Taking Aim at Wikileaks
Various scribbles have started to pepper the conversation started by the adventurous Mike Pompeo after he branded WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence agency before the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (This would have generated a wry smile of content from Julian Assange.)
The words of the Central Intelligence Agency chief are worth retelling in their mind distorting wonder: “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.”[1]
Individuals like Assange and Edward Snowden receive the necessary special treatment as history’s great turncoats: “As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security.” Celebrity disrupters, dangerous irritants, narcissists in pursuit of personal glory.
This wretchedly desperate sentiment – for its nothing else – has wound its way into Congressional ponderings. Prior to the August District Work Period, the Senate Intelligence Committee took up Pompeo’s views, slotting into the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act (SB 1761) some suggestive wording:
“It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resembles a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.”[2]
This inventive provision passed 14-1, the only demurral coming from Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon. To The Hill, Wyden explained that “the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets.”[3] And what, he feared, of the “unstated course of action” against those sinister non-state hostile intelligence services?
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