The US press colluded with the Obama administration to lie to the public regarding the status of Raymond Davis, arrested in Pakistan for murder. Obama maintained Davis was a diplomat but it was known he was working for the CIA and had worked for the private security firm Blackwater, now known as Xe.
US officials have provided fresh details about Raymond Davis, the CIA agent at the centre of a diplomatic stand-off in Pakistan, including confirmation that he had worked for the private security contractor Xe, formerly known as Blackwater. They also disclosed for the first time that he had been providing security for a CIA team tracking militants.
Davis was attached to the CIA’s Global Response Staff, whose duties include protecting case officers when they meet with sources. He was familiarising himself with a sensitive area of Lahore on the day he shot dead two Pakistanis.
The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and other media outlets reported for the first time that Davis is a CIA employee. They said they had been aware of his status but kept it under wraps at the request of US officials who said they feared for his safety if involvement with the spy agency was to come out.
Democracy Now talks with Declan Walsh about the US media hush regarding Davis’ real status with the CIA and The Guardian decision to reveal the truth.
U.S. officials have admitted an American detained in Pakistan for the murder of two men was a CIA agent and a former employee of the private security firm Blackwater, now called Xe Services. Up until Monday, the Obama administration had insisted Raymond Davis was a diplomat who had acted in self-defense. The arrest of Davis has soured relations between the United States and Pakistan and revealed a web of covert U.S. operations inside the country, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. The Guardian of London first reported Davis’s CIA link on Sunday and noted that many U.S. news outlets knew about his connection to the CIA but did not report on it at the request of U.S. officials. We speak with Declan Walsh, the Pakistan correspondent for The Guardian, who first broke the story.
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