Protests outside the court criticised London’s Metropolitan Police (AFP/Tolga Akmen)
A British police officer pretended to arrest a woman for violating covid restriction rules, kidnapped a woman that was “just walking home” from a friend’s house, then raped and killed her. Wayne Couzens, with the elite diplomatic protection unit of London’s Metropolitan Police, admitted kidnapping, raping, and killing Sarah Everard in July. Her strangled remains were found a week later in a wooded area.
Tom Little, the prosecutor says, ”Security camera footage showed Couzens targeted the 33-year-old marketing executive on March 3, after finishing a shift at the US embassy. Couzens, who was off-duty, but wearing his police belt, kidnapped Everard in a “false arrest”, by “handcuffing her and showing his warrant card”. Witnesses said they assumed an undercover police officer was making an arrest.
Sarah’s mother Susan said her daughter “lost her life because Couzens wanted to satisfy his perverted desires. It is a ridiculous reason. I am outraged that he masqueraded as a policeman in order to get what he wanted”.
Sarah’s father Jeremy, asked his daughter’s killer to look at him and then stated, ” No punishment that you receive will ever compare to the pain and torture that you have inflicted on us.”
Metropolitan Police felt betrayed and said they were “sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes, which betray everything we stand for”.
Protestors set off smoke flares and held banners that said, “Met Police Blood On Your Hands”.
Image: International aid agencies have been battling Ebola…Inkz
“Victims were promised jobs in exchange for sexual relations or in order to keep their jobs…29 of the more than 80 women became pregnant and some were forced abort their babies.”, said commission member Malick Coulibaly.
Jolianne, a 14 year old girl, said she “was selling phone recharge cards on the side of the road when a WHO driver offered her a ride home. Instead he took her to a hotel where she says he raped her. She later gave birth to his child”.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian found that supervisors at the W.H.O. and the U.N. forced women to have sex in order to keep their jobs during the Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Over 50 women accused aid workers from the WHO and other charities of demanding sex. Some women lost their jobs because they refused sex with their supervisors.
Both national and international staff are accused of nine allegations of rape. 21 of 83 perpetrators were employed by the WHO and have been banned from future WHO employment. Four contractors have been terminated.
“Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who will be seeking a second term at the United Nations health body, said the report made “harrowing reading” and apologized to the victims. What happened to you should never happen to anyone. It is inexcusable. It is my top priority to ensure that the perpetrators are not excused but are held to account,” he said, promising further steps.”
A woman sits at the steps of the BC Legislature as hundreds of people, many youth who have aged out of foster care, rallied to ask for better support for youth aging out of care. (Arnold Lim/Black Press)
Someone sent information this morning that said “Youth speak out on ‘aging out’ of foster care; requesting extension on age limit”
Lane Ball out of Huntington Beach, West Virginia is developing a story with Nexstar about how foster care facilities push for the “aging out” limit to be extended. We hope that somewhere in the development that he realizes there is a financial incentive to keep children in state custody, and most importantly, we hope that Lane Ball reports how badly the foster care system is failing our most vulnerable youth. If Lane doesn’t “get it” and report it, you can bet that we will.
It is most of the time too difficult for foster “parents” with very little training to integrate the new family with the biological family. The result is that children age out of foster care very often not knowing who they are or where they came from.
What makes it even worse for them is that throughout their lives in foster homes, they are about 80% of the time prescribed psychotropic drugs “to help them cope”. Once they age out, they no longer have access to their medicines.
Less than 3% of foster children ever go to college and less than 2% will ever graduate. Foster placements simply fail to teach the vulnerable youth how to make it in this world and by the time they turn 18 and hit the road, they are ill prepared for what life throws at them.
Lane’s report today shows that lawmakers are taking notice. He says, “When someone ages out of foster care, it can be difficult adjusting to life as an adult. This past year, the federal government offered a safety net for individuals not quite ready to be on their own, but that will soon no longer be the case”.
Some CASA advocates as well as US Senators Sherrod Brown from Ohio, and Shelly Moore Capito from West Virginia are taking notice and working on legislation that will provide support for foster youth that are aging out.
West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito stated, “Throughout my time representing West Virginians in Congress, I’ve consistently worked to deliver needed resources and support to our state’s foster children, and help improve West Virginia’s foster care system as a whole. As legislation is introduced, I’ll prioritize the well-being of those in foster care, regardless of their age, who were particularly hard hit by the pandemic”.
Senator Brown from Ohio said, “It’s critical that Congress act now and extend the moratorium on ‘aging out’ of foster care. Now more than ever – as we continue to recover from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We cannot afford to cut young Ohioans off from critical housing and support services. Every young person deserves a safe and stable place to call home”.
Other senators from other states do not seem to be concerned about foster youth until they realize that there is something in it for them, and there is now about $100 Billion ASFA 1997 dollars and the Trillions of dollars put out into communities through the American Rescue Plan, The Family First Act, the American Family Plan, and countless other Acts that have been made to increase access to quality healthcare and services. Hopefully lawmakers will get on the ball and help desperate, vulnerable foster youth that have no ties to family that can support them.
As Lane Ball develops his story, I hope he does he research well and reports the facts about how badly the state has failed our most vulnerable children that are now becoming young adults and being set free in this messed up world. Our prayers go out to them that God will clear the path and work with everyone’s Hearts and Minds to make each foster youth a successful member of society, hopefully by beginning before they age out not knowing what to do. We pray for people that care to make a powerful difference in their lives each and every day so that they can become the people that God created them to be.
I offer two solutions; (1) place children will family or someone that they already know and trusts so that their lives are not disrupted any more than it has to be, and (2) localize foster care so that youth do not end up in strange places with strange people far from where they no their way around. This will prevent children from being trafficked and provide more stability.
If you want to offer any solutions, please do so in the comment section. Thanks for reading. We look forward to hearing from you.
A malware alert on a company computer led IT to report an Eagle River man with four adopted foster children to the FBI. Now he is facing child pornography charges. Agents arrested John Daniel Brooks, 51.
State records show Brooks is an analyst-programmer for the Department of Environmental Conservation, and a registered foster parent with whom the state Office of Children’s Services had placed four children, ages 1 to 13.
Brooks and his wife had officially adopted the children just one day earlier. Casey Grove, from Alaska Public Media in Anchorage says, “Agents searched Brooks’ home and devices and found hundreds of digital images of child pornography hidden in various computer folders, and when they asked him, Brooks said he was sexually attracted to children. He admitted that he had agreed to become an assistant with one of his daughter’s scouting group, in part because of his attraction to children, according to the charges”.
Brooks has worked for the Department of Environmental Conservation since 2010, and he was placed on unpaid leave this week, so taxpayers are still paying him. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is asking anyone with further information about Brooks’ activities to call the FBI at (907) 276-4441.
Denial and rationalization are two common defense mechanisms that addicts can use that can slow or prevent recovery. Denial is common among addicts. Denial happens when a person fails to accept or acknowledge a reality. Sometimes the truth hurts, and emotions can be difficult to deal with. Addicts can also be manipulative, and this comes from the addict’s ability to rationalize their behavior to themselves and to convince others that there is not a problem.
Everyone uses defense mechanisms to protect themselves from anxiety and in social settings to cope with what is happening around them. Defense mechanisms are usually healthy ways that people have to deal with whatever is happening but become pathological when maladaptive behaviors emerge from the unconscious mind to manipulate or deny reality. Addicts use defense mechanisms to rationalize their addiction and to protect their own ego.
Addicts deny that they have a problem. They deny that they are addicted or that an addiction is the cause of any negative consequences. Often times an addict will blame others for problems and therefore shift the focus off of themselves and the addiction so that someone else or something else is to blame. This is also the way that an addict compartmentalizes their addiction because morally the addict most likely does not want to be an addict or behave like an addict. Extreme denial can lead to dissociative disorders where the addict becomes detached from reality all together and can no longer cope.
Rationalization is the addict’s way of justifying their behavior both to themselves and to other people around them. Addicts can use logic manipulatively to avoid the issues of their addiction. They can even convince their friends and family that nothing is wrong and sometimes even have their friends and family rationalize their behavior for them. Projection and acting out are other defense mechanisms, but they also stem from the addicts ability to deny that they have a problem and shift the blame on to others therefore creating the rationalization that nothing is wrong with them and that someone or something else is to blame.
Defense mechanisms become an addict’s reality and recovery becomes further out of reach. Denial is a major roadblock to recovery and the main reason that addicts do not seek help. Nobody wants to admit that they are wrong or that they have a problem and lots of people do not like asking for help even when they know that they have a problem. A person will have a hard time accepting the fact that an addiction has taken control of their life and that can prevent treatment all together.
Family and friends may even deny that someone is addicted and say that the person has a reason for acting the way they do, that something bad is to blame. The sad thing about that is that the addict has to admit that they have a problem and take responsibility for their life. And sometimes, family and friends may know that their loved one is addicted but the more they push the addict to get help, the more the addict becomes further withdrawn from the people that could be positive influences in their life.
Common behaviors may include acting out, accusing loved ones of be judgmental and condemning, playing the victim, or manipulating the situation and blaming others, and minimizing harm caused by the addiction.
Depression and other mood disorders may also surface further complicating things for both the addict and the people around them. The addict may seem like they just don’t care. The addict may truly believe that they are the only one affected by the addiction and not realize the negative effects the addiction is having on their family.
Denial is just the start of complications to treatment. As the addict denies that they have a problem and places the blame on other things or other people, family and friends may also question their own beliefs about the addiction. Everyone starts to rationalize the addict’s behavior and make excuses. Reality becomes distorted and an addict may withdraw themselves from anyone that disagrees with them and become isolated, or they could just decide to hang around with other people that share their addiction. Afterall, those people are more understanding and less judgmental. The best thing that family and friends can do is admit that there is an addiction and to be understanding rather than judgmental.
How we approach intervention is important. It is possible to push a person further away and further into a crowd of people that share their addiction. This can result in death and other horrible outcomes. Strategies that are proven to be effective are motivational techniques that involve both the addict and their family and support group. Showing an addict how their addiction is affecting the people they care about can sometimes motivate them to change their life and their behaviors. Nobody wants to hurt the person they care about. It is also important to show the family how their action may be enabling the addiction or pushing the addict further away from accepting help. Counseling centers have experts that can help guide a family to accept that their loved one is addicted and teach family and friends to listen and understand the addict so that they can help them recover.
One of the best resources for family and caregivers is the National Alliance of Mental Health (NAMI) and a motivational tool they published several years ago for family members dealing with schizophrenia, “I am not sick, I don’t need help”. Although the booklet is written for people dealing with a family member that suffers schizophrenia, the techniques used to help them want help are also useful to help an addict accept help and it is a useful tool to teach family members and friends how they can help someone they care about who is suffering from addiction or some other disorder.
If someone you know is looking for free resources.
Jacob Brown, 31, a former trooper with the Louisiana State Police, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Shreveport, Louisiana, for using excessive force against an arrestee.
Louisiana State Police Trooper Jacob Brown OUACHITA PARISH SHERIFF’S OFFICE VIA AP Brown’s indictment comes as the federal prosecutors on the case are scrutinizing other troopers who punched, stunned and dragged another Black motorist, Ronald Greene, before he died in their custody on a rural roadside. The probe of Greene’s 2019 death has grown to examine whether police brass obstructed justice to protect the troopers who beat the Black motorist after a high-speed chase.
The indictment charges Brown with a single count of deprivation of rights under color of law.
An arrestee known as A.B. says that he was “repeatedly struck in the head” bThe modified flashlight with a metal tactical cap that is designed for breaking glass is considered a deadly weopon.
Jacob Brown faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000. The FBI, Assistant U.S. Attorney Luke Walker for the Western District of Louisiana, and Trial Attorney Katherine G. DeVar of the Civil Rights Division are prosecuting the case. Investigations are ongoing. (Civil Rights Division, Civil Rights – Criminal Section, Press Release Number: 21-919)
The federal lawsuit claiming abuse at Wade Correctional Center in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana prison alleges harsh treatment and isolation of the mentally ill and has been granted class action status.
Until taxpayers decide that enough is enough, they will just have to keep paying for the damage done through the misconduct of those in charge. State officials of course denied the lawsuit’s allegations when it was filed and do not want to respond now either. That too, of course caused prolonged suffering that taxpayers will just have to keep paying for until it decides that enough is enough and puts the bad actors out!
Jeremy Alford from LA Politics reported…..Finally, a federal judge granted class-action status on Monday to a lawsuit involving several inmates at Wade Correctional Center in Claiborne Parish. The inmates allege that the mentally ill in the prison were not treated humanely in recent years. Based on reporting from the Associated Press, “U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Foote’s decision means the criminal justice advocates who filed the lawsuit in 2018 can potentially seek relief for hundreds of prisoners. … Exactly how many is unclear but the ruling by the Shreveport judge says there were 366 people being held at the buildings in question in March 2020.”
Another baby dies in government custody. This time in an England where prison guards ignored a pregnant mother and let her suffer for 12 hours! Before coming in to take the dead baby the young mother had just given birth to by herself, alone in a prison cell.
I saw a report from Sophia Ankel at Insider this morning about an18 year-old inmate who tragically lost her baby in HMP Bronzefield (womens prison) in Ashford Middlesex, England. Unfortunately, the United States is no better and is often the model that other countries follow. Everyone hates us but they want to be like us.
The United States healthcare system is a uniquely complex system made of both private and public sectors. From an international perspective, The United States spends more than any other country on healthcare though we do not necessarily have the best healthcare delivery system. The Department for Professional Employees (DPE) 2016 Fact Sheet shows though the US has the best doctors in the world, but that the treatment in the U.S. is inequitable, overspecialized, and neglects primary and preventative care. The result is that American’s health care is poor in comparison to other advanced industrialized nations. References for my latest healthcare research topics can be found here.
Thinking again about this young woman and her baby I have to wonder how does the United States healthcare system and prison system compare with England’s? England invests less than the United States, but English people have a better healthcare system than America. England may in some cases even treat prisoners better than the U.S. does. The United States can be barbaric at times. I hate to admit that.
NHS (England’s Department of Health) never offered the young mother counseling, but the department did help the guards that failed to help the young woman which is not unusual here in the states for either of the department agencies. About 50% of U.S. inmates suffer from mental disorders prior to entering the prison system, and U.S. prison conditions are reportedly more inhumane than any third world country. Often American prisoners develop mental disorders because of the abuse they suffer at the hands of the United States Department of Justice.
The Guardian reports that the woman called for help three times during labor, and that none of the guards came to help her. They said the “vulnerable woman, identified only as Ms A, was ignored by prison guards despite multiple calls for help as she went into labor in her jail cell at HMP Bronzefield in Middlesex, England, on September 26, 2019”.
A prison watchdog said “the teenager gave birth completely on her own and was found in her bed cradling her dead baby 12 hours after calling her cell bell. The woman described being in constant pain during this ordeal, even passing out and waking up again only to find that her daughter had died. She bit through the umbilical cord and tried to clean the blood out of her cell”.
Still, according to The Guardian, the young mother was never offered counseling or any type of care. “Police and coroner involvement immediately after Baby A’s death, and a lack of understanding by the prison of the role of the local child death review team, meant Ms. A did not receive the routine bereavement and practical support that would normally be provided”.
Counselors were sent to offer support to the guards that allowed the mother to suffer and the baby to die. They still work at the prison. BBC reports that Vicky Robinson, the prison director stated, “This was tragic and extremely sad. We are deeply sorry that this has happened, and our thoughts throughout have been with the family”.
Reading about this case this morning made my heart hurt. I can’t imagine what that vulnerable mother is going through, and in a cell where no one can offer support or care. It is just unthinkable that it even happens in modern day societies.
Sophia Casias shuffled across the floor at the Bexar county adult detention center in San Antonio, Texas, on March 2017 seven months pregnant, hands cuffed and feet bound, as a guard stood in front of her, holding the chain connected to her handcuffs.
“Casias couldn’t keep her balance though and crumpled on to the wet cement floor. She sobbed and felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She would later realize that she had felt the same way when multiple family members sexually assaulted her as a child”.
Casias recounted that after she fell “a female guard grabbed me by the hair and was making me get up. She was screaming: ‘Bitch, get up.’ Then she said, ‘That is what happens when you are a fucking junkie. You shouldn’t be using drugs or you wouldn’t be in here.”
Lori Yearwood says that the recently enacted federal legislation such as the Prison Policy Initiative of 2018 and the First Step Act of 2018, that are meant to prohibit the most punitive measures against prisoners, including shackling of pregnant women is not enough and that “85% of incarcerated women in America are still at the mercy of the guards who can choose exactly how to control their every movement – as well as the movement of their unborn children”.
Lorie Goshin, associate professor at Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in New York and the lead investigator of a recent study about the treatment of incarcerated pregnant women says that “We dehumanize this group of women to such an extent that we don’t see how wrong this is….. just how unnecessary and cruel it is”.
The practice of shackling pregnant women during birth also violates the 2010 United Nations rule that “instruments of restraint shall never be used … during labour, during birth and immediately after birth”.
Despite laws, guards are in charge and probably do not even know about the laws. Not-for-profits distribute pamphlets to inmates and in support groups, but who educates the people in charge? To make matters even worse, the federal government does not require prisons or jails to collect data on pregnancy and childbirth among female inmates.
Rhode Island is the only state that has what is called “a private right of action”, an enforcement mechanism allowing the illegally shackled woman to sue for monetary compensation.
A 2017 report from the American Psychological Association addresses the acute psychological trauma that shackling inflicts saying, “Women subjected to restraint during childbirth report severe mental distress, depression, anguish, and trauma”.
Terry Kupers, MD, a psychiatrist and the author of the book Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It, implores staff “to be very careful that we do not re-traumatize them. Because re-traumatization makes conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder much worse….Women who get locked up, tend on average to have suffered many more childhood traumas”.
Amy Ard, executive director of Motherhood Beyond Bars, a Georgia not-for-profit worries, “if I am someone who needs to be chained, how can I expect to also see myself as someone capable of protecting my child?”
A former inmate at the California Institute for Women in Corona, Harriette Davis, now 64 and an anti-shackling advocate remembers herself being handcuffed to a hospital bed before giving birth to her daughter 36 years ago. The attending doctor told the guard to remove the shackles, Davis says, so that Davis could move freely, helping her baby travel more easily down the birth canal. “She’s not going anywhere,” Davis says the doctor assured the guard. She said the guard finally removed the shackles just before her baby was born.
Davis bursts into tears as she speaks by telephone from her home in Berkeley, California. “It’s inhuman and it’s not necessary and it’s emotionally and mentally unhealthy”.
The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, with Louisiana and California having the most incarcerated people. According to data from the 2019 Sentencing Report, black women are almost twice as likely to be incarcerated as white women. Advocates say they are making modest progress.
Danielle Edwards, a former Georgia prisoner says that she was taken to and from court hearings and doctor appointments shackled, including leg irons and handcuffs. To prevent the metal around her ankles from cutting into her skin, Edwards wore two pairs of socks. Shackling terrified her.
“It’s all very confining, uncomfortable and cold,” she says. “And it’s scary because when your feet have that limited mobility, you don’t know if you are going to misstep and fall on your stomach.”
She says that at eight months pregnant, standing in front of a judge, a sinking feeling overtook her. She pleaded with the judge to send her to rehab instead of prison so that she could keep her baby after birth.
“And I’m standing there in shackles and once I asked him for that chance he said: ‘Do you actually think I am going to let you walk out of this courtroom? Absolutely not.”
Thanks to Ginger Liberty and Yahoo News, we received and update on Julian Assange’s case this morning.
A recent Yahoo Investigation report by Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor, and Michael Isikoff says that the CIA attempted to kidnap WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange from the Ecuador embassy in London where he has been held since 2012, and that some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed assassinating Julian 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.”}.
The CIA’s war against Assange included spying on WikiLeaks associates, stealing their devices, and attempts to turn the group’s members against each other. I wonder how many people were framed in those attempts? Apparently, the CIA declared this war against Wikileaks because of a sensitive data breach of CIA hacking tools, known as “Vault 7”.
Did Pompeo break the law? Did he put the United States Department of Justise in jeopardy? A former national security official said that the CIA “was completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7. They were seeing blood.” Mike Pompeo, CIA director wanted revenge.
“Assange’s U.S. lawyer, Barry Pollack told Yahoo, “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,”.
Michael Pompeo, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), listens during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, May 11, 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Back in 2017, Ecuadorian officials began efforts to grant Assange diplomatic status to give him cover to leave the embassy and fly to Moscow to serve in the country’s Russian mission. According to officials, that is when the CIA and the White House discussed a number of scenarios to arrest or kill Assange, including “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”. Apparently British officials even agreed to help do the shooting if gunfire according to a former senior administration official.
“It was going to be like a prison break movie.” Said one senior official. “It was beyond comical,”. “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.” They told then President Trump, “this is going to get ugly,”. The White House worried that the campaign against the organization would end up “weakening America,”.
In 2010, Assange published classified U.S. government documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not know how to deal with Wikileaks publishing information that other reporters would never touch. Some think WikiLeaks is an independent journalist institution, and that Julian Assange is a hero. Others think that he is a villainous spy.
Did the Obama Administration change the definition of a journalist? Cyber operations changed in 2013 when Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong with a massive amounts of classified NSA documents. A WikiLeaks editor helped arrange Snowden’s escape to Russia from Hong Kong and lived with him for months. William Evanina, a retired U.S. counter-intelligence official says, “The Obama administration prioritized collecting WikiLeaks information to build a picture of WikiLeak’s contacts and tie it back to hostile state intelligence services. The CIA assembled a group of analysts known unofficially as the WikiLeaks team in its Office of Transnational Issues”, but he also states theta the Obama Administration backed off because of the First Amendment.
Prior to the 2016 presidential election WikiLeaks began publishing Democratic Party emails. The NSA began tracking Twitter accounts. The CIA targeted people affiliated with Wikileaks. U.S. intelligence officials believed Assange “was acting in collusion with people who were using him to hurt the interests of the United States”. A Trump Whitehouse official said, “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”, and the Trump Administration went after Assange.
Shortly after the election, and about five weeks after Wikileaks embarrassed Pompeo by publishing the “Vault 7” files, Pompeo made his speech about 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”.
Vault 7 “hurt the agency to its core,” said a former CIA official. Pompeo was reluctant to brief the president on Vault 7, “Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know,” Pompeo told one briefer, before being advised that the information was too critical and the president had to be informed, said the former official.
Covert actions by U.S. intelligence agencies to interfere with the activities of any foreign actor normally require the president be briefed and that the president sign a “finding” to authorize the covert operations or the CIA can conduct “offensive counterintelligence” activities without getting a presidential finding or having to brief Congress.
“Often, the CIA makes these decisions internally, based on interpretations of so-called common law passed down in secret within the agency’s legal corps. I don’t think people realize how much the CIA can do under offensive counterintelligence and how there is minimal oversight of it, said a former official.”
Was Wikileaks operating as a Russian agent? The CIA had no proof. “It wasn’t clear they were, so the question was, can it be reframed on them being a hostile entity.” Intelligence lawyers decided that the CIA could operate counterintelligence because Pompeo declared WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service”. Pompeo had control of the lawyers in D.C., and he wanted the Vault 7 documents. White House officials considered different ways the counterintelligence operation would play out, and officials reasoned that the CIA would be erasing its own documents.
Pompeo’s plan was to “break into the embassy, drag Assange out and bring him to where we want,” said a former intelligence official. “You can’t throw people in a car and kidnap them,” said a former national security official. Another official even says that the president discussed assassinating Assange. “It was viewed as unhinged and ridiculous”.
Former President Trump denies that he ever considered having Assange assassinated. “It’s totally false, it never happened” and added, “In fact, I think he’s been treated very badly”. Officials says that Trump’s lawyers were against the CIA’s illegal proposals “While people think the Trump administration didn’t believe in the rule of law, they had good lawyers who were paying attention to it”. “The White House told Attorney General Jeff Sessions that if prosecutors had grounds to indict Assange they should hurry up and do so”, and then “the Swedes dropped a rape investigation into Assange giving prosecutors 48 more hours to rush an indictment”.
U.S. officials couldn’t just run over a Russian diplomatic vehicle to arrest or kill Assange, but they had to find a way to prevent Vladimir Putin from getting both Snowden and Assange. Putin would have enjoyed that too much and would have had control of the propaganda.
Assange spent years running WikiLeaks from his living quarters, but the Associated Press uncovered a Spanish firm, UC Global that works for U.S. intelligence to provide detailed reports on Assange’s activities by secretly installed devices in the embassy. Ecuadorian authorities made Assange a citizen and provided him a passport so he could leave for Moscow. Fidel Narvaez told Yahoo News that the first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2017 and 2018 said that Assange said refused to accept that assignment and that he was asked to persuade him. “However, Ecuador did have a plan B,” said Narvaez, “and I understood it was to be Russia.”
The Justice Department secretly charged Assange. UC Global planned to leave the embassy door open to allow U.S officials to get in, and even considered poisoning Assange. Assange’s colleagues planned to publish even more Vault 7 files if he were killed.
There was still no finding from the U.S. president and the CIA was in a bind with no presidential finding. “That kind of lethal action would be way outside of a legitimate intelligence or counterintelligence activity,” a former senior intelligence community lawyer said. Sessions warned the CIA to arrest Assange legally and other U.S. officials worried about what the discovery process might reveal if Assange were to face trial in the United States.
“I was part of every one of those conversations,” Evanina said. “As much as we had the greener light to go do things, everything we did or wanted to do had repercussions in other parts of the administration.” As a result, he said, sometimes administration officials would ask the intelligence community to either not do something or do it differently, so that “we don’t have to sacrifice our collection that’s going to be released publicly by the bureau to indict WikiLeaks.”
In 2019, Ecuador’s government gave Assange to the British police who arrested him on a warrant that was issued in 2012. The U.S. government unsealed its initial indictment of Assange the same day that focused on 2010 allegations that Assange helped Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, crack a password to break into a classified U.S. government network. Prosecutors then charged Assange with Espionage Act charges for publishing classified information. A British judge then ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States because he would be a suicide risk in a U.S. prison.
Trump may or may not have agreed to let Pompeo kill Assange, but in 2018, “Trump granted the CIA aggressive new secret authorities to undertake the same sort of hack-and-dump operations for which Russian intelligence has used WikiLeaks. Among other actions, the agency has used its new powers to covertly release information online about a Russian company that worked with Moscow’s spy apparatus” says Yahoo News investigators. A Trump official told Yahoo News, “There was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange given the embarrassment, not the threat he posed in context,”.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Less is More Act on Friday. Above, Hochul talks to reporters at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum on September 8, 2021, in New York City.CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY
In January 2020 a new criminal justice reform law went into effect that allows New York to release people that cannot afford bail. Jeannie McBride of New York State says that judges can not hold anyone arrested for a misdemeanor, or even some of those charged with felonies on cash bail. Niagara County Sheriff Jim Voutour, said, “The judge will have to go in and ‘ROR’ them, release them on their own recognizance”.
“I have to get paperwork from a judge. So they will have to see a judge. I would guess that there could be 75 to 100 that could possibly get released when this law goes into effect,” he said. It takes time to process people out.
District attorneys do not ask for bail unless there is a significant reason. Sheriff Voutour says that he doesn’t know it the new law will reduce the number of inmates, “If they’re in for 20 days before they are convicted and they get sentenced to 20 days, they get time served,” he said. “What’s going to happen is now that they don’t go in on bail, there’s no time accumulated. So now if they get sentenced to 20 days, now they have to come and serve those 20 days.”, and that the issuance of warrants will increase.
This week, Kathy Hochul, “the New York Governor is directing the state parole board to immediately release 191 prison inmates amid the crisis at Rikers Island that has worsened over the course of the pandemic.” states Jeannie McBride. “On Friday, Hochul signed a new law to help reduce incarceration among those who have been jailed due to technical parole violations, such as missing curfew, marijuana use or arriving late to a meeting with a parole officer.”
It is estimated that about 270 inmates at Riker’s Island will be released. “They have served their sentences under Less is More, but they should not have to wait until the enactment date,” Hochul said. Under the Less is More Act, Hochul also ordered around 200 inmates at Rikers to be transferred to state prison facilities to relieve severe overcrowding.
Rikers has always been known to keep inmates in horrific conditions, and the covid pandemic has made it worse. Over 2,200 New York’s Department of Corrections suffered employees became infected with COVID-19. There are not enough jailers to hold people in the horrific cells anymore. Some reports show that the facility holds people in units that do not even have beds.
This year, 10 people at Rikers have died. At least five by suicide. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to improve conditions at Rikers. He wants to require absent prison guards to get a doctor’s note if they’re out for more than a day, speed inmate intake procedures and fix infrastructure problems.
Hochul says, “It is about protecting human life, the lives of the people who are incarcerated as well as correctional officers. It’s also about protecting human dignity,” she added. “This questions who we are as a people when we can allow situations as we’ve seen at Rikers to exist in a prosperous, mighty city like New York. The fact that this exists is an indictment on everyone.”
