by JOHN JIGGENS
After sensitive CIA information was leaked, Mike Pompeo and the Trump Administration sought to exact revenge upon Julian Assange. Dr John Jiggens reports.
In April 2017, CIA director Mike Pompeo declared that it was time to call out WikiLeaks, describing it as “a non-state hostile Intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia” and said that WikiLeaks would be ended.
Julian Assange responded to Pompeo’s threat in an interview with Jeremy Scahill on his podcast, The Intercept:
“Pompeo has stated that this is the end of WikiLeaks and its publications. So how does he propose to conduct this ending? He didn’t say, but the CIA is only in the business of collecting information, kidnapping people and assassinating people. So it’s quite a menacing statement that he does need to clarify.”
In a powerful piece of investigative journalism this week, Yahoo! News revealed that Julian Assange’s suspicions were right. Pompeo’s speech marked an intensification of the war on WikiLeaks. The CIA had begun planning to either kidnap Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean Embassy or to assassinate the Australian publisher.
The Yahoo! teams’ investigation was based on conversations with 30 former U.S. officials. Among those interviewed, eight provided details on plans to kidnap Assange. They said Assange had become an obsession for the CIA and its director Mike Pompeo.
The Yahoo! team quoted one associate who said:
“Pompeo was completely detached from reality and was seeing blood.”
Greg Barns SC, a barrister and advisor to Julian Assange, told Bay FM that the CIA was angry over the leak about the CIA’s secret computer hacking tools, known as ‘Vault 7’:
Essentially, this was after the publication by WikiLeaks, called ‘Vault 7’, which is a highly classified document of the CIA that is a how-to manual, if you like, and provides a lot of detailed information about how the CIA goes about its very darkest operations. Once it was published, it created a storm. What was already a hostile climate became intense, a collective hatred for Assange in the CIA, which built on top of the already hostile climate WikiLeaks faced in Washington generally.
Mike Pompeo, who was the CIA director then and would later become Secretary of State under Trump, became party to a scheme, which was essentially to kidnap or kill Assange. The CIA hatched a number of extraordinary plans, which were knocked back as too dangerous and likely to endanger U.S. legal moves.
Independent Australia for more