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Julian Assange will be granted asylum, says official
Ecuador's president Rafael Correa has agreed to give the WikiLeaks founder asylum, according to an official in Quito

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 August 2012 14.42 EDT

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (left) will be granted asylum by Ecuador's president Rafael Correa (right), according to sources. Photograph: Martin Alipaz/EPA
Ecuador's president Rafael Correa has agreed to give Julian Assange asylum, officials within Ecuador's government have said.

The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up at Ecuador's London embassy since 19 June, when he officially requested political asylum.

"Ecuador will grant asylum to Julian Assange," said an official in the Ecuadorean capital Quito, who is familiar with the government discussions.

On Monday, Correa told state-run ECTV that he would decide this week whether to grant asylum to Assange. Correa said a large amount of material about international law had to be examined to make a responsible informed decision.

Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patiño indicated that the president would reveal his answer once the Olympic Games were over. But it remains unclear if giving Assange asylum will allow him to leave Britain and fly to Ecuador, or amounts to little more than a symbolic gesture. At the moment he faces the prospect of arrest as soon as he leaves the embassy for breaching his bail conditions.

"For Mr Assange to leave England, he should have a safe pass from the British [government]. Will that be possible? That's an issue we have to take into account," Patino told Reuters on Tuesday.

Government sources in Quito confirmed that despite the outstanding legal issues Correa would grant Assange asylum – a move which would annoy Britain, the US and Sweden. They added that the offer was made to Assange several months ago, well before he sought refuge in the embassy, and following confidential negotiations with senior London embassy staff.

The official with knowledge of the discussions said the embassy had discussed Assange's asylum request. The British government, however, "discouraged the idea," the offical said. The Swedish government was also "not very collaborative", the official said.

The official added: "We see Assange's request as a humanitarian issue. The contact between the Ecuadorean government and WikiLeaks goes back to May 2011, when we became the first country to see the leaked US embassy cables completely declassified ... It is clear that when Julian entered the embassy there was already some sort of deal. We see in his work a parallel with our struggle for national sovereignty and the democratisation of international relations."

Assange took refuge in Ecuador's embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct. He is said to be living in one room of the diplomatic building, where he has a high-speed internet connection.

Ecuadorean diplomats believe Assange is at risk of being extradited from Sweden to the US, where he could face the death penalty. Assange's supporters claim the US has already secretly indicted him following WikiLeaks' release in 2010 of US diplomatic cables, as well as classified Afghan and Iraq war logs.

Correa and Patiño have both said that Ecuador will take a sovereign decision regarding Assange. They say they view his case as a humanitarian act, and are seeking to protect Assange's right to life and freedom. On Monday the state-run newspaper El Telégrafo confirmed a decision had been made, although the paper did not specify what that decision was. It said that senior officials had been meeting in the past few days to iron out the last legal details.

Two weeks ago Assange's mother Christine Assange paid Ecuador an official visit, following an invitation by Ecuador's foreign affairs ministry. She met with Correa and Patiño, as well as with other top politicians, including Fernando Cordero, head of Ecuador's legislature. Both Patiño and Ms Assange appeared visibly touched during a press conference, which had to be briefly suspended when Ms Assange started crying.

Ms Assange also held several public meetings in government buildings, and in one case she was accompanied by the head of Assange's defence team, Baltasar Garzón, the former Spanish judge who ordered the London arrest of Chile's General Pinochet.

Other top political figures in Ecuador have been vocal about the government's support of Assange's bid. "Our comrade the president, who leads our international policy, will grant Julian Assange asylum," said María Augusta Calle, a congresswoman of the president's party, and former head of the Sovereignty, Foreign Affairs and Latin American Integration Commission during the 2008 Constitutional Assembly, during a meeting with Ms Assange.

Over the past year and a half, Assange has remained in touch with Ecuador's embassy in London. In April, he interviewed President Correa for his TV show on Russia Today, the English-language channel funded by the Russian government. The interview, which lasted 75 minutes, included a pally exchange in which Assange and Correa bonded over freedom of speech and the negative role of the US in Latin America. At one point Correa joked: "Are you having a lot of fun with the interview, Julian?" Assange replied: "I'm enjoying your jokes a great deal, yes."

Correa has made international headlines this year for what critics have called a government crackdown on private media. Analysts say that granting the WikiLeaks founder asylum could be a way for him to depict himself as a champion of freedom of speech ahead of the February 2013 presidential elections, in which he is expected to run again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ador/print

The rights groups that lost the plot on Ecuador and Julian Assange

Free speech advocates should defend WikiLeaks' founder from US spying charges, not invent a media crackdown in Ecuador

Mark Weisbrot

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 21 July 2012 09.00 EDT



Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, remains trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 19 June, as he awaits the government of Ecuador's decision on whether to grant him political asylum. It is interesting, if rather aggravating, to see how people who are supposed to be concerned with human rights and freedom of expression have reacted to this story.

Although Assange has not been charged with any crime, the Swedish government has requested his extradition to Sweden for questioning. For more than 19 months now, the Swedish government has refused to explain why he could not be questioned in the UK. Former Stockholm chief district prosecutor Sven-Erik Alhem testified that the decision of the Swedish government to extradite Assange is "unreasonable and unprofessional, as well as unfair and disproportionate", because he can be easily questioned in the UK.

Of course, it's not hard to figure out why Assange's enemies want him in Sweden: he would be thrown in jail and would have limited access to the media, and judicial proceedings would be conducted in secret. But most importantly, it would be much easier to get him extradited to the United States. Here in the US, there is an ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks; and according to leaked emails from the private intelligence agency Stratfor, a criminal indictment for Assange has already been prepared. Powerful political figures such as Dianne Feinstein, Democratic chair of the US Senate intelligence committee, have called for his prosecution under the Espionage Act, which carries the death penalty.

For these reasons and many more, it is quite likely that the government of Ecuador will decide that Assange has a well-founded fear of political persecution, and grant him political asylum. Yet, surprisingly and shamefully, organizations whose profession it is to defend human rights and press freedoms have not only remained silent on the question of Assange's right to asylum, or Sweden's political persecution of a journalist, but have, instead, attacked Ecuador. For example, José Miguel Vivanco, director the Americas Watch division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), has stated:

"I think this is ironic that you have a journalist, or an activist, seeking political asylum from a government that has – after Cuba – the poorest record of free speech in the region, and the practice of persecuting local journalists when the government is upset by their opinions or their research."

Much of the media ran with this, perhaps not knowing a great deal about the media in Ecuador, and not realizing that any of the other independent democracies in South America would also grant asylum to Assange. When Assange was first arrested in 2010, then President Lula da Silva of Brazil denounced the arrest as "an attack on freedom of expression". And he criticized other governments for not defending Assange. If it was clear to Lula and other independent governments that Assange was politically persecuted then, it is even more obvious now.

The problem is that Sweden does not have an independent foreign policy from the United States, which is why the Swedish government won't accept Assange's offer to come to Sweden if they would promise not to extradite him to the US. Sweden collaborated with the US in turning over two Egyptians to the CIA's "rendition" program, by which they were taken to Egypt and tortured. The UN found Sweden to have violated the global ban on torture for its role in this crime.

One would expect better from a human rights organization that is supposed to be independent of any government's political agenda. But Vivanco's attack on Ecuador is inexcusable. As anyone who is familiar with the Ecuadoran media knows, it is uncensored and more oppositional with respect to the government than the US media is.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has mounted a similar political campaign against Ecuador, falsely charging:

"Correa's administration has led Ecuador into an era of widespread repression by systematically filing defamation lawsuits and smearing critics."

What HRW and CPJ are doing is taking advantage of the fact that few people outside of Ecuador have any idea what goes on there. They then seize upon certain events to convey a completely false impression of the state of press freedom there.

To offer an analogy, it so happens that France and Germany have laws that make it a crime, punishable by fines and imprisonment, to lie about the Holocaust, and have recently prosecuted people under these laws. Personally, I agree with a number of scholars who see these laws as an infringement on freedom of expression and believe they should be repealed. But I would not try to pretend that the people who have been prosecuted under these laws – like the extreme rightwing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen of France – are themselves champions of free speech. Nor would I try to create the impression that such laws, or their enforcement, are part of a generalized "crackdown" on political opposition; or that France and Germany are countries where the freedom of expression is under attack from the government.

If I were stupid enough to do so, nobody would believe me – because France and Germany are big, rich countries that are much better known to the world than Ecuador.

Let's look at one of the major cases that groups like Americas Watch and CPJ have complained most about. Last February, the nation's highest court upheld a criminal libel conviction against the daily El Universo, with three directors and an opinion editor sentenced to three years in prison, and $40m in damages. President Correa announced a pardon for the convictions 13 days later – so no one was punished.

As noted above, I am against criminal libel laws and would agree with criticism advocating the repeal of such laws. But to say that this case represents a "crackdown" on freedom of expression is more than an exaggeration. These people were convicted of libel because they told very big lies in print, falsely accusing Correa of crimes against humanity. Under Ecuadorian law, he can – like any other citizen – sue them for libel, and the court can and did find them guilty. Just as Le Pen in France was found guilty of having "denied a crime against humanity and was complicit in justifying war crimes.''

Groups like Americas Watch and CPJ are seriously misrepresenting what is going on in Ecuador. Rather than being a heroic battle for freedom of expression against a government that is trying to "silence critics", it is a struggle between two political actors. One political actor is the major media, whose unelected owners and their allies use their control of information to advance the interests of the wealth and power that used to rule the country; on the other side is a democratic government that is seeking to carry out its reform program, for which it was elected.

In this context, it is difficult to take seriously these groups' complaints that President Correa's public criticism of the media is a human rights violation.

While I would not defend all of the government's actions in its battle against a hostile, politicized media, I think human rights organizations that grossly exaggerate and misrepresent what is going on in Ecuador undermine their own credibility – even if they can get away with it in the mainstream US media. It is equally disturbing that they cannot find the courage – as more independent human rights defenders, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, have done – to defend a journalist who is currently being persecuted by the government of the United States and its allies.


© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political ... 26m7s.html

US calls Assange 'enemy of state'

Philip Dorling
Published: September 27, 2012 - 11:06AM


THE US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States - the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency.

Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with "communicating with the enemy", a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.

The documents, some originally classified "Secret/NoForn" - not releasable to non-US nationals - record a probe by the air force's Office of Special Investigations into a cyber systems analyst based in Britain who allegedly expressed support for WikiLeaks and attended pro-Assange demonstrations in London.

The counter-intelligence investigation focused on whether the analyst, who had a top-secret security clearance and access to the US military's Secret Internet Protocol Router network, had disclosed classified or sensitive information to WikiLeaks supporters, described as an "anti-US and/or anti-military group".

The suspected offence was "communicating with the enemy, 104-D", an article in the US Uniform Code of Military Justice that prohibits military personnel from "communicating, corresponding or holding intercourse with the enemy".

The analyst's access to classified information was suspended. However, the investigators closed the case without laying charges. The analyst denied leaking information.

Mr Assange remains holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London. He was granted diplomatic asylum on the grounds that if extradited to Sweden to be questioned about sexual assault allegations, he would be at risk of extradition to the US to face espionage or conspiracy charges arising from the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic reports.

US Vice-President Joe Biden labelled Mr Assange a "high-tech terrorist" in December 2010 and US congressional leaders have called for him to be charged with espionage.

Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee - both once involved in presidential campaigns - have both urged that Mr Assange be "hunted down".

Mr Assange's US attorney, Michael Ratner, said the designation of WikiLeaks as an "enemy" had serious implications for the WikiLeaks publisher if he were to be extradited to the US, including possible military detention.

US Army private Bradley Manning faces a court martial charged with aiding the enemy - identified as al-Qaeda - by transmitting information that, published by WikiLeaks, became available to the enemy.

Mr Ratner said that under US law it would most likely have been considered criminal for the US Air Force analyst to communicate classified material to journalists and publishers, but those journalists and publishers would not have been considered the enemy or prosecuted.

"However, in the FOI documents there is no allegation of any actual communication for publication that would aid an enemy of the United States such as al-Qaeda, nor are there allegations that WikiLeaks published such information," he said.

"Almost the entire set of documents is concerned with the analyst's communications with people close to and supporters of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, with the worry that she would disclose classified documents to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

"It appears that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the 'enemy'. An enemy is dealt with under the laws of war, which could include killing, capturing, detaining without trial, etc."

The Australian government has repeatedly denied knowledge of any US intention to charge Mr Assange or seek his extradition.

However, Australian diplomatic cables released to Fairfax Media under freedom-of-information laws over the past 18 months have confirmed the continuation of an "unprecedented" US Justice Department espionage investigation targeting Mr Assange and WikiLeaks.

The Australian diplomatic reports canvassed the possibility that the US may eventually seek Mr Assange's extradition on conspiracy or information-theft-related offences to avoid extradition problems arising from the nature of espionage as a political offence and the free-speech protections in the US constitution.

Mr Assange is scheduled this morning to speak by video link to a meeting on his asylum case on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The meeting will be attended by Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino.

In a separate FOI decision yesterday, the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that the release of Australian diplomatic cables about WikiLeaks and Mr Assange had been the subject of extensive consultation with the US.


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RT

Assange to UN: 'It is time for the US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks' (VIDEO)

Published: 27 September, 2012, 03:24
Edited: 27 September, 2012, 05:57


WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has called on the United States to move from words to actions, and put an end to its persecution of WikiLeaks, its people and its sources. He made the statement during an address to a panel of UN delegates.

Addressing the representatives of the United Nations' member countries, the WikiLeaks founder spoke of the difference between words and actions, praising US President Barack Obama for his words.

"We commend and agree with the words that peace can be achieved… But the time for words has run out. It is time for the US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks, our people and our sources."

Assange was highly critical of US involvement in the Arab Spring, denouncing Obama as audacious for exploiting it. He added that it is "disrespectful of the dead" to claim that the US has supported forces of change.

"Was it not audacious for the US President to say that his country supported the forces of change in the Arab Spring? Tunisian history did not begin in December 2010, and Mohamed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so that Barack Obama could be re-elected," Assange told the panel.

"The world knew after reading WikiLeaks that Ben Ali and his government had for long years enjoyed the indifference, if not the support, of the US, in full knowledge of its excesses and its crimes. So it must come as a surprise to the Tunisians that the US supported the forces of change in their country, and it must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American tear gas out of their eyes, that the US administration supported change in Egypt"

Julian Assange also spoke at length about Bradley Manning, the US private accused of supplying WikiLeaks with hundreds of sensitive diplomatic and military cables. Assange accused the US government of detaining Manning without charge and mistreating him, even attempting to offer him a deal in exchange for Manning's testimony against Assange. The WikiLeaks founder told the UN panel that Bradley Manning, accused of 'death penalty crimes', was "degraded, abused and psychologically tortured."

He added that the FBI had produced 42,135 pages of WikiLeaks-related activity, and less that 8,000 concern Bradley Manning, reiterating his belief that the US private is being senselessly detained.

Julian Assange made his address from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he took shelter in June after losing a court battle to avoid extradition to Sweden. The WikiLeaks founder fears that Sweden, which wants him for questioning over allegations of sexual assault, will extradite him to the US for his role in leaking thousands of secret diplomatic and military cables.

The British Foreign Office maintains that it has a binding obligation to arrest Assange once he leaves the embassy grounds. Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, meanwhile, said that allowing Assange to be transferred to the country’s embassy in Sweden would be an acceptable compromise for all parties involved, as he would “remain under our protection while also satisfying the demands of the Swedish justice system.”

The Ecuador FM also said that Assange's right to freedom must be respected.

"I don’t know any case in history where diplomatic asylum did not end in freedom for the person. I hope this will not be an exception in history. Every country must respect the right of the country granting asylum and the person who was granted it."

Julian Assange told journalists present at the UN GA panel that "both the UK and Sweden have refused to offer guarantees" that he would not be extradited to the US, where both he and WikiLeaks have been declared 'enemies of the state' by the milatary, putting them in the same legal category as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The UK and Sweden have remained silent on the possibility of a compromise, though both publicly vowed that Assange should not face special treatment, whether better or worse than normal, under their legal systems.


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http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/27/i ... an_assange

AMY GOODMAN: Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may have been designated an "enemy of the state" by the United States. U.S. Air Force counterintelligence documents show military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or its supporters may be at risk of being charged with "communicating with the enemy," a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death. The designation is the same legal category as al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The report came just before Julian Assange spoke via videolink to a side meeting of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday. Assange spoke from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Ecuador granted him diplomatic asylum to prevent Assange from being extradited to Sweden over sex crime accusations. Assange is seeking asylum because he fears extradition to Sweden may lead to his transfer to the United States, where, he is concerned, he could potentially face charges relating to WikiLeaks.

Later in the broadcast, we’ll speak with Julian Assange’s attorney Michael Ratner, but first we turn to Julian Assange’s address from last night.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Today I want to tell you an American story. I want to tell you the story of a young American soldier in Iraq. The soldier was born in Crescent, Oklahoma, to a Welsh mother and to a U.S. Navy father. His parents fell in love. His father was stationed at the U.S. military base in Wales. The soldier showed early promise as a boy, winning top prizes at science fairs three years in a row. He believed in the truth, and like all of us, he hated hypocrisy. He believed in liberty and the right for all of us to pursue it and happiness. He believed in the values that founded an independent United States. He believed in Madison, he believed in Jefferson, and he believed in Paine. Like many teenagers, he was unsure what to do with his life, but he knew he wanted to defend his country, and he knew he wanted to learn about the world.

He entered the U.S. military and, like his father, trained as an intelligence analyst. In late 2009, age 21, he was deployed to Iraq. There, it is alleged, he saw a U.S. military that did not often follow the rule of law and, in fact, engaged in murder and supported political corruption. It is alleged it was there, in Baghdad, in 2010 that he gave to WikiLeaks, he gave to me, and, it is alleged, he gave to the world, details that exposed the torture of Iraqis, the murder of journalists and the detailed records of over 120,000 civilian killings in Iraq and in Afghanistan. He is also alleged to have given WikiLeaks 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, which then went on to help trigger the Arab Spring. This young soldier’s name is Bradley Manning.

Allegedly betrayed by an informer, he was then imprisoned in Baghdad, imprisoned in Kuwait, and imprisoned in Virginia, where he was kept for nine months in isolation and subject to severe abuse. The U.N. special rapporteur for torture, Juan Méndez, investigated and formally found against the United States. Hillary Clinton’s spokesman resigned. Bradley Manning, science fair all-star, soldier and patriot, was degraded, abused and psychologically tortured by his own government. He was charged with a death penalty offense. These things happened to him, as the U.S. government tried to break him, to force him to testify against WikiLeaks and me. As of today, Bradley Manning has been detained without trial for 856 days. The legal maximum in the U.S. military is 120 days.

The U.S. administration has been trying to erect a national regime of secrecy, a national regime of obfuscation, a regime where any government employee revealing sensitive information to a media organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or espionage, and journalists from the media organization with them.

We should not underestimate the scale of the investigation which has happened into WikiLeaks. I only wish I could say that Bradley Manning was the only victim of the situation. But the assault on WikiLeaks in relation to that matter and others has produced an investigation that Australian diplomats say is without precedence in its scale and nature, that the U.S. government called a "whole of government investigation." Those government agencies identified so far, as a matter of public record, having been involved in this investigation include the Department of Defense; CENTCOM; SOUTHCOM; the Defence Intelligence Agency; the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division; the United States forces in Iraq; the First Armored Division; the U.S. Army Computer Crimes Investigative Unit, the CCIU; the Second Army Cyber Command; and within that three separate intelligence investigations, the Department of Justice, most significantly, and its U.S. grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia; the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which now has, according to court testimony early this year produced a file of 42,135 pages into WikiLeaks, of which less than 8,000 concern Bradley Manning; the Department of State; the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Services. In addition, we have been investigated by the Office of the Director General of National Intelligence, the ODNI; the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive; the Central Intelligence Agency; the House Oversight Committee; the National Security Staff Interagency Committee; and the PIAB, the President’s Intelligence—the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. The Department of Justice spokesperson, Dean Boyd, confirmed in July 2012 that the Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks is ongoing. So, for all Barack Obama’s fine words yesterday—and there were many of them, fine words—it is his administration that boasts on his campaign website of criminalizing more speech than all previous presidents combined.

I am reminded of the phrase, "the audacity of hope." Who can say that the president of the United States is not audacious? Was it not audacity for the United States government to take credit for the last two years of progress? Was it not audacious for him to say on Tuesday the United States supported the forces of change in the Arab Spring? Tunisian history did not begin in December 2010, and Mohamed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so Barack Obama could be re-elected. His death was an emblem of the despair he had to endure under the Ben Ali regime. The world knew, after reading WikiLeaks publications, that Ben Ali and its government had for long years enjoyed the indifference, if not the support, of the United States—in full knowledge of its excesses and its crimes. So it must come as a surprise to Tunisians that the United States supported the forces of change in their country. And it must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American tear gas out of their eyes that the U.S. administration supported change in Egypt. It must come as a surprise to those who heard Hillary Clinton insist that Mubarak’s regime was stable, and when it was clear to everyone that it was not, it must come as a surprise that the U.S. backed its hated intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who we proved the U.S. knew was a torturer, to take the realm. It must come as a surprise to all those Egyptians who heard Vice President Joseph Biden declare that Hosni Mubarak was a democrat and that Julian Assange was a high-tech terrorist. It is disrespectful to the dead and to the incarcerated of Bahrain’s uprising to claim that the United States supported the forces for change. That is indeed audacity.

Who can say that it is not audacious that the president, concerned to appear to look leaderly, looks back on this change, the people’s change, and tries to call it his own? But we can take heart here, too, because it means that the White House has seen that this progress is inevitable. In this season of progress, the president has seen which way the wind is blowing. And he must now pretend that it’s his administration who made it blow.

AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressing a side meeting of the U.N. General Assembly Wednesday night.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/27/e ... ted_julian

AMY GOODMAN: For more on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, we’re joined now by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, legal adviser to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Michael Ratner, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about what he said and also this latest information that has come out under Freedom of Information Act that suggests that the U.S. may be looking at Julian Assange as an enemy of the state.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Amy, the point that he ended on in the speech you just put up on Democracy Now! was that the Obama administration is taking credit for the Arab Spring. And what he points out is that’s a false view of history, that the Obama administration, both with Tunisia, supported Ben Ali, the, quote, "leader" of Tunisia, or was indifferent to him, to what he was doing to his own people. With regard to Egypt, they supported Mubarak. Hillary Clinton, as he said, called him a great democrat or whatever she said about him. And in fact, of course, it was WikiLeaks that brought out the documents in early December about Tunisia that really showed the corruption of the Ben Ali regime and actually has been given credit by the Tunisian government for helping encourage that Arab Spring. So he tries to correct the record here on the Obama administration somehow putting itself forward as taking credit. But, of course, the people in the Middle East, they know what both the Obama administration did or didn’t do and what has been done for a long time by the United States in the Middle East.

With regard to the—this other issue that was revealed yesterday by WikiLeaks, as well as a number of journalists, the designation—the designation, arguably, that WikiLeaks is an enemy of the United States, and Julian Assange is an enemy, that surfaced in a series of Freedom of Information Act documents, in which an analyst in the U.K., an analyst for the United States, a soldier who had top security clearance, began to be sympathetic with Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks. An investigation is then begun. She visited the trial when Julian Assange was on trial. She met with friends of Julian Assange.

AMY GOODMAN: So this is a woman who has top security clearance, and they start to see she’s going to these meetings and rallies for Julian Assange.

MICHAEL RATNER: Right, and they open an investigation—and we have the documents now—in which they investigate her for communicating with the enemy, which is the same charge, 104-D of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which carries the death penalty, communicating with the enemy, the same charge that Bradley Manning is actually being tried on. So, from the face of the documents, it appears that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are looked at as the enemy. If that’s the case, of course, it has serious consequences. We all know what you can do with an enemy. You can drone him. You can capture him. You can put him in a cell forever. So it’s very, very serious. That’s one possibility, or possibly very likely possibility, from reading these documents, that WikiLeaks is an enemy and Julian Assange is an enemy.

The other possibility is that WikiLeaks is the means by which this military analyst is communicating with the enemy. She’s turning over documents. She never did, but she’s allegedly possibly going to turn over documents to WikiLeaks, which then, by doing that, she’s communicating with the enemy, because WikiLeaks is going to publish them, and al-Qaeda or somebody who the U.S. has already designated an enemy is going to read them. Either possibility is terrible for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and, of course, for journalists. It’s terrible because if WikiLeaks is an enemy—I’ve already said how serious that would be if Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are an enemy—if they’re the means of communicating with the enemy, they could still be charged—WikiLeaks could be charged—with aiding the enemy, could be arrested under the National Defense Authorization Act, could be kept at Guantánamo, etc.

AMY GOODMAN: Enemy, again, is like al-Qaeda, is like Taliban.

MICHAEL RATNER: Right. Enemy is al-Qaeda and Taliban. And the question in this document—either answer is very bad for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks—is, is he being looked at like al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or is he simply—not simply—or is he being looked at as the means by which someone like this analyst is communicating with the enemy?

AMY GOODMAN: In these last seconds, where does his case stand? He’s now been in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, holed up there for a hundred days. What’s happening?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, the foreign minister gave a talk with Julian yesterday at the U.N. and said, "We will never, ever surrender Julian Assange." He has been given asylum, and now the demand is that the U.K. give safe passage to Julian Assange to Ecuador. That’s required by law. And today, the Ecuadorean minister said he is meeting with his U.K. correspondent at the U.N. and will really make the request, demand, that Julian Assange be given safe passage. He also said that they made every effort to get guarantees that Julian Assange would not be forwarded from Sweden to the United States for prosecution.

AMY GOODMAN: You mean that they would give him up to be questioned by Sweden. Their concern is him being sent to the United States.

MICHAEL RATNER: Right, that’s their major concern. And the U.K. and Sweden did not do that, refused to do that. And the United States refused to answer the question of whether or not they would prosecute Julian Assange.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, attorney for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

We know, from documents that were obtained and released by Wikileaks, that the Bush-Cheney administration considered, but fortunately eventually decided against, bombing the main studio and office building of Al-Jazeera Television in Qatar in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were known to be furious at what they considered to be the biased reporting on that war by the Arab-language TV news organization. This aborted plan to blow up the whole station, which would have resulted in huge casualties, casts in a very suspicious light the rocket and machine gun attack on the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad on April 8, 2002, during the US assault on Iraq’s capital city just a few weeks into the invasion. In that attack, Tareq Ayyaub, an Al-Jazeera cameraman, was killed and another journalist was injured. The US claimed it had inadvertently struck the Al-Jazeera building because of “shots fired from nearby,” but an investigation disclosed that Al-Jazeera had given the coordinates of its facility to US forces so it was known to be a press site, not a military target.

We've called him a "seed-spilling sex creep," a "pale nerd king," and "a real-life The Matrix extra," so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a phone interview on the condition that we speak only about the book. I agreed, which was a lie.
Cypherpunks is simply the book-length transcript of a conversation between Assange, Wikileaks activist Jacob Appelbaum, cryptography expert Andy Müller-Maguhn, and French activist Jérémie Zimmermann that took place in March 2012 (with subsequent additions and emendations). The central argument is that a new age of total electronic surveillance is dawning, which is leading us toward a "new transnational dystopia." As data storage becomes cheaper, nations are routinely vacuuming up all communication that transpires over the internet—and increasingly, all communication does transpire over the internet—for retrieval later if need be. Assange and his cohorts call this "strategic surveillance," to be distinguished from "tactical surveillance," which is the traditional let's-get-a-warrant-for-this-guy's-phone sort of spying that we're used to.

Assange, who describes himself as the "visionary behind Wikileaks" in the book's forematter, contends that he and his co-authors are at the vanguard of people who have tangled with this new surveillance regime, despite the fact that his well-publicized run-ins with the United States authorities involve a grand jury (an 846-year-old institution) issuing subpoenas (a common legal instrument) while investigating alleged violations of the Espionage Act of 1917.

Assange talked about the similarities between his own situation and that of former CIA director David Petraeus, why the New York Times and Guardian are "bootlicking" cowards, and his efforts to get a copy of his FBI file before blowing me off after about 15 minutes. He also claimed that Wikileaks, which currently offers no way for whistleblowers to securely and anonymously leak information to it—you can try "the mail," Assange told me—and has been therefore rather moribund, is releasing an average of "several thousand" documents every day.

Below is the full transcript of our conversation.

Julian Assange: Good day, John.

John Cook: Hello, Mr. Assange. Pleased to talk to you.

JA: You too.

JC: How are you doing today?

JA: I'm alright. It's been a pretty busy day as far as the book has been concerned.

JC: I can imagine. Congratulations on the book. Let me start with a question about the distinction you make between strategic and tactical surveillance. I think the grander point of the book is that we're entering an age where there's sort of the capacity for total surveillance of communications conducted through the internet, which you call strategic surveillance. But to the extent that you claim you and your co-authors are sort of representative victims of that process—do you have any evidence that this strategic surveillance, as opposed to the routine tactical surveillance you discuss, has actually been deployed against you?

JA: I mean it's—there's—the issue with strategic surveillance, and that's the new game in town, is that it's cheaper to intercept everyone and store that information and then search it than it is to work out who you want to intercept and start following them around. So the evidence for that comes out of several National Security Agency whistleblowing cases in the United States, and lawsuits surrounding that. Plus, information coming from the contracting industry worldwide, which is building mass surveillance devices, and with those devices it produces pamphlets and prospectuses that it goes to intelligence agencies with. We released, together with Privacy International and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, several hundred of those earlier this year and they speak extensively about strategic interception and describe it in the way that I've done— intercept the whole country and store the information.

JC: I gather that, but your book presents you and your co-writers as a sort of vanguard of people who are running up against this brave new world. And its seems to me that what has happened to you is that age-old, centuries-old mechanisms have been used against you. There's nothing new about subpoenas, there's nothing new about stopping people at the border and inspecting their belongings—

JA: Personally, yeah, sort of what's been happening to us personally is what happened to Petraeus personally. But that's the reason that it's easy to talk about it, is because there is some quasi-judicial process, or at least an administrative process, so there is a paper trail. For strategic interception, there is no individualized paper trail, the only paper trail that is there is on the sale of this equipment, and the funding to giant data warehouses in Utah, and statements by National Security Agency whistleblowers, and enabling legislation that has been put through in several countries. There is no individualized paper trail, because it is strategic interception—it's everyone. That's the whole idea, is you don't need to get a warrant to go after a specific person because you're after them all.

There is actually a connection that we do have, in relation to strategic interception. Amesys is a French corporation closely associated with French intelligence. But it sells to the world, like most of the corporations do, and it sold a system called 'The Eagle,' which it termed a nationwide interception system, back in 2009. And we got hold of the internal manuals for that system, and in the examples that were sent to Gadhafi, there is a redacted portion. You can unredact the portion because they did the redaction poorly, and there appear several email addresses that they've been intercepting. And that includes one of the lawyers for the Bureau of Investigative Journalists, and our partner in the very project to expose this stuff.

JC: If I wanted to leak classified information to WikiLeaks right now, how would I do it?

JA: Right now we don't have the public gateway, but we have various private gateways. WikiLeaks has been a—

JC: If they're surveilling your lawyer why would I take the risk of submitting anything through email?

JA: I see what you're speaking about. Yeah. No. Of course if you have information that's of interest to the national security state you have to be extremely careful, because they're intercepting all these communications and keeping records on which computers are communicating with what. Which is why we have always had a variety of ways of getting information, from in-person, through the mail, to anonymity mechanisms like Tor and so on.

JC: But that's not quite what the initial promise of WikiLeaks was, right? I mean, the idea was that it would be this mechanism for anonymously submitting documents and data online and then making those available to anyone who was interested in them. It seems that as a going concern WikiLeaks hasn't really existed since the release of the cables. I mean there's not—

JA: No, that's quite untrue, we published nearly a million documents last year. This year, we have probably published around a million as well. We've been averaging several thousand a day.

JC: Several thousand documents a day you've been publishing?

JA: Yeah. And we're set to publish more next year.

JC: Are they on your website? I mean the last thing I see you publishing is the detainee policies in October, they're certainly aren't several thousand of them.

JA: They've been publishing every day, and Spy Files and so on. You can go in and look at those. But anyway, back to the book, what is your question about the book?

JC: Well the book is about the efforts to target Wikileaks, and it just seems that as a going concern there's not much of a threat of restricted data being published by your website, or acquired by your website, since there's no way to submit to it.

JA: That's completely untrue, you can go and see that we publish, on average, several thousand files everyday.

JC: Why did you…

JA: Yesterday we just published information to the European Commission about the Lieberman-King blockade of WikiLeaks by U.S. financials institutions

JC: I don't see that on your front page, but I'll look for it. Why did you...

JA: It's on the left hand column.

JC: Why did you draw out the release of the State Department cables over such a long period of time? In the end, it wasn't even you that actually made the decision to publish the entire body of cables. That happened because a copy had been inadvertently released...

JA: Off-topic question.

JC: The book is about WikiLeaks, is it not? I mean you mention the cables.

JA: No the book is about how all societies are merging with the internet as the internet becomes an integral part of societal infrastructure. And it has connected societies across the world, and now we have a situation where an illness that befalls the internet, befalls all societies. William Binney, the former National Security Agency chief researcher for signals intelligence automation, describes the present state of play as "turn-key totalitarianism"—that we have all the essential ingredients for a totalitarian society that puts the Stasi to shame, and actually this key is starting to turn in the lock. That's why the problem is so urgent, and people must understand it. Addressing it is a more complex issue, but the first step is to understand the threat that we all face.

JC: In the book, you rightly criticize the New York Times and other newspapers for over-redacting the cables that they released in order to protect certain interests. But the cables that you released—the cables that WikiLeaks released on its website—were heavily redacted in many cases. I remember there was a reference to an energy drink that sponsored a lavish party, I believe in Saudi Arabia, that was mentioned in a cable, and you guys redacted the name of that energy drink company. Why, are you criticizing the Times and these other outlets for over-redacting those cables when you did the same thing, and why did you take the steps to redact them so heavily?

JA: Media is a big problem around the world, it's powerful and can abuse its power — the agreement that we had with various media organizations was that they would redact the cables and then send them to us. Now we published those redacted cables that were fed to us by the New York Times—

JC: Why did you submit to that—

JA: The agreement was that they would be redacted for human rights reasons. And they simply abused those agreements, and it's one of the reasons that we refused to continue working with them. There's a great analysis on those redactions on Cable Drum, also we had provided tools where you can very easily look at cablegatesearch.wikileaks.org—to search the differences between what's in the material and what the media redacted. Even Gawker did some good work on showing redactions that the New York Times applied.

JC: Right, but you applied them too. Bradley Manning reportedly said in chats before he was arrested—

JA: It was an automated process. There was an agreement between WikiLeaks and the media. Part of the deal was that they had to do that work. They had the local knowledge to do it. But they simply abused that part of the deal for their own particular political or legal concerns.

JC: You mentioned Petraeus, I'm curious to get your thoughts on what's become of him. There are some curious parallels between what's happened to you and what's happened to him, how personal lives and sexual behavior — and misbehavior — got wrapped up in surveillance and counterespionage. What do you make of that story?

JA: For Petraeus, what is fascinating is that the surveillance state has now become so out of control that it's starting even to eat its own young. Ultimate insiders like Petraeus have always felt protected from it, and that really the surveillance state was something that affected us—civilians and activists. But it is now so secretive, so sprawling that even the head of the CIA can be taken down by it.

JC: Do you think that given what your current situation—you're holed up in an embassy seeking asylum, you can't leave, you've become something of an international anti-celebrity, partially through your own efforts, agreeing to go on The Simpsons and that sort of thing. Do you think that WikiLeaks was best served with you being the face of it? Do you think that maybe things would have turned out a little bit differently for the organization—for its effectiveness as a tool for disseminating information, which it is not right now, or is certainly not at full capacity—if you had taken a lower profile or if you had not been its public face?

JA: I don't think it's a very interesting question. Any organization like WikiLeaks that exposes very powerful players receives backlash, and the attacks against us are across the board, they are economic attacks — the extrajudicial banking blockade, an extraordinary thing, the grand jury and other investigations in the Pentagon, CIA, publicly declared attacks by members of Congress, attacks by right-wing shock jocks, attacks by even jealous journalists, that's not surprising. It happens to all organizations that are involved in some sort of combative process like WikiLeaks that are trying to achieve justice from players much bigger than they are.

JC: So you think the various people who've worked with you and ended up in conflict with you—the Times, the Guardian, your former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Wikileaks activist Birgitta Jonsdottir—those people are all just jealous?

JA: That's off-topic, but we are proud of the many hundreds of relationships that we have had that have been strong. We're a large organization, span many continents and have many agreements and we're also proud that when people break their agreements, as in the case of the New York Times, they are—we don't work with them again. Or in the case of employees who need to be suspended, we've only suspended one person in our history, but of course others may try and reinterpret those events in order to draw attention away from their own behavior.

JC: What does the fact that the way that the cables were eventually released in full—

JA: WikiLeaks is really a litmus test for those people who walk the talk in the media. How much will they really follow their protestations to be brave publishers, and how much do they really want to lick the boots of power? Well, you can tell by their engagement with us and what they do.

JC: So the Times and the Guardian lick the boots of power?

JA: Absolutely. It happens everyday.

JC: The way the cables eventually came to be released in full—

JA: I've got to go now. I would like to speak more, but I've got a bunch of calls lined up.

JC: One last question for you, will you sign a Privacy Act waiver that would allow me to file a FOIA request with the FBI and the State Department seeking records about you?

JA: Well, we've already tried with the FBI and they refuse to release any documents on the basis of an ongoing investigation.

JC: You got a full denial from the FBI?

JA: That's right.

JC: Okay. Thanks for your time.

iacoccahaha and 2 more
"JC: One last question for you, will you sign a Privacy Act waiver that would allow me to file a FOIA request with the FBI and the State Department seeking records about you?

JA: Well, we've already tried with the FBI and they refuse to release any documents on the basis of an ongoing investigation."

Me: Is that a no?

sylphides and 3 more
Man, what a tough shithead to deal with. Good work, John. I think I would have thrown pillows around my bedroom symbolically if I had to deal with those answers.

For Sweden and 2 more
I know whenever I look at Julian Assange, I'm reminded of David Patraeus...

Well, other than the extremely well educated and stepping out of the limelight when consensual sex compromised his ability to do his job. Also the consensual sex part.

sunhawk and 1 more
Assange gets no sympathy from me. he ran a business that encouraged and enabled treason.

TheOmbudsman
JA: "You hang up."

JC: "No you hang up."

JA: (giggling)

JC: (giggling)

JA: "Ok both at the same time!"

etc. etc.

snetgibble and 3 more
Ah, Gawker ... after months and months of puerile and fatuous character-smearing of this guy -- whose terrible crime is allegedly poking a hole in a condom during consensual sex, with a woman who remained buddies with him long after the fact -- thus dutifully following the U.S. mandate to concentrate on the man's personality rather than the egregious crimes and corruption he helped bring to light -- now you're pretending to be an organization of grown-up journalists. Good for you!

RealAmurrican and 1 more
It's a mindfuck how anyone can defend this guy.

cthulu_17
how pathetic. Considering what JA unearthed, and the sheer absurdity of the "sex" charges leveled against him, combined with the amazing extrajudicial pursuit of wikileaks, I would think that there is plenty of reason to give the man a fair interview. Instead, all I learned is that John Cook thinks he's really super duper smart, and feels no need to ask actual questions of his interviewee. Being suggestive and goading is apparently enough for John. Great job man, you're doing a great job building your resume for a career at Fox. What a fucking waste of breath.

GangOfExGangMember…
"Julian, you were part of a really cool organization, and then you became an autocrat and it's undeniable that you ran it into the ground through incompetence and narcissism. Are you willing to at last, in any capacity, admit to what is evident to everyone on the left, and maybe apologize for making life easy for the myriad forces seeking to destroy wikileaks?" Julian: "No."

BedBoardsAndBeyond
He's kind of a cock-bag?

I mean, sorry JC, the questions were all over the place but I applaud you for asking the tough ones.

So basically this summarizes as: My shit is way above your shit and I can interrupt you and tell you that you're off topic anytime I don't feel like answering it.

It's like every academic conservation. ever....
(I do love his ethos tho....not sure he's handling being a kind of celebrity well)

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/29/ ... ks_bradley

Thursday, November 29, 2012

EXCLUSIVE: Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Cypherpunks, Surveillance State


In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks to Democracy Now! from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for nearly six months. Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. "Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. ... Our rightful and natural growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade." Assange also speaks about his new book, "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet." "The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies," he says. Assange also discusses the United States’ targeting of WikiLeaks. "The Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime. They allege we are criminal, moving forward," Assange says. "Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States." [includes rush transcript]
Filed under Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, Internet, Domestic Spying, Julian Assange
Guest:

Julian Assange, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, now under political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy. Assange is the co-author of the new book, "Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.”

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, may testify today at a pretrial proceeding for the first time since he was arrested in May 2010. Manning could face life in prison if convicted of the most serious of 22 counts against him. His trial is expected to begin in February.

Meanwhile, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, remains holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he sought refuge nearly six months ago to avoid being extradited to Sweden to be questioned over sexual assault claims. Earlier this week, Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. Shortly after the ruling, Assange addressed reporters in Brussels via video stream from inside the Ecuadorean embassy.

JULIAN ASSANGE: The strength of popular and private support means that we continue. There is no danger that WikiLeaks will cease to exist as an organization. Rather, its natural and rightful growth has been compromised, and that is wrong and must change. It would set a very bad precedent—it was not only wrong for WikiLeaks; it sets an extremely bad precedent for all other European organizations and all media organizations worldwide that monopolies can simply exercise financial death penalties over organizations and companies as a result of political controversy.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Julian Assange speaking on Tuesday. He now joins us in a rare interview from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He has been granted political asylum in Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy because the British government promises to arrest him if he steps foot on British soil. He has just co-authored a new book called Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. The book examines how the internet can be used as both an instrument of freedom and oppression.

We want to welcome you, Julian Assange, back to Democracy Now! and first get your reaction to the European Commission’s decision around the issue of Visa, saying it wasn’t breaking antitrust laws when it blocked donations to you. The significance of the credit card company’s blockade of donations to WikiLeaks, what it’s meant for your website?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s good to be with you, Amy and Juan. The decision is disgraceful, but it is only a preliminary decision. We have another submission that the commission has asked for, so hopefully they will turn around before the end of the year or the beginning of next year. Commission had been investigating our complaint for 16 months. The normal turnaround time is four months. The European Parliament last week voted, through an Article 32 section, on how banks should be reformed and credit card companies should be reformed in order to stop arbitrary, extrajudicial financial blockades such as the one that is being applied to WikiLeaks. This year, we—the Council of Europe, all 47 foreign ministers last year passed a resolution saying that these sorts of arbitrary financial blockades on WikiLeaks should not continue, so that it’s interesting to see the playoff in the political wills in Europe between, on the one hand, the Council of Europe and the Parliament and, on the other hand, the commission. But it’s been known for a long time that the commission is closer to big business, and it is often successfully lobbied. Hopefully the commission will do the right thing and turn around in this case.

AMY GOODMAN: And how devastating has it been for WikiLeaks?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. So, that is over $50 million. Now, fortunately, our 5 percent of $50 million is still not nothing, and so the organization can continue. But as I said in that press conference, our rightful and natural growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade.

Now, the United States government has looked into the blockade in January of 2011 and formally found that there is no lawful reason to erect a U.S. financial embargo against WikiLeaks. So what has happened here is that—and this came out in the commission documents that we published yesterday—is that Senator Lieberman and Congressman Peter T. King pressured at the very least MasterCard and Amazon, but perhaps others, including Visa, as well, pressured those organizations to erect an extrajudicial blockade that they were not able to successfully erect through the legislature or through a formal administrative process.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julian, turning to your new book, Cypherpunks, those in the—around the world who have been amazed at your ability to advocate transparency in government and in the corporate world through the internet might be surprised that in your book you now say the internet is a danger to human civilization. Could you explain why?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Human civilization has merged with the internet. Every society has gone onto the internet, with communications between all of us as individuals but also communications between businesses, economic transfers, and even the internal communications and external communications of states. So there is no barrier anymore between the internet and global civilization. That means that when the internet develops a sickness, global civilization also runs the risk of suffering the same sickness.

And the sickness that the internet has developed over the past 10 years is that nation states and their corporate powers have ganged up together to engage in strategic interception of all communications flowing over the internet across national borders and in many countries even within, within its national confines, such as the United States. We know that that has occurred in different places as a result of whistleblowing cases, such as Mark Klein’s case or William Binney’s, a former chief of research at the National Security Agency. So, we have gone from a position that dissidents face and activists face and individuals face 10, 20 years ago, where if we’re engaged in political activity, we could be individually targeted and our friends could be targeted, to a situation where everything, almost, that everyone does over the internet is recorded and intercepted all the time. And that shift is a shift, as it’s called in the internal documents of the hundreds of companies now who supply this national security sector, a shift between tactical interception on a few people and strategic interception, intercepting the entire nation.

We exposed documents earlier this year, the Spy Files—you can look them up—where, for example, the French company AMISYS, which is closely connected to French intelligence, supplied a nationwide—that’s its own words—interception system to Gaddafi’s Libya back in 2009. And in fact, lawyers connected to WikiLeaks and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism were in the manual that AMISYS shipped to Gaddafi as an example of how the interception system worked.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of corporate surveillance, as well, you often find now in the media a huge push to get people to use social networks. The degree to which private surveillance or corporate surveillance is going on, as well as government surveillance?

JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s not a barrier anymore between corporate surveillance, on the one hand, and government surveillance, on the other. You know, Facebook is based—has its servers based in the United States. Gmail, as General Petraeus found out, has its servers based in the United States. And the interplay between U.S. intelligence agencies and other Western intelligence agencies and any intelligence agencies that can hack this is fluid. So, we’re in a—if we look back to what’s a earlier example of the worst penetration by an intelligence apparatus of a society, which is perhaps East Germany, where up to 10 percent of people over their lifetime had been an informer at one stage or another, in Iceland we have 88 percent penetration of Iceland by Facebook. Eighty-eight percent of people are there on Facebook informing on their friends and their movements and the nature of their relationships—and for free. They’re not even being paid money. They’re not even being directly coerced to do it. They’re doing it for social credits to avoid the feeling of exclusion. But people should understand what is really going on. I don’t believe people are doing this or would do it if they truly understood what was going on, that they are doing hundreds of billions of hours of free work for the Central Intelligence Agency, for the FBI, and for all allied agencies and all countries that can ask for favors to get hold of that information.

William Binney, the former chief of research, the National Security Agency’s signals intelligence division, describes this situation that we are in now as "turnkey totalitarianism," that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built—the car, the engine has been built—and it’s just a matter of turning the key. And actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it’s arguable that key has already been partly turned. The assassinations that occur extrajudicially, the renditions that occur, they don’t occur in isolation. They occur as a result of the information that has been sucked in through this giant signals interception machinery.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, we can’t ignore the fact that we’re speaking to you inside the Ecuadorean embassy, where you’ve taken refuge, where you’re really there as a kind of refugee. You’ve gotten political asylum from Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy. What are your plans right now? Are you negotiating with the Swedish government, if you were to be extradited there, that they would not extradite you to the United States?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Amy, Ecuador has really stepped up to the plate and must be congratulated. I have been found to be, through a formal process, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a political refugee and have been granted political asylum, in relation to what has been happening in the United States and allied countries and their behavior—Sweden and the United Kingdom. The situation for me now is that I have been here for five months in this embassy; prior to that, 18 months under house arrest; prior to that, being chased around the world for about six months by U.S. intelligence and its allies.

Now, I must correct an earlier statement that you made—this has become common in the press—saying that I was here in relation to Sweden. The reason I am here is essentially in relation to the United States. But the Swedish government said publicly that it would imprison me without charge. And in such a situation, I’d not be able to apply for asylum. Now, the Ecuadorean government has asked the Swedish government to give a guarantee that I would not be extradited to the United States. We have asked for a long time for such a guarantee. That has been refused. All the regular processes have been refused in this case. You know, it’s an extremely odd and bizarre case, and I encourage everyone to go and look at that aspect of the case at justice4assange.com. And you can see report after report. You can see all the material that the police claim to be true and all the things that have occurred, the Cambridge International & Comparative Law Journal condemning the decisions that were made here in the British courts.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying, Julian, that you would go to Sweden, if they assured you that you wouldn’t be extradited to the United States, to answer questions about these two women who have made charges on sex abuse on your count?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, that has been our public position for quite a long time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julian, I’d like to get back to your book for a second and talk about, at this crossroads, as you see it, in terms of the future of the internet, the importance that you see of cryptography as a weapon of the people on the internet.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, the development of cryptography is absolutely fascinating. So, we’re not just talking anymore about people being able to write in a secret code that other people can’t read except their intended recipient. Crytography, as a science, in the last 30 years, has developed a basic—basic techniques that we would normally associate with democratic civilization and moved it into the digital realm. So that includes things like anonymous electronic cash and digital voting and signatures and proofs of agreements between people.

So, when we look at what happens when civilization moves onto the internet, how is it controlled? At the moment, a lot of the problems we face on the internet and the independence of the internet is guys with guns can simply turn up to any internet server and tell the people there to behave in a certain way, just like they do with oil wells or they do with customs. So, as an international new civilization, a forum where people are intellectually expressing themselves, where we deposit our history and our political ideals and ambitions, the internet is suffering, on one hand, from mass interception and, on the other hand, that it is still in many ways subservient to the physical force in the various states that its infrastructure is located in. Cryptography provides a way to abstract away from the physical world to create a sort of mathematical barrier between the physical world and the intellectual world, and in that way slowly declare independence from nation states. So our intellectual world cannot simply be censored or deleted or taxed in the manner which we have suffered from for so long in nation states.

Now, the internet—on the internet, there’s no direct physical force that needs to be policed in that manner, so we don’t need armies on the internet. We don’t need policemen on the internet, in a way that we may need them in our regular nation states. So, we do have this opportunity, with careful use of cryptography and a movement behind it, to achieve some forms of independence for the intellectual record and for our communications with one another. And those aspects of cryptography, we have used, with varying degrees of success, in WikiLeaks to publish material that no other publisher in the world was able to publish because they were constrained by physical threats within particular nation states.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, we are talking to you on the day that Bradley Manning is expected to testify, be heard publicly for the first time in over two years at Fort Meade. His lawyer has said he would plead guilty to certain charges, and that is releasing documents that he got in Iraq on the computer to your organization WikiLeaks, but refused to plead to others, like aiding the enemy. Talk about Bradley Manning, and then talk also—if you could weave that into why you’re so concerned about being extradited to the United States.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Amy, what is happening this week is not the trial of Bradley Manning; what is happening this week is the trial of the U.S. military. This is Bradley Manning’s abuse case. Bradley Manning was arrested in Baghdad, shipped over and held for two months in extremely adverse conditions in Kuwait, shipped over to Quantico, Virginia, which is near the center of the U.S. intelligence complex, and held there for nine months, longer than any other prisoner in Quantico’s modern history. And there, he was subject to conditions that the U.N. special rapporteur, Juan Méndez, special rapporteur for torture, formally found amounted to torture.

There’s a question about who authorized that treatment. Why was that treatment placed on him for so long, when so many people—independent psychiatrists, military psychiatrists—complained about what was going on in extremely strong terms? His lawyer and support team say that he was being treated in that manner, in part, in order to coerce some kind of statement or false confession from him that would implicate WikiLeaks as an organization and me personally. And so, this is a matter that I am—personally have been embroiled in, that this young man’s treatment, regardless of whether he was our source or not, is directly as a result of an attempt to attack this organization by the United States military, to coerce this young man into providing evidence that could be used to more effectively attack us, and also serve as some kind of terrible disincentive for other potential whistleblowers from stepping forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian, the Ecuadorean ambassador to the U.K., to Britain, Ana Alban, was quoted in The Independent saying that you’re suffering from a chronic lung infection from being in captivity for so long in London in the embassy. Can you talk about your health?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Amy, being in prison, house arrest, and now held captive in an embassy, with a bunch of cops outside, of course is a difficult circumstance, but it is not more difficult than the circumstance that is faced by Bradley Manning in Fort Leavenworth or by Jeremy Hammond, an alleged source related to the Stratfor files in New York, or by many other prisoners around the world. So, yes, circumstances is hard, but it could be much worse than it is, and people should direct their attention on these other cases.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about Jeremy Hammond, who is in prison here in New York City? Explain what Stratfor is; if you can, how you got the documents; or just explain what has taken place.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Stratfor is a organization based in Texas. It has tried to model itself after some weird combination between doing private intelligence work, on the one hand, and covering that with an illusion of journalism by creating this thing called the Stratfor report, which has become very influential within—within the military and within government. It has a particular worldview, which is—which the head of Stratfor, Friedman, admits to being a Kissingeresque realpolitik. And through stealing, bribing, gathering information in various ways, they’re able to influence U.S. policy and, more broadly, Western policy. Now, it’s also—you know, it’s done all the usual nasty stuff, like working for Coca-Cola, making reports on PETA, making reports on Bhopal activists and so on. But its greatest importance is its private influence into the decision making of different people throughout government.

But we have found through the Stratfor files, which this young activist Jeremy Hammond is accused of hacking out of Stratfor and giving to us—we have found that actually the information or the sourcing for these reports is rather thin in many places or politically biased or is used to feed something that Stratfor set up called StratCap, which is a private capital investment company which takes the information that they’ve gained from bribery and uses it to make investments in, say, gold futures and so on. So, you know, you can see from the Stratfor material that this is a company that—where the boss, Friedman, has gone, "How can I be as evil as possible? How can I be some kind of stereotype cross between Kissinger and James Bond and tell everyone else to do it?" And, you know—and that’s what is done in that company. So, whoever the source is of the Stratfor material deserves enormous credit. Story after story has come out from all around the world of—about material that Stratfor collected and didn’t publish or gave to their private clients.

AMY GOODMAN: And Julian, one of the emails that WikiLeaks released of Stratfor of the vice president said that there was a secret indictment against you by the secret grand jury that we believe is convened in Alexandria, Virginia, that is going after you and other WikiLeaks volunteers. Do you know any more about this information or any confirmation that there is this sealed indictment against you?

JULIAN ASSANGE: There are some 3,000 emails in the Stratfor collection about me personally and many more thousands about WikiLeaks. The latest on the grand jury front is that the U.S. Department of Justice admits, as of about two weeks ago, that the investigation is ongoing. On September 28th this year, the Pentagon renewed its formal threats against us in relation to ongoing publishing but also, extremely seriously, in relation to ongoing, what they call, solicitation. So, that is asking sources publicly, you know, "Send us important material, and we will publish it." They say that that itself is a crime. So this is not simply a case about—that we received some information back in 2010 and have been publishing it and they say that that was the crime; the Pentagon is maintaining a line that WikiLeaks inherently, as an institution that tells military and government whistleblowers to step forward with information, is a crime, that we are—they allege we are criminal, moving forward.

Now, the new interpretation of the Espionage Act that the Pentagon is trying to hammer in to the legal system, and which the Department of Justice is complicit in, would mean the end of national security journalism in the United States, and not only the United States, because the Pentagon is trying to apply this extraterritorially. Why would it be the end of national security journalism? Because the interpretation is that if any document that the U.S. government claims to be classified is given to a journalist, who then makes any part of it public, that journalist has committed espionage, and the person who gave them the material has committed the crime, communicating with the enemy. And we released other material about a young Air Force woman who was suspected of communicating with us, and they went to internally prosecute her under 104-D, which is communications with the enemy. So, who’s the enemy? Well, the enemy is either WikiLeaks, formally an enemy of the United States, or the interpretation is that any time that there is a communication to the public—and we saw this in the Bradley Manning case—there is a chance for al-Qaeda or the Russians or Iran to read it; therefore, any communication to a journalist is communication to the public, is communication to al-Qaeda, which means that any communication to a journalist is communicating to the enemy. Now, it’s absurd overreach, but it is an overreach now which has been put into practice, not at the conviction level yet, but certainly at the investigative and prosecution level. Barack Obama brags publicly on his campaign website of having prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined, in fact, more than twice that of all previous presidents combined.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Julian, on that particular note, I’d like to ask you to, if you can, talk about what you consider to be the long-term impact of WikiLeaks, that as governments continually centralize through the digital revolution their information, it makes it more possible for dissidents or whistleblowers within the structures of these governments to make that information available to broader sectors of the public. And if WikiLeaks—if the governments are able to squash WikiLeaks, how do you see that movement developing in terms of other organizations that are arising that continue the kind of work that you’ve been doing?

JULIAN ASSANGE: The attempts to squash WikiLeaks are there to set a general deterrent. I mean, there’s no doubt about this. Since 2008, that’s been the case. We released a classified U.S. intelligence report, in fact, showing in 2008 the concern that the U.S. military had about WikiLeaks and the ways in which it could be crushed. Other material came out showing that Bank of America had hired lawyers who had looked into hiring people to make all sorts of attacks and smears on us, massively funded millions of dollars per month. And you can look that up. It’s the HBGary report.

I think this tension between power and knowledge is extremely important. So, we’ve all heard the saying that knowledge is power. Well, it’s true. And the mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies. Now, if that is to be resisted, we must have a transfer of information that is going the other way.

Fortunately, the system is in part eating itself. When it sets up these huge databases designed to be extremely efficient, brings in five million people, a state within a state in the United States, who have security clearances to work out how to best use it in order to maximize the power of that sector, it also leaves itself open to people extracting some of that information and reversing the flow and giving it back to the public, putting it into our common intellectual record. But it’s not, by any means, an easy battle. I would say that the transfer of power that has occurred as a result of the NSA’s admitted 1.6 billion interceptions per day is much greater than the transfer that has happened the other way. The successes of WikiLeaks, yes, to some degree, reflect our vigor and the vigor of activists on the internet, but I think they more fairly represent the vast treasure of global information that is being accumulated by these otherwise unaccountable intelligence organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: Your reaction—you mentioned Petraeus, General Petraeus, before and how he’s been taken down as his email was gone through. What do you think about that? The—here he was—

JULIAN ASSANGE: I think it’s fascinating, Amy. Now, we can look into—you know, if you’ve been involved in this business for a while, you can start to smell when there must be something more to the situation. So I assume, in those emails that the FBI got hold of, there’s additional information that would be embarrassing to Petraeus above and beyond an extramarital affair, which is why he’s resigned. But that someone in the position of being the ultimate—an ultimate insider, the head of the CIA, has fallen victim to the surveillance state really shows you how massively out of control the thing has become, where it is like a vicious dog that has suddenly spotted its own tail and has gone after it, is lashing out irrationally, and now it’s affected an insider. And people have started to take note, but of course it’s been doing that to activists and, in fact, most of—most of us, it has been doing that, although we can’t see the result, for years.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, as we wrap up, your final thoughts as you speak to us from political exile inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London? This is extremely rare. How long do you plan to be holed up there? Could you see yourself being there for years?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Possibly, Amy. I mean, it is possible. I mean, the Ecuadorean government said, "If it takes 200 years for Mr. Assange to be safe, then 200 years it is," to their credit. There’s an Ecuadorean national election in February next year. And it seems to be that there’s a bit of a diplomatic waiting game on, as far as the U.S. and the U.K. are concerned, to look to see how that election goes. President Correa is the most popular political leader in Latin America, so by rights it should be fine. But there have been reports that the United States has increased its sort of anti-Correa funding by three times, so that’s a potential problem. But the people of Ecuador have been very supportive, so I suspect, even if there is a switch to another leader, it’s now a matter of sort of national pride for Ecuador, so they’ll stick the course.

AMY GOODMAN: And as to, you feel, the—how people should use the internet today and protect themselves, as we wrap up with your book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, first, first, they have to—it is not always possible to protect oneself. You know, if you walk over the edge of a cliff, it’s not really that possible to protect yourself. But it’s important to know the cliff is there, so you can simply avoid doing certain things that would put you at risk. Now, the first thing they should do is go out and buy the book. It’s not easy to protect yourself. That is part of the problem. It really is not easy. It is, in fact, with some exceptions, something that is presently only open to extremely knowledgeable people. So, we must push forward to empower the greater development of this technology, the—preventing moves to outlaw it, which have been done—we fought a big war in the 1990s to prevent the outlawing of cryptography—and additionally, preventing the back-dooring of cryptographic technology. There are moves afoot to try and do that.

I’m sorry—sorry, Amy, I’m getting the cut-off signal for some reason.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Julian. Julian Assange spread that 10 minutes to about 40, and we thank you so much for being there. Julian Assange is the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, now under political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, happens to have co-authored this new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, which can make it outside of the embassy, which he can’t do right now. Thanks so much for being with us. And folks, if you want a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. But we’ll be back in a minute.


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Blanking Bradley Manning: NYT and AP Launch Operation Amnesia
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 30 November 2012 14:39

On Thursday, Bradley Manning, one of the foremost prisoners of conscience in the world today, testified in open court -- the first time his voice has been heard since he was arrested, confined and subjected to psychological torture by the U.S. government.

An event of some newsworthiness, you might think. Manning has admitted leaking documents that detailed American war crimes in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He has been held incommunicado for more than 900 days by the Obama administration. Reports of his treatment at the hands of his captors have sparked outrage, protests and concern around the world. He was now going to speak openly in a pre-trial hearing on a motion to dismiss his case because of that treatment. Surely such a moment of high courtroom drama would draw heavy media coverage, if only for its sensationalistic aspects.

But if you relied on the nation's pre-eminent journal of news reportage, the New York Times, you could have easily missed notice of the event altogether, much less learned any details of what transpired in the courtroom. The Times sent no reporter to the hearing, but contented itself with a brief bit of wire copy from AP, tucked away on Page 3, to note the occasion.

That story -- itself considered of such little importance by AP that it didn't even by-line the piece (perhaps the agency didn't send a reporter either, but simply picked up snippets from other sources) -- reduced the entire motion, and the long, intricate, systematic government attack on Manning's psyche, to a matter of petty petulance on Manning's part, a whiner's attempt to weasel out of what's coming to him. This is AP's sole summary of the motion and its context:

Private Manning is trying to avoid trial in the WikiLeaks case. He argues that he was punished enough when he was locked up alone in a small cell for nearly nine months at the brig in Quantico and had to sleep naked for several nights.

It is clear what the unnamed writer wants the reader to take away from his passage. We are supposed to think: "That's it? That's all he's got? That they gave him a private room and made him sleep in the buff for a few nights? Is that supposed to be torture?"

As we noted here the other day, the New York Times is the pacesetter for the American media; it plays a large part in setting the parameters of acceptable discourse and honing the proper attitude that serious, respectable people should take toward current events. The paper's treatment of Manning's court appearance is exemplary in this regard. The case is worth noting, yes, but only briefly, in passing; Manning himself is a rather pathetic figure whose treatment by the government, while perhaps not ideal in all respects, has not been especially harsh or onerous. This is what serious, respectable people are meant to believe about the case; and millions do.

For the actual details of Manning's hearing -- which actually began a few days before his appearance -- you have to turn to foreign papers, such as the Guardian, whose coverage of Manning's situation has been copious. The Guardian provided two long stories (here and here), totalling 68 paragraphs, on Manning's testimony, both written by one the paper's leading reporters, Ed Pilkington, who was actually present in the courtroom. This was preceded by three long stories (here, here and here), also by Pilkington reporting on the scene, about previous testimony in the hearing, from the brig's commander and from the Marine psychiatrist overseeing Manning's condition.

As noted, the Times provided only the single wire story, 11 paragraphs long, during the entire week of testimony. Contrast this to the paper of record's treatment of those other prisoners of conscience, Pussy Riot, when they were put on trial by the Russian government this summer. In an eight-day period surrounding the trial, the Times ran no less that 14 stories on Pussy Riot's plight. Later this fall, when sentencing hearings were held for the group, the NYT ran 13 stories in a comparable time period.

I believe Pussy Riot's case warranted such coverage. But certainly Manning's case -- involving revelations of war crime, mass murder, brutality and his own unconscionable treatment by an American government that lectures other nations, including Russia, about impartial justice and human rights -- is of at least equal weight. But of course, it is easier -- not to mention more politic, and profitable -- to run 27 stories about the Kremlin's harsh and wildly disproportionate punishment for an act of civil disobedience while dribbling out a single reductive, dismissive story about entirely similar actions by the American government.

Again, recall the NYT/AP appraisal of Manning's motion: "He argues that he was punished enough when he was locked up alone in a small cell for nearly nine months" and had to "sleep naked for several nights." Here, from Pilkington, is what really happened. We begin with Manning's treatment in Kuwait, where he was first incarcerated -- a period entirely ignored by the NYT, although it took up much of his six-hour testimony.

"I didn't know what was going on, I didn't have formal charges or anything, my interactions were very limited with anybody else, so it was very draining."

[Manning] was put on a schedule whereby he would be woken up at 10 o'clock at night and given lights out at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. "My nights blended into my days and my days into nights," he told the court. … The guards stopped taking him out of his cell so that he became entirely cut off from human company. "Someone tried to explain to me why, but I was a mess, I was starting to fall apart." Military police began coming into his cell in a tent in the Kuwaiti desert two or three times a day doing what they called a "shakedown": searching the cell and tearing it apart in the process.

Eventually, Manning was strapped into an airplane and transported to the Marine Corps prison at Quantico, Virginia. There he was placed under the brig's most restrictive regime:

…no contact with other people, being kept in his cell for more than 23 hours a day, being checked every five minutes, sleeping on a suicide mattress with no bedding, having his prescription glasses taken away, lights kept on at night, having toilet paper removed.

… [The cell was] 6ft by 8ft. The cell contained a toilet that was in the line of vision of the observation booth, and he was not allowed toilet paper. When he needed it, he told the court, he would stand to attention by the front bars of the cell and shout out to the observation guards: "Lance Corporal Detainee Manning requests toilet paper!" …

For the first few weeks of his confinement in Quantico he was allowed only 20 minutes outside the cell, known as a "sunshine call". Even then whenever he left his cell – and this remained the case throughout his nine months at the marine brig – he was put into full restraint: his hands were handcuffed to a leather belt around his waist and his legs put in irons, which meant that he could not walk without a staff member holding him. …

He was under observation throughout the night, with a fluorescent light located right outside the cell blazing into his eyes. While asleep he would frequently cover his eyes with his suicide blanket, or turn on to his side away from the light, and on those occasions, sometimes three times a night, the guards would bang on his cell bars to wake him up so they could see his face. … He was forbidden from taking exercise in his cell, and … allowed out of the cell for at most one hour a day for the entire nine months at Quantico.

The official reason given for this treatment was Manning's mental health; he was supposedly a "suicide risk" who must be kept under special measures. This assessment by the brig commander was refuted by the brig's own psychiatrist, who testified during this week's hearing:

The psychiatrist who treated the WikiLeaks suspect, Bradley Manning, while he was in custody in the brig at Quantico has testified that his medical advice was regularly ignored by marine commanders who continued to impose harsh conditions on the soldier even though he posed no risk of suicide.

Captain William Hoctor told Manning's pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade that he grew frustrated and angry at the persistent refusal by marine officers to take on board his medical recommendations. The forensic psychiatrist said that he had never experienced such an unreceptive response from his military colleagues, not even when he treated terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo.

"I had been a senior medical officer for 24 years at the time, and I had never experienced anything like this. It was clear to me they had made up their mind on a certain course of action, and my recommendations had no impact," Hoctor said. ….

By 27 August 2010, Hoctor testified, he had spent enough time with Manning to recommend a further easing of conditions. From then on he advised in a regular weekly report that Manning should be … returned to the general brig population.

… The blanket denial of his expert opinion was unprecedented in his quarter century of practice, the psychiatrist said. "Even when I did tours in Guantanamo and cared for detainees there my recommendations on suicidal behaviour were followed."

Hoctor said he openly protested about the thwarting of his expert opinion at a meeting with the commander responsible for the brig, Colonel Robert Oltman, on 13 January 2011. … Hoctor said that the marine commanders should no longer pretend they were acting out of medical concern for the detainee. "It wasn't good for Manning. I really didn't like them using a psychiatric standard when I thought it clinically inappropriate," Hoctor said.

The court heard that Oltman replied: "You make your recommendations, and we'll do what we want to do."

This is the treatment that Barack Obama upheld in his one public comment on the case, in 2011. Obama said that Manning's treatment was "appropriate and meeting our basic standards." In a private fundraiser that year, Obama went further and declared Manning -- who is yet to stand trial -- guilty: "He broke the law." As Horton said, the government had made up its mind "on a certain course of action" -- trying to break Manning's mind and will in its larger goal of punishing WikiLeaks for its multiple revelations of Washington's crime and folly around the world. And from brig commander to commander-in-chief, it followed this course with admirable discipline.

As Pilkington notes, it was one of Manning's efforts to show how sane he was -- and his misplaced trust in a guard -- that led to the most infamous aspect of his imprisonment: the forced nudity that his captors found so titillating:

[Manning] related how he turned for help to one particular member of staff at the brig at Quantico marine base in Virginia where he was taken in July 2010. He assumed that Staff Sergeant Pataki was on his side, so opened up to him.

"I wanted to convey the fact that I'd been on the [restrictive regime] for a long time. I'm not doing anything to harm myself. I'm not throwing myself against walls, or jumping up or down, or putting my head in the toilet."

Manning told Pataki that "if I was a danger to myself I would act out more". He used his underwear and flip-flops as an example, insisting that "if I really wanted to hurt myself I could use things now: underwear, flip-flops, they could potentially be used as something to harm oneself"…. Manning felt good about his interaction with Pataki. "I felt like he was listening and understanding, and he smiled a little. I thought I'd actually started to get through to him."

That night guards arrived at his cell and ordered him to strip naked. He was left without any clothes overnight, and the following morning made to stand outside his cell and stand to attention at the brig count, still nude, as officers inspected him.

The humiliating ritual continued for several days, and right until the day he was transferred from Quantico on 20 April 2011 he had his underwear removed every night. …

All this is what the Times and AP have reduced to nothing more than being "locked up alone in a small cell" and having to "sleep naked for several nights." Nothing at all about the draconian restrictions; nothing at all about "shakedowns," wake-ups, 24-hour surveillance in bright light (even on the toilet), isolation, chains, deprivation, betrayal, interrogation, and forced nudity -- not just when he was sleeping (in bright light, under observation) but also out in corridors, while "officers inspected him."

All of this has been erased by the 'objective' reporting of the NYT and AP. None of this is to be known or considered by serious, respectable people. It didn't happen. It doesn't matter. Manning is a whiner who made America look bad, and in doing so, he helped a website that made America look bad. That's all that really matters. The details of his treatment -- not to mention the details of what he and WikiLeaks revealed -- are unimportant. You don't have to think about it. Just nod your head, shrug your shoulders, and go about your business.

http://johnpilger.com/articles/wikileak ... s-shameful

WikiLeaks is a rare truth-teller. Smearing Julian Assange is shameful.

14 February 2013


Last December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Candles were lit; the faces were young and old and from all over the world. They were there to demonstrate their human solidarity with someone whose guts they admired. They were in no doubt about the importance of what Assange had revealed and achieved, and the grave dangers he now faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus of a few who claim the right to guard the limits of informed public debate.

These public displays of warmth for Assange are common and seldom reported. Several thousand people packed Sydney Town Hall, with hundreds spilling into the street. In New York recently, Assange was awarded the Yoko Ono Lennon Prize for Courage. In the audience was Daniel Ellsberg, who risked all to leak the truth about the barbarism of the Vietnam war.

Like the philanthropist Jemima Khan, the investigative journalist Phillip Knightley, the acclaimed film-maker Ken Loach and others lost bail money in standing up for Julian Assange. "The US is out to crush someone who has revealed its dirty secrets," Loach wrote to me. "Extradition via Sweden is more than likely... is it difficult to choose whom to support?"

No, it is not difficult.

In the New Statesman last week, Jemima Khan, a philanthropist, ended her support for an epic struggle for justice, truth and freedom with an article on WikiLeaks's founder. To Khan, the Ellsbergs and Yoko Onos, the Knightleys and Loaches, and the countless people they represent, have all been duped. We are all "blinkered". We are all mindlessly "devoted". We are all cultists.

In the final words of her j'accuse, Khan describes Assange as "an Australian L. Ron Hubbard". She must have known such gratuitous abuse would make a snappy headline - as indeed it did across the press in Australia.

I respect Jemima Khan for backing humanitarian causes, such as the Palestinians. She supports the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am a judge, and my own film-making. But her attack on Assange is specious and plays to a familiar gallery whose courage is tweeted from a smartphone. One of Khan's main complaints is that Assange refused to appear in a film about WikiLeaks by the American director Alex Gibney, which she "executive produced". Assange knew the film would be neither "nuanced" nor "fair" and "represent the truth", as Khan claimed, and that its very title 'WikiLeaks, We Steal Secrets', was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could doom him to one of America's hell-holes. Having interviewed axe grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as paranoid. DreamWorks is also making a film about the "paranoid" Assange. Oscars all round.

The sum of Khan's and Gibney's attacks is that Ecuador granted Assange asylum without evidence. The evidence is voluminous. Assange has been declared an official "enemy" of a torturing, assassinating, rapacious state. This is clear in official files, obtained under Freedom of Information, that betray Washington's "unprecedented" pursuit of him, together with the Australian government's abandonment of its citizen: a legal basis for granting asylum.

Khan refers to a "long list" of Assange's "alienated and disaffected allies". Almost none was ever an ally. What is striking about most of these "allies" and Assange's haters is that they exhibit the very symptoms of arrested development they attribute to a man whose resilience and humour under extreme pressure are evident to those he trusts.

On her "long list" is London lawyer Mark Stephens, who charged him almost half a million pounds in fees and costs. This bill was paid from an advance on a book whose unauthorised manuscript was published by another "ally" without Assange's knowledge or permission. When Assange moved his legal defence to Gareth Peirce, Britain's leading human rights lawyer, he found a true ally. Khan makes no mention of the damning, irrefutable evidence that Peirce presented to the Australian government, warning how the US deliberately "synchronised" its extradition demands with pending cases and that her client faced a grave miscarriage of justice and personal danger. Peirce told the Australian consul in London in person that she had known few cases as shocking as this.

It is a red herring whether Britain or Sweden holds the greatest danger of delivering Assange to the US. The Swedes have refused all requests for guarantees that he will not be dispatched under a secret arrangement with Washington; and it is the political executive in Stockholm, with its close ties to the extreme right in America, not the courts, that will make this decision.

Khan is rightly concerned about a "resolution" of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange, and neither claimed otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor, Eva Finne, all but dismissed the case. As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardian last August, "The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction... The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?"


This article originally appeared in the New Statesman, UK

Lunch and dinner with Julian Assange, in prison

..
For several years, Assange has been serious about entering formal politics. A new WikiLeaks Party is soon to be launched. He’s sure it will easily attract the minimum of 500 paid-up members required by law. The composition of its 10-member national council is decided. There’s already a draft election manifesto. The party will field candidates for the Senate, probably in several states. And, yes, Assange is certain to be among them, probably as a candidate in Victoria, where (conveniently) three Labor senators face re-election. ..

What he has in mind has never before been attempted in Australian federal politics. Eugene Debs ran for the US presidency from prison (in 1920). Sinn Fein MP Bobby Sands was elected to Westminster while on hunger strike (in 1981). Under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi won a general election (in 1990). In defiance of Israeli occupation and prison confinement, Wael Husseini was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council (in 2006). There are plenty of similar examples, so why shouldn’t Julian Assange attempt to do the same, and in style? ..

I’m curious about the kind of political party WikiLeaks will launch. “The party will combine a small, centralised leadership with maximum grass roots involvement and support. By relying on decentralised Wikipedia-style, user-generated structures, it will do without apparatchiks. The party will be incorruptible and ideologically united.” I flinch at his mention of ideological unity. He explains that the party will display iron self-discipline in its support for maximum “inclusiveness”. It will be bound together by unswerving commitment to the core principles of civic courage nourished by “understanding” and “truthfulness” and the “free flow of information”. It will practise in politics what WikiLeaks has done in the field of information. It will be digital, and stay digital. Those who don’t accept its transparency principles will be told to “rack off”. That’s the ideological unity bit.

Assange agrees the WikiLeaks Party must address and respond creatively to the creeping local disaffection with mainstream politicians, parties and parliaments. “I loathe the reactiveness of the Left,” and that’s why, he says, much can be learned from clever new initiatives in other countries. We discuss Beppe Grillo’s 5 Star movement (it could well win up to 15% of the popular vote in Italy’s forthcoming general election). On our list is the Pirate Party in Germany (it practises “liquid democracy” and has representatives in four state parliaments). So is Iceland’s Best Party. It won enough votes to co-run the Reykjavik City Council, partly on the promise that it would not honour any of its promises, that since all other political parties are secretly corrupt it would be openly corrupt.

Assange lets out a laugh. “Parties should be fun. They should put the word party back into politics.” The WikiLeaks Party will try to do this, and to learn from initiatives in other democracies. Supported by networks of “friends of WikiLeaks”, it will be seen as “work in progress” designed “to outflank its opponents”.
..

The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power lists his odds of winning a Senate seat as seven-to-two. The cautious fortune telling may be significant. Down under, nationwide polls conducted by UMR Research, the company used by the Labor Party, show (during 2012) that a clear majority of Australians think he wouldn’t receive a fair trial if extradited to the United States, and that in any case he and WikiLeaks shouldn’t be prosecuted for releasing leaked diplomatic cables. Green voters (66%) and Labor supporters (45%) are sympathetic to Assange. Significant numbers of Coalition supporters (40%) think the same way. In the most recent UMR poll, Assange tells me, around 27% of voters say they’ll vote for him.

By god i hope he runs tho, the MSM freakout will be priceless.

Today, 9 December 2013, WikiLeaks has released two more secret TPP documents that show the state of negotiations as the twelve TPP countries began supposedly final negotiations at a trade ministers’ meeting in Singapore this week.

http://wikileaks.org/Second-release-of- ... Trans.html

conniption » Fri Oct 02, 2015 6:44 pm wrote:

Axis of Logic

The Revolutionary Act of Telling the Truth

By John Pilger
Information Clearing House
Friday, Oct 2, 2015

John Pilger, speaking at the launch in London of The WikiLeaks Files, following an introduction by Julian Assange.

George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.

Wondrous technology has become both our friend and our enemy. Every time we turn on a computer or pick up a digital device – our secular rosary beads -- we are subjected to control: to surveillance of our habits and routines, and to lies and manipulation.

Edward Bernays, who invented the term, “public relations” as a euphemism for “propaganda”, predicted this more than 80 years ago. He called it, “the invisible government”.

He wrote, “Those who manipulate this unseen element of [modern democracy] constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of ...”

The aim of this invisible government is the conquest of us: of our political consciousness, our sense of the world, our ability to think independently, to separate truth from lies.

This is a form of fascism, a word we are rightly cautious about using, preferring to leave it in the flickering past. But an insidious modern fascism is now an accelerating danger. As in the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the regularity of a metronome. Muslims are bad. Saudi bigots are good. ISIS bigots are bad. Russia is always bad. China is getting bad. Bombing Syria is good. Corrupt banks are good. Corrupt debt is good. Poverty is good. War is normal.

Those who question these official truths, this extremism, are deemed in need of a lobotomy – until they are diagnosed on-message. The BBC provides this service free of charge. Failure to submit is to be tagged a “radical” – whatever that means.

Real dissent has become exotic; yet those who dissent have never been more important. The book I am launching tonight, The WikiLeaks Files, is an antidote to a fascism that never speaks its name.

It’s a revolutionary book, just as WikiLeaks itself is revolutionary – exactly as Orwell meant in the quote I used at the beginning. For it says that we need not accept these the daily lies. We need not remain silent. Or as Bob Marley once sang: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.”

In the introduction, Julian Assange explains that it is never enough to publish the secret messages of great power: that making sense of them is crucial, as well as placing them in the context of today and historical memory.

Reading through this book just now, I was wondering if anyone here could make an educated guess as to the identity of the anonymous author of the first part of it?

"The author of Chapters 1 through 3 has chosen to remain anonymous."

I'm thinking it may be someone who doesn't speak English as a first language (judging by certain typos) but who knows...

A reviewer said:

Unfortunately for WikiLeaks, four years is a long time to delay your arrival at your own party. All the good stuff has already been published in the mainstream media, mined, as Assange somewhat sneeringly remarks in his introduction, for “juicy, headline-grabbing morsels”.

To offset this Assange claims, reasonably enough, that the point of the book is not to grub for sensational angles but to begin addressing “the need for scholarly analysis of what the millions of documents published by WikiLeaks say about international geopolitics”.

Yet there then follows a three-part, 118-page treatise on the many present and historical crimes of the United States by a “scholar” who has “chosen to remain anonymous”. This last is ironic and somewhat baffling, given the lack of new revelations in his or her rather heavy-handed sermon.

I actually enjoyed the heavy-handed sermon for the most part, but the anonymity thing does seem sort of pointless. Must be someone who thinks they have a lot to lose, I guess.

Anonymous wrote:In a stroke of grim irony. the United States responded to the cascade of revelations through WikiLeaks by capturing one of the people accused of leaking the original cables from the State Department, US army private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and torturing him. A State Department spokesperson who criticized this practice was forced to resign. Yet it appears that none of those responsible for the torture program have lost employment as a result, nor will they be charged—much less stripped naked and thrown into solitary confinement for almost a year.

All of this goes on while the soothing bromide 'We do not torture" is ceaselessly repeated. For, while US politicians have never seemed to be in much doubt about what "terrorism" is, when the subject of "torture" arises a strange epistemological relativism intervenes. Victims may be waterboarded, so that they involuntarily inhale lungfuls of water and are almost drowned. They may be given the strappado, with their hands bound behind their back, and suspended from the ceiling so that the pressure crushes their chest until they die. They may be kept in coffins filled with insects, raped with chemical light sticks, and forced to masturbate or simulate sex acts. But, the politicians query, is this really "torture"?

What are the laws concerning torture in the United States? The government ratified the UN Convention Against Torture in 1994, a decade after it was adopted by the UN General Assembly. Article 1 of the convention defined torture as

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental. is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

This seems fairly precise, going into some detail about who can be guilty of torture, to what end, and under what circumstance. The convention also makes the following categorical statement: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war, or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture." As the National Lawyers Guild argues, this seems to provide an unequivocal argument in favor of prosecuting the perpetrators of torture. But there are three problems that throw this definition into some obscurity. First, it is not clear what qualifies as "severe." It does not seem to be possible to quantify pain in an objective way, as it is a subjective response.

The infamous "torture memos"—a set of legal memoranda drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo in August 2002 that carefully defined torture so that anything short of serious injury or organ failure would be permissible—played on precisely this necessary ambiguity. Second, the insistence that torture must be "intentionally" inflicted makes it almost impossible to verify that torture has been inflicted, short of a confession. Third, by excluding pain or suffering arising from "lawful sanctions." the convention opens up significant leeway for states to legitimize forms of torture as legal penalties.

The vagueness of this definition of torture is not simply a matter of unfortunate phrasing in the convention, but derives from two facts external to the text. The first is that "torture" is inherently a prescriptive, normative term and, like any term in political language. is contested. The second is to do with the legal system itself. The US empire is based on a liberal world order under law. But these norms pull in opposing directions. The right to be free from torture comes into conflict here with the right of states to punish. This partially explains why. even though the American empire has always tortured, it has never had a coherent position on torture—those who torture have always had to confront those for whom torture is anathema by America's own standards.

Many polls find that most Americans view torture as an acceptable way of treating "those people,- believing that it generates actionable intelligence—a fact that the historian Greg Grandin relates to the long tradition of demonology that begins with the origins of the United States as a settler-colonial state based on slavery, always threatened by racial "others."

But even in the highly charged atmosphere of the "war on terror," many CIA staff found the infliction of torture intolerable. Those who witnessed the punishments inflicted on Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi national and Islamist fighter whom the United States tortured in Guantanamo under the erroneous pretext that he was connected to al-Qaeda, were said in internal documents to be "very uncomfortable ... to the point of tears and choking up."

It is these moral and political differences that are given expression in the form of legal arguments. In almost all legal situations, there will be more than two relevant legal concepts that enter into the argument, thus opening up a surfeit of possible legal interpretations. When it comes to applying these laws. there is nothing but superiority of power to decide between rival interpretations.

This has been particularly useful for the US government since the CIA alighted on the advantages of psychological torture during its "mind-control" experiments between 1950 and 1962. The result of this intense human experimentation was a dark scientific breakthrough: the CIA learned that torture methods involving psychological manipulation and no physical contact were far more effective than physical torture. Having spent so much time looking for the frailties and vulnerabilities of the human organism, they developed a sophisticated system of torture that left psychological wreckage, but no physical evidence. The two key elements were "sensory deprivation," such as hooding or masking, and "self-inflicted pain," such as stress positions. These are the types of methods that the CIA classifies as "enhanced interrogation techniques," and thus were perfectly congruent with America's international legal obligations. Once again. the power to classify is an immense, indispensable asset for the empire.