charrob
05-28-2015, 06:30 PM
Some highlights from a conversation with Julian Assange this past Monday, May 25, 2015; click on links for the full conversation.
"On Monday, Democracy Now! went to London to interview Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy. When we were inside, British police asked the Ecuadorean Embassy to hand over our identification. That’s unusual. Local police aren’t supposed to ask people for ID entering foreign embassies , so we refused."
On the U.S. Case Against Julian Assange:
As Julian Assange Faces Swedish Legal Setback, New Details Come to Light on U.S. Case Against Him (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/27/as_julian_assange_faces_swedish_legal)
Both of the women involved [in the Swedish rape case] explicitly say that they had not alleged rape; in fact, even in the court documents, say that they had no intention of making a complaint and that this is something that the Swedish state brought. The preliminary investigation was dropped by the most senior prosecutor in Stockholm. It was Borgström, the politician, who intervened in the case, took it to another prosecutor in Gothenburg, the current one, and resurrected the matter, which is a quirk of the Swedish justice system that you can shop around to different prosecutors. [So one prosecutor can drop it, and another can then pick it up?] The most senior prosecutor of Stockholm, Eva Finné, dropped it and said there was no rape that had been committed, then there was not even any evidence that there had been, and not an allegation that there had been. And then he took this to Gothenburg. Subsequently, he has become the most disgraced lawyer in Sweden.
The big case [against] Wikileaks is the U.S. case, which started in the beginning of 2010. A grand jury was in place by the middle of 2010. A WikiLeaks war room was established by the Pentagon, comprised predominantly of Defense Intelligence Agency and FBI, over 120 people working 24/7, more than a dozen different government departments involved. [How do you know this?] It’s publicly stated by those organizations. And subsequently, the case has narrowed down in its focus and is now being run by the Department of Justice National Security Division and the Department of Justice Criminal Division. The latest information is, in federal court this year, March 4th, the U.S. government again admitted that they are pending prosecution, and they are proceeding. And it is a national security criminal investigation, multi-subject, long-term pre-prosecution. And as a result, the press is not entitled to any information at all. There’s around 500 Freedom of Information requests from different media organizations trying to look at whether the case has been conducted in an illegal manner—spying on our supporters, spying on funding and so on. All of that is restricted under the basis that the matter is pending prosecution.
The U.S. case against WikiLeaks is widely believed to be the largest-ever investigation into a publisher. It is extraterritorial. It’s setting new precedents about the ability of the U.S. government to reach out to any media publisher in Europe or the rest of the world, and try and achieve a prosecution. They say the offenses are conspiracy, conspiracy to commit espionage, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, computer hacking, conversion, stealing government documents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzghHY3Z28
"Pretrial Punishment": Julian Assange Remains in Ecuadorean Embassy Fearing Arrest If He Leaves (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/28/pretrial_punishment_julian_assange_remains_in)
The latest information is from the 4th of March. Now, we know, as a result of warrants that were issued to our journalists’ Google accounts, that the charges are espionage; conspiracy to commit espionage; the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is computer hacking; conversion, which is theft of government secrets; and general conspiracy. We don’t know how many of each one, but we know that these are the charge types. This is what has been used to apply for warrants. We know that there are several more warrants that Google has. Google has admitted publicly that it is still gagged about the other warrants that have been applied.
Now, on the 4th of March, there was a case in federal court where EPIC, which is a Electronic Privacy Information Center, NGO based in Washington, D.C., has been litigating to try and see whether the U.S. government is illegally surveilling our supporters. And their case has become unexpectedly important. There are some 500 information requests from the media and us, that have been blocked by the U.S. government, into what has been happening with WikiLeaks. And they’ve been blocked under the excuse that to release such information would be to help us resist the prosecution, and that they want to use that in the prosecution, and therefore they can’t release it to anyone. Now, the FBI has admitted that they have more than 42,135 pages just in the FBI file. There’s the DOJ file. There’s the grand jury file. And they’re not going to release a single sentence, not a single paragraph. But they have to explain themselves. And in explaining themselves, they’ve revealed some important things, that the investigation is being run by the DOJ National Security Division, and it’s being run by the DOJ Criminal Division, and that there is responsive documents in the DOJ extradition unit. So, we see the flavor of the prosecution from this, but also many other things. But this is the most recent one, from the 4th of March.
Now, importantly, we lost that case. Or rather, EPIC lost that case to get those documents, because the court accepted that to release any information about the WikiLeaks prosecution would affect the WikiLeaks prosecution, that we could use this to defend ourselves. And the argument used is quite incredible. So, we argued that—the argument used to restrict all information about the pending WikiLeaks prosecution is quite incredible. It is that not only would any information be—if released, assist us, even saying that we’re no longer interested in that particular person, we’re interested in this one, but that the court doesn’t have a right to, itself, make this determination. So, the government says that we need to keep all this information secret about the WikiLeaks investigation—tens and tens of thousands of pages, not a single sentence can be released—because it would help—would help WikiLeaks, would help me.
And then, so we say, "Well, we want the court to look at the documents and say whether they can be released or not, whether they would truly affect the investigation." And then the government argues, "The court does not have a right to make this assessment. This is a question of a national security fact. Either it is a fact that the information held by the DOJ and held by the FBI would—about WikiLeaks, would affect national security or not. And it is the government that is best placed to determine this fact, not the court." And so, in the judgment, the judge states that it is necessary to show, quote, "appropriate deference to the executive on matters of national security," and therefore she is simply going to defer to the government’s claim without looking at the material at all. This is incredible, that you have the judiciary—the whole purpose of the judiciary is it is not to defer to the executive; it’s meant to be an independent assessor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuW1HPdpDyo
Julian Assange: Despite Congressional Standoff, NSA Has Secret Authority to Continue Spying Unabated (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/27/julian_assange_despite_congressional_standoff_nsa)
So unless there’s an emergency recall of enough of the Senate and Congress, the sunset clause will hit, and that means there will have to be a new PATRIOT Act reintroduced. So it will have to be resuscitated as opposed to having a rollover, and that’s a more involved process. However, our sources say that the NSA is not too concerned, that it has secret interpretations of other authorities that give it much the same power that it would have had under the secret interpretation of 215 and other areas of the USA PATRIOT Act.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic6YEWrjx5Q
WikiLeaks Releases 500K U.S. Cables from 1978 on Iran, Sandinistas, Afghanistan, Israel & More (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/28/wikileaks_releases_500k_us_cables_from)
On Wednesday, WikiLeaks added more than a half a million U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 to its Public Library of US Diplomacy database.
The U.S. State Department cables. 1978 was a very interesting period. These cables have come through the State Department system, international archives. We have sucked them all out and put them into our system, where we now have more than two million cables in the collection, all indexed. So, 1978, a very interesting time period. We have deliberately released all 400,000 at once to everyone. So, no one’s had an opportunity to cherry-pick, and we haven’t done that, either. What we have done is identified broad areas which are very interesting.
For example, 1978 actually set in progress many of the regional elements, the geopolitical elements, that are playing out today. For example, 1978 was the beginning of the Iranian revolution. It wasn’t until 1979 that it succeeded, but the push against the Shah started in 1978, with demonstrations and killings in response. Similarly, Nicaragua in 1978, the Sandinista movement started in its popular form as a result of a killing of a newspaper editor and was complete within two years. Afghanistan, the war period in Afghanistan began in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since. It was—the Soviet-friendly government came in in 1978, the assassination of the previous president, the rival of Soviet special forces towards the end of the year.
1978 saw the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. And while you might think, "Oh, well, that just concerns Vietnam and Cambodia," no, this is an important consequence of the Vietnam War and how Cambodia was used and became a Chinese and American proxy in relation to Vietnam. So China, the U.K., U.S. supported Cambodia against the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese prevailed, but the conflict also led to a finalization of what had started under Kissinger’s rapprochement with China— a decisive move to configure China against the Soviet Union and onto the U.S. side of the Cold War conflict. And this war with Vietnam is something that facilitated Brzezinski’s visit to China and the eventual normalization of relations which occurred shortly after.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPKs9-krDn4
Assange on the Untold Story of the Grounding of Evo Morales’ Plane During Edward Snowden Manhunt (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/28/assange_on_the_untold_story_of)
The U.S. deep state, the general intelligence community, which is about 100,000 strong, vast resources were put into trying to grab Edward Snowden or work out where he might go, if he was leaving Hong Kong, and grab him there. So we worked against that, and we got him out of Hong Kong and got him to Russia, and we were going to transit through Russia to get him to Latin America. Now, the U.S. government canceled his passport as he was en route, it seems, to Moscow, meaning that he then couldn’t take his next flight, which had been booked through Cuba. And at that point, there became a question of, well, how else can he proceed?
If he can’t proceed by a commercial airline, are there other alternatives? And so, we looked into private flights, private jets, other unusual routes for commercial jets, and presidential jets. Now, we managed to get some intelligence on the U.S. government thinking of the different types of jets and that they were concerned that the presidential jets might be difficult for them, from a legal perspective. In fact, from a legal perspective, they are flying embassies. They’re protected under the Vienna Convention. And no one has a right to go into the presidential jet.
So it’s the week of the oil conference. A number of presidential jets are flying back, and we are considering one of these. And so, we then—our code language that we used deliberately swapped the presidential jet that we were considering for the Bolivian jet. And so we just spoke about Bolivia in order to distract from the actual candidate jet.
The U.S. successfully pressured France, Portugal and Spain to close their airspace to President Evo Morales’s jet in its flight from Moscow to the Canary Islands for refueling and then back to Bolivia. And as a result, it was forced to land in Vienna. And then, once in Vienna, there was pressure to search the plane. Just a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity. Portugal, Spain and France should apologize to Evo Morales for not following the law. Some other things happened. Some preemptive extradition requests were sent out, for example, to Iceland, which we got hold of and published. So there was—the U.S. was pressuring countries where flights might go through or land or refuel.
…
The U.S. flew a private jet with six FBI officers and two prosecutors—one from New York and the other one, we believe, from Alexandria, Virginia, where the ongoing WikiLeaks grand jury is taking place—into Iceland under false pretenses, pretending that they were investigating a hacking threat to the Icelandic government. The interior minister of Iceland found out about what was going on and ordered that the FBI leave. They said they would. They didn’t. And then a second order was put in. And then they fled Iceland under fear of arrest and, at that point, then got the informant to fly to Washington, D.C., where they interrogated them for another five days and then tried to use them to infiltrate a part of WikiLeaks. That informant has confessed doing that, has been prosecuted in Iceland for fraud, embezzlement and other crimes, being pursued by us and by some other Icelandic businesses where this person was involved in embezzlement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBgdiCZmNw
Julian Assange on the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Secretive Deal Isn’t About Trade, But Corporate Control (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/27/julian_assange_on_the_trans_pacific)
Well, the TPP is an international treaty that has 29 different chapters. We have released four of them, and we are trying to get the remainder. … [As far as Congressmen wanting to read the agreement], they go into a room. If they try and take notes, the notes have to be handed over to the government for safe keeping. And, of course, congressmen under those situations won’t take notes. So it is very well guarded from the press and the majority of people and even from congressmen. But 600 U.S. companies are part of the process and have been given access to various parts of the TPP. It is mostly not about trade. Only five of the 29 chapters are about traditional trade. The others are about regulating the Internet and what Internet—Internet service providers have to collect information. They have to hand it over to companies under certain circumstances. It’s about regulating labor, what labor conditions can be applied, regulating, whether you can favor local industry, regulating the hospital healthcare system, privatization of hospitals. So, essentially, every aspect of the modern economy, even banking services, are in the TPP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5b-99oxCEs
"On Monday, Democracy Now! went to London to interview Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy. When we were inside, British police asked the Ecuadorean Embassy to hand over our identification. That’s unusual. Local police aren’t supposed to ask people for ID entering foreign embassies , so we refused."
On the U.S. Case Against Julian Assange:
As Julian Assange Faces Swedish Legal Setback, New Details Come to Light on U.S. Case Against Him (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/27/as_julian_assange_faces_swedish_legal)
Both of the women involved [in the Swedish rape case] explicitly say that they had not alleged rape; in fact, even in the court documents, say that they had no intention of making a complaint and that this is something that the Swedish state brought. The preliminary investigation was dropped by the most senior prosecutor in Stockholm. It was Borgström, the politician, who intervened in the case, took it to another prosecutor in Gothenburg, the current one, and resurrected the matter, which is a quirk of the Swedish justice system that you can shop around to different prosecutors. [So one prosecutor can drop it, and another can then pick it up?] The most senior prosecutor of Stockholm, Eva Finné, dropped it and said there was no rape that had been committed, then there was not even any evidence that there had been, and not an allegation that there had been. And then he took this to Gothenburg. Subsequently, he has become the most disgraced lawyer in Sweden.
The big case [against] Wikileaks is the U.S. case, which started in the beginning of 2010. A grand jury was in place by the middle of 2010. A WikiLeaks war room was established by the Pentagon, comprised predominantly of Defense Intelligence Agency and FBI, over 120 people working 24/7, more than a dozen different government departments involved. [How do you know this?] It’s publicly stated by those organizations. And subsequently, the case has narrowed down in its focus and is now being run by the Department of Justice National Security Division and the Department of Justice Criminal Division. The latest information is, in federal court this year, March 4th, the U.S. government again admitted that they are pending prosecution, and they are proceeding. And it is a national security criminal investigation, multi-subject, long-term pre-prosecution. And as a result, the press is not entitled to any information at all. There’s around 500 Freedom of Information requests from different media organizations trying to look at whether the case has been conducted in an illegal manner—spying on our supporters, spying on funding and so on. All of that is restricted under the basis that the matter is pending prosecution.
The U.S. case against WikiLeaks is widely believed to be the largest-ever investigation into a publisher. It is extraterritorial. It’s setting new precedents about the ability of the U.S. government to reach out to any media publisher in Europe or the rest of the world, and try and achieve a prosecution. They say the offenses are conspiracy, conspiracy to commit espionage, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, computer hacking, conversion, stealing government documents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzghHY3Z28
"Pretrial Punishment": Julian Assange Remains in Ecuadorean Embassy Fearing Arrest If He Leaves (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/28/pretrial_punishment_julian_assange_remains_in)
The latest information is from the 4th of March. Now, we know, as a result of warrants that were issued to our journalists’ Google accounts, that the charges are espionage; conspiracy to commit espionage; the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is computer hacking; conversion, which is theft of government secrets; and general conspiracy. We don’t know how many of each one, but we know that these are the charge types. This is what has been used to apply for warrants. We know that there are several more warrants that Google has. Google has admitted publicly that it is still gagged about the other warrants that have been applied.
Now, on the 4th of March, there was a case in federal court where EPIC, which is a Electronic Privacy Information Center, NGO based in Washington, D.C., has been litigating to try and see whether the U.S. government is illegally surveilling our supporters. And their case has become unexpectedly important. There are some 500 information requests from the media and us, that have been blocked by the U.S. government, into what has been happening with WikiLeaks. And they’ve been blocked under the excuse that to release such information would be to help us resist the prosecution, and that they want to use that in the prosecution, and therefore they can’t release it to anyone. Now, the FBI has admitted that they have more than 42,135 pages just in the FBI file. There’s the DOJ file. There’s the grand jury file. And they’re not going to release a single sentence, not a single paragraph. But they have to explain themselves. And in explaining themselves, they’ve revealed some important things, that the investigation is being run by the DOJ National Security Division, and it’s being run by the DOJ Criminal Division, and that there is responsive documents in the DOJ extradition unit. So, we see the flavor of the prosecution from this, but also many other things. But this is the most recent one, from the 4th of March.
Now, importantly, we lost that case. Or rather, EPIC lost that case to get those documents, because the court accepted that to release any information about the WikiLeaks prosecution would affect the WikiLeaks prosecution, that we could use this to defend ourselves. And the argument used is quite incredible. So, we argued that—the argument used to restrict all information about the pending WikiLeaks prosecution is quite incredible. It is that not only would any information be—if released, assist us, even saying that we’re no longer interested in that particular person, we’re interested in this one, but that the court doesn’t have a right to, itself, make this determination. So, the government says that we need to keep all this information secret about the WikiLeaks investigation—tens and tens of thousands of pages, not a single sentence can be released—because it would help—would help WikiLeaks, would help me.
And then, so we say, "Well, we want the court to look at the documents and say whether they can be released or not, whether they would truly affect the investigation." And then the government argues, "The court does not have a right to make this assessment. This is a question of a national security fact. Either it is a fact that the information held by the DOJ and held by the FBI would—about WikiLeaks, would affect national security or not. And it is the government that is best placed to determine this fact, not the court." And so, in the judgment, the judge states that it is necessary to show, quote, "appropriate deference to the executive on matters of national security," and therefore she is simply going to defer to the government’s claim without looking at the material at all. This is incredible, that you have the judiciary—the whole purpose of the judiciary is it is not to defer to the executive; it’s meant to be an independent assessor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuW1HPdpDyo
Julian Assange: Despite Congressional Standoff, NSA Has Secret Authority to Continue Spying Unabated (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/27/julian_assange_despite_congressional_standoff_nsa)
So unless there’s an emergency recall of enough of the Senate and Congress, the sunset clause will hit, and that means there will have to be a new PATRIOT Act reintroduced. So it will have to be resuscitated as opposed to having a rollover, and that’s a more involved process. However, our sources say that the NSA is not too concerned, that it has secret interpretations of other authorities that give it much the same power that it would have had under the secret interpretation of 215 and other areas of the USA PATRIOT Act.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic6YEWrjx5Q
WikiLeaks Releases 500K U.S. Cables from 1978 on Iran, Sandinistas, Afghanistan, Israel & More (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/28/wikileaks_releases_500k_us_cables_from)
On Wednesday, WikiLeaks added more than a half a million U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 to its Public Library of US Diplomacy database.
The U.S. State Department cables. 1978 was a very interesting period. These cables have come through the State Department system, international archives. We have sucked them all out and put them into our system, where we now have more than two million cables in the collection, all indexed. So, 1978, a very interesting time period. We have deliberately released all 400,000 at once to everyone. So, no one’s had an opportunity to cherry-pick, and we haven’t done that, either. What we have done is identified broad areas which are very interesting.
For example, 1978 actually set in progress many of the regional elements, the geopolitical elements, that are playing out today. For example, 1978 was the beginning of the Iranian revolution. It wasn’t until 1979 that it succeeded, but the push against the Shah started in 1978, with demonstrations and killings in response. Similarly, Nicaragua in 1978, the Sandinista movement started in its popular form as a result of a killing of a newspaper editor and was complete within two years. Afghanistan, the war period in Afghanistan began in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since. It was—the Soviet-friendly government came in in 1978, the assassination of the previous president, the rival of Soviet special forces towards the end of the year.
1978 saw the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. And while you might think, "Oh, well, that just concerns Vietnam and Cambodia," no, this is an important consequence of the Vietnam War and how Cambodia was used and became a Chinese and American proxy in relation to Vietnam. So China, the U.K., U.S. supported Cambodia against the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese prevailed, but the conflict also led to a finalization of what had started under Kissinger’s rapprochement with China— a decisive move to configure China against the Soviet Union and onto the U.S. side of the Cold War conflict. And this war with Vietnam is something that facilitated Brzezinski’s visit to China and the eventual normalization of relations which occurred shortly after.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPKs9-krDn4
Assange on the Untold Story of the Grounding of Evo Morales’ Plane During Edward Snowden Manhunt (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/28/assange_on_the_untold_story_of)
The U.S. deep state, the general intelligence community, which is about 100,000 strong, vast resources were put into trying to grab Edward Snowden or work out where he might go, if he was leaving Hong Kong, and grab him there. So we worked against that, and we got him out of Hong Kong and got him to Russia, and we were going to transit through Russia to get him to Latin America. Now, the U.S. government canceled his passport as he was en route, it seems, to Moscow, meaning that he then couldn’t take his next flight, which had been booked through Cuba. And at that point, there became a question of, well, how else can he proceed?
If he can’t proceed by a commercial airline, are there other alternatives? And so, we looked into private flights, private jets, other unusual routes for commercial jets, and presidential jets. Now, we managed to get some intelligence on the U.S. government thinking of the different types of jets and that they were concerned that the presidential jets might be difficult for them, from a legal perspective. In fact, from a legal perspective, they are flying embassies. They’re protected under the Vienna Convention. And no one has a right to go into the presidential jet.
So it’s the week of the oil conference. A number of presidential jets are flying back, and we are considering one of these. And so, we then—our code language that we used deliberately swapped the presidential jet that we were considering for the Bolivian jet. And so we just spoke about Bolivia in order to distract from the actual candidate jet.
The U.S. successfully pressured France, Portugal and Spain to close their airspace to President Evo Morales’s jet in its flight from Moscow to the Canary Islands for refueling and then back to Bolivia. And as a result, it was forced to land in Vienna. And then, once in Vienna, there was pressure to search the plane. Just a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity. Portugal, Spain and France should apologize to Evo Morales for not following the law. Some other things happened. Some preemptive extradition requests were sent out, for example, to Iceland, which we got hold of and published. So there was—the U.S. was pressuring countries where flights might go through or land or refuel.
…
The U.S. flew a private jet with six FBI officers and two prosecutors—one from New York and the other one, we believe, from Alexandria, Virginia, where the ongoing WikiLeaks grand jury is taking place—into Iceland under false pretenses, pretending that they were investigating a hacking threat to the Icelandic government. The interior minister of Iceland found out about what was going on and ordered that the FBI leave. They said they would. They didn’t. And then a second order was put in. And then they fled Iceland under fear of arrest and, at that point, then got the informant to fly to Washington, D.C., where they interrogated them for another five days and then tried to use them to infiltrate a part of WikiLeaks. That informant has confessed doing that, has been prosecuted in Iceland for fraud, embezzlement and other crimes, being pursued by us and by some other Icelandic businesses where this person was involved in embezzlement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBgdiCZmNw
Julian Assange on the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Secretive Deal Isn’t About Trade, But Corporate Control (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/27/julian_assange_on_the_trans_pacific)
Well, the TPP is an international treaty that has 29 different chapters. We have released four of them, and we are trying to get the remainder. … [As far as Congressmen wanting to read the agreement], they go into a room. If they try and take notes, the notes have to be handed over to the government for safe keeping. And, of course, congressmen under those situations won’t take notes. So it is very well guarded from the press and the majority of people and even from congressmen. But 600 U.S. companies are part of the process and have been given access to various parts of the TPP. It is mostly not about trade. Only five of the 29 chapters are about traditional trade. The others are about regulating the Internet and what Internet—Internet service providers have to collect information. They have to hand it over to companies under certain circumstances. It’s about regulating labor, what labor conditions can be applied, regulating, whether you can favor local industry, regulating the hospital healthcare system, privatization of hospitals. So, essentially, every aspect of the modern economy, even banking services, are in the TPP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5b-99oxCEs