Mike Pompeo Belongs in Prison, Not in the Administration

Mike Pompeo Belongs in Prison, Not in the Administration

Notorious former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has reentered the political world, a fact that should sound alarm bells for all opponents of the deep state and war machine.

This is because his name has been floated in recent weeks for a new position in the Trump administration. In one of his final campaign stops, Donald Trump recently praised the man, allowed him to speak at one of his final campaign events, and hosted him in his VIP section.

To say Pompeo is guilty of horrendous offenses would be an incredible understatement. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a modern bureaucrat with a longer and more sinister list of evil deeds.

Among other offenses, he is guilty of unforgivable foreign policy blunders, pushing war propaganda, enriching the military-industrial complex, and organizing politically-driven assassination attempts—all to the detriment of American liberty.

Perhaps the most grievous aspect of Pompeo’s reign of terror over the deep state is his obsession with Iranian regime change. As head of the CIA, he employed a “leadership decapitation” strategy that relied upon assassinating Iranian officials, and characteristically brushed off concerns about the plan’s constitutionality. “Don’t worry about if it’s legal,” Pompeo said, “that’s a question for the lawyers.”

Much to the pleasure of neocons and the Israel lobby, Pompeo got his wish in 2020, when the US orchestrated the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander.

But have recent tensions with Iran—worsened by the targeted murder and unlimited financial and military support for Israel—changed Pompeo’s fixation on the country? Hardly.

In fact, Pomepo has continued to sell war with Iran to Republicans. He has insisted that “US policy should be regime change in Iran,” and argued this required “increasing pressure on the regime until it fails.” As recently as two weeks ago, he was still promoting military strikes against Iran and pushing the absurd claim that Iran is a dire threat to America.

Pompeo’s destructive foreign policy aims don’t end at Iranian regime change, though. As an unwavering supporter of the US-backed starvation campaign in Yemen that has claimed the lives of nearly 400,000 people, he is perhaps the biggest reason why the American military remains embroiled in that conflict today.

Over the objections of peers and Congressional opposition, he used the situation in Yemen to secure $8.1 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in 2019. Pompeo’s commitment to the Saudi-backed catastrophe and influence over the president no doubt contributed to Trump’s decision to veto a bill that would have ended all US involvement in the theater in April of 2019.

Adhering entirely to the neocon blueprint, Pompeo also ordered the re-designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” promoted regime change in North Korea, and took every opportunity to rattle sabers with nuclear China.

Most treacherously, Pompeo was the chief architect of a kidnapping and assassination plot against Julian Assange. In 2021, senior officials inside the CIA admitted to the plan, and asserted that “there seemed to be no boundaries” regarding what should be done to the world’s most famous whistleblower. By one account, discussions from a spring 2017 meeting between Trump and the CIA centered upon which options were on the table for his assassination.

Pompeo’s hatred of Assange seems to have originated with WikiLeaks’ release of “Vault 7,” classified documents detailing the specifics of CIA hacking tools. In embarrassment over the leak, Pompeo became “completely detached from reality,” and drew up plans to kidnap and assassinate Assange within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

As if high-level details of the plot weren’t horrifying enough, the CIA even targeted Assange’s family in the plot, and planned to extract DNA from his son’s nappy to help accomplish the task.

Should he ever be placed in a seat of power again, Pompeo has financial motives for new misdeeds. As the co-founder of American Global Strategies and Board Member of Cyabra, he’s not only connected to the war propaganda industry—he directs much of it. But nothing else should be expected from the man who denied the deep state existed, and boasted about CIA training courses that taught agents how to lie, cheat, and steal.

The fact that the newly elected president is even testing the waters for another Pompeo appointment is especially mystifying. After all, his former secretary openly supported Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump over the embarrassing claim that the former president was the ringleader of an attempted “insurrection” on January 6, 2021. A casual observer can easily see that he has far more loyalty to the deep state and war machine than the MAGA movement.

Appointing Pompeo to any position within the new administration would be a monumental error by Trump. Doing so would send a clear signal that neocons still have a place in the foreign policy apparatus, and prove he has learned nothing from Pompeo’s blunders and betrayals.

Beyond being the poster child for the corruption of the deep state, Pompeo is the modern embodiment of a neoconservative agenda that continues to exert influence on American foreign policy. He doesn’t belong anywhere near the new presidential administration; he belongs in prison for committing war crimes and planning political murders.