Steal This Secret: CIA Does Exactly What it Accuses Julian Assange of Doing – Progressive.org

Over the past few decades, several directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have openly admitted to doing exactly what U.S. officials are now accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of doing: stealing the secrets of other nations.

Lets be blunt about what we do, Tenet said. We steal secrets for a living. . . . I do not know how else to tell people what we do.

As Assange faces extradition to the United States over his role in publishing classified information, U.S. officials are charging him with conspiring to steal classified information, an action that the CIA conducts on a routine basis.

Hell yeah, we steal secrets, Mike Pompeo acknowledged in 2017, when he was the director of the CIA. Thats what we do. Its in our charter.

WikiLeaks denies its own engagement in this practice, saying it does not steal, but reveals. The organization identifies itself as a media organization that specializes in publishing secret information about war and espionage. In recent years, WikiLeaks has partnered with several leading news organizations, including The New York Times, to expose lies, misconduct, and criminal activities by governments around the world.

U.S. officials, on the other hand, repeatedly brag that they steal secrets. They argue that their efforts are noble and legitimate.

We make no apologies for doing so, Pompeo said in 2017. Its hard stuff and we go at it hard.

Some of the confusion over WikiLeaks is attributable to a 2013 documentary film titled We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. The films title, We Steal Secrets, does not come from WikiLeaks but is actually a quote from General Michael V. Hayden, a former CIA director who boasted in the film about the U.S. governments involvement in espionage.

We steal other nations secrets, Hayden said.

Critics of WikiLeaks have also sown doubts about the organization by accusing it of interfering in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before the election, WikiLeaks repeatedly published damaging information about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party that was allegedly stolen by hackers.

The U.S. government has indicted a dozen Russian officers for conspiring to hack into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and Clintons presidential campaign, but it has not charged WikiLeaks with stealing those documents. The U.S. governments attempt to prosecute Assange stems from unrelated events that took place several years earlier, such as his effort to help protect Chelsea Manning, another one of his sources.

If Assange is extradited to face charges for practicing journalism and exposing government misconduct, Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker warned in an op-ed last month in the Independent, the consequences for press freedom and the publics right to know will be catastrophic.

Attempts to portray WikiLeaks as an organization that steals secrets are all the more confounding given the long history of CIA directors openly acknowledging that they oversee a vast and sweeping infrastructure to steal the secrets of other nations.

In 1998, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told the editorial board of Studies in Intelligence that one of the core functions of the CIA is stealing secrets. Lets be blunt about what we do, Tenet said. We steal secrets for a living. . . . I do not know how else to tell people what we do.

Despite such admissions, the official CIA line is that, as CIA Director John Brennan told National Public Radio in 2016, Everything we do is consistent with U.S. law.

Some of the strongest pushback to this claim came from the intelligence community, as a number of former intelligence agents castigated Brennan for misrepresenting their work.

Every aspect of what the CIA does overseas is illegal, John Maguire, a retired CIA officer, told NBC News. We dont solicit secretswe steal them. What does he call breaking into an embassy?

Brennans remarks caused such an uproar in the intelligence community that one of his successors, Mike Pompeo, made it a point to rebut his comments. In several defiant talks and speeches in 2017, Pompeo insisted that the purpose of the CIA is to conduct espionage, which he defined as the art and science of running assets and stealing secrets.

The CIA, to be successful, must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentlessyou pick the word, Pompeo said.

While CIA officials boast about their mission of stealing secrets, U.S. officials continue tarnishing WikiLeaks. Pompeo has described WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service.

Undoubtedly, the CIA has a strong motive for discrediting WikiLeaks. In early 2017, WikiLeaks published a trove of documents that allege to show how the CIA hacks into computers and smartphones. The documents indicate that the CIA employs a vast array of tools to steal secrets from its targets.

Given the hundreds of thousands of additional documents that WikiLeaks has published over the past several years, the organization has clearly been in the work of publishing information, not stealing it. While U.S. officials attempt to discredit Assange by portraying him as a criminal hacker, the Central Intelligence Agency remains at the forefront of stealing secrets, just as multiple former directors have acknowledged.

We lied, we cheated, we stole, Pompeo acknowledged in a talk last year, in reference to his earlier work at the CIA. We had entire training courses.

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Steal This Secret: CIA Does Exactly What it Accuses Julian Assange of Doing - Progressive.org