Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is expected to appear in a UK court tomorrow!

[Peter Lemkin]

ssange: U.S. Probe of WikiLeaks & "Show Trial" of Bradley Manning Aims to Scare Whistleblowers


Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of disclosing a trove of government documents and cables to WikiLeaks, is set to go on trial next week. Manning has already pleaded guilty to misusing classified material he felt "should become public," but has denied the top charge of aiding the enemy. Speaking from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange calls Manning's case "a show trial ... to terrorize people from communicating with journalists and communicating with the public." Assange also discusses his own legal status as he continues to evade extradition to Sweden. Assange fears that returning to Sweden would result in him being sent to the United States, where he fears a grand jury has secretly indicted him for publishing the diplomatic cables leaked by Manning.


[h=2]Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Julian Assange for the hour. He is in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. If he steps foot outside, the British government says they'll arrest him and extradite him to Sweden. If you could just for a moment, Julian, describe your situation right now, physically where you areyou're standing in front of an image. Describe what that image is and, well, the fact of how long you have been inside that embassy.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Right now I am inside the embassy, as I have been for 11 months. Before that, I was under house arrest for approximately 590 days, and before that, I was in solitary confinement for 10 days. The image that you see behind you is a frame from "Collateral Murder," a famous release by WikiLeaks, which displays the murder of two Reuters staff and a number of others in Baghdad in 2007, which was then subsequently covered up by the U.S. military. Bradley Manning has been charged with supplying that video to us and has himself said that he did so. You will see a cannon shell through the front of the van and some dead bodies lying around. One of them is Namir Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, the two Reuters staff. This video we had as a background frame for a talk that I did at Oxford, similar to the way I'm conducting this one now, beaming into the Oxford Union. And the Oxford Union redacted the whole background by hand. Even the little monitors that were in the audience, that the audience could see, footage of those monitors they redacted by hand and put that out on the Internet. You can google for "Assange censored Oxford." So, partly to pay tribute to the people who died in this incident, but also to Bradley Manning, and to take a stand against the censorship of Oxford, we have presented this background.
AMY GOODMAN: A quick question. Since we last spoke to you, again holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy, in November, Bradley Manning has pled guilty. Bradley Manning pled guilty to misusing classified material that he felt, quote, "should become public," but denied the top charge against him, aiding the enemy. He acknowledged he gave the classified documents, among them the video that you're describing, what you've called "Collateral Murder," that shows the journalists and the men in New Baghdad blown up by an Apache helicopter, and it's footage from the Apache helicopter, and then the subsequent exploding of the van that had two children in it. But he has pled guilty to doing this and to giving these documents to WikiLeaks, to you. You have always said you will not reveal your sources, but since he has pled guilty to this, can you talk about the significance of what Bradley Manning gave to WikiLeaks and what you published?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Bradley Manning is making his statements under duress, presently. He is facing a capital offense, which Barack Obama would have to sign, so politically there is possibly only a 3 percent, say, chance that Barack Obama would sign a death certificate or that the judge would decide to promote a death certificate. But if there was a 3 percent chance of you crossing the road, you wouldn't do so.
He's also facing a quite decent chance of life imprisonment. And the life imprisonment charge comes from a very new ambit claim of the Pentagon, that isand the Department of Justice, that is, communicating with a journalist is communicating to the public, is communicating to al-Qaeda. And there's no allegation that Bradley Manning intended to communicate to al-Qaeda. The only allegation is that he indirectly did so as a result of communicating with journalists, who communicated to the public. If that precedent is allowed to be erected, it will do two things. Firstly, it means it's a potential death penalty for any person in the military speaking to a journalist about a sensitive matter. Secondly, it also embroils the journalist and the publication in that chain of communicating, they would say, to the enemy, and therefore making them susceptible, as well, to the Espionage Act, which also has capital offenses. And that is part of the U.S.that latter part is part of the U.S. attack on WikiLeaks, including myself.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Julian Assange, there are about 150 witnesses who are set to testify against Manning at the trial. Among those witnesses, The Washington Post reports, is a person they have called a DOD operator, whose name they have not revealed, who is likely to say that Osama bin Laden received access to some of the WikiLeaks material through an associate because of what Manning revealed.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, the latest information I have is that there are, in fact, four of those people involved in the Osama bin Laden raid who will be testifying in one way or another. This is, of course, part of the show trial. The alleged actions here are a communication between a source and a journalist. There's no allegation anyone else was present in the room. So, 141 prosecution witnesses, 31 of them are giving secret testimony, in part, or behind a screen or something like this. This is a show trial. The trial is meant to go for 14 to 16 weeks, And the prosecution, the Pentagon and possibly White House is hungry for this. This is their big Broadway musical moment, and they have their star divas, from the SEALs and elsewhere, that they intend to put up in order to terrorize people from communicating with journalists and communicating with the public.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Julian Assange, what do you think the significance is of the fact that over two dozen witnesses will partially testify in secret?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it's a furtherance of what we've been seeing, as this new political structure of centralized intelligence and military power continues to gain financial and political capital. It is advancing the frontiers to the degree where it is now conducting extensive secret trials. The same thing has been introduced here in the U.K. But we all know that without open justice, there is no justice at all. Justice must be seen to be done. Judges must themselves be on trial before the public as they conduct trials. We are all aware of the terrible abuses in the past that have come about as a result of secret star chambers. But nonetheless, the neo-military-industrial complex has gained enough political power where it is able toor at least it thinks that it is able to go back to this earlier depraved time.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to recent comments made by the Australian foreign minister, Bob Carr. He was speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and was asked specifically about the threat of your possible extradition to the U.S. in the event that you're taken to Sweden.

BOB CARR: Julian Assange could have been the subject of extradition action by the United States any time in the last two years, when he's been residing in the U.K. He wasn't. To suggest that the Swedes are after him, as a CIA conspiracy, to get him to Stockholm and allowingallowing him to be bundled off to Langley, Virginia, is sheer fantasy. The Swedes have won in the U.K. courts. It's nothing to do with WikiLeaks. It's about a criminal allegation made in Sweden. And that's why he is in the Ecuadorean embassy. In this, Australia has precisely no status. We've got no standing in the courts on this in the United Kingdom. We've made representations to the Swedes about him being treated with due process. We've done that three times this month. We've made every effort

TONY JONES: And, by the way, just on that score, have you got some sort of assurance from the Swedes he would never be

BOB CARR: Oh, yes, yes. Well, the Swedes

TONY JONES: extradited to the United States?

BOB CARR: The Swedes say, "It is our policy, and it's been our policy for decades, that we never extradite someone on a matter related to military or intelligence." They just don't do it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Julian Assange, that was Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr. Could you comment on what he said?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Bob Carr is a well-known liar in Australian politics. The man's ignorance is only eclipsed by his arrogance. WikiLeaks published records showing how Bob Carr became a U.S. embassy informer way back in the 1970s, while he was in the unions, while he had no business whatsoever dealing with the U.S. embassy. At that time, he was giving sensitive political intelligence on the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, and that Gough Whitlam was subsequently removed in 1975 in a political coup in Australia.
Look, let's go through these points by Bob Carr. Bob Carr is a master of rhetoric. For example, he says that there's no evidence of some CIA conspiracy designed to smuggle me off to Langley, Virginia. Quite right, that's not the issue at stake here. That's a straw man that is erected by Bob Carr. What there is is extensive evidencein fact, the DOJ admits, as of March, which is subsequent, but has also made previous admissions, that the investigation, the criminal investigation against WikiLeaks, which Australian diplomats, in their own official correspondence, have said is of unprecedented scale and nature, continues. That is admitted by the DOJ. The subpoenas that have come out as a result of the grand jury always just have two names on them: Bradley Manning's name and my name. Those are the only two people who were named in those subpoenas. In the Bradley Manning court case, government witnesses say, when cross-examined, under oath, that the targets of the grand jury investigation are the founders and managers of WikiLeaks, amongst some others.
Now, in relation to whether Sweden extradites, there's a number of issues here. First of all, let's look at timing. Bob Carr says the United States could have extradited any time that they liked. Well, just go and look at justice4assange, with the numeral 4, dot com, slash extraditing, dash assange, dot html. It's justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html. It is normal for grand juries to go for two to three years. That is absolutely normal. The DOJ admits that this grand jury, in relation to us, is still going. John Kiriakou's grand jury went for a number of years. [Thomas] Drake's grand jury went for a number of years. Furthermore, it is unlawful for any U.S. official to admit to the existence of a sealed indictment, even to other U.S. officials, except in carrying out the arrest. It's only after the person has been arrested. So that is the situation I face in the U.K. if I walk outside. I could be arrested in relation to Sweden. I could be arrested in relation to the United States. What Bob Carr doesn't say is that I have never been charged for an offense in Sweden. While there's a decent chance of a secret indictment in the United States, and my lawyers say that they believe that there is a secret indictment, that records from Stratfor, allegedly obtained by Jeremy Hammond, reveal the existence of a secret indictment, there is no charge against me in relation to Sweden. The Ecuadorthe Swedes refuse to provide a guarantee to me, to Ecuador, that I will not be re-extradited to the United States as soon as I hit Sweden. They also say, formally, and said so before I came into the embassy, that I would be imprisoned without charge in Sweden, initially said held incommunicado during the course of their preliminary investigation, is perfectly normal. And the head of the Swedish Supreme Court even has come out and said it is normal and correct for Swedish police, if they are investigating some allegation, to have a phone call with the person, to take a statement, to come to the country here. The Swedes refuse to do that. They refuse to explain why even that they are doing that. And this whole matter was investigated by the most senior prosecutor in Stockholm, Eva Finné, who the Swedes have now been appointed to head up investigation into their race riots, investigated by Eva Finné, and dropped. The case was dropped. It was resurrected subsequently by a politician, Claes Borgström, who went to a different city, Gothenburg, and to a particular prosecutor there and got that prosecutor to resurrect the matter.






Julian Assange on Meeting with Google, Responds to Anti-WikiLeaks Attacks from New Film to Finances[/h]


WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy last year to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sex assault and rape allegations. He fears that Sweden will agree to extradite him to the United States. On Tuesday, Ecuador's foreign minister accused the British government of trampling on Assange's rights by refusing to allow him to travel to Ecuador, which granted him political asylum almost a year ago. Joining us from the embassy, Assange addresses what he calls "attacks on all fronts against WikiLeaks," from a monetary embargo involving some of the world's largest financial firms to a new Hollywood documentary on WikiLeaks, "We Steal Secrets." Assange also discusses a little-known meeting he held in June 2011 with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. We air an excerpt of audio recording from that meeting. Check back soon for our extended interview with Assange.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We are speaking today with Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, granted political asylum by Ecuador last year, sought refuge almost a year ago at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, because the British government promises to arrest him if he steps foot outside. Julian Assange is also author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. I wanted to ask you quickly, Julian, about the Icelandic Supreme Court decision around Visa and theand the whole issue of how the money supply to WikiLeaks has been cut off online, if you can explain this latest development.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Amy, first let me contextualize it. There's attacks on all fronts against WikiLeakscriminal, reputational, financial, in many different countries. There's also counterattacks that we have been making. And in relation to this Visa blockade, back inback in late 2010, U.S. right-wing politicians, like Senator Lieberman, contacted a number of different financial institutions in the United States and encouraged them to cut off WikiLeaks as a recipient of Visa donations, our donations but by Visa. Now, as a result, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Moneybookers, Western Union, Diners Club, Discover, JCB and the Bank of America and Swiss Post Financethat's 10 different financial organizationsas a result of that pressure, engaged in extrajudicial financial blockade against us and our donors, much the same as they do to Cuba, but without any legislative backing, without any administrative backing. Even the U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner investigated whether we should be formally added to a U.S. blacklist, and found that there was no legal basis to do so.
In response, WikiLeaks, for the past year and a half or so, has been engaged in litigating some of these giant financial services companies that are influenced by Washington power brokers. And we won in the lower courts in Iceland, and we have won in the Supreme Court in Iceland just a few weeks ago. Now, that victory in the Supreme Court stated that Visa must open up the gateway and its subcontractor Valitor in Iceland must open up the gateway. Visa has relented and has opened up the gateway. However, it has also activated what it says is another clause in the contract to shut it back down again on midnight June 30. So, between now and midnight June 30, people can donate directly to WikiLeaks; otherwise, they have tocome midnight June 30, they will have to engage in indirect mechanisms. But they are there. For example, Daniel Ellsberg, John Cusack, John Perry Barlow and some others set up the Free Press Foundation in the United States precisely to deal with some of these economic blockades. But if you go to WikiLeaks.org/donate, you will see that there's different ways that we have constructed to work around this economic blockade. Unfortunately, they're all a little bit indirect, so it's a little bit of an extra burden for donors and a reputational burden, because you don't see that you are donating directly to WikiLeaks; you see that you're donating to the Free Press Foundation or the Wau Holland Foundation in Germany or a number of others. But donations now to WikiLeaks via the Free Press Foundation in the United States are tax-deductible. We've also had a major victory in Europe in relation to the German tax authorities, which also were politically pressured, and that has come out and been admitted, to remove our tax deductibility in Europe. That's now back. We've won against that. So, the position of my asylum here is such that we've been able to concentrate more of our resources on counterattack and have been successfully engaged in that battle.
AMY GOODMAN: We wanted to turnswitch gears right now. The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has come out with a new book called The New Digital Age. And we wanted to ask you about a meeting you had. On June 23rd, 2011, Julian Assange, you had a secret five-hour meeting with the Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At the time, you were under house arrest in rural England. Also in attendance Jared Cohen, former adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Scott Malcomson, director of speech writing for Ambassador Susan Rice at the State Department and current communications director of the International Crisis Group; and Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting to discuss their ideas for this book that has just come out, The New Digital World. We want to go to a part of your conversation with Schmidt and Malcomson. This is a recording you made of that meeting, first time being played in a national broadcast, where you talk about the PATRIOT Act.

JULIAN ASSANGE: We wouldn't mind a leak from Google, which would be, I think, probably all the PATRIOT Act requests.

ERIC SCHMIDT: Yeah, which would be illegal.

JULIAN ASSANGE: There's no jurisdiction, da-da-da-da-da.

ERIC SCHMIDT: We are a U.S.

JULIAN ASSANGE: There's higher laws. There's higher laws, First Amendment, you know.

ERIC SCHMIDT: No, no. I've actually spent quite a bit of time on this question, because I amI am in great trouble because I have given a series of criticisms about PATRIOT I and PATRIOT II, because

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.

ERIC SCHMIDT: which I think arebecause they're nontransparent, you know, because the judge's orders are hidden, and so forth and so on. And the answerthe answer is that the laws are quite clear about Google in the U.S., that we couldn't do it. It would be illegal.

JULIAN ASSANGE: We're fighting this case now with Twitter, that we've done three court hearings now, trying to get the names of the other companies that fulfilled the subpoenas to the grand jury in the U.S. Twitter resisted, and so that's how some of us became aware. They argued that we should be told that there was a subpoena. I wasn't told, but

ERIC SCHMIDT: And this isand this is concerning you, concerning WikiLeaks?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, me personally, yeah. But three other people were told, but we know it is at least four other companies.

ERIC SCHMIDT: I can certainly pass on your request to our general counsel.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Tell them to argue that we should be told.

ERIC SCHMIDT: So, your specific request is that Google argue legally

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.

ERIC SCHMIDT: that WikiLeaks, as an organization, should be informed

JULIAN ASSANGE: Or any of the individuals.

ERIC SCHMIDT: or the individuals, if they are named in a FISA.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.

ERIC SCHMIDT: OK.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.

ERIC SCHMIDT: I will pass that along.

AMY GOODMAN: That is a part of this five-hour conversation that you had with the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Malcomson, director of speech writing for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. Can you talk about the circumstances of this meeting, how you made this recording, and then talk about the substance of what we just heard?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It's quite interesting to speculate as to the surface excuse for the meeting being about a book versus was there another side to it, as well. If we look at the way that Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have been going to North Korea and meeting with some other thieves, and how that information very rapidly goes back to the State Departmentwe know that the results of that meeting with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen went very, very quickly back to the top levels of the State Departmentthat they're, in some ways, becoming informal, deniable foreign ministers for a section of U.S. power. That's a very interesting thing to see Google resting so heavily on the U.S. State Department.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to an excerpt from the book by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen called The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. In it, the authors suggest WikiLeaks has endangered lives. They write, quote, "Neither WikiLeaks nor groups like Anonymous are terrorist organizations, although some might claim that hackers who engage in activities like stealing and publishing personal and classified information online might as well be. The information released on WikiLeaks put lives at risk and inflicted serious diplomatic damage," end-quote. The authors don't cite evidence for their claim, but they do put an asterisk next to the statement saying, quote, "At a minimum, platforms like WikiLeaks and hacker collectives that traffic in stolen classified material from governments enable or encourage espionage." Julian Assange, your comments on that quote taken from Eric Schmidt's book?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it's absurd. States that engage in espionage want to keep the information that they gain to themselves in order to get competitive knowledge advantage over other states, and also simply to protect their sourcing operations. There's a reason why that claim, like all such claims, remains uncited: because it is false. Not even the Pentagon, in fact, no government organization, claims that the activities of WikiLeaks have led even to the loss of life for a single person anywhere in the world. And if we want to speculate about speculative risks, as opposed to talk about the hundreds of thousands of cases ofhundreds and thousands of deaths that WikiLeaks documented, the U.S. military being involved in one way or the other, then we can go to a statement made by NATO in Kabul, reported by CNN, that NATO could not see a single case of an Afghan needing protection or needing to be moved as a result of our publication of the Afghan War Diaries, and that it was the Afghan War Diaries that led to all these rhetorical flourishes by the Pentagon and by the establishment media in the United Kingdom, led by Murdoch, and in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me end with your response to Alex Gibney's recently released documentary. We interviewed him at Sundance, the documentary called We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. This is Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, or NSA.

MICHAEL HAYDEN: Everyone has secrets. Some of the activities that nation states conduct in order to keep their people safe and free need to be secret in order to be successful. If they are broadly known, you cannot accomplish your work. Now look, I'm going to be very candid, alright? We steal secrets. We steal other nations' secrets. One cannot do that above board and be very successful for a very long period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, or NSA, his statement, "We steal secrets," the one that Alex Gibney used for the title of his documentary. Your response, Julian Assange? And have you gotten to see this documentary?
JULIAN ASSANGE: [inaudible] at best. The claim in the title is simply false. It has spread everywhere, of course, because it's in all the promotional literature. I assume very few people will go actually to see that film. That the promotion has been done by Universal. That's a $2.5 million hit job on my reputation, the reputation of the organization. What's the equivalent title? I Make Fictitious, Fraudulent Films: The Story of Alex Gibney. In response, we have published the full transcript, ahead of publicahead of the film's release, with line-by-line detail showing exactly how Alex Gibney edited statements, stitched them together, etc., and didn't engage indidn't engage, it seems, in any fact checking of the statements that the people he was interviewing. You know, for an example, I make some statement that begins with, "Well, what they say is," and then I quote it. Alex Gibney cuts off the "What they say," so in order to put someone else's words into my mouth. And that's present throughout the film. This is not a serious work.
AMY GOODMAN: We have just 10 seconds in this part of the interview, Julian.
JULIAN ASSANGE: This is not a serious work, and this is not a seriousnot a serious filmmaker.