US intelligence agencies occasionally make mistakes but should still be trusted and taken at their word, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who once famously boasted that the CIA “lies, cheats and steals.”

In an interview with Euronews, the former CIA chief insisted that US intelligence agencies are right to consider Chinese telecom giant Huawei a national security threat – a claim that has been disputed by Washington’s European allies.

There’s no doubt the intelligence community gets things wrong from time to time but their overall body of work is excellent and to be relied upon and trusted.

He bragged further that "Western countries, liberal democracies share a common value set. The Chinese don’t share that value set.”

While the US insists Huawei products contain “backdoors” which can be used to spy on behalf of the Chinese government, no proof of the alleged snooping operation has yet been produced. Unconvinced by the unsupported claims, some of Washington’s closest allies have rejected US pressure to end cooperation with the Chinese firm. Germany, for example, announced in March that it would not prevent Huawei from bidding on contracts to develop the country’s 5G networks.

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Berlin and others are right to be weary of Washington’s evidence-scarce accusations against Huawei. In just the last two decades, US intelligence agencies have been repeatedly accused of misleading and lying to the American public and the international community.

Their less than stellar track record includes providing dubious intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction program, and runs right up to the current day.

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Anonymous sources in the intelligence agency were repeatedly cited by the media to push now-debunked Russiagate. Former CIA Director John Brennan even predicted that there would be big-name indictments before the release of Robert Mueller’s deflating report. When the indictments never came, Brennan suggested that he “may have received bad information.”

Pompeo himself has seemingly contradicted his own assertion that America’s spooks should be trusted. In April, he bragged about how the CIA “lied, cheated and stole” during his time at the agency.

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