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.
I don’t really trust Whitney webb. She says soms interesting stuff, but she also helps spread a lot of disinformation.
Like shining light on the shadowy private bioscience company the U.S. worked with to stockpile vaccines and forcibly administer their anthrax vaccine to a bunch of soldiers in the 90s. They had zero quality control, and administered vaccines that were expired, and sometimes contaminated with mold.
They showed up again in 2020 under a new name (EmergentBio), and it seems like Trump had plans to get rich giving all COVID/Operation Warp speed vaccine manufacturing contracts to them.
Eventually they were investigated and shut down because of quality control issues, and it was a pretty big scandal that got swept under the rug. It’s unclear if some people might have received contaminated vaccines before they were shut down.
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Ok awesome glad she is actually talking about this. Maybe we can clear some of this bullshit up and get the entire company shut down before they do more harm to gain more profits.
However, she then tries to lump this shady private company (Emergent Biosolutions) that was working with Trump to manufacture the contaminated vaccine in with the entire NIH/Moderna public private partnership that created the COVID vaccine. Not actually linking them by any evidence, more just like general distrust of vaccines.
Not sure if you remember but Trump had a bit of a grudge against the NIH bc he didn’t like them contradicting him on issues of public health and safety.
To my knowledge Webb has not mentioned any of this other information:
In the years leading up to Trump’s second administration, Republicans went to war against the NIH and especially vaccine/Gain-of-function (GOF) related research and the origins of COVID-19.
Republicans have been pushing the narrative that the virus escaped from a lab. While this is a possibility it has never been conclusively proven, despite the claim by many Republicans in congress. It’s also extremely convoluted, but important to note that HHS giving the greenlight to lift the ban on NIH GOF research (and allowing the NIH to fund the allegedly dangerous joint GOF research project with a lab in Wuhan that had lax safety standards) occured under Trump’s first administration.
There has also been very weird ongoing beef between the director of Trump’s CDC at the time of the pandemic (Robert Redfield) and Ralph Baric, the UNC scientist responsible for the spike protein mRNA technology used to manufacture COVID vaccines. With Redfield claiming that COVID-19 was actually manufactured by Baric at Chapel Hill but “he can’t prove it,” and he doesn’t even seem to offer any evidence of why he believes that.
Once Trump took office again in 2025, the NIH was one of the first places he sent DOGE to investigate and freeze budgets until they could make sure nothing was being spent on “DEI practices.”
Eventually, HHS under Trump rescinded funding that the Biden administration had granted to Moderna to work with the NIH to create and roll out an updated mRNA bird flu vaccine. It’s unclear why he did this, given growing concerns of a bird flu pandemic.
Changes made at the NIH since Trump took office have resulted in many senior leaders either retiring or being removed from their positions, and funding for mRNA vaccine related research has been halted.
Interestingly, the manufacturing location that was shut down due to quality control issues was purchased by a different bioscience company not long after Trump’s inauguration in 2025. The company that purchased the location seems to be in the process of getting everything in order to begin manufacturing “non-vaccine preventatives” as an alternative to traditional vaccines.
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That’s good not to trust her. I don’t really trust anybody haha. She seems to have a lot of ideas and info but at the same time it’s generalized and vague sometimes. I think there could be some truth to some of her ideas though and they might offer some leads for people to think about.
I mean I agree with her you definitely can’t blindly trust the government (or like you said, anyone really). I don’t agree you should throw amazing vaccine science under the bus because the government is too sloppy/cuts corners on quality control and safety manufacturing.
If anything, by completely dismissing the science behind the public-private partnership, it’s like she’s kind of helping push for full privatization and less regulations/public oversight.
I understand her criticism that private companies are profiting anyway, but she also makes a claim about people falling for there being any difference between privatization and public-private roll out. The thing is though that removing the public from the equation means you’re saying why not just trust this private contractor who’s only incentive is profit. If he says he needs to cut corners/do whatever he says he needs to do without public oversight to get the vaccine rolled out, that means you lose any federal standards for safety and quality control. Without those, EmergentBio’s labs would have continued manufacturing and churning out unsafe products, and the public would just have to accept that your only options are either a dangerous vaccine or no vaccine at all.
If you just blindly buy what Webb is selling, it kind of seems like a strategy to help the people who intentionally undermined the system, by making people believe that there’s no difference between a flawed system of public oversight/regulations and no public oversight/regulations.
That way, when the people who intentionally undermined the public system, remove it completely and hand full product control and government contracts over to their friends that run the private company, there will be less resistance from the public.
It’s still your tax money that’s paying for these private contracts, but you’ve now lost all federal regulations and public oversight that could monitor the safety behind the product being manufactured. Consider yourself like a shareholder who can’t even ask questions or critique the product, but was forced to invest in the only private monopoly available. Your return on the money you were forced to invest, will be the final product that’s offered by the company as is. Yeah it’s probably contaminated with mold and expired, but it’s your only option. Take it or leave it.
Meanwhile the actual shareholders of the private company, use their positions in government to get richer and protect the monopoly by giving the monopoly an endless cycle of government contracts that are funded by your tax dollars.