Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tiff w/ The Intercept & If He'll Ever Leave Embassy Refuge,Pt. 2

[KoKo]

Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tiff w/ The Intercept & Whether He'll Ever Leave Embassy Refuge

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT BELOW VIDEO....w/LINK to REST AT:
http://www.democracynow.org/appearanc...

Published on Jul 9, 2014

http://www.democracynow.org - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits down with Democracy Now! inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been living in political asylum for over two years. Assange explains his critique of First Look Media and The Intercept for agreeing not to name a country targeted by bulk National Security Agency spying, following U.S. government concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. Assange and WikiLeaks went on to reveal the targeted country, Afghanistan, which along with the Bahamas had all of its cell phone calls recorded. "That is as great an assault to sovereignty as you can imagine, other than completely militarily occupying a country, to record the intimate phone calls of every single Afghan citizen," Assange says. "My perspective is, [this is] up to the Afghan people." Assange also gives an overview of the close to eight million documents WikiLeaks has released since 2007 about nearly every country in the world; details how WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden evade U.S. arrest and find political asylum in Russia; and addresses his prospects for ever being able to leave the Ecuadorean embassy without fear of arrest.

Watch the full 2-part Democracy Now! interview with Julian Assange:
http://www.democracynow.org/appearanc...


Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tiff w/ The Intercept & Whether He’ll Ever Leave Embassy Refuge
http://www.democracynow.org/appearanc...
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits down with Democracy Now! inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been living in political asylum for over two years. Assange explains his critique of First Look Media and The Intercept for agreeing not to name a country targeted by bulk National Security Agency spying, following U.S. government concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. Assange and WikiLeaks went on to reveal the targeted country, Afghanistan, which along with the Bahamas had all of its cellphone calls recorded. "That is as great an assault to sovereignty as you can imagine, other than completely militarily occupying a country, to record the intimate phone calls of every single Afghan citizen," Assange says. "My perspective is, [this is] up to the Afghan people." Assange also gives an overview of the close to eight million documents WikiLeaks has released since 2007 about nearly every country in the world; details how WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden evade U.S. arrest and find political asylum in Russia; and addresses his prospects for ever being able to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy without fear of arrest.

Click here to watch part one of this interview.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange from inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London, where he has political asylum and has been living for more than two years.

AMY GOODMAN: In a nutshell, Julian, if you would, can you summarize the releases of documents since the "Collateral Murder" video was released in the spring of 2010? For people who aren’t keeping up on things, and even if you are an avid viewer of the media or reader of the media, especially in the United States, they may know who Julian Assange is, the publisher of WikiLeaks, but actually what it is you have released, the substance of these documents, could you just go through them?

JULIAN ASSANGE: WikiLeaks has been publishing since 2007. We have published material from every country—almost every country in the world and about every country in the world. We are now up to just over eight million individual documents that we have released during that period. Now, the heat in the debate with the United States arose in 2010. We have had heated debates with other countries, and we’ve had major court cases in the United States in relation to our fight with Swiss banks and so on. In 2010, the number of documents and publications that we were releasing, each one after another, ended up erecting a grand jury against us by the DOJ, National Security Division. And so, we entered into a major media conflict with the U.S. government.

So, going in order, they are "Collateral Murder," a documentary that we produced based on the tape from an Apache helicopter mowing down 12 to 18 people in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, and very clearly engaged in the murder. And the murder was an unarmed man, wounded, crawling in the gutter, and good Samaritans came to rescue him, and all of them were killed, and two children came away with serious injuries.

Then the Afghanistan War Logs, now, these came at a very important moment in 2010, where Michael Hastings had just—the late Michael Hastings had just released a report on McChrystal, and these publications came not long after that.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash. And that shifted the debate about Afghanistan. Early in 2010, it was: What can we do to win in Afghanistan? After the Hastings article about McChrystal and WikiLeaks’ war logs, the result was: There was no longer a debate about can we win in Afghanistan; it is how were we going to get out of Afghanistan. So it was quite an important shift.

Then, with the Iraq War Logs, which were published in October 2010, which in some ways has been one of our best analytical works, we worked together with not just other media organizations, but a number of statistical organizations to work out what the kill count was for Iraq, and combining with other figures, and we ended up with more than 100,000 civilian casualties—in fact, 15,000 new, completely undocumented civilian kills—and documenting U.S. involvement and approval of Iraqi torture centers within the police and many killings of civilians at checkpoints and some political issues and so on. And that produced a number of inquiries and has fed into cases that have been taken by Iraqis, and that has now ended up with an ICC filing, International Criminal Court filing, against the British military.

If we then move on, in December of that year, we started the release of Cablegate, the more than 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from all around the world from 1966 to 2010. And that is the largest compendium of diplomacy that has ever been released. It’s about 3,000 volumes of material. As a sort of history of how the modern world behaves in practice, it’s extremely important, and it fed into the Tunisian revolution quite directly. In fact, Ben Ali’s propaganda minister, after the government fell, said that the WikiLeaks releases about Tunisia is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.

AMY GOODMAN: Because?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, because it exposed the corruption that many Tunisians knew about, but in a much more flagrant form of what money had gone where and people keeping pet tigers and so on, but also that there was various kinds of debates about it, and within the United States and from others, and that when push came to shove the U.S. would probably back the military and not Ben Ali. And it was undeniable. So it wasn’t just the Tunisian activists alleging this; it was a U.S. ambassador writing back to Washington, for several years, you know, that the U.S. had kind of let it gone on, but documenting what had gone on. And that then made its way into Europe and affected the French support for Ben Ali, and the Tunisians became—Tunisian activists again confident. And then, two weeks—20 days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, and then he became the personified symbol of all the problems, and then it properly kicked off. But anyway, the propaganda minister and some others say this is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.

And those cables are really quite incredibly important. They have gone into literally dozens of court cases. They have released people from prison. People have been released from prison holding these cables above their head as the reason that they had been released from prison. The El-Masri case, where the CIA kidnapped a German citizen unlawfully, renditioned him and kept him in a CIA black site for four months, it was a case of mistaken identity. He wasn’t even an alleged terrorist. He just happened to have the same name. And they then dumped him in eastern Europe, later on, on the side of the road, no explanation given, to try and make it look—you know, to give him no evidence to take a case. And he did try and take cases in the United States. And this is something relevant, perhaps, what would happen to Edward Snowden in the United States. He was not able to get anywhere because the U.S. government activated state secrets privilege, said all the things that the CIA had done to him were secrets, and they would not be revealing anything at all. He met a complete dead end. Then, as a result of the release of the diplomatic cables, which spoke about what the United States had done with Macedonia, where he was taken from when he tried to enter into Macedonia, he was able to take a case against Macedonia at the—within Europe and to the European Court of Human Rights, and eventually won. And there were six cables cited in the judgment, you know, showing that it actually happened.

Similar cases in Spain, and an important precedent was set about the use of our materials in court cases generally, specifically cables. So, this relates to Chagos islands. So there’s an island group called Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It’s owned by the British. It is very important strategically because it’s sort of on the way between things. Now, the British handed over, rent-free, one of these islands, Chagos, to the United States military.

AMY GOODMAN: C-H-A-G-O-S.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, to the United States military. And it has been now turned into a base, and rendition flights go through there and so on. But there was original inhabitants. At the time it was handed over to the United States in the '60s, the original inhabitants were pushed off. And they were all pushed off to Mauritius and Madagascar, and they had been trying to fight a court case to come back. And some cables revealed that in fact the British government had told the U.S. it was setting up a secret plan to make it very difficult or impossible for them to come back. It was going to declare—you know, it was going to suck in the Liberal Left. And here's how it was going to do it. Create a marine park. It’s a coral atoll, the Chagos islands. Going to create a marine park. Well, what was the economy of the Chagos islands? It was fishing. So this is explicitly that they’re going to prevent the Chagos islanders having any meaningful economic return to the island by creating this marine park, which all the Liberals will love. And that way, you know, these islanders won’t be able to interfere or spy on the U.S. base.

Anyway, that provoked new litigation by the Chagos islanders in the British courts. And ultimately, the lower courts found that the cables were inadmissible, because they had come from embassies, and there’s a Vienna Convention, the same thing that is protecting me here that protects diplomatic correspondence. But in a higher court, it was appealed, and it was found that’s not true. Actually, diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks are not protected by the Vienna Convention. They’re already public. It’s the first instance of getting them out that’s protected, not what happens to them subsequently. So that’s quite an important precedent within the common law world, because it means these cables can be used in many more court cases.

MORE AT LINK :


http://www.democracynow.org/appearanc...

[KoKo]

4. Part 2 ...gets into the DEEPER WEEDS...Re. "The Intercept" holding back info........

Last edited Thu Jul 10, 2014, 01:43 PM - Edit history (1)

It's truly and interesting watch ...whether one Agrees or Disagrees with the Message.

[canoeist52]

2. Thanks for posting Part II, with the transcript.

[KoKo]

3. Truly an Interesting Watch....it Buffered for me on my DSL..ATT...but it's available

Last edited Wed Jul 9, 2014, 08:56 PM - Edit history (1)

in other ways...and many DU'ers understand the "other ways" .....but its great watch or READ.

He's going into stuff we didn't know about and connecting dots ...(after all ....he has much time to reflect) given his incarceration......no access to sunlight or plants or walks or individual expression or choices....in this Ecuadorian PRISON.....

Please watch........"Pieces of the Puzzle."

[navarth]

5. fascinating...thank you very much nt

[wildbilln864]

6. Awesome! Thanks for posting>

[DeSwiss]

7. K&R

I love Julian and all he's done for humanity, but we're chasing our tails here. Using a crooked system to try and correct a crooked system can only result in another crooked system. And while these exposures do help people come to understand this fact, the exposures themselves have not had the desired effect here, where reaction to these affronts should be greatest but are muted at-best. Because the ''self-policing controls'' within our society are as invisible as they are effective, and stronger than steel.

The crooks are in-control of their crooked system. And they'll just wear you down with it. And when you've defeated them (because they ain't too bright - just ruthless) they'll just create another impediment for us to fight.

- We MUST have a:

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details. The foremost, or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle.

They (the emperors) frequently abused their power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; .. But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.

Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

~Alexis de Tocqueville