Some facts about visiting US Foreign Secretary Michael Pompeo

LAHORE: Due to arrive in Pakistan on Wednesday (today), on what could prove to be an ice-melting tour between Islamabad and Washington DC, the 54-year old American Foreign Secretary, Michael Richard Pompeo, had staunchly opposed the-then US President Barack Obama's plan to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay and relocate some of the facility's prisoners to other sites.

According to the "US News," the "hawkish" Pompeo had also supported the CIA resuming the use of water-boarding and other inhuman interrogation techniques condemned as torture. The visiting American Foreign Secretary had said he did not think nuclear enrichment should be acceptable in Iran for any purpose.

He was also of the opinion that WikiLeaks whistleblower, Edward Snowden, should be tried in the United States and that the proper outcome should be a death sentence. Pompeo was the editor of the Harvard Law Review during his time at the prestigious Harvard Law School.

The US Congress is Pompeo's fourth career. He was an Army officer, then a lawyer and then founded a business in Kansas before serving as the representative for the Fourth District in Kansas State. He moved to Kansas in 1996 and was first elected to office in 2010.

In March 2018, the "Reuters" had stated: "Pompeo, 54, regularly briefs Trump on intelligence matters, and is considered one of the most hawkish voices on North Korea in Trump’s inner circle. Pompeo has downplayed the extent of Russia’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, saying Moscow has sought to influence American elections for decades. In February, he defended talks he had that month at CIA headquarters with Russian spy chiefs."

The globally-acclaimed British news agency had gone on to write: "Pompeo has supported the U.S. government’s sweeping collection of Americans’ communications data. In an opinion piece published in 2016, he called for restarting the bulk collection of domestic telephone metadata and combining it with financial and lifestyle information into one searchable database."