Tag: assassinations

In secret recording, Florida Republican threatens to send Russian-Ukrainian ‘hit squad’ after rival

A little-known GOP candidate in one of Florida’s most competitive congressional seats was secretly recorded threatening to send “a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad” to a fellow Republican opponent to make her “disappear.”

During a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seatbecause he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor.

“I really don’t want to have to end anybody’s life for the good of the people of the United States of America,” Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week, according to the recording exclusively obtained by POLITICO. “That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f—ing speed bump in the road. She’s a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.”

Reached by text message, Braddock refused to say whether he made any threats about Luna to the personwho recorded him, Erin Olszewski.

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The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt

Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation of his left leg. It was like something was eating him up. Long past were his years of heroic service to the country.

In the CIA, he’d helped mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But no longer could you see in him the suave, pipe-smoking, cocktail-party-loving clandestine operative whose Cold War exploits he himself had, almost obsessively, turned into novels, one of which, East of Farewell, the New York Times once called “the best sea story” of World War II. Diminished too were the old bad memories, of the Bay of Pigs debacle that derailed his CIA career for good, of the Watergate Hotel fiasco, of his first wife’s death, of thirty-three months in U.S. prisons – of, in fact, a furious lifetime mainly of failure, disappointment and pain. But his firstborn son – he named him St. John; Saint, for short – was by his side now. And he still had a secret or two left to share before it was all over.

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Intersectional Torturers

Social media was ablaze yesterday over a CIA recruiting video which you should definitely watch if you haven’t seen it already, because it has to be seen to be believed.

The video features a Latina CIA officer proudly describing her ascent to her position in one of the most depraved institutions that has ever existed using a jaw-dropping fountain of social justice buzzwords and appeals to Latin American culture while wearing a t-shirt featuring a girl power symbol and the caption “Mija, you are worth it.”

“I am a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder,” she says. “I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. I am a walking declaration. A woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her sentences suggesting that a question has been asked.”

“I did not sneak into the CIA,” says the officer over inspirational-sounding music, adding, “At 36, I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”

“Know your worth, command your space. Mija, you are worth it,” the video concludes.

“People in other parts of the world who make even modest efforts to ‘command their space’ often end up murdered by the CIA or its proxies,” someone commented under the video.

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As Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Pleads Guilty, Advocates Warn of “Profound Threat” to Free Press

Press freedom, peace, and human rights advocates are rallying behind Daniel Hale, the former intelligence analyst who blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s drone assassination program, and who pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to violating the Espionage Act.

The Washington Post reports Hale, who was set to go on trial next week, pleaded guilty to a single count of violating the 1917 law that has been used to target whistleblowers including Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Reality Winner, and others.

Hale was charged in 2019 during the Trump administration after he leaked classified information on the U.S. government’s targeted assassination program to a reporter, who according to court documents, matches the description of The Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill. He is the first person to face sentencing for an Espionage Act offense during the administration of President Joe Biden.

As vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden contributed to the creation of whistleblower protections in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, while simultaneously serving in an administration that, while promising “a new era of open government,” relentlessly targeted individuals who revealed U.S. war crimes and other classified information.

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