CIA Director calls WikiLeaks an “enemy,” says Assange has “no First Amendment freedoms”
By
Eric London
15 April 2017
In a speech Thursday at a Washington, DC think tank, CIA Director Michael Pompeo called the whistleblower site WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” and said news organizations that reveal the government’s crimes are “enemies” of the United States.
Pompeo’s remarks announce an open break with the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and a threat that the Trump administration will not tolerate opposition to war, surveillance and corporate plunder.
Referring to WikiLeaks’ founder, Pompeo declared that “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms.” Pompeo’s remarks were prompted by Assange’s April 11 op-ed in the Washington Post, in which the whistleblower defended WikiLeaks. The threat of US prosecution or assassination has forced Assange to seek refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012.
In his remarks, Pompeo said, “We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”
Pompeo is the head of an organization whose record in criminality, illegality and murder is unsurpassed. Over the course of its 69 year history, the CIA has overseen assassinations and coups d’état, trained and armed fascistic death squads, collaborated with dictators, and, following 9/11, established a global network of black site torture chambers, giving rise to a new vocabulary of words like “extraordinary rendition,” “advanced interrogation,” and “rectal rehydration.” The number of people…