Edward Snowden on his website: The CIA is not your friend

Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who turned whistleblower in 2013 after revealing a number of highly classified documents belonging to the United States’ National Security Agency, has shared on Twitter a piece he had written on his website on September 20, 2022. This post by Snowden comes hours after he was granted permanent residency in Russia by the country’s president, Vladimir Putin.

Snowden, in his post, quotes 17th-century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza: “They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”

Check out his post right here:

The article he has penned on his website is titled “America’s Open Wound”. It comes with a tagline: “The CIA is not your friend”. 

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In the piece, the 39-year-old says that 2022 will mark the 70th anniversary of the National Security Agency and the 75th anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He claims that within a decade of its foundation, the CIA “was directing the coverage of American news organizations, overthrowing democratically elected governments (at times merely to benefit a favored corporation), establishing propaganda outfits to manipulate public sentiment, launching a long-running series of mind-control experiments on unwitting human subjects”. However, he has not provided any evidence regarding his claims.

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The whistleblower goes on to claim that the CIA interferes in foreign elections, wiretaps journalists, and compiles “files on Americans who opposed its wars.”

Snowden, in the article, goes on to claim how the CIA was responsible for the death of a number of individuals and also accuses the organization of plotting the murder of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Yahoo News reported in 2021 that senior CIA officials had met and discussed the possible assassination of Assange in 2017 after the latter leaked details of a set of the CIA’s hacking tools, Vault 7.