The approvals required to kill Assange
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When Michael Isikoff's account of CIA plans against Julian Assange appeared in September 2021, John Kiriakou said half a dozen friends emailed it to him with expressions of shock, and that he had to take it seriously: a Pulitzer-winning reporter who had interviewed more than thirty current and former CIA officers and administration officials.

What he added to the reporting was procedural.

How such a thing is authorised

"There is a way at the CIA that you go about doing something like this," he said. "First of all, you have to declare a person a clear and present danger to the United States." That, he judged, was what had been done, the finding that Assange was a danger to the safety and security of the country, "and as such he has to be executed."

The second approval follows from nationality. Assange is an Australian citizen, and Australia is one of the Five Eyes countries: "the United States would have had to bring the Australians in on the operation. They would have had to have Australian permission to go ahead and murder an Australian national."

Kiriakou reads the absence of any refusal in the reporting as significant. "There's no paragraph saying the Australians said, wait a minute, he's an Australian national, and while we don't like him either, you can't kill an Australian national. We didn't see any of that. So what are we supposed to conclude?"

The third

The last is the one that appals him. "Number three, and this is one that sort of makes me want to swallow my tongue, you have to get the approval of the congressional oversight committees. Now if they were serious about this operation and the planning for the operation went as far as it did, that means that they got the permission of the oversight committees."

He adds his standing complaint about those committees, that they have been "little more than cheerleaders for the CIA" since the 1990s, and then says this is of a different order: "but this is ridiculous. This is murder. Murder of an Australian national, murder of somebody who has never been convicted in a US court of committing any crime."

The acts of war

Two details in the reporting he treats as separately disqualifying. One was a contemplated shootout in the streets of London outside the Ecuadorian embassy. The other was shooting out the tyres of a Russian diplomatic aircraft to stop it lifting off from an airport outside London with Assange aboard.

Kiriakou's objection to the second is that a diplomatic aircraft carries the same protections as an embassy: "that is like firing a rocket at the Russian mainland. You just can't do things like that." That the British had reportedly agreed to do the shooting does not help, "that doesn't make it any less of an act of war."

He contrasts it with television: "we see these cute little scenes on Law and Order where they trick this Iranian diplomatic car into opening its doors and they grab the guy out. That doesn't happen in real life."

His own measure of how far the institution had moved is 2004: had anyone then proposed murdering an Australian national for publishing, "that would have been like a bad joke. I don't even know anybody in 2004 who would have said words like that out loud."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Julian Assange
- Five Eyes
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- Vault 7
