WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hits back at Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo after he accused WikiLeaks of being a “hostile nonstate intelligence agency” operating outside of the protections of the First Amendment. This week on Intercepted: We spend the entire show talking with Assange from inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been holed up since June 2012. In the wide-ranging interview, Assange discusses the allegations that WikiLeaks was abetted by Russian intelligence in its publication of DNC emails and the new-found admiration for him by FOX News, Anne Coulter, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump. Also, why Assange believes he and Hillary Clinton may get along if they ever met in person. And we premiere an unreleased song by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine fame.
JA: Yeah. I mean, I quite like the phrase. So, let’s unpack it a bit. Interestingly, what the media, in picking up that statement — well, most journalists in the United States are Democratically-aligned, and they have a particular existing narrative that they want to play out. So, they see the word “state,” they see the word “hostile,” they see the word “intelligence service,” and they see the word “WikiLeaks,” and somehow, they put this soup together to imply that somehow, WikiLeaks is a state intelligence service. But if you look at what he’s saying, he says non-state intelligence service; i.e., we are not a state. We’re not a front for a state whatsoever. We’re a non-state entity. Okay, the type of entity that he’s trying to say we are is an intelligence service. It raises an interesting question. What are the similarities between publishers, investigative publishers, and intelligence services? Are there similarities?
Yes, there are similarities. For example, the German intelligence service, the BND, the German equivalent of the CIA and NSA combined — what does BND expand to? Bundesnachrichtendienst, which literally means “federal news service.” The CIA itself, early on in the Obama administration, changed its policy of how it would write its internal
— source theintercept.com | Apr 19 2017