Follow on TwitterVideo Clips Of U.S. Politicians & Political Analysts Declaring WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange A ‘Terrorist’
For those who continue to belittle Julian Assange’s fears for his safety, and who insist that Ecuador’s granting him political asylum was merely a ploy to evade questioning on sexual accusations in Sweden, WikiLeaks has just compiled video clips of U.S. officials, world Leaders, and famous TV political pundits proclaiming Julian Assange to be a ‘terrorist’, with many explicitly calling for his assassination:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-DIZvcK6Rc[/youtube]
Just a few transcript highlights of an alarming number of implicit and explicit threats made against Assange and WikiLeaks:
1. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Meet The Press:
David Gregory: Should the United States do something to stop Mr. Assange?
Biden: We’re looking at that right now. The Justice Department is taking a look … I would argue that he is closer to being a high tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.
2. Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove:
The head of WikiLeaks is not a particularly credible source in my mind. He is a … to my mind he is a criminal and he ought to be hunted down, and grabbed, and put on trial for what he has done here.
3. Former Speaker, House of Representatives, (2012 GOP Candidate for President of the US) Newt Gingrich:
Information warfare is warfare and Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information ‘terrorism which leads to people getting killed is ‘terrorism’, and Julian Assange is engaged in ‘terrorism’. He should be treated as an enemy combatant. WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.
4. U.S. Senator (from Kentucky) Mitch McConnel:
I think the man is a high-tech terrorist, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem we need to change the law.
5. Bob Beckel, Political Commentator and Analyst:
The way to deal with this is pretty simple. We’ve got special-ops forces. I mean a dead man cannot leak stuff. This guy is a traitor and treasonous, and he has broken every law in the United States. The guy ought to be — and I’m not for the death penalty, so if I’m not for the death penalty … illegally shoot the son-of-a-bitch!
6. Bo Dietl, Chairman NY Security Guard Advisory Council:
Obama, if you’re listening today? You should take this guy out — have the CIA take him out.
7. President Obama: “He broke the law.”
[…]
VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Addresses UN, Confronts US ‘Regime Of Secrecy’
Assange Addresses UN General Assembly
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed the United Nations General Assembly via video chat from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Here he remains confined, having been granted political asylum by Ecuador, but threatened by the UK with arrest and extradition to Sweden (where he is wanted for questioning on sexual assault allegations).
A U.S. grand jury has been building a case against Assange and WikiLeaks on espionage charges, for publishing whistleblower-obtained classified documents that have embarrassed the US government by exposing a vast assortment of illegalities.
Most Assange defenders suspect that the Swedish extradition request (Note: Assange has not been charged with anything. It is only for questioning.) is simply a ruse to get him into the Swedish legal system, where he would then be immediately extradited to the U.S. to face persecution.
He used his speech to the UN to remind the Assembly about the virtues of liberty, democracy, transparency, and the rule-of-law and contrasted these universal rights with the dark reality he helped to expose as practiced by the world’s most powerful and ‘virtuous’ nations.
He gave a profile of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning, commending him for taking huge personal risks in his quest for truth and justice, and then condemned the U.S.’s persecution of him, using the findings of the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture to highlight that point.
Then Assange took President Barack Obama to task, by taking the very words he used in his speech to the U.N. and contrasting them with his actual policies, showing a stark contrast between the two.
The transcript follows the video.
WATCH:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmQwvgvR1S8[/youtube]
TRANSCRIPT:
Foreign Minister Patino, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen.
I speak to you today as a free man, because despite having been detained for 659 days without charge, I am free in the most basic and important sense. I am free to speak my mind.
This freedom exists because the nation of Ecuador has granted me political asylum and other nations have rallied to support its decision.
And it is because of Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that WikiLeaks is able to “receive and impart information… through any media, and any medium and regardless of frontiers”. And it is because of Article 14.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which enshrines the right to seek asylum from persecution, and the 1951 Refugee Convention and other conventions produced by the United Nations that I am able to be protected along with others from political persecution.
It is thanks to the United Nations that I am able to exercise my inalienable right to seek protection from the arbitrary and excessive actions taken by governments against me and the staff and supporters of my organisation. It is because of the absolute prohibition on torture enshrined in customary international law and the UN Convention Against Torture that we stand firmly to denounce torture and war crimes, as an organisation, regardless of who the perpetrators are.
I would like to thank the courtesy afforded to me by the Government of Ecuador in providing me with the space here today speak once again at the UN, in circumstances very different to my intervention in the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva.
Almost two years ago today, I spoke there about our work uncovering the torture and killing of over 100,000 Iraqi citizens.
But 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 Cresent Oaklahoma to a Welsh mother and US Navy father. His parents fell in love. His father was stationed at a US military base in Wales.
The soldier showed early promise as a boy, winning top prize at science fairs 3 years in a row.
He believed in the truth, and like all of us, hated hypocrisy.
He believed in liberty and the right for all of us to pursue 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 US military and, like his father, trained as an intelligence analyst.
In late 2009, aged 21, he was deployed to Iraq.
There, it is alleged, he saw a US military that often did not 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, and 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 US 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 9 months in isolation and subject to severe abuse. The UN Special Rapporteur for Torture, Juan Mendez, 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 offence. These things happened to him, as the US 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 US military is 120 days.
The US administration is 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 for espionage and journalists from a 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 precedent in its scale and nature. That the US 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, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the US Army Criminal Investigation Division, the United States Forces in Iraq, the First Army Division, The US Army Computer Crimes Investigative Unit, the CCIU, the Second Army Cyber-Command. And within those three separate intelligence investigations, the Department of Justice, most significantly, and its US 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 8000 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 Director of National Counterintelligence Executive, the Central Intelligence Agency, the House Oversight Committee, the National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the PIAB – 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.
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 that all previous US 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’ avalanche of progress?
Was it not audacious to say, on Tuesday, that the “United States supported the forces of change” in the Arab Spring?
Tunisian history did not begin in December 2010.
And Mohammed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so that Barack Obama could be reelected.
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 the Ben Ali regime 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.
It must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American teargas out of their eyes that the US 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, that its hated intelligence chief, Sueilman, who we proved the US knew was a torturer, should 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 incarcerated of the Bahrain uprising to claim that the United States “supported the forces of change.”
This is indeed audacity.
Who can say that it is not audacious that the President – concerned to appear leaderly – looks back on this sea change – the people’s change – and calls 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 is his adminstration that made it blow.
Very well. This is better than the alternative – to drift into irrelevance as the world moves on.
We must be clear here.
The United States is not the enemy.
Its government is not uniform. In some cases good people in the United States supported the forces of change. And perhaps Barack Obama personally was one of them.
But in others, and en masse, early on, it actively opposed them.
This is a matter of historical record.
And it is not fair and it is not appropriate for the President to distort that record for political gain, or for the sake of uttering fine words.
Credit should be given where it is due, but it should be withheld where it is not.
And as for the fine words.
They are fine words.
And we commend and agree with these fine words.
We agree when President Obama said yesterday that people can resolve their differences peacefully.
We agree that diplomacy can take the place of war.
And we agree that this is an interdependent world, that all of us have a stake in.
We agree that freedom and self-determination are not merely American or Western values, but universal values.
And we agree with the President when he says that we must speak honestly if we are serious about these ideals.
But fine words languish without commensurate actions.
President Obama spoke out strongly in favour of the freedom of expression.
“Those in power,” he said, “have to resist the temptation to crack down on dissent.”
There are times for words and there are times for action. The time for words has run out.
It is time for the US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks, to cease its persecution of our people, and to cease its persecution of our alleged sources.
It is time for President Obama do the right thing, and join the forces of change, not in fine words but in fine deeds.
Glenn Greenwald Defends WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange’s Asylum Claim In Radio Debate
AlterNet Radio’s Joshua Holland recently invited Guardian columnist (and former constitutional lawyer) Glenn Greenwald onto his show to defend Ecuador’s granting asylum to Julian Assange.
The asylum was granted based on the belief that if the UK were to extradite Assange to Sweden for questioning on sexual assault claims, Sweden would promptly extradite him to the United States, where a grand jury investigation is underway with the goal of indicting him on Espionage charges.
Based on the torturous treatment (see here and here and here) of alleged whisteblower PFC Bradley Manning, who presently stands trial for passing state secrets to WikiLeaks, Assange supporters believe the U.S. government has every intention of persecuting Assange as a political prisoner.
Greenwald makes a compelling case here, in one of the best debates I’ve listened to yet on this issue. Here are some highlights of the partial transcript:
[…]
JH: We have an international incident, a standoff if you will. Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The Brits say they’re not going to give him safe passage. The Swedes are not going to give him a guarantee that he won’t be extradited to the United States. That’s the situation we’re looking at.
GG: The important thing about that is that’s the initial position of the parties. Typically, when there’s international standoffs and countries are unable to resolve their difference they get together and negotiate. Thus far the Brits and the Swedes have been unwilling to negotiate with the Ecuadorians, which is what made the Ecuadorian government conclude that there was something else going on her. It made them believe that Assange’s fear of political persecution was well-grounded.
Now that they’ve granted asylum there have been a couple of additional meetings. Whether the parties have softened their positions in an attempt to get closer together is something I don’t know, but generally that’s what has happened. So what you’ve laid out is generally a beginning gambit. That’s the reason there’s a standstill.
JH: I think he’s citing the threat of extradition to the US in order to avoid facing these charges. In one sense what he’s asking for from Sweden is a little difficult for them to grant. There has been no extradition request made of the Swedes, and there are no charges here in the United States as far as we know. There were certainly reports that there was a sealed indictment. Wouldn’t the Swedes have to kind of concede that they don’t have a good and independent judiciary in order to grant that request?
GG: I think there are two issues to note. One is that you’re right that there have been no extradition requests that we know of from the United States to Sweden, nor have there been any publicly disclosed indictments. I don’t really place much credence in the report you referenced — the Stratfor emails that were leaked when Anonymous hacked into them, that there’s a sealed indictment. There may or may not be, but I don’t consider some Stratfor employee to be dispositive. I guess if you’re Assange you look at that and take it seriously, but to me that’s very much up in the air.
What we do know, though, is that there is a very aggressive and active grand jury investigation based in a northern district of Virginia that has been subpoenaing people and investigating whether or not Assange should be indicted under the Espionage Act. We know that prominent people in the government, like Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, and Eric Holder, the attorney general, have to varying degrees made clear that he should be prosecuted, that they want to prosecute him and that they are actively looking to do so. I think it would be very irrational to discount the extremely genuine threat that he faces from prosecution in the United States, especially given that this administration has proven its unprecedented fixation on criminally punishing people who leak information. I think that threat is very real.
You’re right that it would be odd for the Swedish government to give some sort of ironclad guarantee that they will not extradite him to the United States under any circumstances without having seen any extradition request. The odd aspect of this case is that Ecuador, a real country, has now granted political asylum to Assange in order to protect him from political persecution, and there is a need there for Sweden to negotiate if they want to get ahold of him in Sweden. They need to satisfy the Ecuadorians that this is not a ruse to get him to the United States. That makes the situation somewhat odd. Even if you believe that Sweden can’t, or that it would be hard to, issue some kind of hard and fast guarantee now, I think it’s very debatable.
Let’s assume that they couldn’t. Then what you do is sit down with Assange’s lawyers and the Ecuadorian government representatives and you say you can’t give him a guarantee, but you can make a public statement saying that we think that any attempt to prosecute Assange for Wikileaks’ disclosures would be a political crime. A political crime is not something under our extradition treaty that we can extradite for. So you take this position in advance that you consider this a political crime, but you still reserve the right to analyze the extradition request if and when it comes in.
Now will that be enough to assuage the Ecuadorians to withdraw their asylum or to Assange to go to Sweden? I don’t know, but I certainly think it’s worth the negotiation effort, and the fact that it hasn’t happened yet is why there is a lot of suspicion.
JH: There were a number of stories a few months back about the grand jury. They were also accompanied by various legal scholars expressing the opinion that it would be very difficult to charge Assange, given that the New York Times worked with him in publishing the cable leaks. How do you charge Assange without at least exposing the New York Times to the same charge, and if you do that you’d have a very tough First Amendment hurdle to overcome.
I’m not convinced the United States is actively trying to prosecute him because it’s a very tricky case to prosecute, and Assange is not the whistleblower or leaker. If anything he’s a publisher; he’s basically a journalist. Obviously Bradley Manning is accused of leaking documents, leaking classified information. It’s different to be the leaker and the acceptor of those leaks, isn’t it?
GG: Sure. I think you’re making an argument from a very legalist perspective, and it’s one that I wholeheartedly agree with. It would be an incredibly violent breech of the First Amendement guarantee of freedom of the press for Assange to be prosecuted for doing what media outlets do all the time, which is receive classified information from government sources, and then publish it in the public interest. As you pointed out, the New York Times published many of these same documents. They’ve not only done that, but they’ve published far more secrets than Julian Assange has ever dreamed of publishing, including top-secret information. The New York Times has published all kinds of top-secret designations, whereas Wikileaks never has. None of the documents leaked from the Iraq War and Afghanistan war logs or the diplomatic cables were top-secret. They were either classified or confidential, a much lower designation of secrecy.
From a strictly legal perspective you’re right. Nonetheless if you look at what the United States government has done over the past 10 years, the fact that something is legally dubious or difficult seems to be no bar from them doing it. This is the same government that’s assassinating its own citizens without due process of any kind, putting people in cages in Guantanamo without a whiff of due process. The prior administration got away with declaring torture as something other than torture. We see the constant manipulation of law for the benefit of the United States government. When you add on to that the very deferential posture of the federal courts when it comes to claims about national security — where all kinds of Muslims have been prosecuted for what looks to all kinds of scholars to be nothing other than First Amendment activity, like advocating for groups and putting YouTube clips on the Internet — I think it’s a lot easier to say in some abstract legal sense that it would be a difficult prosecution, but that’s far from the same thing as saying that it won’t happen and that it won’t be successful.
The other thing I would add is that the Justice Department doesn’t convene grand juries for fun. They do it only when they’re serious about prosecuting. They didn’t convene a grand jury during the Wall Street financial crisis because they weren’t serious about prosecuting. They didn’t convene one to investigate Bush’s torture crimes or eavesdropping crimes because they weren’t serious about prosecuting. They’ve convened a grand jury, they’ve had testimony, they’ve filed motions, and have been very active in this process leading to the very rational conclusion that they are serious. Whether they will go through with it or not nobody knows. It would be incredibly foolish for someone in Julian Assange’s position to blithely assume that it won’t happen, or that if it did happen it would succeed given the success of the United States in its court system over the last decade.
[…]
One argument I hear over and over again by Assange critics is “If the U.S. planned to request his extradition, why wouldn’t they just make that request to the UK? What would be the advantage of waiting until he is in Sweden?” Greenwald gives a couple reasons, but I believe this one in particular, to be very significant:
GG: […] The other aspect is that everything that would be done in Britain would be very transparent and public. We saw this with the Swedish extradition over the last year and a half. It’s all done in open court and all the proceedings are public. Sweden has a very unusual judicial system in that it has all kinds of levels of secrecy to their proceedings, especially in the pretrial stage that most Western nations would not even recognize as a justice system, let alone accept. There’s all kinds of condemnations of it, even from the US State Department. I don’t mean to suggest that they’re some tyrannical regime, but it is the case that this secrecy in their judicial system has always led Assange to fear that whatever the United States and Sweden did it would be away from the scrutiny of the public. It would be much easier than in Britain.
Finally, although the British government is very accommodating when it comes to the United States they have a very independent judiciary that has repeatedly ruled against the government and expressed disapproval of the United States in the war on terror. A lot of this would go through that court system. Sweden has a history of having the government just bypass its legislature, bypass the judiciary in order to comply with the requests of the United States — including in instances where the UN found that it’s lawless. He perceives that the transparency of the more established judiciary, and public opinion, would be much bigger hurdles to overcome if he were in Britain than if he were in Sweden where it could just be out of the public eye.
I highly recommend listening to/reading the entire debate. The radio podcast can be found HERE at the 39 minute, and the rest of the partial transcript can be found HERE.
New IAEA Report To Be Harsh On Iran, But WikiLeaks Doc Exposes IAEA Dir. General Subservience To U.S. On Iran Nuclear Program
On March 5, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will release a follow-up report on Iran’s nuclear program, and it is expected to be even harsher than its November 2011 report — which ultimately led to the current international sanctions and oil embargo against Iran. The upcoming follow-up report from the IAEA will apparently include […]
VP and Assist. General Counsel Of NY Times: How Can Corporations Blacklist WikiLeaks, But Not The NY Times?
At the ‘Media Law in the Digital Age‘ conference at Kennesaw State University last weekend, the Vice President and General Counsel of the New York Times, David McGraw, addressed the disturbing trend in which private for-profit corporations have been doing governments’ bidding by shutting down publishers like WikiLeaks: Lucy Dalglish, Exec. Dir. RCFP: Even organizations like […]
Julian Assange: Western Newspapers Hesitant To Publish Israel-Related Leaks
In a new, largely unreported Al Jazeera interview (with Julian Assange’s responses overdubbed in Arabic), the WikiLeaks founder reveals that he intends to release 3,700 documents pertaining to Israel. 2,700 of these documents, he said, originate from within Israel, and include “Sensitive and classified documents” on the 2006 military excursion into Lebanon (which resulted in […]
WATCH: Cenk Uygur Interviews WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange On Dylan Ratigan Show
The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur conducted a terrific interview today with Julian Assange on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show. They covered a wide range of topics including: Assange’s role as a publisher/member of the press, 1st Amendment Rights, the main stream media’s gradual shift from demonizing WikiLeaks to now somewhat defending the whistleblower group; and […]
Time Magazine’s 2010 Person Of Year: People Vote Julian Assange, Establishment Crowns Mark Zuckerberg
Here’s how Time Magazine’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel, in his letter, leads up to his justification for the 2010 Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Award: There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another. Our sense of identity is […]
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