'This Week' Transcript: WikiLeaks' Julian Assange

[struggle4progress]

~snip~

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me bring this back to Julian Assange. Back in 2010, an email that was revealed from you by Bart Gellman in "Time" magazine, said that you hoped the revelations from Wikileaks would bring about, quote, "the total annihilation of the current U.S. regime." Is that still your goal, and what did you mean by that?

ASSANGE: I did not say that and there is no such email. That is simply false.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's quoted in "Time" magazine in December 2010.

ASSANGE: Yes. Well, I mean, "Time" magazine. But this is -- it's very interesting that you raised such a thing like that. We are in a situation where we have these extraordinary revelations that are causing great embarrassment to a new national security state that is arising in the U.S. It's not just the U.S. Similar national security states are rising in other countries, but it is trying to evade democratic will. It's treating Congress like a bunch of fools. And we saw Clapper up there lying, bald-face lying to Congress. We have secret interpretations of the law. What does the law mean if there are secret interpretations in secret courts?

~snip~

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-wikileaks-julian-assange/story?id=19521380

[think]

1. That quote from Time can be sourced back to a Right Wing hit piece in 2007 tying Wikileaks to Soros:

Here is the quote from the Time write up in 2010 with the undocumented quote:

2010 Person of the Year Runner Up Julian Assange
By Barton GellmanWednesday, Dec. 15, 2010

~Snip~

Four years later, a great deal can be said about Assange, much of it unpleasant. He is inclined to the grandiose. Contempt for nearly every authority drives his work, and unguarded e-mails — leaked, naturally — reveal hopes that transparency will bring "total annihilation of the current U.S. regime." In London, he is fighting extradition to face allegations in Sweden that he sexually assaulted two WikiLeaks supporters.

What no one can say about the man, any longer, is that his boasts are empty. In 2010, WikiLeaks became a revolutionary force, wresting secrets into the public domain on a scale without precedent. Assange and company wrought deep disruptions in the marketplace of state power, much as tech-savvy insurgents before them had disrupted markets in music, film and publishing. The currency of information, scattered to the four corners of the globe, is roiling not only U.S. foreign relations but also the alliances and internal politics of other nations.

WikiLeaks has established itself, too, as a competitor to news media and intelligence agencies. By posting documents in their entirety, the site "disintermediates" the market, as economists say, weakening the old prerogatives of editors and analysts to filter information for their audiences. "This is not just a threat to those who would want to keep their own secrets," says a former member of the site's steering committee, who declined to be named. "WikiLeaks is a threat to those who would like to have other people's secrets too."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037118_2037146,00.html #ixzz2XjQdcHnz

Funny they didn't ask Mr Assange when they interviewed him two weeks before and Assange makes no such claims in the interview:

TIME's Julian Assange Interview: Full Transcript/Audio
Wednesday, Dec. 01, 2010

This is the transcript of TIME managing editor Richard Stengel's interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange via Skype on Nov. 30, 2010.

RS: What is the effect thus far of the latest round of leaks and what effect do you hope to have from those leaks?
(See TIME's video "WikiLeaks Founder on History's Top Leaks.&quot

JA: I can see that the media scrutiny and the reaction from government are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it. And I think there is a new story appearing, a new, original story appearing about once every two minutes somewhere around the world. Google News has managed to index. At this stage, we can only have a feeling for what the effect is based upon just looking at what the tips of the wave are doing, moving currents under the surface. There is simply too much volume for us to even be able to see. But looking at what we can, I can see that there is a tremendous rearrangement of viewings about many different countries. And so that will result in some new kind of harmonization [variant: harm minimization]. And we can see the Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu coming out with a very interesting statement that leaders should speak in public like they do in private whenever they can. He believes that the result of this publication, which makes the sentiments of many privately held beliefs public, are promising a pretty good [indecipherable] will lead to some kind of increase in the peace process in the Middle East and particularly in relation to Iran. I just noticed today Iran has agreed to nuclear talks. Maybe that's coincidence or maybe it's coming out of this process, but it's certainly not being canceled by this process

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00.html#ixzz2XjSOD1FM

And here is the original "source". The NewsReal Blog. Which is a right-wing blog operated by the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

in 2007 claiming to have an email from Wikileaks saying this about the current regime. The current regime would have been George W Bush:

E-Mails Revealed: Show Intent To Bring Down The U.S. Government And Possible Connections to George Soros
by Joseph Klein
Posted on December 1 2010 10:44 am

~Snip~

In the following example, after discussing the virtues of file-sharing over the Internet as a way to defeat copyright enforcement, the e-mail ends with its author’s belief that Wikileaks can assist with the ” total annihilation of the current US regime.

From:

WL can advance the political/governance aspects of these developments by several years which will have all sorts of positive cascades, not the least of which is total annihilation of the current US regime and any other regime that holds its authority through mendacity alone.

Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 08:56:55 +1100

To:

[This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g.

Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to 'WL'. This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer and plenty of backbone.]

It’s clear to me that as i2p, tor, anonnet and freenet evolves, other p2p programs become more anon and file-sharing web-sites become more popular the anon + can’t get the cat in the bag part aspects
of the in internet will become fait acompli with its general in speed and sophistication.

There will be real free speech — that also means an inability to enforce copyrights…


Then there are the tantalizing references to George Soros, whom Wikileaks apparently tried to hit up for a substantial donation to its cause.

Full post:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/12/01/wikileaks-internal-e-mails-revealed-show-intent-to-bring-down-the-u-s-government-and-possible-connections-to-george-soros/2/

So there's your source that ABC chose to use for a quote to ask Jullian Assange.

[struggle4progress]

2. Assange, 24 May 2011: "I don't know if I wrote that e-mail"

See: http://wikileaks.org/WikiSecrets-Julian-Assange-Full.html

Assange, 30 June 2013: "I did not say that and there is no such email. That is simply false."
See: OP

So two years ago, Mr Assange wasn't sure whether or not he wrote the email, although now he seems quite sure he didn't: that's somewhat odd, since memories usually don't improve with time