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Julian Assange has said in an interview that he persuaded Edward Snowden to avoid seeking asylum in Latin America due to the CIA's reach, and that he fears assassination himself:
Julian Assange has said he advised the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden against seeking asylum in Latin America because there he could have been kidnapped and possibly killed. The WikiLeaks editor-in-chief said he told Snowden to ignore concerns about the "negative PR consequences" of sheltering in Russia because it was one of the few places in the world where the CIA's influence did not reach.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Times, Assange also said he feared he would be assassinated if he was ever able to leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought asylum in 2012 to avoid extradition.
[...] WikiLeaks was intimately involved in the operation to help Snowden evade the US authorities in 2013 after he leaked his cache of intelligence documents to Glenn Greenwald, then a journalist with the Guardian. Assange sent one of his most senior staff members, Sarah Harrison, to be at Snowden's side in Hong Kong, and helped to engineer his escape to Russia – despite his discomfort with the idea of fleeing to one of the US's most powerful enemies.
"Snowden was well aware of the spin that would be put on it if he took asylum in Russia," Assange told the Times. "He preferred Latin America, but my advice was that he should take asylum in Russia despite the negative PR consequences, because my assessment is that he had a significant risk he could be kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders. Kidnapped or possibly killed."
Assange also outlined his own fears of being targeted. He said that even venturing out on to the balcony of Ecuador's embassy in Knightsbridge posed security risks in the light of bomb and assassination threats by what he called "unstable people". He said he thought it was unlikely he would be shot, but that he worried that if he was freed he could be kidnapped by the CIA. "I'm a white guy," Assange said. "Unless I convert to Islam it's not that likely that I'll be droned, but we have seen things creeping towards that."
Here's an example of the CIA's alleged influence in Latin America.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:01PM
At this point why does the CIA even care? They have already done whatever damage they could have done and now they are just a PR irritant, not worthy of the risk. Sure, if they step foot on US soil they get picked up then extradited for trial and with luck spend a lot of time behind bars, but talking about 'secret midnight kidnappings' and ' personal drone strikes' is just plain silly. Neither of them are really that important.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @06:17PM
I think Snowden has less worth the U.S. than Assange, despite Assange being much more legally difficult to pin a leak-related crime on. Snowden has done his part while Assange seems determined to continue a WikiLeaks role. WikiLeaks has recently leaked TPP drafts, Sony documents, and more diplomatic cables.
There may not be a rational reason for the U.S. to have Assange or Snowden knocked off, but at the individual level, there have been murder mutterings [buzzfeed.com].
Don't forget that Assange has made more enemies than just big bad ol' Uncle Sam. Going through their abridged history [wikipedia.org], WikiLeaks has leaked "a decision to assassinate government officials signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys", "corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi", "allegations of illegal activities at the Cayman Islands branch of the Swiss Bank Julius Baer", "the collected secret 'bibles' of Scientology," Sarah Palin's email account, two membership lists of the "far-right British National Party", "86 telephone intercept recordings of Peruvian politicians and businessmen involved in the 2008 Peru oil scandal", "a set of documents belonging to Barclays Bank that had been ordered removed from the website of The Guardian", an early Stuxnet/Natanz nuclear facility report, internal documents from Kaupthing Bank in Iceland, the British Joint Services Protocol 440 "advising the security services on how to avoid documents being leaked," a super-injunction that "was being used by the commodities company Trafigura to stop The Guardian (London) from reporting on a leaked internal document regarding a toxic dumping incident in Côte d'Ivoire", climate scientist emails (leaked elsewhere), 570,000 9/11/2001 pager messages, and alleged lists of forbidden or illegal web addresses for Australia, Denmark and Thailand.
All of the above is prior to the Manning documents in 2010.
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