Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
While Americans busily made the hashtag #moab about everything other than a scenic town in Utah for most of the day yesterday, Mike Pompeo gave his first speech as Director of the CIA; and it was hilarious.
“Pompeo, in an address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘a fraud’ and ‘a coward.’
‘It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,’ Pompeo said,” Wrote Warren Strobel and Mark Hosenball for Reuters.
“Hostile?” Really? The CIA is calling an outfit that has never participated in a coup “hostile.” The irony is just awesome. Really though, poor Julian Assange; now that the Republicans have won the election, they sadly have no more use for him, as Reuters pointed out by quoting Pompeo back in July, then a GOP congressman.
“In July, Pompeo, than a Republican member of the House of Representatives, mentioned it in a Twitter post referring to claims that the DNC had slanted the candidate-selection process to favor Clinton. ‘Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by Wikileaks.’”
My, what a difference a few months and an election win makes! I wonder what WikiLeaks could have done in those intervening months to so sour Pompeo’s opinion of them? Oh, that’s right, back in March, Assange and company released a massive trove of CIA material that exposed the organization’s efforts to hack into everyday “smart” devices and have them spy on their owners via their internal microphones and / or cameras. Among the information leaked were a handful of “zero-day exploits” that CIA had been unethically hoarding for later use.
So, for those keeping score at home, the new CIA director says that Assange, who helped get his boss elected – according to the official narrative – is a bad guy for exposing to the American public all the dirty tricks their appointed bureaucrats were using against them, tricks paid for with the money stolen from the intended victims of the illicit surveillance. Indeed, how dare he?
Of course, if a statist intel spook is going to blast Assange with one barrel, it’s pretty easy to guess who gets the second one.
“’More than a thousand foreign targets, people, groups, organizations, more than a thousand of them changed or tried to change how they communicated as a result of the Snowden disclosures,’ Pompeo said. ‘That number is staggering,’” Reuters reported.
Well trained, he is; made sure to include the word “foreign” specifically. Never mind that the same tools were used domestically as well, which is what made Edward Snowden’s revelations so important and terrifying.
Another hilarious condemnation of Assange came in the form of Pompeo worrying that the WikiLeaks founder is inspiring others to join his cause.
“Pompeo said it has ‘encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence,’” Reuters wrote.
Actually, that would be pretty awesome: a whole swath of CIA analysts just dumping everything they can get out of government onto WikiLeaks’ servers and thereby exposing all the awful stuff going on that we pay for and have no knowledge of. I actually hope this bit of conservative paranoia proves true, I’d love to know what kind of evil I’ve been financing all these years.
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