The question is no longer free from doubt.
Mike Pompeo, who craves the White House, would have enthusiastically joined the Redcoats of King George III to fight against the American Declaration of Independence and the Continental Army headed by General George Washington.
The Harvard Law School graduate and Harvard Law Review editor (Class of 1994), former secretary of state, former director of the CIA, and former member of Congress sets forth his odious conception of America and politics in a new book with a cynical title: Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love.
But Pompeo’s ideas and actions align him foursquare against American independence from British monarchical rule and the United States Constitution he swore to uphold and defend.
Mr. Pompeo decries an alleged overreaction to the assassination of United States permanent resident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia. The CIA concluded with a high degree of confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) ordered Khashoggi’s grisly dismembering in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
But Pompeo assails Khashoggi as an “activist” as if the noun were a pejorative. Sam Adams was an activist; Paul Revere was an activist; the Boston Tea Party participants were activists; the signers of the Declaration of Independence who risked and gave that last full measure of devotion were activists. America would not be a nation if it were not for activists which Mr. Pompeo vilifies. As Justice Louis D. Brandeis underscored in Whitney v. California (1927), “[T]he greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.”
The America Mr. Pompeo is fighting for is not the America born at Lexington and Concord with a shot heard ’round the world. It is an America indistinguishable from monarchy in which the king can do no wrong.
Mr. Pompeo approves presidential power to play prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner to exterminate any person on the planet (including American citizens not on a battlefield) based on a speculative hunch that the victim might become a danger to national security. His rebarbative views echo those of his predecessor, Henry Kissinger, who groused to President Gerald Ford in 1975, “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.”
Mr. Pompeo heroizes CIA operatives who committed torture (a universal crime under the United Nations Convention Against Torture) or destroyed the incriminating evidence.
Mr. Pompeo supports the warrantless spying on every American by the National Security Agency, shredding the right to be left alone under the Fourth Amendment. He would have been appalled at William Pitt the Elder’s denunciation of limitless monarchial power to invade the home: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail; the roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter. All his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”
Mr. Pompeo sneers at George Washington’s Farewell Address. It warned against “passionate attachments” or “habitual fondness” towards any nation. But Pompeo swoons over Saudi Arabia and MBS. As to the latter, Pompeo sounds much like former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, who gushed in 1978 that Iran’s fanatical Ayatollah Khomeini was destined to “be hailed as a saint.” Pompeo similarly effuses that MBS “is leading the greatest cultural reform in the nation’s history. He will prove to be one of the most important figures of his time, a truly historic figure on the world stage.”
But Pompeo’s own State Department accused MBS’s Saudi Arabia of the following in 2020:
[U]nlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees by government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including threats of violence or unjustified arrests or prosecutions against journalists, censorship, site blocking, and engaging in harassment and intimidation against Saudi dissidents living abroad; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association; severe restrictions of religious freedom; restrictions on freedom of movement; inability of citizens to choose their government peacefully through free and fair elections; violence and discrimination against women, although new women’s rights initiatives were implemented; trafficking in persons; criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity; and restrictions on workers’ freedom of association, including prohibition of trade unions and collective bargaining.
In other words, human rights enjoy startlingly little breathing space in MBS’s Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Pompeo’s general disrespect for the rule of law was illustrated by his cavalier campaigning for President Donald Trump’s re-election through a recorded speech for the 2020 Republican National Convention in violation of the Hatch Act.
If Mr. Pompeo ever barges into the White House as President, we shall have lost that last best hope of earth.