The White House under Gerald Ford tried to block a landmark Senate report that disclosed the CIA’s role in assassination attempts against foreign leaders and ultimately led to a radical overhaul in how the agency was held to account, documents released to mark the 50th anniversary of the report’s publication reveal.
The documents, dating from 1975, were posted on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, as it sought to highlight the report’s significance amid conjecture that Donald Trump may have authorized the agency to assassinate Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, amid a massive US military build-up against the country.
Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, said highlighting the Church report’s historical significance had become more urgent in the context of the speculation surrounding Maduro, who the White House has accused of “narco-terrorism”.
“Fifty years after the scandal of the revelations of the Church committee report, we’ve come a long way in the wrong direction, where we have US presidents who now seem to feel they can openly discuss assassination plots against foreign leaders,” he said.
“We can’t have an honest and full discussion of the merits of assassinating the head of state of Venezuela without going back and reading the Church committee report. People have forgotten what a scandal this report generated, and the discussion of morality and US foreign policy it created.
The justice department’s office of legal counsel has reportedly been tasked with drafting an opinion that could render any assassination of Maduro legally justifiable, according to the New York Times.
The state department has announced it will declare the Cartel de los Soles, a shadowy cartel whose existence has been doubted by some drug experts but which the Trump administration insists Maduro heads, a terrorist organization as of 24 November.
That could pave the way for assassination strikes on a similar legal basis as applied to the strikes on al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, during the post-9/11 “war on terror”, and on Qassem Suleimani, the senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, after the US designated the unit a terrorist group.
Kornbluh said the 9/11 attacks changed public perceptions on whether assassinations – at least of terrorists – were acceptable.
“If someone was designated a terrorist, they could then legitimately be taken out, and that is why you today see the Trump administration doing linguistic and legalistic somersaults,” he said.
Applying it to Venezuela would violate the principles established by Church and may ill-serve US foreign policy goals, Kornbluh warned.
Oh heads up just in case you cared about knowing wtf is actually happening right now.
The National Security Archive released these documents a few days ago in the hopes of gaining public attention, and to warn us that the CIA is about to assassinate a foreign leader and pretend it's justified by preemptively creating a false legal argument for the planned assassination that's already been in the works for a very long time.
Just another normal week in the U.S. 🇺🇸🦅🏈✝️🙏
National Security Archive, not Agency.
Ah, corrected and makes a lot more sense, but still an equally terrifying warning to give 5 days ago, considering the DOJ is now claiming bombing those boats in Venezuela was an act of self defense.
I can't wait for the tankie idiots to paint Maduro as some kind of Allende allegory, when he's more ... IDK, less violent Kim Jong Un?
He literally pissed away any kind of progress Chavez (who was also controversial) made, so even if you wanted to be "fair" to the ... regime in Venezuela, he's still a fuckup.
I ain't no GD tankie, but I still don't support the CIA manufacturing lies to justify murder and installing their own leader in Venezuela.
Especially when:
-They've been murdering civilians in boats for over a month for absolutely no reason at all
-They're working with their own fucked up anti-democratic home grown regime to carry out these murders
The argument that "we're trying to help the Venezuelan people so that democracy can prevail," is a lot less convincing when you're murdering innocent Venezuelan people.
It seems much more "our dictator wants to take the other dictator's resources because we need more money to continue to fund whatever the fuck we want with no public oversight."
bingo. completely with you there. Fuck whatever the CIA is doing and the blowing up of random boats. But, also fuck Maduro, not just because he sucks domestically for the Venezuelan people, but also, because he gives left wing policies a bad name internationally.
There's also the problem that elections are coming up in less than a year and voters are not happy. A war is usually popular in the beginning, so my guess is that one will start around March or so of next year.
New lemmy tankie definition: Someone who opposes assassination of the heads of sovereign states. Liberals learning that word was a travesty
why did you choose to interpret the tankie part as the pro-assassination part, and not the "paint him as a kind of Allende allegory", which is clearly the aim with that statement.