What happened

President Donald Trump Wednesday confirmed he has authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela and said he was also considering military strikes inside the country. Trump announced on Tuesday that the U.S. military had destroyed a fifth boat in the Caribbean, killing six more alleged drug traffickers. With “the sea very well under control,” he told reporters Wednesday, “we are certainly looking at land now.”

Who said what

Trump said he approved the CIA intervention because Venezuelan authorities “have emptied their prisons into the United States” and because “we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.” He provided no evidence to back up either claim. When asked if the CIA had permission to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro, Trump called it a “ridiculous question” but said he thinks “Venezuela is feeling the heat.”

Trump’s “decision to confirm, even in general terms, his instructions to the CIA was highly unusual,” The Washington Post said. According to The New York Times, which first reported the classified directive, the CIA’s “new authority” allows it to “carry out lethal operations in Venezuela,” including “covert action” against Maduro or his government “either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation.” U.S. officials “have been clear, privately, that the end goal” of the “intensifying pressure campaign against Venezuela” is to drive Maduro from power, the Times said.

“How long will the CIA continue to carry on with its coups?” Maduro said in a televised speech Wednesday night. “Latin America doesn’t want them, doesn’t need them and repudiates them.” Trump’s decision, The Associated Press said, also “spurred anger in Congress from members of both major political parties that Trump was effectively committing an act of war” on legally dubious grounds and “without seeking congressional authorization.”

What next?

Authorizing “covert CIA action, conducting lethal strikes on boats and hinting at land operations in Venezuela slides the United States closer to outright conflict with no transparency, oversight or apparent guardrails,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said Wednesday. “The American people deserve to know if the administration is leading the U.S. into another conflict.”

For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency has stated that it was unaware of Lee Harvey Oswald before his 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. But a bombshell list of records from the CIA, released this month among a tranche of documents from the House Oversight Committee, claims that this was not the case. This marks the first time the CIA has openly admitted that it had prior knowledge of Oswald in the lead-up to Kennedy's death. It could also raise new questions about one of the most longstanding conspiracy theories in American history.

What did the files reveal?

The documents, now available on the agency's website, concern a CIA intelligence officer based in Miami, George Joannides. They show that in 1963, Joannides was "helping finance and oversee a group of Cuban students opposed to the ascension of Fidel Castro" as part of a "covert assignment to manage anti-Castro propaganda and disrupt pro-Castro groups," said The Washington Post.

The group Joannides led, known as DRE, was "aware of Oswald as he publicly promoted a pro-Castro policy for the U.S.," said the Post, and the group reportedly clashed with Oswald just three months before Kennedy's assassination. Oswald also "debated DRE activists on local TV, providing more media attention to him as a communist," said Axios. It's unclear whether Joannides himself ever met Oswald, but he was known to operate under the alias "Howard." This is despite the fact that the CIA has long "stated that it had no records of anyone named Howard," said The Independent.

It may be that the CIA was tracking Oswald even before Joannides got involved, especially after he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. At least "35 CIA employees handled reports on Oswald between 1959 and 1963," said Jefferson Morley, a Kennedy researcher, to the Post. This included a "half dozen officers who reported personally" to CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton or Deputy Director Richard Helms.

What does this mean?

The documents show that the CIA "lied for decades about Joannides' role in the Kennedy case," said The Daily Beast. The agency also claimed that it had "nothing to do with" the Cuban students' anti-Castro efforts. The revelation that the CIA appeared to cover up its prior knowledge of Oswald "adds fuel to the long-simmering questions around what the agency knew about the plot to murder the president, and what else it may be hiding," said the Post.

The files were released as part of an effort to "comply with President Donald Trump's executive order to disclose all documents about the former president's death," said The Daily Beast. But experts noted that the original release of documents "didn't include two-thirds of the promised files, any of the 500 IRS records, or the recently discovered FBI files," said The Independent. But this new information on Oswald has some historians wondering aloud.

This is a "breakthrough, and there's more to come," said Morley to the Post. The "burden of proof has shifted. There's a story here that's been hidden and avoided, and now it needs to be explored. It's up to the government to explain." The main "question is what was Joannides doing for the CIA monitoring Oswald?" said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA counterintelligence officer, to the Post. "This looks a hell of a lot like a CIA operation."

In March 1984, customs officials at the port of Swinoujscie, in northwestern Poland, spotted something suspicious about a truck that had "arrived on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen", said Luke Harding in The Observer.

While inspecting its contents, they noticed that its interior was disproportionately small. Breaking through a walled-off panel, the officials found a cache of 800 books and pamphlets, along with "illicit printing presses" and "forbidden walkie-talkies". The source of this "reactionary propaganda" was none other than the CIA, which over a 35-year period sought to sow dissent in eastern Europe by flooding it with books, magazines and videotapes banned behind the Iron Curtain. "The methods used were ingenious": copies of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" were floated over the border in balloons; Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" was stuffed into a baby's nappy on a flight to Warsaw.

In his "entertaining and vivid new work", Charlie English examines this "highbrow delivery service" and argues that, in several countries, including Romania and Hungary, it helped hasten the demise of communism.

English focuses particular attention on the CIA's smuggling operation in Poland, which he turns into a "vivid and moving story", said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. "He is terrific at evoking the atmosphere of Poland in the 1970s and 1980s – not just the regime's narrowed horizons and suffocating repression, but the excitement of the Solidarity trade union movement and the idealism of the young dissidents." He picks out several "memorable" characters, including Solidarity's "minister for smuggling", Mirosław Chojecki, a blue-eyed rebel whose friends thought him like a "Polish Christ". So gripping is this material that "your heart slightly sinks" whenever English cuts to the US side of the story, "which is essentially a series of committee meetings".

The CIA's smuggling operation sought to bypass a Polish censorship system "which was both ubiquitous and ridiculous", said Piers Brendon in Literary Review. "Every typewriter had to be registered, access to photocopiers was restricted", and even a book about growing carrots was banned "because it implied that individuals as well as collectives could cultivate vegetables".

In such a climate, smuggled books were a lifeline, said John Simpson in The Guardian. "A book was like fresh air," a Polish activist recalls. "They allowed us to survive and not go mad." Finely written and well researched, this book is a reminder of the role literature played in the collapse of the "Soviet empire in Europe".

There is perhaps no clandestine institution on Earth more storied than the CIA, but over the past three weeks, the agency's goals have shifted significantly as President Donald Trump continues his unprecedented efforts to reshape the federal government. Less than a month into the Trump administration, the Central Intelligence Agency finds itself in the president's rapidly changing crosshairs, joining the many federal programs that have offered employees legally dubious buyout offers. As Trump, who has long railed against a supposed "deep state" of nebulous law enforcement and national security interests, casts his attention toward the CIA, experts are left wondering what the world's premier spy enterprise might look like should the president realize his vision.

Infusing the agency with 'renewed energy'

The buyout offers are a "signal to those who oppose Trump's agenda to find work elsewhere," said The Wall Street Journal. The goal is to "bring the agency in line with President Trump's priorities, including targeting drug cartels," and to have a workforce suited to the agency's "new goals, which also include Trump's trade war and undermining China." More broadly, Trump's vision for the agency is to have a "greater focus on the Western Hemisphere."

The buyouts and renewed focus on CIA priorities are part of a "holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy," a CIA spokesperson said to CBS News. The goal is to "provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission." The decision to include the CIA in Trump's broader federal buyout initiative appears to have come from newly installed Director John Ratcliffe — a longtime Trump loyalist — who "personally decided he also wanted the CIA to be involved," CNN said. However, one source said to the outlet, the effort may be "far less sweeping" than for agencies "not considered to be doing national security work." For instance, "some employees," such as those "handling high-priority tasks," would "not be eligible for the offer," said NBC News.

'Radical, unplanned and self-contradictory'

The CIA's overarching mission of protecting U.S. interests "requires depth of thought, strategy and long-term planning," said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Trump's plan to remake the agency exhibits "none of those qualities," and is instead "reactive, poorly designed and likely to achieve the opposite of its stated goal." Already there is "panic within the broader national security community," said NPR. Experts are worrying about the possibility that "years of experience, talent and secrets could soon be heading out the door." It's still unclear whether other intelligence agencies would "follow suit with a buyout offer," said the Journal.

Crucially, none of the Trump administration's planned reforms "freeze the actual new and emerging threats" eager to "pounce on any perception of polarization or additional vulnerabilities," said the Robert Lansing Institute for Global Threats and Democratic Studies. It is "entirely possible," then, that a host of American adversaries "stand to benefit the most" from a pivot from "reasonable, dedicated, thoughtful and necessary reform and review toward a radical, unplanned and self-contradictory near-elimination of the intelligence agencies in their conventional sense."

Donald Trump has signed an executive order to declassify documents about the killings of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. – to the delight of cynics and conspiracy theorists who, for years, have stoked rumours about the notorious assassinations.

Trump's order means that the "final secret files" are coming out on the murders that "shattered the 60s", said CNN.

The US Congress had already passed a law, in 1992, setting a release date in 2017 for most of the documents relating to the JFK assassination. But there had been "no congressional acts forcing the release of records" related to the assassinations of RFK and MLK Jr., said Forbes. It was Trump who decided that the release of those documents was "also in the public interest".

What happened to JFK, RFK and MLK Jr?

President John F. Kennedy was shot dead by Lee Harvey Oswald on a visit to Dallas, Texas in November 1963. Five years later, in June 1968, JFK's brother Robert was assassinated in Los Angeles while campaigning to become Democratic nominee for president – only two months after celebrated civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

All three killings are mired in continuing controversy. JFK conspiracy theories have become a veritable cottage industry over the decades. Robert F Kennedy Jr., who is RFK's son and Trump's nominee for health secretary does not believe Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of his father's killing, was responsible. And King's relatives believe white nationalist James Earl Ray, who fired the deadly shots, did not act alone and was instead part of a larger conspiracy, particularly in light of the FBI's extensive surveillance of King.

When will the documents be released?

The US attorney general and head of national intelligence have 15 days to "come up with a plan" to declassify the JFK files, and they must do the same, "within 45 days", for the other two cases, said Sky News. So its "unclear" exactly when the newly unclassified details will "see the light of day".

Didn't Trump already release the JFK files?

During his first presidential term, Trump authorised the disclosure of 19,045 documents relating to JFK, although many of them were heavily redacted at the request of the CIA and FBI. According to the National Archives, 99% of records related to JFK's death have already been released.

Will new details be revealed?

As he signed the executive order at the White House, Trump asked for the pen he used to be given to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a memento. But how much the upcoming revelations will appease RFK Jr. and other sceptics remains to be seen.

The remaining documents might clarify the extent to which the CIA was aware of, or even involved with, Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK's assassination – something at the centre of many people's suspicions, Jefferson Morley, editor of the JFK Facts newsletter, told the The Washington Post . Gerald Posner, who wrote the 1993 Kennedy assassination book "Case Closed", said he thinks Oswald "acted alone" but the new documents "might show the CIA failed to report him to the FBI" before the assassination.

Trump has said "everything will be revealed", said CNN, but the new information "may not satisfy" those who hope it will "fully clear the veil of mystery" that has surrounded all three killings.

Secrecy and security are hallmarks of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but the organization has now started performing one of its key duties out in the open: recruiting foreign spies. The agency has now released instructions in non-English languages for people in other countries who want to work as CIA informants.

The instructions are an attempt by the CIA to solicit information from authoritarian countries without putting American spies at risk or jeopardizing the lives of people living in these nations. But the success of this recruiting program could depend on a variety of international factors.

What are the CIA's new recruiting instructions?

The agency provided online instructions on "how to securely contact CIA via our public and Dark Web sites," the CIA said in a press release, advising people to use either a virtual private network (VPN) or the anonymous browser Tor. The instructions are available in Farsi, Mandarin and Korean. The agency is posting these instructions on Telegram, a social media network often used in authoritarian countries, as well as Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. It asks for people to send any useful information to the CIA, though it also cautions not to use any names associated with real identities.

These instructions are "just one way in which CIA is adapting to a new global environment of increased state repression and global surveillance," the agency said. Recruiting efforts of this nature have been "successful in Russia, and we want to make sure individuals in other authoritarian regimes know that we're open for business."

The instructions' three languages are widely used in countries under authoritarian regimes; Farsi is "spoken by more than 100 million people in Iran and nearby countries, while Mandarin, with more than 1 billion speakers, is the majority language in China," according to NBC News. Additionally, providing the instructions in Korean will potentially allow people in North Korea to contact the CIA.

How could this affect authoritarian regimes?

The United States' push for foreign intelligence is unsurprising as China "expands cooperation with Russia and Iran and flexes its regional military muscle," said Reuters. In particular, Russia, Iran, North Korea and China — countries that are all being targeted by the CIA's recruiting efforts — are "known within the U.S. intelligence community as 'hard targets' — countries whose governments are difficult to penetrate." At the same time, the U.S. is "grappling with Iran's conflict with Israel, its nuclear program, its growing links with Russia and its support for militant proxies."

The most notable of the intelligence-gathering efforts might be in China, where the "CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have faced questions about their broader collection capabilities," said Bloomberg, citing a 2017 report from The New York Times claiming that China had broken up several CIA spying operations. China has "ramped up efforts in recent years to warn the public, government workers and even university students about foreign espionage efforts," practices that have also been seen in Russia.

It is unclear how useful these U.S. efforts will be in all of these authoritarian countries — particularly North Korea. The CIA is "basing this off the success they had in Russia — but I would question how effective this will be considering most North Koreans don't have access to the internet," Mason Richey, an international politics professor at South Korea's Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said to the BBC.

There has long been a "dichotomy" in histories of the CIA, said Toby Harnden in The Spectator. While some have depicted America's foreign spying agency (founded by President Truman in 1947) as an "all-powerful evil force", others have presented it as "comically inept". 

The former accounts emphasise the argument that the CIA is "pulling the strings" everywhere. The latter highlights its "pratfalls" and "madcap schemes" – such as its ill-fated plot to assassinate Fidel Castro with exploding cigars, or its plan to discredit President Sukarno of Indonesia by faking his appearance in a porn film. In this fascinating new history, Hugh Wilford falls into "neither camp". 

A British historian who moved to California State University in 2006, Wilford is an "admirably fair-minded and dispassionate" guide. And he offers up a "lively and original thesis" – that the CIA is essentially an "imperial" body, which carried on much of the work that European intelligence services had done in the colonial era. 

Wilford argues that the "shadow of empire" informed everything the early CIA did, said Theo Zenou in The Sunday Times. Its agents were raised on "heroic tales of British empire"; many of them were devotees of T.E. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling. Allen Dulles, the CIA's long-time boss, had a "well-thumbed copy" of "Kim" – Kipling's 1901 masterpiece about a British spy in India – on his bedstand when he died in 1969. Such a culture, Wilford argues, made it natural for the CIA to function as the "secret weapon" of an increasingly imperialistic American state. From Vietnam to Guatemala, the agency "propped up pro-American regimes, toppled anti- American ones and spread American power". Written with "clarity and nuance", this is a "gripping" and comprehensive history. 

Wilford's account gives "fresh context" to such well-known chapters in the CIA's history as the 1953 coup in Iran, its covert action in Guatemala in 1954, and the "fiasco" of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, said Calder Walton in The Telegraph. Yet his book is by no means flawless. It's odd that he pays so little attention to the KGB's actions "in faraway lands", which generally "far outstripped the corresponding CIA activities". And his attempts to view more recent US actions through an imperial lens – such as the war in Afghanistan after 9/11 – are not wholly convincing. Nonetheless, his book is "important and engrossing" – and a must-read for "anyone interested in intelligence and national-security affairs today".

Thousands of classified documents relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy could finally be released this week after Joe Biden vowed to make them available to the public.

More than 15,000 files concerning the fatal shooting that took place in Dallas in 1963 remain locked away at the National Archives 59 years after the president’s death.

In October a lawsuit was filed against the Biden administration and National Archives demanding the release of all JFK-related documents amid reports that several government agencies, including the FBI and CIA, were desperately trying to keep at least some classified.

Do we know what is in them?

While many of the remaining classified files may be “only indirectly related to the assassination”, reported Politico, some come “directly from the FBI’s ‘main investigative case files’ about the president’s murder”.

That includes the all-important case files on Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin, and Jack Ruby, the Dallas strip club owner who murdered Oswald two days after Kennedy’s death.

According to Jefferson Morley, vice-president of the historical archive, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, these would shed light on, among other areas, a covert Cuba-related CIA programme that involved Oswald less than four months before he shot the president.

The Daily Mail said experts believe this could be the “smoking gun” proving direct ties between Oswald and the CIA.

Why have they been kept secret?

That thousands of documents related to JFK’s murder remain under lock and key at the National Archives is “in clear violation of the spirit of a landmark 1992 transparency law that was supposed to force the release of virtually all of them years ago”, said Politico.

The news site argued that the fact that anything about the assassination is still classified nearly 60 years after it took place, “and that the CIA, FBI and other agencies have refused to provide the public with a detailed explanation of why – has convinced an army of conspiracy theorists that their cynicism has always been justified”.

Internal correspondence between the National Archives and several US government agencies obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a furious bureaucratic tug-of-war between different departments, including the CIA, FBI and Pentagon, with several agencies “desperately trying to keep them under wraps”, said the Daily Mail.

The correspondence reveals the thinking behind some agencies wanting to keep documents classified. Of primary concern is that still-living intelligence and law-enforcement informants from the 1960s and 1970s could be at risk of intimidation or even violence if they were publicly identified.

So will they be released in full and on time?

Last year Biden ordered a review into the remaining files, issuing a memo delaying the documents’ release until this month unless federal agencies persuaded him to give them even more time.

His administration “is now facing a federal lawsuit from a New York-based lawyer who discovered that the CIA, FBI, DEA and other agencies are hell-bent on keeping the files secret”, said the Daily Mail, “lending more credence to the incredulity of conspiracy theorists with each passing year”.

If Biden makes the documents public on 15 December, as promised, “he would have broad bipartisan and bicoastal support”, said NBC News.

According to a survey of 2,000 US voters conducted by the Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, seven out of ten want the president to honour his commitment made last year and release the final trove of JFK assassination records in full.

Half of voters believe the assassination involved multiple conspirators while 38% said Oswald was the lone gunman, the poll showed.

“There’s not a lot that unites a lot of American voters these days, but one of the few things that does is to see President Biden release the long-overdue JFK files as he promised,” said Amandi.

Vladimir Putin has handed control of Russia’s intelligence operations in Ukraine to the spying unit that orchestrated the attempted assassination of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, it has emerged.

The GRU, Moscow’s foreign military intelligence agency, is taking over from the FSB, the country’s principal security organisation, amid reports that the latter is being “blamed for failings” that contributed to Russia’s “humiliating retreat from Kyiv”, The Telegraph said.

Putin’s invasion has prompted an “unprecedented wave of expulsions of Russian diplomats” from Europe, The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour said, a move that is not only “symbolic” but may “mark the end of an era” for overseas espionage.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, bye

The US and Europe have sought to “crack down on Russian spies” since Putin gave the green light for an invasion, Axios reported. This has led to the “expulsion of more than 400 Russian diplomats and embassy staff” as of early April.

Many of them were declared “persona non grata”, meaning they were suspected of being “intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover”. And their removal could “degrade Russia’s ability to spy and carry out subversive activities on Western soil”.

In what is thought to be an effort to reverse the damage, Moscow has “ordered tens of thousands of new diplomatic passports” as part of a “suspected scam to allow officials and spies – and their spouses – to bypass Western sanctions”, the Daily Mail reported.

Citing a report by Russian opposition media outlet SOTA, the Mail said the foreign ministry has “suddenly demanded the rapid printing of almost 175,000 of the elite travel documents at a cost of £3.3million”.

Boarding call

In what has developed into an “international game of spy vs. spy”, The Washington Post said that the expulsions have “dealt Russia a potentially crippling blow”.

The Kremlin and FSB depended on these operatives “to gather intelligence inside the countries where they serve”, meaning the move “could dismantle large parts of Moscow’s spy networks”.

“The intelligence war with Russia is at full swing,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the agency’s operations in Europe and Russia, told the paper. “This will prove to be a significant dent in Russian intelligence operations in Europe.”

The individuals being expelled “will not be chosen at random”, said The Guardian’s Wintour. Instead, they will be handed a plane ticket home if “there is evidence they are in breach of the Vienna convention, the code that governs legitimate diplomacy”.

Foreign ministries are “reluctant to expel” suspected spies “unless the evidence is overwhelming”, he continued. This is because “diplomats naturally believe in their profession” and “regard experts in situ” as “vital to conveying accurate information about their host country back to their capital”.

With that in mind, “few think” the wave of expulsions “can be reversed for decades to come”, he added.

Close collaboration

While most experts consider the damage done to Russia’s intelligence network to be immense, former US officials have warned that the Biden administration should “shut up” about their close collaboration with the government in Kyiv.

After senior officials told The New York Times that the US provided intelligence about Russian units that allowed Ukraine to target and kill Russian generals in the field, John Sipher, a former member of the CIA Clandestine Service, tweeted: “Shut up about it.”

His warning that the briefings could further exacerbate tensions between the US and Russia was echoed by Professor Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Moscow, who added: “No one should be talking to [the] press about such things.”

Collaboration between Western intelligence agencies and their allies in Ukraine has been extensive, GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming yesterday told a cyber security conference in Wales, explaining that the UK’s spying agency is “seeing this conflict in near real time in information, cyber and technology spaces.

“It is a remarkable feature of this war just how much information about the behaviours and tactics of the Russian forces are out in the public domain – and how much intelligence has been released by Western allies to challenge and get ahead of Putin’s actions.

“This is modern warfare influenced and shaped by the democratisation of information.”

‘Gung-ho forces’

With his international web of spies being dismantled by the minute, Putin has turned to the GRU to “strengthen its spy capabilities”, The Telegraph reported.

The “new man in charge of Putin’s intelligence gathering” is Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, who has already been “implicated in attacks and assassination attempts against the West”.

In an article for the Washington-based Centre for European Policy Analysis, investigative journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov said: “He [Alekseyev] is accused by the UK and the European Union of overseeing the chemical weapons attack in Salisbury in 2018.

“An experienced special forces officer, he is also sanctioned by the US for direct cyber interference in the US 2016 election.”

Alekseyev also “saw military action in Syria, and he was involved in the conflict in Donbas”, they wrote. His fellow troops viewed him as “brutal and self-confident to the point of recklessness”.

Alekseyev’s appointment suggests that “it is the gung-ho forces within Russia’s spy community that are now charged with plucking victory from the morass of their country’s worst military and intelligence failure since World War II”, they added.

Ariel Henry has been sworn in as Haiti’s new prime minister following the assassination two weeks ago of the man who handpicked him for the role.

President Jovenel Moise chose Henry just days before being gunned down at his home in the capital Port-au-Prince. But Moise’s death triggered what the BBC describes as a “political tussle” between Henry and interim PM Claude Joseph, who had been in the post since April.

Addressing crowds in the nation’s capital after being sworn in yesterday, Henry said that “one of my priority tasks will be to reassure the people that we will do everything to restore order and security”. Yet pundits fear this challenge may prove too great for the new PM, who inherits a “strife-torn” nation that “was already mired in political and security crises, no working parliament, frequent anti-government protests and a surge in gang violence”, the broadcaster reports.

‘Protracted interference’

“Everyone who knows me, knows that I am not interested in this battle, or in any kind of power grab,” Joseph told The Washington Post after agreeing on Sunday to step down. “The president was a friend to me. I am just interested in seeing justice for him.”

But despite Joseph’s seeming olive branch, whether Henry faces a “battle” to restore order is likely to be decided by shadowy criminal forces within Haiti who have long been assumed to be pulling the strings behind the facade of a democratic society.

The details surrounding Moise’s assassination “remain a mystery”, says the BBC.

All the same, his killing is “brutally representative of the situation” in “a country that since 2018 has been convulsed by protests and violence”, says The Guardian, and “where guns - and those prepared to use them - are the currency in an escalating crisis”.

The most impoverished country in the western hemisphere, Haiti “has become routine to see one of the world’s most corrupt and ill-governed states lurch from catastrophe to catastrophe, amid coups, failed governments and natural disasters”, the newspaper continues.

As the first black-led independent country following a successful slave revolt in the late 18th century, Haiti has “faced blockades, isolation and protracted interference over two centuries from white-majority powers, including France, which imposed a century of impoverishing reparations for the loss of its slaves, only paid off in 1947”.

In 1990, former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was chosen as the nation’s PM in what is widely considered to be the country’s first truly democratic election. However, he was ousted a year later in a CIA-backed coup.

And Western powers have continued to interfere in Haiti.

As The Independent notes, Joseph said he would stand aside as PM just “two days after a group of key foreign nations” announced that they supported Henry to take over.

“Neither had been elected,” the paper adds. And while “from a distance, it might appear the arrangement brokered by the international community was intended to offer calm amid chaos and anxiety”, some Haitians feel that the intervention “mirrors the fate suffered by Haiti for generations - or even centuries”.

“Some of the toxic consequences of intervention have been obvious,” says The Guardian, but others, such as the conditional delivery of aid, “have been more subtle”.

“Rather than strengthening institutions, the mechanisms by which [aid] has been delivered inherently undermine [Haitian institutions], especially in more recent decades, which has seen the outsourcing of the state,” Jake Johnston, a researcher at the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, told the paper.

“Aid to Haiti has been used for political purposes going back years. It is transactional. It has gone up under certain leaders and it has gone down when someone isn’t liked, or it goes to an organisation that shares the interest of the donor country.”

What next?

Civil society leaders in Haiti have “sharply criticised the international community for backing Henry”, arguing that “a new interim government decoupled from Haiti’s jostling political parties” should be formed to organise elections, The Washington Post says.

Many “had been calling for Moise to step down” prior to his death, the paper adds, and have pledged not to recognise “anyone as interim leader whom the slain president had named”.

“Haitians are facing systematic human rights violations - corruption, assassination, gangs massacres,” lawyer Rosy Auguste Ducena, an activist with the human Haiti-based National Network for the Defense of Human Rights, told The Independent.

Meanwhile, foreign intervention - both military and humanitarian - means the international community “dictates what they want to see in Haiti”, she continued. “But, at the end of the day, we have not seen any improvement in the situation.

“Today, the civil society is asking for a chance to let Haitians find solutions to their own problems, without international interference.”

However, some pundits point out that a “profound disconnect between a barely governing ruling class, drawn from a wealthy elite, and the barely governed” has created “little incentive for those notionally in charge to combat Haiti’s many problems”, says The Guardian.

According to the paper, Henry is seen by many as the latest in a string of leaders drawn from the same stock, prompting suggestions that “politicians and criminals alike” will continue to “enjoy impunity”, relying “on armed gangs - operating like paramilitaries - rather than electoral accountability to remain in office”.

Moise’s reign saw him “steadily hollow out Haiti’s institutions” amid allegations of “corruption and links to gangs”, says the Financial Times. “But his sudden demise leaves a dangerous vacuum.”

The Joe Biden administration has said that the 100,000 Haitians who arrived in the US before 21 May will be granted the right to apply for Temporary Protected Status, an offer extended to citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters or armed conflict.

But “that won’t help anyone who has decided to leave Haiti in light of the recent constitutional crisis and power struggle”, says Vox.

Nor will it solve the ongoing issues at home, where Henry has inherited a “long-running democratic crisis” stemming from a perception that multiple “governments have been largely divorced from Haitians’ lives of poverty”, The Guardian adds.

Instead, his appointment has perpetuated the sense that Haiti’s political class come “from within the same tight circle of politically connected oligarchs with the blessing of foreign powers, not least Washington”.

The US government has ordered an investigation into a spate of mysterious brain injuries that have impacted up to 130 US personnel since 2016.

Reports of “long-term brain injuries including debilitating headaches” among staff from the US State Department, Defence Department and CIA who have served overseas have caused “broad concern” in the Joe Biden administration, The New York Times (NYT) reports.

According to the National Security Council, the affected staff describe “experiencing ‘sensory phenomena’, such as sound, pressure or heat, along with or followed by physical symptoms, such as sudden-onset vertigo, nausea, and head or neck pain”, says the paper.

Security headache

No conclusive explanation has been found for the sudden illnesses - widely known as “Havana syndrome”, because the first cases occurred in the US Embassy in Cuba. But as the tally of reported victims continues to climb, “there is growing pressure from Congress to figure out what has affected so many US diplomats, spies and other officials - and who or what is behind it”, says ABC News.

A National Security Council spokesperson confirmed to the broadcaster that President Biden has launched a review into whether there are further cases that have not been recorded and whether the mysterious illnesses fit into a “broader pattern”.

“At this point, at this moment, we don’t know the cause of these incidents, which are both limited in nature and the vast majority of which have been reported overseas,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told a press briefing yesterday, amid reports that the CIA has formed a new “targeting cell” to investigate the outbreaks.

“The initial publicly confirmed cases were concentrated in China and Cuba and numbered about 60,” says the NYT. But current and former officials told the paper that a total of “more than 130 people” have been impacted, including “cases from Europe and elsewhere in Asia”.

Sources say that at least three CIA officers have reported serious health effects from episodes overseas since December 2020. “One occurred within the past two weeks, and all have required the officers to undergo outpatient treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center or other facilities,” according to the NYT.

Indeed, while “the severity of the brain injuries has ranged widely” among all of the reported victims, the paper continues, some have suffered “chronic, potentially irreversible symptoms and pain, suggesting potentially permanent brain injury”.

Amid growing concern among lawmakers, senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio - the most senior Democrat and Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee - issued a statement at the end of April warning that “this pattern of attacking our fellow citizens serving our government appears to be increasing”.

“We have already held fact finding hearings on these debilitating attacks, many of which result in medically confirmed cases of Traumatic Brain Injury, and will do more,” pledged committee chair Warner and vice-chair Rubio.

All in the mind

US security officials have considered a series of possible explanations for the head injuries, with some experts even suggesting that outbreaks might even be down to “mass hysteria”.

However, a report released in December on the findings of a study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) suggested that the true culprit may be a “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” - essentially, some form of targeted microwave weapon. The NYT says that some government officials agree that “a microwave or directed-energy device is the most likely cause”.

However, the NAS experts also considered the possibility of “chemical exposures, infectious diseases such as Zika and psychological issues” - but failed to reach a definitive conclusion.

China has deployed microwave weapons during skirmishes with India on its Himalayan border, where a no-live-shots agreement is in place to avoid violent escalation.

In November last year, the Chinese military used “high-energy electromagnetic radiation” technology to effectively turn two strategically important hilltops that had been occupied by Indian soldiers “into a microwave oven”, as The Times reported at the time. The attack was said to have left Indian troops vomiting and unable to stand, allowing the People’s Liberation Army to retake the hilltops without firing a shot.

As the CIA investigates whether similar technology could have been used against embassy staff, US federal agencies are also probing “at least two possible incidents on US soil”, including one that took place “near the White House” in November 2020, CNN reports.

The broadcaster adds that the incidents “appear similar” to the “invisible attacks” on overseas US personnel - and points out that the possibility a similar offensive was launched so close to the White House “is particularly alarming”.

“Some Pentagon officials believe Russia’s military intelligence agency” may be behind the various attacks over the past five years, the NYT reports - an allegation that Moscow has denied.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration “is trying to strike a careful balance between showing officials that they are taking the issue seriously and trying to keep panic from spreading, either inside the government or among the public”, the paper adds.

As the investigation continues, National Security Council spokesperson Emily J. Horne promised that “we are bringing the US government’s resources to bear to get to the bottom of this”.

Reports that the woman accused of killing British teenager Harry Dunn is a former senior CIA agent has fuelled theories that the US has offered her special protection.

According to The Mail on Sunday, British ministers are also aware of Anne Sacoolas’s “career in espionage”, although she was not registered as an employee of the spy service when she moved to Britain with her diplomat husband.

The US is refusing to extradite Sacoolas, who fled the UK after crashing into the 19-year-old’s motorbike in Northamptonshire last August.

Following the espionage reports, Dunn’s mother Charlotte Charles said that “things are now beginning to fall into place”.

What do we know about Sacoolas?

A US government source told The Mail on Sunday that the fugitive mother-of-three was “more senior than her husband” in the country’s intelligence community.

Multiple sources say that she was “not active” in the UK, but one added: “You never really leave the CIA.”

The US State Department declined to comment on the claims, telling the newspaper: “The driver was the spouse of an accredited diplomat to the United Kingdom.”

But “the disclosure that the wanted woman was in the CIA will fuel suspicions that the US is giving her special protection and further strain relations between the nations”, says The Times.

Dunn’s family has also condemned Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab for concealing Sacoolas’s CIA background from them, The Guardian reports.

They claim that when they asked him about her role in the UK, the minister confirmed that she had been an employee of the US State Department, but did not mention that she was an ex-CIA officer.

Dunn’s mother said: “How could [the British government] do this to us? We have thrown ourselves into building relationships with the Government despite the terrible way they were treating us. We believe in giving people a second chance. But I am livid today and my family are full of anger.”

In comments to the Mail, she added: “Whether or not you are a CIA officer, a diplomat or anyone else, the Vienna Convention states that you must abide by and respect the rules and regulations of the host country.”

Sacoolas has been charged with causing death by dangerous driving over the fatal crash last year, when she allegedly collided head-on with Dunn while driving on the wrong side of the road outside RAF Croughton base. The teenager suffered multiple injuries and later died in hospital.

Claiming diplomatic immunity, Sacoolas then fled the UK for the US. The US government claims the family notified the Foreign Office that they were leaving, the Mail reports.

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What next?

The UK and US governments insist that, at the time of the accident, Sacoolas had diplomatic immunity as her husband was working as a technical officer at the Northamptonshire air base.

However, The Guardian reports that Raab was said to be “incandescent with rage” after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month rejected a request to extradite Sacoolas.

The Crown Prosecution Service had announced in December that it was charging Sacoolas over Harry’s death. But her lawyers said she would not return to the UK voluntarily, and insisted that the 14-year prison term she could face was “not proportionate” for what was “a terrible but unintentional accident”.

Last week, the Daily Mail tracked down Sacoolas to Virginia, where she was pictured driving her children to school.

Dunn’s parents are now calling for a public inquiry into the killing, Sky News reports. Their spokesperson, lawyer Radd Seiger, said it was “high time that the nation can see with full transparency whether or not the Government prioritised protecting the identity of the Sacoolas family over the welfare and rights of Harry’s family”.

Edward Snowden has been granted Russian citizenship nine years after the former US intelligence contractor, who leaked classified surveillance data, fled his homeland and settled in Moscow.

According to The Times, the whistleblower’s name “appeared on a list of 72 foreigners” granted passports in a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin.

Snowden, 39, is still wanted in the US on spying charges. The move, therefore, “may be intended as a provocation during a low point in relations with the US”, added the paper.

Earlier this week, Snowden tweeted: “After two years of waiting and nearly ten years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them – and for us all.”

Snowden was granted permanent residency in Russia in October 2020. At the time said he intended to apply for Russian citizenship while also keeping his US nationality.

The former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor became a household name in 2013 after leaking details of extensive internet and phone surveillance by US intelligence agencies worldwide. His actions polarised commentators, with some viewing him as a human rights hero while others called him a traitor to his nation.

Last year, a US appeal court found the surveillance programme Snowden exposed was unlawful, and that intelligence leaders who had publicly defended the programme had lied.

Early years

Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on 21 June 1983.

He dropped out of high school and studied computers at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland, before spending four months in 2004 in special-forces training in the US Army Reserves.

Snowden told The Guardian in 2013 that he was discharged from the army after he “broke both his legs in a training accident”, but an unclassified report published by the US House Intelligence Committee refuted his version of events, stating: “He claimed to have left army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints.”

Wired reported that Snowden subsequently landed a job as a security guard at a “top-secret facility that required him to get a high-level security clearance”, passing polygraph exams and background checks that would pave the way for jobs at the CIA and later the NSA.

Following a posting in Japan as a technologist, Snowden grew disillusioned about the far-reaching surveillance operations of the US government, particularly in regards to the secret monitoring of mobile phones and browser activity. While working with tech consulting firm Booz Allen, he began digitally storing highly confidential NSA documents, “building a dossier on practices that he found invasive and disturbing”, including “vast information on the NSA’s domestic surveillance practices”, said Biography.com.

He also began anonymously contacting journalists around the world in preparation for a massive leak of the secret documents.

Leak and escape

In spring 2013, Snowden told his NSA supervisor that he had been diagnosed with epilepsy and needed a leave of absence. At this point, he was stationed at the NSA’s Hawaii Cryptologic Center, more than 5,000 miles away from the NSA headquarters in Maryland.

For legal reasons, Snowden has never disclosed exactly when or how he smuggled the data out of the facility. However, the 2016 biopic Snowden depicts him embedding a micro SD card in a Rubik’s Cube that he hands to a security guard as he passes through a metal detector on the way out of the building.

On 20 May 2013, Snowden boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he hid out in various locations with the help of activists and lawyers, and held a series of secret meetings with Guardian journalists as well as filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Following a number of extradition attempts, in June 2013 he attempted to fly to Ecuador via first Moscow and then the Cuban capital Havana, but his passport was cancelled midway through the journey. The fugitive was left stranded in Russia, where he successfully applied for asylum.

What was in the leaks?

They contained previously unpublished details of a major global surveillance apparatus run by the NSA with the help of three partners in the Five Eyes security network – Australia's Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSEC).

Within this framework was a programme known as Prism, which allows for court-approved direct access to the public’s Google and Yahoo accounts without their knowledge. The documents also revealed details of “Tempora”, a British black-ops surveillance programme run by GCHQ.

German news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA kept a spy database on more than 100 world leaders, including Angela Merkel, the German chancellor at the time.

Wired claimed that Snowden was particularly enraged by a document from Keith Alexander, NSA director from 2005 to 2014, that “showed the NSA was spying on the pornography-viewing habits of political radicals”, with the accompanying memo suggesting that the agency could use these so-called “personal vulnerabilities” to destroy the reputations of government critics.

Under the law at the time, individuals were to be targeted only if they were accused of plotting terrorism.

Snowden was reportedly “astonished” by the memo. “It’s much like how the FBI tried to use Martin Luther King’s infidelity to talk him into killing himself,” he said. “We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back in the 1960s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we getting involved in this again?”

Living in Russia

On 21 June 2013 – Snowden’s 30th birthday – the US Department of Justice unsealed charges against him of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property.

Snowden fled but ended up stranded at a Moscow airport, where he spent 40 days stuck in the confines of the transit zone. However, on 1 August, he was granted temporary asylum in Russia for one year, and was later granted a residency permit.

In an interview with CBS News in 2019, news anchor Gayle King told Snowden that living in Russia meant the “optics are not good” for him, the Daily Express reported at the time. Snowden said: “Of course it’s problematic and of course I would like to return to the United States.”

He has previously stated that he feels unsafe living in Russia, and had asked France to grant him asylum.

Nevertheless, he has spent the past nine years living in Moscow, and married his American partner Lindsay Mills in the city in 2017, said The Telegraph. The couple have since had two children.

He tweeted in November 2020: “Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love – including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the States, so the whole family can be reunited.”

His new Russian citizenship has led some to speculate he could be called up to join the Russian military as part of Putin’s “partial mobilisation” of more than 300,000 conscripted troops.

The BBC reported that on Monday Snowden’s lawyer Anatoliy Kucherena was “quoted by Russian state-run news agencies as saying that his client has never served in the Russian army, and therefore would not be called up” to fight.

The Government of Canada is attempting to reassure its allies after one of the country’s top intelligence officials was arrested for allegedly violating national security laws.

On Friday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) charged Cameron Ortis – head of the police force’s own intelligence unit – with leaking or offering to share covert data. After concerns were raised about the content of this information, the RCMP admitted Ortis had “access to intelligence originating from our partners both domestically and internationally”.

The row poses a major threat to Canada’s standing among the so-called Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing network set up in the wake of the Second World War that also includes the US, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The RCMP has suggested the other Five Eyes members may decide they can no longer trust Canada, prompting Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to announced this week that Ottawa is in “direct communications with our allies” to assess the potential damage, reports Reuters.

“We are also working with them to reassure them, but we want to ensure that everyone understands that we are taking this situation very seriously,” Trudeau said during an election campaign stop in Newfoundland.

But his words have done little to quell widespread fears over the alleged leak. Stephanie Carvin, a professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University and former government national security analyst, described the reported breach as “potentially the worst” in Canadian intelligence history, says The Times.

What is the Five Eyes?

Building on a successful intelligence network constructed during WWII, the UK and US created the UKUSA Agreement in 1946, in which they vowed to share vital information pertaining to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Canada joined in 1948, followed by Australia and New Zealand in 1956, leading to the organisation’s Five Eyes nickname.

CNN says that although there are other multilateral intelligence-sharing arrangements, “such as within Nato”, the Five Eyes is different because “more information gets shared” owing to a “common language and decades of trust”.

The organisation is also notorious for its selective treatment of outsiders, only sharing information with others on a case-by-case basis.

US whistle-blower Edward Snowden has described the Five Eyes as a “supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries”. In 2013, Snowden leaked documents that alleged members of the alliance “have been spying on one another’s citizens and sharing the collected information with each other” in order to “circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens”.

Who is Cameron Ortis?

The 47-year-old head of the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Centre graduated from the University of British Columbia with a doctorate in political science before becoming an adviser for the Canadian federal government in 2007. He is a proficient Mandarin speaker.

Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reports that his work in the RCMP “gave him broad access to both Canadian and allied intelligence”, adding that “as recently as last month, he was working on a probe of defrauded Russian tax money being laundered through Canada”.

Sources familiar with his professional role said Otis would have had knowledge of code words and operations.

Friends and colleagues told the newspaper that he “offered up few details about what he was working on, and with whom”.

Why has he been arrested?

The arrest last week follows a secretive in-depth inquiry that started last year, according to reports. Ortis is accused of communicating operational information in 2015 and of gathering intelligence last year to share with a foreign entity or terrorist group. He faces seven charges under the Security of Information Act and the criminal code.

The charges filed against him include the “unauthorised communication of special operational information”, possessing a device or software “useful for concealing the content of information or for surreptitiously communicating, obtaining or retaining information”, and breach of trust by a public officer.

According to Canadian federal prosecutors, Ortis “obtained, stored [and] processed sensitive information, we believe with the intent to communicate it to people he shouldn’t be communicating it to”.

It is not currently known who those people might be, but state-run broadcaster CBC News claims to have seen documents that tie Ortis to Vincent Ramos, the former CEO of a Vancouver company that sold modified Blackberry devices to organised crime rings including the infamous Sinaloa drug cartel.

US police arrested Ramos, a Canadian citizen, last year and charged him with conspiring to distribute narcotics and racketeering. After pleading guilty in October, he was sentenced to nine years in prison.

CBC News alleges that leaked papers from the FBI and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment say that “a person was sending emails” to Ramos “offering to provide valuable information”.

“The documents allege that person was Ortis,” says the broadcaster.

One message quoted in the files reportedly said: “You don’t know me. I have information that I am confident you will find very valuable.”

Why are allies worried?

According to The Guardian, the breach has “sent tremors through the Five Eyes”, with the other members “concerned that their own secretive intelligence-gathering methods might also be compromised”.

On Tuesday, Canadian leader Trudeau stated that he wanted to “ensure that everyone understands that we are taking this situation very seriously”, but refused to offer further details.

But RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki admitted there was “always the possibility” that partner agencies might lose trust in Canada’s security apparatus.

“I would definitely imagine that there is concern amongst our Five Eyes community as well as within Canada,” she said.

However, a former intelligence analyst for the Australian government told The Guardian that the Five Eyes alliance was not under threat.

“While it’s very serious, and countries will be concerned, I don’t think it’s going to undermine the Five Eyes arrangements,” said Daniel Flitton, of the Lowy Institute think tank. “Ultimately, what this reflects is that the weakest part of any security system is the people that you let have access.”

A shadowy group committed to overthrowing the North Korean regime has claimed responsibility for a violent raid on the country’s embassy in Madrid last month.

Ten members of the Cheollima Civil Defence (CDC), a self-styled human rights group and “government-in-waiting”, shackled beat and interrogated embassy staff during the incident on 22 February, a Spanish high court judge has revealed.

Writing on its own website that it had “responded to an urgent situation in the Madrid embassy”, “it remains unclear why the raid took place”, says the BBC.

It took place less than a week before the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, met US President Donald Trump in Hanoi for denuclearisation talks, “prompting speculation that the group was attempting to obtain information about North Korea’s former ambassador to Spain, Kim Hyok Chol”, reports The Guardian.

The intruders reportedly made off with computers, a phone and hard discs. “The group’s brazen actions led some to speculate that there could be serious dissent against Kim Jong Un taking shape”, reports Reuters “but other analysts were more sceptical, and say there are lingering questions over possible ties to foreign intelligence agencies”.

In a post the CDC, also known as Free Joseon, said it had “shared information of enormous potential value” with the FBI, the US intelligence agency, “under mutually agreed terms of confidentiality”.

El Pais had initially reported that investigators from the Spanish police and National Intelligence Center (CNI) had linked the embassy attack to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), something if proven “could lead to a diplomatic spat between Madrid and Washington”.

The group has denied it was working with FBI or any other foreign organisation and the US government has also denied any involvement in the raid.

However, Reuters quoted “a judicial source as saying that [high court judge Jose] de la Mata believes all of the identified suspects fled to the US after the raid”.

“The Cheollima Civil Defence has been a topic of conversation among journalists for months”, says the BBC’s Laura Bicker, “but there are still so many questions”.

Cheollima Civil Defence, which takes its name from a winged horse commonly featured in East Asian mythology, first came to prominence after taking credit for getting Kim Jong Un's nephew, Kim Han Sol, safely out of Macau after the assassination of his father.

On 1 March the group published a statement declaring itself the North Korean provisional government in exile and vowed to overthrow the regime for committing crimes against humanity.

Justin McCurry in The Guardian writes that “the group’s use of direct action contrasts with other movements, which have traditionally used propaganda, sent inside the country via leaflets and USB drives, to foment popular opposition to Kim Jong Un’s regime”.

The CDC is believed to be led by Adrian Hong Chang, a Mexican citizen and well-known North Korean human rights activist who lives in the US.

He has helped defectors flee North Korea in the past “but where would he get the funding and the know-how to carry out an operation such as this?” asks Bicker.

Whoever is ultimately behind it, the BBC says the raid “has exposed a group which was once in the shadows and put it firmly in a legal spotlight where it may not want to be”.

A court in Guatemala has ruled that genocide was committed against ethnic Mayan civilians during the country’s protracted civil war but has acquitted a former military chief of ordering the mass murder.

Retired general Jose Mauricio Rodriguez, 73, was accused of ordering the killings of almost 1,800 indigenous Ixil civilians, and of disappearing tens of thousands more, during the dictatorship of Efrain Rios Montt in 1982 and 1983. The dictator’s brutal 14 months in power are considered the “darkest hours” of the Guatemalan civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.

The court’s ruling is the culmination of the Guatemalan Maya’s decades-long fight for justice, a process that has been fraught with retrials, appeals and overturned convictions. “The harm caused by the genocide affects the lives of many Mayan Guatemalans even today,” says Luke Moffett, a law lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, in an article on The Conversation.

But what happened in Guatemala, and why has justice eluded the survivors?

Why was there civil war?

For more than a decade from 1931, Guatemala was led by Jorge Ubico, a ruthless CIA-backed dictator who gave sweeping concessions to the US-based United Fruit Company, a vast corporation with control over the politics of multiple countries in the region.

In 1944, a popular uprising against Ubico led to the overthrow of his government. A democratic election the following year brought Juan Jose Arevalo into office as president, before Jacobo Arbenz took power in 1951. Arbenz’s left-wing policies, which included plans to nationalise United Fruit Company plantations, prompted the US to orchestrate a 1954 coup to replace him with another authoritarian dictator, Carlos Castillo Armas.

Castillo Armas was assassinated in 1957, and was in turn replaced by fellow conservative Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes in a disputed election. The vote triggered extreme social unrest and the rise of the left-wing Revolutionary Movement 13th November (MR-13) and Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), which took up arms against the government.

Rios Montt

The war was characterised by indiscriminate state-sanctioned violence against the civilian population. More than 200,000 people were killed - most of them indigenous - and many more were raped and tortured, according to the Public Radio International news site. At least half a million Guatemalans were driven from their homes.

A 1982 coup saw power seized by military general Efrain Rios Montt, who ramped up the campaign of violence against mostly-Mayan rural communities in order to “to make way for large-scale farming, mining, and hydroelectric programmes”, says Moffett on The Conversation.

During his reign, Rios Montt instigated a “ground campaign that led to a string of horrific massacres against the civilian population”, says travel site Culture Trip. Moffett adds that the killing of so many Mayans “badly damaged their transmission of oral history and traditional knowledge”, with ramifications into the present day.

The murders under Rios Montt are often referred to as the Silent Genocide. Jose Mauricio Rodriguez was the head of military intelligence during this time.

Rios Montt was overthrown in 1983 by his own defence secretary, before a 1996 peace agreement brought the war in the Central American nation to an end.

Trial and acquittal

In May 2013, a court found Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity but acquitted Rodriguez, Reuters reports. However, “just ten days afterwards, the country’s top court quashed the conviction on a technicality after persistent efforts by [Rios Montt’s] defence team to derail the trial with complex appeals”, the news site adds.

In 2017, a retrial began, despite Montt’s senile dementia rendering him unfit for court appearance. He died in April this year, before a verdict could be handed down.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez was subject to a full retrial, during which he maintained his innocence.“I did not do or order others to do all the things it’s said happened,” he told the court. “I ask you give me my freedom. There isn’t a piece of evidence that I ordered the killings.”

Family members of the Ixil Mayans laid flowers and photos outside the Guatemala City court as they awaited the verdict, which saw two of three judges on the panel vote to absolve Rodriguez, formally acquitting him.

“There is no evidence that shows that the accused had knowledge of what was happening in the conflict areas. The accused could not issue orders due to the rank and position he held in the army,” said judge Delmer Gonzalez.

The sole dissenting judge, Sara Yoc Yol, said: “He should have been sentenced because he handed over all that information and as far as I’m concerned he is guilty of genocide.”

Donald Trump has revoked the security clearance of a former director of the CIA, in an unusual move that appears to be politically motivated.

The White House announced yesterday that former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance would be pulled, which CNN says is an “unprecedented use of a president’s authority over the classification system to strike back at one of his prominent critics”.

Why has Brennan’s security clearance been revoked?

CNBC has described the withdrawal of Brennan’s security credentials as “more of a political than practical move”.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, reading from a statement by Trump, said: “Mr Brennan’s lying and recent conduct characterised by increasingly frenzied commentary is wholly inconsistent with access to the nation's most closely held secrets.”

How did Brennan react?

Brennan responded to the announcement on Twitter, saying: “This action is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics. It should gravely worry all Americans… My principles are worth far more than clearances. I will not relent.”

Who could be next?

Trump foreshadowed his latest move at the end of July, when he announced he was exploring the option of revoking security clearances for a number of former intelligence officials, including Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former Director of the National Security Agency Michael Hayden, among others.

Time reports that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that while Trump “has the authority to revoke the clearances”, doing so in response to criticism would be “a very, very petty thing to do” and an “abuse of the system.”

According to CNN, “Singling out dissenting former public servants in this way is a norm-busting power play that might seem tame in political systems ruled with an iron grip by Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping, who Trump admires. But it would be fueled by a strongman's instinct that both those leaders might recognise.”

Five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed in Dallas, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic primary on 5 June 1968.

In the half-century since his death, Bobby Kennedy (as he was known) “has come to embody the Democratic Party’s lost dream”, says Politico’s Joshua Zeitz. He alone, it seemed, “could draw working-class white, black and Latino voters into an umbrella coalition”.

He was an “activist champion of the country’s disinherited”, Chris Matthews, the MSNBC host and longtime political observer, tells Zeitz. He “seemed uniquely capable of preaching a message of reconciliation in a country violently torn at the seams in 1968”, adds Zeitz.

But others suggest Kennedy’s path to the presidency wasn’t so clear cut. Even one of his aides, Jeff Greenfield, who wrote an alternative history account of a Robert F. Kennedy presidency, “concedes that on this day 50 years ago the path to that actually happening was rocky and uncertain”, says New York magazine.

“We were losing altitude,” de facto campaign manager Fred Dutton told Greenfield. In fact, the day of Kennedy’s death, Dutton “was sceptical enough of our chances to suggest that RFK would take the vice-presidential slot if offered”, says Greenfield.

In the end the world was robbed of even that possibility. But, 50 years after the assassination, Kennedy’s son is calling for a new investigation, as Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of his father’s murder, remains in prison serving a life sentence.

Last year Robert F. Kennedy Jr met Sirhan “face-to-face”, reports CBS News. He left that meeting believing the gunman had been “falsely accused”.

Kennedy Jr told The Washington Post that once he saw the autopsy report, “I didn’t feel it was something I could dismiss. I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.”

So what are the theories surrounding Robert F. Kennedy’s death?

Sirhan Sirhan

A jury convicted Sirhan of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death in 1969. This was commuted to a life term in 1972. Sirhan’s appeals have been rejected “at every level”, according to The Washington Post. They were rejected as recently as two years ago, “even with the courts considering new evidence that has emerged over the years that as many as 13 shots were fired when Sirhan’s gun held only eight bullets”.

There’s plenty of “damning evidence” against Sirhan, adds the paper. This includes his confession at trial, the hours of target practice with his pistol earlier in the day and taking the gun into the Ambassador Hotel that night.

Immediately after his arrest, following the shooting, Sirhan told his captors that he’d made the decision to kill Kennedy only three weeks earlier, reports the Israeli news organisation Haaretz. “On the radio, he had heard a speech delivered by the candidate during a visit to a synagogue, in which Kennedy promised to arm Israel with dozens of warplanes, calling it the lesson he’d learned from the Six-Day War a year earlier.”

Sirhan is now 74.

The second shooter theory

One of the driving forces behind the belief that there was a second gunman is the testimony of Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi. He maintained from the start that Kennedy was shot from behind and at a closer range, which witnesses said Sirhan could not have done.

The Los Angeles Times reported Noguchi’s findings in 2005: “Eyewitnesses put Sirhan no closer than 18 inches from Kennedy, but Noguchi testified that when the fatal wound was inflicted the gun was 1 inch to 1 1/2 inches from Kennedy’s ear. His testimony fed conspiracy theories that Sirhan had not acted alone.”

Witness Paul Schrade, who is supporting Sirhan’s ongoing appeal, said: “I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman.”

Fellow witness Nina Rhodes-Hughes told CNN in 2012: “What has to come out is that there was another shooter to my right.”

Security guard as second shooter

Thane Eugene Cesar was the security guard who was standing behind Robert F. Kennedy when the presidential candidate was assassinated.

“There were dozens of articles that have come out saying that I carried a second gun, and that I possibly could’ve been the person who shot Bobby Kennedy – because the bullet entered the back of his head,” Cesar told author Dan Moldea for the book The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity.

Cesar was standing directly behind Kennedy and gave “different versions of his movements” – and different accounts of when he drew his gun – the Moldea book says. The security guard was a supporter of 1968 American Independent Party presidential candidate George Wallace and “made no secret of his hatred” of the politics of both John and Robert Kennedy.

Multiple witnesses saw Thane Cesar “pull out his gun, but only one accused him of firing it, which Cesar has denied over the years”, says Heavy magazine.

The key witness cited by many believers of the second gunman theory is a man named Don Schulman, who was then a runner for KNXT-TV.

Hypnosis

Though Sirhan admitted at his trial in 1969 that he shot Kennedy, he claimed from the start that he had no memory of doing so.

More recently, Sirhan’s lawyers have explored whether he was “hypnotised to begin shooting his gun” when given a certain cue, hiring an expert in hypnosis from Harvard to meet him, says The Washington Post.

In 2016, the US magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich dismissed the suggestion.

CIA

In 2006, filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan stated that while researching a screenplay based on the hypnosis theory for the assassination of Robert Kennedy, he uncovered “new video and photographic evidence” suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing.

“I did not buy the official ending that Sirhan acted alone, and started dipping into the nether-world of ‘assassination research’, crossing paths with David Sanchez Morales [a CIA operative who died in 1978],” O’Sullivan told The Guardian.

“When the subject of the Kennedys came up in a late-night session with friends in 1973, Morales launched into a tirade that finished: ‘I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.’”

Since 2006, a number of people have discredited O’Sullivan’s theory, including David Talbot who wrote the book Brothers about RFK and JFK. Talbot discovered that one of the three senior CIA operatives supposedly behind the killing had died six years earlier.

Gina Haspel is set to become the first female director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its 71-year history after being nominated by US President Donald Trump for the position last week.

The decision to appoint CIA director Mike Pompeo as the new secretary of state - following Rex Tillerson’s unceremonious dismissal - clears the path for Haspel, his deputy, to take over as head of the intelligence agency, pending the approval of the Senate.

But while her appointment would represent a milestone for female representation in Washington’s corridors of power, her alleged role in CIA torture programmes in the wake of 9/11 could sink her nomination.

So who is Haspel, and what are the allegations against her?

The 61-year-old’s CIA biography states that she joined the agency in 1985 and has “extensive overseas experience and served as chief of station in several of her assignments”, earning a number of honours, including the George H.W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism.

However, according to a report in The New York Times in February last year, she played a direct role in the agency’s “extraordinary rendition” programme, under which suspected militants were remanded to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by CIA personnel.

It is alleged that Haspel oversaw one of these secret “black site” prisons in Thailand, where two terrorism suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, were subjected to waterboarding.

Citing a book written by one of the interrogators involved, independent news website ProPublica reported last year that Haspel spoke directly with Zubaydah, accusing him of faking symptoms of physical distress and psychological breakdown.

Haspel reportedly told Zubayah during his interrogation: “Good job! I like the way you’re drooling; it adds realism. I’m almost buying it. You wouldn’t think a grown man would do that.”

ProPublica last week issued a correction, admitting it had misunderstood its source on Haspel’s role in the torture programme and the timeline of her employment at the prison. Haspel did not arrive at the prison in question until after Zubayah had been waterboarded.

However, the correction does not get Haspel off the hook completely, says The Guardian. The agency-sanctioned waterboarding of Nashiri did take place on her watch, and was confirmed in 2008 to have taken place by then-CIA director Michael Hayden.

The torture sessions at the prison were videoed and stored at a secure location within Thailand until 2005, when Haspel ordered that they be destroyed, The New York Times reports.

Senator Rand Paul last week became the first Republican to openly oppose Haspel’s appointment, quoting the erroneous ProPublica article and saying of Haspel’s now-disproven behaviour toward Zubayah: “When you read that, sort of the joyful glee at someone who’s being tortured, I find it just amazing that anyone would consider having this woman for head of the CIA.

“So my opposition to her is over her direct participation in interrogation and her gleeful enjoyment at the suffering of someone being tortured.”

Paul said on Sunday that he will vote against appointing Haspel to the role, despite the retractions. A spokesperson for the senator said: “Regardless of the retraction of one anecdote, the fact remains that Gina Haspel was instrumental in running a place where people were tortured.”

If Paul goes ahead with his threat, it could potentially upsetting the Republicans’ one-seat advantage on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senate Republican leaders would need to decide if they would submit the nominations to a vote on the Senate floor without committee approval - a move which is technically possible but hardly auspicious, says CNN.

Donald Trump is to release a trove of long-classified documents on the assassination of former president John F Kennedy.

Tweeting over the weekend, the current US President said “subject to receipt of further information” he would allow the “long blocked and classified JFK files to be opened”.

In 1992, partly in response to the Oliver Stone film JFK, Congress ruled that all documents relating to the assassination should be released within 25 years, unless the president decided they would harm national security.

The deadline for the release of the final batch of files, believed to number around 3,100 documents, is Thursday 26 October. “It is unclear whether Trump intends to allow the release in full or with redactions,” says the BBC.

Even though their publication is required by law, “speculation has mounted among his critics that Trump might have readily agreed to release the files in order to distract from the ongoing investigation into his alleged ties with Russia”, says The Independent.

The Washington Post claims Kennedy assassination experts do not think the last batch of papers contains any bombshells. However, it may shed light on Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in Mexico City months before the assassination and especially his links to the CIA, potentially discrediting one of the agencies investigating Trump over his links to the Kremlin.

Oswald was arrested in Dallas just hours after the President was shot on 22 November 1963 and was himself gunned down by night-club owner Jack Ruby while in police custody two days later.

Trump is no stranger to spreading JFK conspiracy theories, says Newsweek, “alleging that the father of his rival for the Republican presidential candidacy, Ted Cruz, was involved in the plot, prompting a furious denial from the Texas senator”.

Forty years ago, a Freedom of Information request revealed the terrifying scope of Project MKUltra, a CIA programme which used human subjects to experiment with mind control for more than ten years.

Although the majority of documentation relating to the project had been destroyed by 1977, enough remained that - along with witness testimony - two congressional investigations were able to build an eye-opening picture of the programme.

Over eleven years, thousands of Americans were subjects of unethical and often illegal experiments to test mind control techniques, from subliminal messaging to sensory deprivation to the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

What was it for?

Project MKUltra, launched at the height of the Cold War, was intended to give the US the edge over the Soviet Union in psychological warfare - by any means necessary.

In 1977, CIA director Stansfield Turner testified that MKUltra was set up to investigate "the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior".

This included experiments designed to "render the induction of hypnosis easier", "enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion" and "produce amnesia, shock and confusion", says Smithsonian Magazine.

The mass destruction of documents relating to MKUltra means that we may never know the full extent of the project, making it a rich source of conspiracy theories and speculation.

Who were the test subjects?

According to the hearing report, 86 institutions - including universities, mental hospitals and prisons - participated in CIA-sponsored experiments on human subjects.

Vulnerable people were among the unwitting subjects of the top-secret experiments, many of them conducted by doctors, scientists and academics secretly under contract to the intelligence agency.

Chemical tests were even conducted on terminal cancer patients, "presumably because the experiments were anticipated to have long-lasting detrimental, if not lethal, effects," says Gizmodo.

Ethical standards and medical safeguarding were often non-existent. One of MKUltra's subprojects was to "observe the behaviour of unwitting persons being questioned after having been given a drug", according to the 1977 congressional hearing.

One such unwitting test subject, military scientist Dr Frank Olson, fell to his death from a New York hotel window nine days after CIA agents spiked his drink with LSD, provoking a nervous breakdown.

Among the most high profile suspected victims was Ted Kaczynski, who would become infamous as the Unabomber.

In his second year as a student at Harvard University, 17-year-old maths prodigy Kaczynski volunteered for a psychological study run by Dr Henry Murray, a Harvard professor who was secretly employed by the CIA.

For three years, the volunteers were subjected to aggressive, traumatising sessions in which their most cherished beliefs were torn apart, as part of research into emotional responses to extreme stress under interrogation.

Following the experiment, Kaczynski became increasingly withdrawn and eventually dropped out of society altogether. From a remote backwoods cabin in Montana, he developed a nihilistic, anti-capitalist, anti-technology political philosophy.

Eventually, he would turn to violence to further his agenda, justifying his deadly letter bomb campaign in a rambling manifesto which, according to expert witnesses for the defence at his murder trial, showed the influences of the traumatic Harvard experiment.

The mass destruction of records means that we may never know for sure whether or not the Murray experiment was an official part of MKUltra, Kaczynski's brother, David, wrote in 2010.

Either way, Kaczynski was one of thousands of victims of "a scientific culture that failed to learn and recoil from the grotesquely unethical conduct of Nazi scientists who treated human subjects with no more empathy than they would have treated an inanimate object".

Netflix is part of a CIA plot to brainwash the planet, according to the Kremlin.

Vladimir Medinsky, Russia's minister of culture and a loyal supporter of President Vladimir Putin, claims the online streaming service is on the US government payroll.

Speaking to a Russian news service, he said the White House had realised "how to enter every home, creep into every television, and through that television, into the head of every person on earth, with the help of Netflix".

"It turns out that our ideological friends [the US government] understand perfectly well which is the greatest of the arts," he said, alluding Lenin's famous comment about the propaganda of cinema.

"And you thought, what? That all these gigantic start-ups appear by themselves? That some boy student thought something up and billions of dollars flutter from above?"

Medinsky made his claim while setting out an argument for increasing the funding of Russian cinema to counter the dominance of Hollywood productions.

The minister is a colourful figure and known for his nationalistic outbursts against western culture, says The Times.

Nevertheless, Medinsky has also criticised Russian films. Andrei Zvyagintsev's Oscar-nominated film Leviathan, about corruption and brutality in a coastal town, was dismissed as opportunistic and its director more interested in "glory, red carpets and statuettes" than the fate of his characters.

Taxpayers should not pay for films that openly spit on the government, he added.

Netflix launched in Russia earlier this year. The state media watchdog has requested a meeting with the firm, as officials warn that it could be blocked if it fails to pay taxes or produce 30 per cent of its content locally.

The CIA did fund cultural projects during the Cold War, including art exhibitions, musicians and Hollywood films. Netflix has declined to comment.

The CIA has released a dump of files relating to UFOs on its website, saying it believes they might be of interest to fictional agents Mulder and Scully.

The cases were once secret but have been declassified since 1978. This is the first time the agency has placed them online and the release coincides with a new series of the conspiracy-theory TV show The X-Files.

Most of the documents relate to alleged sightings in the 1940s and 1950s, when UFO-fever first peaked.

The agency highlights a few documents it believes both sceptics and believers will find interesting. "You will find five documents we think X-Files character Agent Fox Mulder would love to use to try and persuade others of the existence of extra-terrestrial activity," it says in a statement.

"We also pulled five documents we think his sceptical partner, Agent Dana Scully, could use to prove there is a scientific explanation for UFO sightings."These are a few of the newly available files:

The Barcelona smoker One case from 1952 describes a "smoke-trailing object over Barcelona" in Spain. A witness saw a "strange object flying at high speed from the direction of Prat Airport, about 2,000 metres [1.2 miles] above ground, and leaving a wide smoke trail". Barcelona's two airports apparently denied all knowledge of the "rocket-shaped" craft.

Sheffield's flying saucer troop A photograph allegedly shows a host of flying saucers passing over Sheffield in England, in March 1952. The grainy black-and-white image is "terrifying", according to Metro, though it could equally be described as "unconvincing".

The New Jersey loner While UFOs seemed to travel in packs over South Yorkshire in the 1950s, one photograph taken in July 1952, over New Jersey in the US, shows a perfect example of one flying solo. The suspiciously well-captured saucer was supposedly recorded by a member of the public passing over Passoria.

The "it's all nonsense" report An "overall evaluation of 'flying saucers' and associated reports", also made in 1952, makes disappointing reading for UFO believers. It says most of the 1-2,000 reports the agency had catalogued were either "phoney" or could be explained as "known flights" of "aircraft, weather balloons, etc". Only about 100 reports at the time could not be explained – and this was probably down to incomplete information.

A teenage boy claims he has hacked the personal email account of CIA director John Brennan.

The teenager claims he accessed sensitive government documents, which the espionage chief had forwarded as attachments from his work email. He says these included a 47-page application that Brennan had filled out to achieve top-secret government security clearance.

Such applications, used by the government to perform background checks, contain a treasure chest of delicate details not only about workers seeking security clearance, but also about their friends, spouses and other family members, reports Wired.

The hacker, who says he was working with two other people, accessed other sensitive documents, including a spreadsheet containing names and social security numbers – some of them for US intelligence officials. He also uncovered a letter from the Senate asking the CIA to halt its use of torture.

The hacker says he first got access to Brennan's AOL account by posing as an employee of US telecoms giant Verizon to trick a staff member into disclosing the spy chief's personal information.

He claims Verizon "easily" released the information, including Brennan's account number, his four-digit PIN, the back-up mobile number on his account, his AOL email address and the last four digits on his bank card.

Having obtained these details he was able to repeatedly reset the password on Brennan's email account, as the spy chief reportedly tried to wrestle back control. The trio of hackers were said to be in Brennan's account for three days before it was disabled last Friday.

They phoned Brennan, who, they claim, asked them what they wanted. After jokingly replying: "Two trillion dollars", they said they were asked again how much money they wanted. They apparently told Brennan: "We just want Palestine to be free and for you to stop killing innocent people."

The FBI and Secret Service are said to be looking into the reports, while Verizon said it was "actively investigating".

The Illuminati still rule the world, the Moon landings were fake, and Elvis is alive and working as a preacher. When it comes to conspiracy theories, there is no shortage of weird and wacky “alternative truths” out there. But although it is easy to dismiss conspiracy theories as “unhinged beliefs held by a small number of paranoid idiots”, said New Scientist, they are in fact the product of normal human psychology.

“Once someone has fallen down the rabbit hole”, said The Observer, “everything becomes evidence confirming that belief system”. In the 21st century, this inclination is exacerbated by social media algorithms that create echo chambers, reinforcing existing beliefs by pushing similar messaging.

Here are some of the most intriguing and bizarre conspiracy theories.

Denver airport is home to Illuminati and lizard people

Depending on who you believe, Denver International Airport is actually a hidden lair for Nazis, members of the New World Order or an underground colony of lizard people.

Constructed in the early 1990s, the sprawling complex is twice the size of Manhattan and “continues to be shrouded in secrecy and a magnet for conspiracy theories”, said The Independent.

Exhibit A is the airport’s runway design, which resembles the shape of a swastika. Justified by designers as a practical and efficient way to lay out multiple terminals, theorists suggest this in fact proves it is home to a sinister secret organisation – the New World Order, Illuminati or Freemasons – that supposedly pulls the strings behind global governments. Weird murals, statues depicting gargoyles and Egyptian gods, and a satanic horse sculpture are all evidence of occult influence, say the theorists.

Others claim a network of tunnels beneath the airport, built to house an automated baggage system, is linked to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, 90 miles away in Colorado Springs, and houses government bunkers and alien research labs. An even more outlandish theory posits that they are home to reptilian humanoids.

But “rather than dismiss the wild claims, Denver International Airport has embraced its notoriety”. It has launched its own website, the DEN Files, documenting its favourite conspiracy theories and it has leant into its reputation during recent renovations, with one display reading: “What are we doing behind this wall? Adding new restaurants … or hiding the Illuminati?”

5G phone mast towers are dangerous

Conspiracy theories centred on phone towers and other forms of wireless communication have “existed as long as the technologies themselves”, said Popular Science. Covid gave the paranoia a new twist, leading to “ludicrous claims” that 5G microchip implants were placed in “fake vaccines”.

For believers, however, the idea that 5G frequencies are “actively harmful” to human health goes much further. One of the most prolific anti-5G campaigners, Sean Aaron Smith, admitted six counts of arson in a US federal court, attacks motivated by his belief that the masts are a “linchpin of a globalist plot to zombify humanity”, said Wired.

In July, police were forced to engage in “proactive patrolling” around 5G network masts in west Belfast following arson attacks in the area, feared to be fuelled by online chatrooms, said the BBC. Since 2023, there have been 16 arson attacks on 5G towers in this area alone.

The government controls the weather

UK weather can often feel unpredictable and erratic, but some people believe there is “nothing random about it”, said BBC News. Conspiracy theorists have argued that climate change is a hoax for years, but a new theory is gaining followers.

This one “alleges that the government is supposedly controlling both weather and climate for sinister purposes”. Especially in the wake of unusual or extreme weather events, conspiracy theorists allege the government is using geoengineering and weather modification methods to orchestrate the weather.

“Although it may sound like science fiction, the US government once engaged in serious research into weather weapons and other hostile environmental modification technologies” but later “halted its pursuit”, said the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Despite a lack of evidence that any government is engaging in weaponised weather control, “disinformation campaigns are most successful when they can attach themselves to a kernel of truth”, so weather modification speculation has struck a chord with conspiracy theorists.

One of the main proponents of this claim is US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote in an X post: “Yes they control the weather”, after Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina “particularly hard”, said The Economist.

Avril Lavigne was replaced with a clone

When a Brazilian pop fan published a blog post titled “Avril Está Morta” (“Avril is Dead”) in 2011, few thought it would spark a global conspiracy theory that persists to this day.

It claimed that Canadian singer Avril Lavigne died in 2003 and that her “record company used Melissa Vandella – Lavigne’s doppelganger who was supposedly hired to pose as Lavigne for paparazzi – in her place to profit off of her celebrity”, said Rolling Stone.

As “proof” of the theory, “fans have scrutinised Lavigne’s appearance, including her face and stylistic choices, suggesting that Vandella has a slightly different facial structure and that Vandella wears more skirts and dresses, while Lavigne opts for pants”, said Forbes. Theorists also point to Lavigne’s post-2003 lyrics, perceived changes in her handwriting, and a photoshoot where she has the word “Melissa” printed on her hand.

The only problem is that, as Buzzfeed explained in an article titled “Here’s How I Accidentally Made An Old Avril Lavigne Death Hoax Go Viral,” the original Brazilian post made it clear at the beginning that it was created to show “how conspiracy theories can look true”.

Lavigne herself has denied the theory, calling it “so dumb” in an interview with the popular “Call Her Daddy podcast” last year. “That’s totally something Melissa would say,” was the most-liked comment on TikTok.

The Illuminati conspiracy

For the “powerless and frustrated”, it can be “pretty compelling” to believe the story that the “establishment is ruled by a corrupt elite and that we are but innocent pawns in their sinister game”, said Indy100. Enter the Illuminati – a powerful elite secret society influencing the world, and one of the longest-running and most widespread conspiracy theories of all time.

Conspiracy theories began almost the moment the secret society was banned, by Karl Theodor, the Duke of Bavaria, in 1785. In 1797, Jesuit priest Augustin Barruel claimed the Illuminati were behind The French Revolution, and the order was the “bogeyman” of the fledgling US republic, according to AP News.

Even today, the myth rages on, as society becomes susceptible to the idea of a “world-dominating” elite, the Illuminati “has never really left people’s minds”, and still “infiltrates” popular culture across the world, said HistoryExtra. Despite the longevity of the organisation, and the rumours that surround them, “most historians believe the original group only gained moderate influence”.

The Moon landings were a hoax

Our fascination with the Moon has arguably never been stronger, with national space programs and private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX racing to reach the lunar surface.

Neil Armstrong’s giant leap kicked off one of the most persistent conspiracy theories of the 20th century – that the 1969 landings, and all those that followed, were faked by Nasa and that no human being has ever set foot on the surface of the moon.

Moon landing sceptics take issue with the apparently waving flag in the famous photo, when the Moon has no atmosphere, and therefore no wind. The flag’s position can be explained by astronauts exerting force on it while posing for the photographs, meaning that it would continue to move with no atmospheric resistance.

Other points of contention are the lack of stars, and the fact that the footprint does not match the boot of the pictured astronaut. Both of these can be explained by light pollution from the Sun and the Earth, and a larger “lunar overshoe” not included in the image.

Even though there is substantial evidence to the contrary (including Moon rocks brought back to Earth and manmade objects left on the Moon) some remain adamant that film director Stanley Kubrick was hired to produce the footage after his experience on “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

The JFK assassination was a cover-up

In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to release thousands of classified documents related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. It was music to the ears of those who have long believed that a cover-up exists around JFK’s death.

Two months later, he backed up his promise, though experts at the time “doubted the new trove of information” would “change the underlying facts of the case”, said The Guardian. Some of the main reports included handwritten notes of a 1964 interview questioning Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about “inconsistencies in material” about marriages between Russian women and American men.

Some documents also referred loosely to “various conspiracy theories” suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962, with the express intention of assassinating JFK.

In November 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning to the US, was accused of the crime but was shot dead before he could stand trial. But was he just a scapegoat? Did the real killers get away with murder? No official investigation was able to definitively confirm a conspiracy, but theories implicating everyone from the KGB to Jackie Kennedy continue to circulate.

Elvis is alive

Music legend Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977 – or did he? If one conspiracy theory is to be believed, the King of rock ’n’ roll faked his own death and now works as a groundsman in Graceland.

Despite assertions that Elvis Presley has “most certainly left the building”, fans still believe that he “faked his death” to remove himself from public life and “escape fame”, said People. “There’s been so much that’s untruthful out there,” Elvis’ ex-wife Priscilla told the outlet. “Things like Elvis is still alive and hidden somewhere… I wish he was still alive.”

One leading theory is that a preacher from Arkansas named Bob Joyce may be Elvis, or “at least a doppelgänger who bears an uncanny resemblance”, said International Business Times. Believers claim Joyce has “striking similarities in his appearance, voice, and mannerisms”, linking him to the music star. His sons, too, look “eerily” like the singer.

Joyce’s protestations to the contrary, and the fact that he was born in 1952 – 17 years after Elvis – have done nothing to dissuade Elvis-death sceptics.

Aliens helped build Stonehenge

In 2024, the science journal Nature revealed that the six-tonne Altar Stone at Stonehenge came from the northeast of Scotland, and not Wales like the rest of the monument’s bluestones. It was a fascinating revelation, not least because it reignited the question: how were the stones – some weighing 45 tonnes – transported and arranged to where they sit today?

Without basic transportation technology, such as wheels (which were invented more than five centuries later), there is no obvious answer to how the biggest stones were moved.

Much of what scientists do know about the construction of Stonehenge is from educated guesses and constantly evolving research, the most recent of which suggests that in fact two of the largest boulders that make up Stonehenge have always been “more or less” where they sit today.

If not aliens, then perhaps giants. One of the earliest names for Stonehenge was Chorea Gigantum, which has been interpreted by some as “giants’ dance”, said Dazed, and “lends a (very small) amount of credibility to the idea that giants used to roam the Earth”.

Jesus married Mary Magdalene

Sometimes the best conspiracy theories are the oldest – and prove they existed well before the invention of the internet. For those who take the stories of Jesus Christ as matters of historical fact, there remain some aspects of his life that are highly contentious. Central among these is Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Phillip, discovered in 1945, and still disputed by religious scholars, refers to Magdalene as Jesus’ koinonos, a Greek term for “companion” or “partner”.

While there is scant evidence elsewhere in the scriptures to support the claim that Jesus and Magdalene were married, this has not stopped a host of theories springing up.

Most famous of these is undoubtedly Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” which also wraps in conspiracy shibboleths like the Illuminati, Opus Dei and the Knights Templar for good measure.

Dismissed as a heavily fictionalised thriller, it could be that Brown was nearer to the truth than even he knew after a 1,500-year-old manuscript unearthed at the British Library appeared to reveal Jesus not only married Mary Magdalene but had two children with her. Dubbed ‘The Lost Gospel’, it also made the startling claim that the original Virgin Mary was Jesus’ wife and not his mother.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, outspoken proponent of torture techniques, has vilified the Senate report into the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” and reiterated an emotional justification for the agency’s behaviour.

Cheney argues that it is the context that matters. In response to the brutal treatment of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Cheney said, “He is in our possession, we know he’s the architect [of 9/11], what are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks?”

There is also the argument that if it had not been for the information disclosed under such interrogation, further terrorist attacks would not have been prevented. But the Senate report concludes not only that the CIA misrepresented the interrogation techniques used on suspects but also that the efficacy of these techniques was overstated. The interrogations led to no useful intelligence.

If we now know that the interrogations were ineffectual, Cheney’s point about context becomes even more meaningful. As he says, “How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 people on 9/11?” If torture is of no use in providing intelligence, then at least it can be used as a means of revenge.

Within the US, the fear generated by the terrorist attacks of 2001 led to an intense paranoid response, as expressed most dramatically in Bush's declaration of a War on Terror. The once invincible nation, never before invaded, suddenly became vulnerable and helpless in the face of sudden and secretive enemy attack.

It was this fear, and outrage at being attacked so ruthlessly, that fuelled the special legal powers to imprison – and effectively torture – those suspected of terrorism.

• CIA claims Bush, Cheney and Rice all ‘knew’
• The psychologists who lost sight of morality

Especially when the enemy is from without, it is very easy to personify them as "other". They embody everything that is bad and dangerous that we would like to deny in ourselves. The good guys and the bad guys are split into two clear camps.

By projecting all the evil onto "these people", we not only remain pure but the tactics we use to exterminate evil are exonerated. The torturer serves a righteous cause in believing that he is safeguarding his country’s security and meting out justice.

In defending democracy, Cheney, like many others, asserts that the means justify the ends. Referring to brutal interrogations, Cheney claims, “I’d do it again in a minute.”

In our self-justifications we become virtually identical to the extremist religious terrorists who similarly believe they are ridding the world of evil. We are copying them and in doing so we become like them. Even the techniques of torture adopted by the US are based on techniques employed by our "enemies", notably those used by the Chinese Communists in the Korean War and by the Soviet intelligence services.

What is so terrifying about terrorism – and torture – is that it treats the individual as an object of hatred. The ultimate aim of terrorism is to destroy the "other" by stripping them of their humanity. And it is our humanity that must be protected – at all costs.

What is increasingly apparent from the evidence coming out of Guantanamo Bay and the CIA’s ‘black sites’ is the dehumanisation of the victims who are tortured. This is what is also at the heart of terrorism.

While we are aware of the scarring effects of torture on prisoners, what we fail to recognise is the effect of torture on the perpetrator.

The torturer not only wants to force the enemy to disclose the whereabouts of the ticking bomb, he also wants revenge for the anxiety and torture he (or his country) have been put through. In the act of torture, the torturer turns the tables. He becomes omnipotent in his fantasy and wants to make his victim feel helpless, trapped and terrified so that he can be rid of these feelings inside himself. He expels his terror into the terrorist, the "other", who is further dehumanised.

It is not possible to conduct torture of any kind without dehumanising the victim. This also requires the torturer to become dehumanised and here is the rub. In order to do his job, the torturer must cut off from his feelings of concern and empathy towards the other and turn the victim into an object, not a person. This also explains why the job of torturer at times attracts people who already suffer from such a split in their psyches.

For those who are more intact emotionally, the act of committing torture necessitates a perversion of their emotions. It becomes very difficult, if not impossible, for the torturer to allow himself to feel true compassion without opening the flood gates of guilt, remorse and horror.

The torturer is condemned to a twilight of numbed experience in which his feelings need to be suppressed so that he can continue to function. There is a striking parallel with the massive denial that victims of torture need to put into place in order to survive their ordeals. Torturer and tortured become dehumanised images of one another. Both are inevitably traumatised.

The CIA torture report highlights the underlying sadistic revenge inflicted in the process of interrogations. These findings cannot be denied and are critical in addressing the question as to whether torture can ever be justified.

However, there is also the risk that the torturers will now be regarded as the “other”, dissociated from the rest of American society. They have done the dirty work that many in the US are now condemning.

This supports the idea that torture, like a cancerous growth, can be discretely removed, leaving the rest of the body intact. It sidesteps the fact that the use of torture is a symptom that reveals we are no better than our enemies, and that we too have been corrupted by dehumanising the object of our fear.

The US Senate report detailing "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by the CIA has been widely discussed in the British press, but few media outlets in the Arab world have devoted much space to it.

Although many of the mistreated prisoners identified in the report came from the Middle East, including a good number from countries that the US considers to be allies in the war on terror, most publications appear to have ignored what the Senate had to say. Others have mentioned the report only briefly.

Who covered the report?

Al Jazeera Arabic has the most extensive coverage of the Senate report among Arab-language sources. It has so far published a number of articles explaining the methods of interrogation used in US-run prisons, as well as the names and nationalities of two tortured prisoners: Abu Zubaydah from Saudi Arabia and Kuwaiti national Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The CIA used violent interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah, a member of al Qaeda, even though he was critically ill, Al Jazeera says. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of 9/11 attack on the US, was waterboarded.

Who ignored it?

At least two prisoners mentioned in the report came from Saudi Arabia, the home of several big Middle Eastern media outlets.

One of them, Al Arabiya, chose not to mention the names or nationalities of the tortured prisoners, nor how they were treated in American captivity. Instead, it concentrated on the reaction of US policy-makers and officials. An article published on its website is titled: "After exposing CIA torture report ... Obama says: when we commit a mistake we admit it".

Another Saudi media outlet, Al Sharq Al Awsat, had nothing to say about the report. Its main headline today referred to a routine joint military exercise in Saudi Arabia between the Saudi Royal Marines and the US Marines.

The Kuwaiti media scene is similar to that of Saudi Arabia. A major Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai had nothing to say about a Kuwaiti national Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Its lead story today reported praise for the Kuwaiti Emir and his humanitarian work.

During the War on Terror, the CIA’s operations subjected hundreds of suspected terrorists to harsh interrogation techniques, which were often criticised as constituting torture.

Now, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the operation has made it clearer than ever that the CIA used many forms of “enhanced interrogation” to elicit information – very harsh methods indeed that simply did not yield the intended results. As a leaked State Department memo put it, the report “tells a story of which no American can be proud”.

This is a matter of outrage for everyone, but as psychologists, we have a particular obligation to speak out. Many of the approaches the CIA used were developed by our discipline, and by individuals who will have known about the codes of conduct by which US psychologists are bound – which include beneficence and non-maleficence, and respect for rights, dignity and integrity.

It is profoundly disturbing to see that the CIA’s techniques included deprivation of basic needs (warmth, food, water), humiliation, threats and the repeated use of waterboarding.

Ironically, many of the methods adopted were based on psychologists’ previous work directed at training members of the military, intended to assist them in avoiding talking to interrogators should they be captured and tortured. This work was apparently reverse-engineered for use on terrorist suspects.

‘Enhanced interrogation’

Although these techniques have been given the newspeakish euphemism “enhanced interrogation”, they are consciously meant as a powerful assault on the basic conditions necessary for mental survival, specifically by overloading the subject’s homeostatic system.

Homeostasis is the body’s ability to adjust in response to external changes in order to maintain a stable internal equilibrium. The objective of an extreme assault on a human system is to stop the individual from adjusting in time, or at all.

For example, we are built to respond to various complex stimuli throughout the course of any given day, and when the arousal system is subjected to severe sensory deprivation over long periods, it seeks to readjust.

If the deprivation is intense and persistent, the arousal system seeks to fill the gap. And in the process, it can fill the void created with psychotic symptoms: hallucinations, paranoia, hearing voices and a loss of a sense of a cohesive or continuous sense of self.

Several other methods are directed at overload rather than deprivation, such as threats, “feral treatment” (treating people like animals), pharmacological manipulation, and humiliation. These can induce similar psychological effects, and may result in severe short, medium and even long-term symptoms, including loss of memory and a damaged ability to learn, reason or make decisions.

In fact, such techniques can damage brain structures such as the hippocampus (one of the first regions to suffer in Alzheimer’s disease) and lead to the loss of brain mass by inhibiting the regeneration of brain cells.

So both from an ethical standpoint and going on the evidence of myriad studies of trauma, enhanced interrogations are both unlikely to work and manifestly objectionable. The psychologists involved in this work should clearly have known it was an incredibly dangerous path to tread.

Connection, not correction

If you really want to stage an effective interrogation, the literature points in entirely the opposite direction – and so does orthodox law enforcement practice.

In the US (as in many other countries), rapport is considered a vital part of police interrogation. Psychological research has long shown that building rapport with witnesses increases the amount of accurate information generated. We know that rapport enhances cooperation during interviews, and elicits more accurate information.

In our own work, based on hundreds of hours of observation of field interviews, we found that interrogators that used approaches more akin to methods used in therapy were more effective at both decreasing detainee disengagement (including “no comment” interviews) and eliciting useful information and evidence.

We found that where non-judgemental acceptance, empathy and autonomy were present, alongside the ability to fluidly adapt to the detainee’s topics and shifts in what they were prepared to talk about (or not talk about), reflective listening and attentiveness were by far the most successful approach.

In fact, interrogators who resisted the (perhaps natural) urge to try and change or challenge the detainee’s behaviours and beliefs engaged more with their suspects and got more information from them.

A failure of morality

Our work on rapport is nothing new. More than 200 clinical trials, efficacy reviews, and meta-analyses have found more humane approaches to be effective in the treatment of a range of health problems once treated with harsh and coercive methods – issues as diverse as chronic mental disorder, cardiovascular rehabilitation, problem gambling, and substance use disorders.

In all those arenas, the original notion was that the “problem” needed to be dealt with through rational/persuasive and manipulative means that might persuade, coerce or control individuals “out” of their errant, criminal and destructive ways – essentially to bully them into compliance.

So a fundamental point stands: despite the ethical sanctions, the evidence is that enhanced interrogations just don’t work, and that rapport-based methods do.

It remains to be seen exactly why psychologists working today might have advocated, designed or implemented the methods described in the Senate report, but there can be no doubt that their complicity is a failure of both scientific rigour and morality. As the committee’s findings are picked over, and the political back-and-forth over them gets underway, this must not be forgotten.

Laurence Alison is Director of the Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology at University of Liverpool. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.

The CIA believes that there may be as many as 31,000 Islamic State fighters spread across Iraq and Syria – three times as many as previously estimated.

The new assessment comes just days after US president Barack Obama authorised an open-ended campaign of air strikes against IS.

The CIA had previously thought that the militant group had around 10,000 fighters, but new intelligence reports dating from May to August indicate that numbers may have risen due to successful recruitment.

"This new total reflects an increase in members because of stronger recruitment since June following battlefield successes and the declaration of a caliphate, greater battlefield activity, and additional intelligence," CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani said.

America's Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and six Gulf states have offered swift "if vague" support for Obama's new strategy, The Guardian reports.

John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, held talks with representatives of the Arab states who agreed to support the military campaign "as appropriate" and help rebuild communities "brutalised" by IS.

The new Iraqi government expressed its support for the campaign: "We welcome this new strategy," said Hoshyar Zebari, one of Iraq's newly appointed deputy prime ministers. "There is an urgent need for action. People cannot sit on the fence. This is a mortal threat to everybody."

However, Russia, Iran and Syria warned that without prior approval from the UN, an offensive against IS within Syria would violate international law.

Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said: "The US president has spoken directly about the possibility of strikes by the US armed forces against Islamic State positions in Syria without the consent of the legitimate government. This step, in the absence of a UN Security Council decision, would be an act of aggression, a gross violation of international law."

The US military is already active in Iraq, where it has mounted 150 air strikes against IS militants. The BBC says that the US has already sent hundreds of military advisors to assist the Iraqi government and Kurdish fighters. Other countries, including the UK, are providing humanitarian assistance to Iraqi people displaced by the conflict.

Pyongyang has called a political thriller commissioned by Channel 4 a "slanderous farce" and has threatened to sever diplomatic ties with the UK if the series is broadcast.

The Channel 4 drama Opposite Number will follow CIA and MI6 agents working on an undercover mission in Pyongyang to secure the release of a kidnapped British nuclear scientist before he is forced to help the country's nuclear weapons programme.

North Korea's top military body, the National Defence Commission (NDC) has called it "mud-slinging" and described it as part of a "premeditated politically-motivated provocation", according to the KCNA news agency. It said the show was designed "to hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership".

It went on to dismiss the show's writers as "hooligans and rogues under the guise of artistes" who are intent on spreading lies about North Korea. The show had been "orchestrated at the tacit connivance, patronage and instigation by 'Downing Street'", added the NDC.

The statement ends with a warning that the UK "would be well advised to judge itself what consequences would be entailed if it ignores the DPRK's warning".

Westminster, however, seems unfazed by the threats, telling the Daily Telegraph: "It is for Channel 4 to decide upon its programming schedule. British media is editorially independent of the British government, and as such we would not be involved in the development or production of programmes."

The UK currently maintains diplomatic relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and even has an embassy in Pyongyang. Westminster insists its policy is one of "critical engagement" with regards to the country's nuclear programme and poor human rights record.

The show is written by British playwright and screenwriter Matt Charman. "North Korea is one of the last truly impenetrable nations on the planet, and one of the most dangerous for the West," says Charman. "I wanted to write a drama that could blow the lid off our understanding of who we think the North Korean people are and what their government truly wants."

A secret US government rulebook, revealing details of how its internal terrorist watchlist is compiled, has been published in full by The Intercept, the investigative website set up by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

The 116 page document was written by the National Counterterrorism Center in March 2013 and includes input from the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, FBI and other national agencies. It authorises "a secret process that requires neither 'concrete facts' nor 'irrefutable evidence' to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist", says the website.

What is the Terrorism Watchlist and how many people are on it?

The FBI describes the Terrorism Watchlist as one of its "most effective counterterrorism tools".

The list is shared with local US law enforcement, international governments and "private entities", helping them to identify confirmed and potential terrorists trying to secure travel documents, board planes or in engage in other potentially dangerous activities.

Over 1.5 million names have been added to the list in the last five years, according to the Associated Press.

What did the document reveal?

The document includes a "wide definition of what constitutes terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a terrorist", says The Intercept.

Individuals are never told why they have been placed on the watchlist and the rules make it "nearly impossible to get off it".

So who can be placed on the list?

• US and foreign nationals who have previously engaged in terrorism.
• Anyone government agencies "reasonably suspect" to be a terrorist. The suspicion needs to be based on gathered intelligence, "mere hunches and guesses are not sufficient" to watchlist someone, the report states.
• Entire "categories" of people can be placed on the list if a terror threat is imminent.
• Someone who has already been acquitted of a terrorism crime by the courts can still be watchlisted.
• People who have died often remain on the watchlist in case their identities are stolen by other potential terrorists.
• The document contains "loopholes" whereby a suspected terrorist's family, friends and acquaintances can also be placed on the list.

What has the response been?

The rules are "an abuse of privilege" says The Freedom of the Press Foundation.

"Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future," says Hina Shamsi, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project.

"On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven't carried out."

The government is yet to comment on the release of the documents.

What are the consequences?

A watchlist with over a million names on it has wider implications, not just for civil liberties, but for national security, law professor Anya Bernstein told MintPress news.

"Having irrelevant people on these lists is not something harmless, like receiving a couple of pieces of junk mail that you can throw out", she said. "It actually places us in danger, because the avalanche of irrelevance distracts agents from actual dangers. It's not a couple of pieces of junk mail, it's hundreds of thousands of spam emails cluttering up your inbox, making it hard to spot the important stuff."

Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which surfaced in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor for input on how to kill people. Requirements included the appearance of an accidental or purely fortuitous terminal experience suffered by the agency's victim.

Bill's friend - internal evidence suggests he was a doctor - offered practical advice: "Tetraethyl lead, as you know, could be dropped on the skin in very small quantities, producing no local lesion, and after a quick death, no specific evidence would be present." Another possibility was "the exposure of the entire individual to X-ray." (In fact these two methods were already being inflicted on a very large number of Americans in lethal doses, in the form of leaded gasoline and radioactive fallout from the atmospheric nuclear test programme in Nevada.)

"There are two other techniques," Bill's friend concluded bluffly, which "require no special equipment beside a strong arm and the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth, such as a bath towel."

Regular as congressmen being outed for adultery or taking cash bribes, the Central Intelligence Agency has to go into damage-control mode to deal with embarrassing documents like the memo to Bill, and has to square up to the question: does it, did it ever, have in-house assassins - a 'licensed to kill' Double-O team?

It is alleged that Dick Cheney ordered the formation of a CIA kill squad after 9/11

It just happened again. In mid-July the news headlines were suddenly full of allegations that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the formation of a CIA kill squad and expressly ordered the agency not to disclose the programme even to congressional overseers with top security clearances, as required by law. As soon as CIA officials disclosed the programme to CIA director Norman Panetta, he ordered it to be halted.

And regular as adulterous congressmen seeking forgiveness from God and spouse, the CIA rolled out the familiar response that yes, such a programme had been mooted, but there had been practical impediments. "It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do it, it’s not that easy," one former intelligence official told the New York Times. "Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?" The CIA insisted it had never proposed a specific operation to the White House for approval.

Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation programme post-2001 surfaced, the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either. Torture manuals drafted by the agency would surface - a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the 'Contra' war against central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan's years - and the agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as "an old story".

In fact the agency took a keen practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly. As it prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953, the agency distributed to its agents and operatives a killer's training manual (made public in 1997) full of practical tips:

"The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75ft or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve... The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the 'horrified witness', no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.

"...in all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.

"If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing-out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism."

What about assassination attempts by the CIA, acting on presidential orders? We could start with the bid on Chou en Lai's life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; they blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but fortunately he'd switched flights.

Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved, dispatching among others the late Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the agency's in-house killer chemist, with a hypodermic loaded with poison.

The agency made many efforts to kill General Kassem in Iraq. The first such attempt, on October 7, 1959, was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Husssein, was, spirited out to an agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second agency effort in 1960-1961 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally they shot Kassim in the coup of February 8/9, 1963.

The Kennedy years saw deep US implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well attested efforts by the agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. Reagan's first year in office saw the inconvenient Omar Torrijos of Panama downed in an air crash. In 1986 came the Reagan White House's effort to bomb Muammar Gaddafi to death in his encampment in 1986, though this enterprise was conducted by the US Air Force.

Led by that man of darkness, William Casey, in 1985 the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shia leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by setting off a car bomb outside his mosque. He survived, though 80 others were blown to pieces.

In his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Bill Blum has a long and interesting list starting in 1949 with Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader, going on to efforts to kill Sukarno, Kim Il Sung, Mossadegh, Nehru, Nasser, Sihanouk, Jose Figueres, 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, Gen Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic...

And we should not forget that the CIA is by no means the only player in the assassination game. The military have their own teams. A friend of mine had a gardener – "a very scary looking guy" - who remarked that he'd been part of a secret unit in the US Marine Corps, murdering targets in the Caribbean.

In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, as in the Sixties, it has been an arm of domestic policy as well. This is true before and after the issuing in 1976 of Executive Order 11905 by President Gerald Ford, banning assassinations. "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," it states.

In the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood

One way to read the brou-ha-ha of the past few days is as an effort at pre-emptive damage control by the CIA. Remember, in the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood. They wanted teams to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his crew and kill them. They cheered stories - now resurfacing - of containers filled with Taliban prisoners of war being left out in the sun with an okay by US personnel, until their occupants - hundreds, maybe thousands of them - roasted and suffocated.

Over the next few months and years, more terrible stories will probably surface. Attorney General Eric Holder told Newsweek recently he was "shocked and saddened" after reading the still secret 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the torture of detainees at CIA "black sites." Shocked and saddened, after what we know already? It must be pretty bad.

The CIA death squads and kindred units from the military killed many, many people and most certainly there was extensive 'collateral damage' - meaning innocent people being murdered. As regards numbers, we have this public boast in 2003 by President George Bush: "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

The CIA's former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, recently remarked: "There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavoury things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA. There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it's going to handicap future activities."

Just because Vice President Dick Cheney may have been running a Murder Inc doesn't mean that CIA officers won't be legally vulnerable. At the moment, President Obama is trying to keep the lid on what outrages were committed by US government agencies in the Global War on Terror in the Bush years. The CIA is clearly positioning itself for further disclosures. So is Dick Cheney.