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In the process of issuing another not-really-a-denial about a Yahoo News report that the CIA plotted to kidnap, extradite and assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017, former CIA director Mike Pompeo said that the 30 former government officials the report was based on “should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Here are some quotes from the exchange on Pompeo’s recent Megyn Kelly Show appearance courtesy of Mediaite:
Kelly asked Pompeo about the claims.
“Makes for pretty good fiction, Megyn,” said Pompeo. “They should write such a novel.”
He added, “Whoever those 30 people who allegedly spoke with one of these reporters, they should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Pompeo called Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” that is “actively seeking to steal American classified information.”
“You deny the report?” asked Kelly.
“There’s pieces of it that are true,” said Pompeo. “We tried to protect American information from Julian Assange and Wikileaks, absolutely, yes. Did our justice department believe they had a valid claim which would’ve resulted in the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial? Yes. I supported that effort for sure. Did we ever engage in activity that was inconsistent with U.S. law?… We’re not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations. We never acted in a way that was inconsistent with that.”
Fmr. CIA Director Mike Pompeo calls for mass prosecutions of sources who spoke to Yahoo! News reporters about plans to kidnap or kill Assange.
"Whoever those 30 people [are] who allegedly spoke with one of these reporters, they should all be prosecuted"https://t.co/UWNgmFAvUX
— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) September 29, 2021
Pompeo’s point that “We’re not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations” is not especially convincing considering how the Trump administration openly assassinated Iran’s top military commander Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike last year, a move which Pompeo supported and defended.
“President Trump and those of us in his national security team are re-establishing deterrence, real deterrence, against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo gushed in support of the assassination at the time.
Pompeo’s pseudo-denial is of course further undermined by his position that the former officials who spoke to the press should all be prosecuted for “speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.” Is it false or is it “classified activity”? It can’t be both. The two things Pompeo admitted to, trying to “protect American information” and working to extradite Assange, are not classified information. The classified information he wants them prosecuted for is therefore something else.
After a lot of flailing and humming and hawing Pompeo does eventually make what sounds like a concrete denial with the curiously-worded phrase “I can say we never conducted planning to violate US law.” But even this wouldn’t be a denial of the claims in the Yahoo News report, because the report is mostly about the intelligence community and the Trump administration trying to find legal loopholes that would allow them to take out Assange.
For example, this quote from the Yahoo News article: “A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal.” This would in no way be contradicted by Pompeo’s claim that “we never conducted planning to violate US law.” It would mean that there were discussions and plans about assassinating Assange amid conversations and debates about whether it would be legal to do so. The fact that they didn’t plan to violate US law doesn’t mean they didn’t plan to assassinate Assange if they could find a legal loophole for it.
There's no actual denial here. https://t.co/Drj417XJfd
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 28, 2021
This follows an earlier non-denial by Pompeo of the exact same nature in an interview with conservative pundit Glenn Beck. Pompeo points out that one of the article’s authors was a Russiagater and says of the former officials cited in the report that “those sources didn’t know what we were doing.” But he doesn’t actually deny it.
If Pompeo had not been involved in plots to kidnap, rendition and assassinate Julian Assange, he would have just said so. He wouldn’t have engaged in all kinds of verbal gymnastics to squirm his way out of a difficult question, and he certainly wouldn’t be calling for the criminal prosecution of his accusers for “speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Mike Pompeo is a literal psychopath. He chuckles about lying, cheating and stealing with the CIA. He defends murderous sanctions and openly admits to using them to foment civil war in empire-targeted nations. He defends assassination. He strongly implied the US would interfere in UK politics if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister. And yet somehow he escaped the Trump administration the mass media so despised with nary a scratch of media criticism on him.
This is because Mike Pompeo, as full of centipedes and demon spawn as his enormous head may be, is highly representative of the mainstream US power establishment. He is the embodiment of the empire’s values. He’s just one of its less-subtle representatives.
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10 responses to “Pompeo Effectively Admits To Assange Allegations”
Any time a politician says we can’t afford something that will help the average person, remind them that they always have money for killing people and blowing shit up.
Israel has universal health care, the U.S.A. does not. Yet the U.S.A. can pay for Israel’s anti-rocket defense so that they can keep killing Arabs, stealing their land, and destroying their houses and villages.
The U.S.A. has money to support the continued bombing in Yemen. The U.S.A. had money for a 20-year war and occupation in Afghanistan complete with mission creep, apparently just so they could blow shit up and kill people there.
We can always afford to fund out priorities. What we choose to fund is known in economics as “revealed preferences.”
Yeah – all those of us who work at the State Department sort of held our noses during the Pompeo tenure –
there’s nothing to dispute or expand in this column, except that I always knew that Pompeo is a psychopath, just like Trump, but far, far worse.
If you do not want More Of The Same, do not vote for another R or D, ever, no matter what an R or D promises!
The usual gangsterism – that is the hallmark of the Christian evangelical in western society.
As he says in the video, lying, cheating and stealing “reminds you of the glory of the American experiment”. Couldn’t make that stuff up in a million years if you tried! He forgot killing though. Nobody’s perfect… :o)
Pompeo, the Big Brother, is the head of the genie that got out of the bottle, already pre-President Eisenhower (read his departure speech). Pompeo doesn’t really care if we take him at his words or not – all he really cares is that, like Assange, anybody who will dare to expose the Orwellian Party’s lies – to be killed (with or without torture). That’s the real message.
‘we never conducted planning to violate US law’
No, just the laws of dozens of other nations and states.
‘We’re not permitted by US law to conduct assassinations’
WTF!
Isn’t that what they’ve been doing for the last seventy five years?
What a pompous, prostitute for the MIC he is.
The US government assassinated Gaddafi and Hillary Clinton laughed about it.
“We never assassinate anyone…” Who does he think he’s kidding?
Pompeo is a nasty piece of work, a man who would kill his own mother if it suited his evil purposes.
The USA breaks its own laws about assassinations on a daily basis – openly, too. Anyone who believes that the CIA did not plan to assassinate Julian Assange has lost touch with reality. Probably the only reason it didn’t happen was that the whole world would have known it was the USA, and the political fallout would have been too much.