russian operatives exfiltrating Assange from the Ecuador embassy, writes Joe Lauria.
The Yahoo! News report that is mistakenly being credited for breaking the story of a CIA plot to assassinate or kidnap WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is filled with crucial errors, while at the same time providing important new details about inside-Washington deliberations on how the plot came about.
Consortium News, along with other outlets, reported a year ago, on Sept. 30, 2020, of a CIA plot to kidnap or poison Julian Assange, based on sworn testimony in Assange’s extradition hearing in London. Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone was the first to report the story back in May 2020.
The September 2020 testimony made first in a Madrid court came from a former partner, and an employee of UC Global, the Spanish security firm paid by the CIA to spy on Assange inside Ecuador’s London embassy, including on Assange’s privileged conversations with his lawyers and doctors.
Julian Assange in Ecuadorian embassy in London with journalist Stefania Maurizi shot on UC Global surveillance tape.
One of the witnesses testified that in December 2017 “the U.S. was desperate” to get Assange out of the embassy, and that “more extreme measures should be used.”
“Leaving the embassy door open to allow Mr. Assange to be kidnapped and even poisoning was under consideration,” a witness testified that UC Global CEO David Morales told him. Both witnesses approached an attorney who contacted a Madrid court which ordered an arrest warrant, a search of Morales’ home and issued charges against him for spying on Assange.
The reaction to the 7,000-word piece by Yahoo! News on Sunday proves the axiom that until something appears in the mainstream media, it didn’t happen. That’s because establishment media largely ignored the story a year ago when it was revealed in court. The Yahoo! piece has now been covered by CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian and other corporate outlets, making a larger audience aware of it for the first time and potentially putting pressure on the Biden administration to drop the case.
Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post have reported on it so far and did not cover the UC Global employee’s testimony in September 2020. The Guardian was one of the few big outlets that reported it when it first emerged in court. Yahoo! buried deep in its story that The Guardian covered it back then (they weren’t the first or only ones), allowing an impression to form that Yahoo! was breaking the story for the first time.
While the Yahoo! article does advance the story by providing Washington confirmation of the UC Global witnesses’ testimony and fleshes out crucial details from U.S. intelligence sources for the first time, especially then CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s role in the plot (discussed below), it contains a number of factual errors.
Yahoo! uncritically reports a made-up story about Russia trying to extract Assange from the Ecuador embassy. Yahoo! falsely reports that the Obama administration took no action against Assange until WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden escape Hong Kong in 2013, when the Obama FBI actually ran a sting operation against Assange in Iceland in 2011, and empaneled a grand jury the same year, facts not mentioned in Yahoo!‘s report. Yahoo! takes as fact that Russia hacked the Democrats and gave its emails to Assange, though these are only allegations in a U.S. indictment and ignores congressional testimony from CrowdStrike’s CEO that there was no concrete evidence of a hack resulting in data being taken. The thrust of the Yahoo! article is that the Obama administration was good to Assange while elements of the Trump administration plotted the assassination or abduction before taking the acceptable path of making a legal case against Assange. But the legal case is also troubling.
The article also sets up a misleading idea that the CIA’s extrajudicial methods, such as assassination and abduction, sometimes as freelance acts without a presidential directive, are rare in the agency’s history. That history is littered with criminal acts, scores of which were uncovered by mid-1970s congressional investigations.
What the CIA plotted to do with Assange is one more criminal act in a sordid history. It should produce no shock to anyone who knows that history. There has never been a time when the CIA was not willing to break the law in the service of U.S. elites, nor has the U.S. ever been a nation predominately ruled by law and not men, as many Americans believe.
Stopping the ‘Russian Exfiltration’
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