JGeropoulas
The Living Force
I recently bought Rolling Stone magazine to get a copy of an article (about the marine injured at Occupy Oakland) for veterans to read in my waiting room. When tearing out that article, I saw there was an interview with Julian Assange. I hadn't really kept up with that story much the past year, so I was curious to see what the “counter culture” was being told by their “official” magazine.
If someone skims by what seems to be a big clue early on in the article, ("As a teen-ager, he discovered computers and became on of the world's foremost hackers, going by the name of Mendax, Latin for "nobly untruthful"), a quick read certainly leaves the impression that Assange is really sincere in his mission.
The more likely fact is that disinfo writers have really just gotten slicker.
FWIW, here are some excerpts from the introduction (followed by some of the Q&A):
The entire interview is on line here:
_http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118?page=7
If someone skims by what seems to be a big clue early on in the article, ("As a teen-ager, he discovered computers and became on of the world's foremost hackers, going by the name of Mendax, Latin for "nobly untruthful"), a quick read certainly leaves the impression that Assange is really sincere in his mission.
The more likely fact is that disinfo writers have really just gotten slicker.
FWIW, here are some excerpts from the introduction (followed by some of the Q&A):
Some of the Q&A:…At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a or journalist. He's become better at handling the media - more willing to answer questions than he used to be, less likely to storm off during interviews - but the protracted legal battle has left him isolated, broke and vulnerable. Assange recently spoke to someone he calls a Western "intelligence source," and he asked the official about his fate. Will he ever be a free man again, allowed to return to his native Australia, to come and go as he pleases? "He told me I was f–-ked," Assange says.
…The British Supreme Court will hear his extradition appeal on February 1st - but even if he wins, he will likely still remain a wanted man. Interpol has issued a so-called "red notice" for his arrest on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in "connection with a number of sexual offenses" Qaddafi, accused of war crimes, earned only an "orange notice"…
"From the glory days of American radicalism, which was the American Revolution, I think that Madison's view on government is still unequaled," he tells me, that "people determined to be in a democracy, to be their own governments, must have the power that knowledge will bring - because knowledge will always rule ignorance. You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.”
The question is, where has the United States betrayed Madison and Jefferson, betrayed these basic values on how you keep a democracy? I think that the U.S. military-industrial complex and the majority of politicians in Congress have betrayed those values.
…Assange is huddled over a laptop in the dining room he has turned into his office, monitoring what has become his sole focus over the past few days: the trial of Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private alleged to have provided the diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Assange has two lawyers representing him in the Maryland courtroom, and his name has been mentioned virtually every day during the initial hearing. The government's strategy, it has become clear, is to pressure Manning to implicate Assange in espionage to present his work at WikiLeaks as the act of a spy, not a journalist.
Why is WikiLeaks so focused on defending Bradley Manning?
Manning is alleged to be one of our sources, regardless of whether those allegations are true or not. He has now sat in various U.S. military prisons for the past 600 days as a result of what we published. So we feel that we owe him a duty of care. I have heard from people close to his defense that it is their view that the abuse of him was in order to get him to testify against us.
I understand that you believe the Justice Department has been attending the hearing, to see how it impacts their investigation into WikiLeaks.
There are three gray-faced men who always show up. They're so furtive: They refuse to identify themselves, or to even make - eye contact with our lawyers. They go into the classified hearings when everyone else is kicked out. One of them, we have discovered, is a prosecutor for the Department of Justice on the WikiLeaks investigation. I believe they are there to make sure that the government, in presenting its case against Manning, did not reveal information that was critical to its investigation into us.
In diplomatic cables, the investigation into WikiLeaks by the U.S. government has been called "unprecedented both in its scale and nature." How much do you know about it?
Since last September, a secret grand jury was empaneled in Alexandria, Virginia. There is no defense counsel. There are four prosecutors, according to witnesses who have been forced to testify before the grand jury. The jury itself is taken from the local area, and Alexandria has the highest density of government and military contractors anywhere in the United States. It is a place where the U.S. government chooses to conduct all national-security grand juries and trials because of that makeup of the jury pool. The investigation has involved most of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, the FBI, the State Department, the United States, Army. It has subpoenaed the records of most of my U.S. friends or acquaintances. Under what are called Patriot Act production orders, the government has also asked for their Twitter records, Google accounts and individual ISPs. The laws which they're working toward an indictment on are the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
And they're going after Manning, who is facing a life sentence, to get him to say that you're a spy?
To be another chess piece on the board in the attack on us. The U.S. government is trying to redefine what have been long-accepted journalistic methods. If the Pentagon is to have its way, it will be the end of national-security journalism in the United States.
How so?
They're trying to interpret the Espionage Act to say that any two-way communication with a source is a collaboration with a source, and is therefore a conspiracy to commit espionage where classified information is involved. The Pentagon, in fact, issued a public demand to us that we not only destroy everything we had ever published or were ever going to publish in relation to the U.S. government, but that we also stop "soliciting" information from U.S. government employees. The Espionage Act itself does not mention solicitation, but they're trying to create a new legal precedent that includes a journalist simply asking a source to communicate information…
Given the broader implications, it's surprising that you haven't received much support from what you call the 'Anglo-American press." In fact, "The New York Times" and "The Guardian," both of which collaborated with you on releasing some of the documents, have done their best to distance themselves from you.
...The Times ran in the face of fire; it abandoned us once the heat started from the u.s. administration. In doing so, it also abandoned itself, and it abandoned all journalists working on national-security journalism in the United States.
…If Bradley Manning or another U.S. government employee had collaborated with us to provide us with classified information, and we, in turn, collaborated with the Times to provide it to the world, then the argument would run that the Times had been involved in a conspiracy with us to commit espionage…
Bill Keller, the former editor of the "Times," wrote a widely read and lengthy piece that attacked you personally. In it, he says four or five times that "WikiLeaks is a source, they are not a partner. "
Keller was trying to save his own skin from the espionage investigation…by attacking me personally, using all the standard tabloid character-assassination attacks…Keller also came out and said how pleased the White House was with them that they had not run WikiLeaks material the White House had asked them not to. It is one thing to do that, and it's another thing to proudly proclaim it.
Why did Keller feel the need to tell the world how pleased the White House was with him? For the same reason he felt the need to describe how dirty my socks were. It is not to convey the facts - rather, it is to convey a political alignment. You heard this explicitly: Keller said, "Julian Assange may, or may not be a journalist, but he's not my kind of journalist." My immediate reaction is, "Thank God I'm not Bill Keller's type of journalist."
The publishing mindset at WikiLeaks, it's fair to say, is radically different than that of the mainstream press. Where a newspaper that received 500,000 documents might release 20, you released all of them.
Cablegate is 3,000 volumes of material. It is the greatest intellectual treasure to have entered into the public record in modern times. The Times released just over 100 cables. There are over 251,000 cables in Cablegate. So our approach is quite different to that of the Times. The Times in its security arrangements was only concerned with preventing The Washington Post from finding out what it was doing…
And in return, the "Times" has basically portrayed you as a pariah, despite being responsible for getting them all this incredible material, as well as setting up an innovative organization to gather and process all the leaked data.
Absolutely no honor or gratitude. I don't wish to make light of the difficulties the Times faces in working in the United States, but I do think it could have managed those difficulties in a more honorable way.
…when we published the Iraq War logs, we discovered details about the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians, and details of the torture of more than 1,000 people. Every other paper ran the story...Yet the Times refused to use the word "torture" at all. Instead, they ran a sleazy hit piece against me on the front page that was factually inaccurate…I don't mind taking a hit, but it must be factually accurate. For the Times to descend into a tabloid hit piece on the front page when we had just exposed the deaths of more than 100,000 civilians was not commensurate.
"Collateral Murder" - the video you released in April 2010 showing a U.S. helicopter gunship firing on a group of Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists and two children. You learned that "The Washington Post" actually had the video and had been sitting on it
A Post reporter named David Finkel had the video…Yet he concealed it.
Finkel's response was, "There were a lot of bad days in Iraq."
He had been embedded with ground troops in that area for some nine months on the ground…(so he) came out essentially campaigning on their behalf after the of the video.
Were those kinds of failings by the mainstream media what inspired you to start WikiLeaks?
The things that informed me most were my experiences in fighting for freedom of the press, freedom to communicate knowledge - which, in the end, is freedom from ignorance.
Secondly, my experiences in understanding how the military intelligence complex works at a practical level. I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.
You first registered the domain name for leaks.org back in 1999, when you were working on encryption technology for dissidents and human rights workers. That was before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon enabled the government to dramatically expand its power to keep information secret and spy on its own citizens.
Yes. On September 11th…within an hour, I saw what the counter-reaction would be, and that all the proposals that the military-industrial complex had to spy on everyone, to remove probable cause, to increase its funding, would be rushed forward again. That's precisely what happened.
Then, two years later, the U.S.. invaded Iraq.
…it was clear to me that what the world was missing in the days of Iraq propaganda was a way for inside sources who knew what was really going on to communicate that information to the public. Quite a few who did ended up in very dire circumstances, including David Kelly, the British scientist who either committed suicide or was murdered over his revelations about weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War was… also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.
WikiLeaks has been credited, even by its critics, with fueling the Arab Spring; and even Occupy Wall Street. Was this your plan? Did you imagine you could have this kind of impact?
We planned for most of what has occurred over the past 12 months. It is fair to say we're unexpectedly delighted that those plans came to fruition.
In relation to the Arab Spring, the way I looked at this back in October of 2010 is that the power structures in the Middle East are interdependent, they support each other. If we could release enough information fast enough about many of these powerful individuals and organizations, their ability to support each other would be diminished. They'd have to fight their own local battles - they'd have to turn inward to deal with the domestic political fallout from the information. And therefore they would not have the resources to prop up surrounding countries.
Would you like to see those regimes fall?
…we're not interested in shaking something up just for the hell of it. I believe that if we look at what makes a civilization civilized, it is people understanding what is really going on…
Do you think governments should be allowed to keep some secrets?
This is a question that is much more interesting than the answer. In some cases - tracking down organized crime, say - government officials have an obligation to keep their investigations secret at the moment that they are performing them. Similarly, a doctor has an obligation to keep information about your medical records secret under most circumstances. This is a question about obligations. It is absurd to suggest that simply because a police officer may have the obligation to keep secret certain information relating to an investigation, that the entire world also must be subject to a coercive force.
When people talk about your childhood, the two main words used to describe you are "nomadic" and "hacker." You first got into trouble when you were 17 for hacking into Pentagon networks, as well as several Australian sites. It seems in some ways that you've been engaged in a lifelong campaign against authority.
I haven't had a lifelong campaign against authority. Legitimate authority is important. All human systems require authority, but authority must be granted as a result of the informed consent of the governed. Presently, the consent, if there is any, is not informed, and therefore it's not legitimate.
To communicate knowledge, we must protect people's privacy - and so I have been, for 20 years, developing systems and policy and ideals to protect people's rights to communicate privately without government interference, without government surveillance. The right to communicate without government surveillance is important, because surveillance is another form of censorship. When people are frightened that what they are saying may be overheard by a power that has the ability to lock people up, then they adjust what they're saying. They start to self-censor.
So you never tried (drugs)?
I think under the circumstances I'll just be quiet about my adult private life. There is something, actually. While not being a Calvinist, if you're striving to change the world in an important way, then it is beholden on you to, if you're opposing the actions of companies like Philip Morris, to not actually buy their products.
Let's talk about some of the attacks on you. Even many of those closest to you say you're difficult to work with. Are you?
…I think your question is very interesting, and where does it come from? Well, when The Guardian broke their Cablegate contract with us, when we told The New York Times to piss off because of them sucking up to the White House, then these two groups tried to say that the reason we told them to piss off is simply a matter of my character as opposed to a fundamental institutional incompatibility.
We say The Guardian broke its contract, the Times engaged in shoddy, tabloid journalism, fearful, uncourageous journalism, and so to defend themselves against that, they say, "Oh, no, it's because Mr. Assange's socks were dirty," or, "He's an extremely difficult person to work with."
…You wouldn't be the only person in the media to suffer from a massive ego.
I don't think I have a massive ego. I just am firm at saying no. No, we will not destroy everything we've already published. No, we will continue to publish what we have promised to publish. No, we will not stop dealing with U.S. military leaks. For some people, that comes across as a big ego, when it's just sticking to your ideals.
(In her book) Heather Brooke, a writer for "The Guardian”…sounds almost like a scorned lover - she says she "swooned madly" when you first looked at her, then later concluded that you're an -bad person-.
[Long pause]… I don't think Heather Brooke is particularly interesting. The general phenomenon is interesting...Someone has an involvement to some extent in our work, which they then overstate tremendously to gain authority. They get something from the involvement - a reputation by proximity, information we've collected or some other item of value. Then we're not able to continue the relationship with them at the same degree of involvement, so they feel rejected.
When you become a celebrity - at various times, within the English language, I have been the most famous person being discussed in the news - people's behavior shifts. What they lose through the lack of an ongoing relationship seems to be so incredibly valuable to them, so their desire to keep it, or their feeling of loss when they are not able to preserve the interaction, is so extreme that it drives them to do things you would not normally expect people to do. I always thought that A-level celebrities and their complaints about the difficulties of being a celebrity were rather self-indulgent...I've subsequently changed my opinion…I must say, I'm not terribly impressed with the experience.
Have you been in any serious or significant relationships over the past year?
For security reasons, I can't talk about my intimate private life. I want to make that clear. My children have received death threats and are in hiding. Many people I am close to in a familial way, I have to be extremely cautious about exposing.
What happened in Sweden with the two women who have accused you?
It's before the court, so I can't discuss the case. It is very difficult, being in the position where you can't tell your version of events. It's clear that the matter is absurd, and you can read all about what the prosecution says its case is on the Internet.
By calling it absurd, aren't you implying that these women are making it up?
…I'm saying the allegations are absurd… Although I've not been charged …that hasn't stopped our opponents from constantly referring to "rape charges," which is false. Back when we last did a survey, in February, there were a total of 33 million references on the Internet to the word "rape" in any context, from Helen of Troy to the Congo. If you search for "rape" and my name, there were just over 20 million. In other words, perceptively, two-thirds of all rapes that have ever happened anywhere in the world, ever, have something to do with me.
So why not say, "Look, I did nothing wrong, but I'm sorry if I upset these people. These are very serious things, and I'm taking it seriously, and I'll come to Sweden and face these allegations." People who support you wonder why you haven't done that.
I have no faith in the Swedish justice system being just. The International Prison Chaplains Association says that Swedish prisons are the worst prisons in Europe. That covers even Romania, Estonia and so on. That's because in 47 percent of cases, prisoners in Sweden are held incommunicado. So to the degree that my ability to act would be severely if not completely eliminated by entering into a Swedish prison, I am concerned about it. In addition, if you criticize matters, such as that Swedes have the worst prison system in all of Europe, then it would be the worse for you, because the Swedish justice system will take its revenge.
If you knew that governments were looking to find a way to pull dirty tricks on you, didn't you feel like you were putting yourself at risk in Sweden when you were with the women? Weren't you pushing the envelope?
It's been falsely reported that I have said that the Swedish allegations are a result of a CIA trap. That's false. What I have said is that the case was instantly politicized by opportunists - instantly, within hours. That day, we did receive, from an intelligence source, (information) that the U.S. would find the legal case against me very difficult, and that therefore I should be very cautious about extralegal means. Those extralegal means not being assassination, but rather the planting of drugs, child pornography or being otherwise embroiled in disgraceful conduct. So it was on my mind and everyone else's mind when the allegations arose.
Do you wish you'd done anything different?
In general? Of course. Many. I can't stand these people who say they would never do anything different. That simply means that they have not learned a single thing from their experiences.
Why didn't you hire a PR guy?
We tried. We hired someone in the UK. to cope with the volume of media inquiries. He accepted at a very substantially reduced rate because we're activists, a cause celebre. His largest clients were Virgin and Sony. After one week, it was clear that it was either us or them. His board, according to him, insisted that we be dropped, so we were. There have been about a dozen similar instances of pressure being applied to companies who we've been working with. When people say, "Why didn't Julian do this, why didn't Julian do that, why didn't WikiLeaks do this," in many cases we have actually tried. It's not so easy when you're fighting a superpower.
What forms has the pressure taken?
My personal bank account was shut down, and some of our people have also had their personal bank accounts closed. Many people have lost their jobs - even those who were quite indirectly connected. The person who registered our Swiss domain name lost their job when Bloomberg reported their name on the record. One of the board members of the German charity that collects donations for us lost their security contract with the Swiss stock exchange. The stock exchange even put in writing that the cause was his affiliation with us. The Tor Project, which protects people around the world from being spied on or censored, lost some $600,000 to the U.S. government, as a result of one of their people, Jacob Appelbaum, having filled in for me once at a conference in New York. This type of indirect pressure has been applied to a great many people .
What happened when you were thrown in jail in England?
I had 10 days in solitary. I think everyone should have 10 days in solitary, especially politicians. I broke the back of solitary. It is a sensory-deprivation experience. So I have a lot of sympathy with Bradley Manning and other prisoners who are similarly contained.
Was it terrifying?
No, I was rather excited and looking forward to the challenge of adapting to the new environment. I knew it would be helpful to our cause, politically, and it was. I told my lawyers, "Don't get me out too quickly." They disagreed.
So you saw yourself as a martyr to the cause.
There's been an observation of how the rest of the world was choosing to make my myth, positively and negatively. That process has been fascinating, horrifying and comical all at the same time. It's caused many laughs from the people who know me well, a subject of great mirth in the team.
We're dealing with a situation where we're engaged in a historic endeavor that has very serious consequences for people's lives and political systems. It's extremely important, the consequences for everything from revolutions to individuals' jobs, and the gravity of that task is so great that I don't have time to consider how this celebritization affects me personally.
The concern is always simply, is it helpful or harmful in being able to survive as an institution? Or will the character assassination wipe a million dollars off our budget or change political moods enough to cause us to lose a court case? Or will lionization mean that we have enough political support to survive?
How expensive has the legal battle been?
It is unquestionable that the case has been politicized as a result of my role in the organization. However, to avoid the attack that the funding would be spent on this case, which is effectively used by our opponents to assassinate my character, it's completely separate. Which means that I'm now completely bankrupt as a result.
Completely bankrupt?
Yeah. There have been all sorts of strange complications, such as that the previous lawyers managed to get hold of all my book advances and keep them. So I have not received a cent from any publicity that I've done.
There's a rumor that you have £3.3 million in your bank account that you're keeping.
Yeah, sure. Our opponents like to spread these rumors to deny us our donations.
So that's not true?
It's absolute nonsense.,.If you want to attack an organization, how do you attack it? You attack the cash flow and leadership. The character assassinations are dangerous, but taken as a whole, they're absurdly comical. We have, on the one hand, some 700,000 references to me being an anti-Semite, and on the other hand, some 2.5 million references to me being a member of the Mossad. I'm accused of everything from being a cat torturer to being a rapist to being overly concerned about my hair to being too rich to being so poor that my socks are dirty.
The only ones I have left now to look forward to are some kind of combination of bestiality and pedophilia.
From a legal standpoint, it seems that you're in a no-win situation. If you lose your appeal on February 1st, you will be extradited to Sweden to face questioning, and the United States can ask to extradite you from there. But even if you win your appeal, there's the possibility that the U.S. could just come in and extradite you from England.
Yeah. And the ability to resist extradition here in England is not good.
The conventional wisdom - both in Sweden and the U.S. - is that you won't be extradited. Why are you convinced you will?
Extradition is a political matter. The extradition treaties - those from the U.K. to the U.S.. and from Sweden to the U.S. - are both very dangerous for me. Every day that I remain in England, it is dangerous, and if I am in Sweden, it will be at least as dangerous as it is here, and very probably more so. The Swedish foreign minister responsible for extradition, Carl Bildt, became a U.S. Embassy informant in 1973 when he was 24 years old. He shipped his personal effects to Washington, to lead a conservative leadership program, where he met Karl Rove. They became old friends and would go to conferences together and so on.
...So the political environment in Sweden to defend me against extradition to the United States is quite adverse. Some people have said, "Look, both the United Kingdom and Sweden and many countries say that there is not to be extradition for political offenses." But the United States government is not trying to indict me for a "political" offense - it is trying to indict me for espionage, or conspiracy to commit espionage, and computer hacking. The U.S. grand jury is looking at indicting us for charges which are not, on their face, political. But of course, the reasons are political, and that is a different matter.
So you think the government is going to try to lay the groundwork by saying you're a spy…?
…I imagine what they would do is say that this material we published had adversely affected the United Kingdom or adversely affected Sweden. Perhaps they could introduce or leak to the press, under the surface, false speculations that we had killed Swedish soldiers in Afghanistan' or that we had sold information to the Iranians.
What has the low point been for you in all this? Were there any mornings you woke up saying, "What have I got myself into?"
I understood that the significance of what we were doing was greater than WikiLeaks as an institution and greater than our personal lives. In November, I told our people, perhaps to their surprise, that what we were doing was more significant than the life of anyone of us. To that degree, the battles that we've had, the severity of the battles that we've had…is a reflection of the quality and importance of our work…
…it's not quite right to call it the U.S. national security state, because it's a transnational phenomenon - has brought out the best and worst in people…There's an old military saying: It's not the length of the war but the depth of the trench. For the past year, we have been in a very deep trench, and so the friendships have become deep.
Who has been your most crucial public supporter?
John Pilger, the Australian journalist, has been the most impressive. And the other is Dan Ellsberg. It's the amount of time I've spent with him, both in front of and behind the scenes. When people are working in front of the scenes, in public, it is often because it is helpful to them. One never really knows what the true allegiance is. But when someone puts it on the line both publicly and privately, that's a sign of true character. Ron Paul did come out and make an impassioned and rational speech. It has not been the soft liberal left, the pseudo left that has defended us. In fact, they have run a mile. It has been strong activists who have a long record of fighting for what they believe in, both on the libertarian right and on the left.
What do you make of Anonymous? They've supported you.
…It was a young pranksterish Internet culture, not something at all to be taken seriously. What's wonderful about what has happened over the last few years is that through engaging with forces much larger than themselves, starting with the Church of Scientology, they have been educated about how the world actually works… As a result of joining our battle and trying to protect themselves, they have come to see that the threats related to Internet freedom come from the military-industrial complex, the banking system and the media. The media is the third big power group, because when you're involved in something like this, it becomes newsworthy.
What advice do you have for journalists, based on your experience?
I have a lot of sympathy for journalists who are trying to protect their sources. It's very hard now. Unless you're an electronic-surveillance expert or you have frequent contact with one, you must stay off the Net and mobile phones. You really have to just use the old techniques, paper and whispering in people's ears. Leave your mobile phones behind. Don't turn them off, but tell your source to leave electronic devices in their offices. We are now in a situation where countries are recording billions of hours of conversations, and proudly proclaiming that you don't have to select which telephone call you're intercepting, because you intercept every telephone call.
So what's the future of WikiLeaks? Is the organization going to survive?
This week, I think we'll make it. We'll see what happens next week.
Where do you want to end up, when all the legal battles are over?
I don't want to end up anywhere. I want to do what I was doing before. I lived in Egypt when we had important things that needed to be done, or in Kenya or the United States or Australia or Sweden or Germany. When we have opportunities, then that's where I am.
When do you think you'll be able to regain that freedom to do that?
In relation to the United States, we'll have to wait for the revolution.
The entire interview is on line here:
_http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118?page=7
