For many years, Assange has been speaking very uncomfortable truths - truths that some didn't want to hear. It is surely time to listen to him now. He may be imprisoned, but his words are not.
What follows are the words of Julian Assange, captured in video, audio and text and shared on the internet. Captured, but - unlike the man himself [at the time this was written] - not imprisoned. His words are still free to travel the world and be shared by all.
While far from an exhaustive library of links, these entries cover the main events in the public life of Julian Assange, providing an extensive insight into the evolution of his thoughts and activities. Due to space constraints, only a few key releases from WikiLeaks itself are highlighted here. These include the 2010 releases that put WikiLeaks on the map, the 2016 DNC & Clinton releases that incurred the wrath of the US “left”, and the 2017 Vault 7 releases that ensured the undying hatred of the “intelligence” community. The rest are all listed on WikiLeaks.
On images used
The images included here also provide a visual history of Julian Assange as he negotiates a very difficult Via Appia (PART 10 has more to say on that topic).
Some images permit the related video to be watched from within this document. In other cases I have included a screengrab instead. In those cases, the image caption includes a link to the video, from which you can watch it on its original platform.
In order to provide a ‘one stop’, searchable file, this compendium is very large, so please be patient if some images (especially interactive videos) are a little slow in loading. This compendium is best viewed on a desktop with plenty of memory.
On dates and places
Many video records do not carry the place or date of the event covered and now, in many cases, YouTube (and some other platforms) even hide the specific date of publication (which may be months or years later). Sometimes videos have been copied without stating the original date or source.
Our shared history, where it remains, is becoming an amorphous junk heap on a muddled timeline - something Julian Assange would abhor. Perhaps some of this is deliberate. Where it is not, I beg of those who make videos - please do better with your labelling and video header data.
I have done my best to locate correct dates. If readers have a correction to suggest (or an addition), please put it (with a link to source) in the comments.
On censored sources
YouTube (and other social media) have drastically stepped up their levels of censorship recently. This has meant that many of the entries in my extensive archives cannot now be seen - YouTube annotates such videos, in many cases, with “This video is not available in your country” when what they really mean is that YouTube has ensured thatthe video can’t be viewed in ANY country.
Some other sites (particularly legacy press sites) have “memory-holed” various videos and articles, or made them otherwise inaccessible (sometimes just through careless changes to website structure, but also via paywalls). Despite this, I have left in links to some of these sources in the hope that these suppressions will not remain a permanent state of affairs. Where possible, I also provide an alternate link.
♦ INDEX
Listed below are videos and articles containing the direct speech of Julian Assange.
1997 TEXT “Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier” by Suelette Dreyfus[Underground]
In the acknowledgments: ”I also want to thank Julian Assange for his tireless research efforts. His superb technical expertise and first-rate research is evidence by the immense number of details which are included in this book.”
Later editions of this book list Julian Assange as a co-author. [Amazon]
♦ 1999
1999 EVENT Assange registered the domain ‘leaks.org’
1999 Nov 15 TEXT Suelette Dreyfus “Network: This is just between us (and the spies)” [The Independent]
The article begins:
“THE US National Security Agency has designed and patented a new technology that could aid it in spying on international telephone calls. The NSA patent, granted on 10 August, is for a system of automatic topic spotting and labelling of data. The patent officially confirms for the first time that the NSA has been working on ways of automatically analysing human speech.
The NSA's invention is intended automatically to sift through human speech transcripts in any language. The patent document specifically mentions "machine-transcribed speech" as a potential source.”
Assange, who already wrote a book with Suelette Dreyfus, is quoted as saying: “This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.”
He refers to this article nearly two decades later, in 2015, soon after the Snowden revelations, when addressing the Commonwealth Lawyers Association on surveillance issues.
♦ 2006
2006 Dec TEXT “Conspiracy as Governance” [Archived]
Sometimes referred to as “The WikiLeaks Manifesto”
♦ 2007
2006 -2007 TEXT “IQ.ORG Selected Correspondence” [Archived]
2007 Oct 7 TEXT “On the Take and Loving It - Academic recipients of the U.S. intelligence budget." [WikiLeaks]
“Over the last decade, U.S intelligence funding of academic researchhas taken on cavalier, even brazen qualities. This article reveals over 3,000 National Security Agency and over 100 Defense Intelligence Agency funded papers and draws attention to recent unreported revelations of CIA funding for torture research. […]
♦ 2008
2008 Apr 29 TEXT “The Hidden Curse of Thomas Paine by Julian Assange” [Guernica]
“In 1789 Thomas Paine, American pamphleteer, philosopher and revolutionary, compared the sun to the truth: “[S]uch is the irresistible nature of truth,” Paine declared, “that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.”
Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man was wrong. Paine gave away his copyright to Common Sense—allowing printers to pocket the author’s fee. Printers, happy with this state of affairs, preferenced its production over other popular, but less profitable works. Thomas Paine had discovered the essential economic underpinning of the modern press release. Paine’s truth appeared not only because of its coherence but because Paine subsidized its production above competing ideas.
The modern press release may have been seen as a blessing by the fourth estate, for it made certain ideas more profitable without making other types less. Yet once electronic cut-and-paste came into play, the press release and similar content subsidies proliferated. When the system of ideas regained its economic equilibrium, unsubsidized words became unprofitable and were eliminated. The consequence has been a great shift from words pulled out of writers by reader demand, to words pushed out of writers by special-interest subsidies. […]
This article goes on to discuss some of the early work of WikiLeaks - and why you have never heard of it (at that point in time).
2008 Dec 27VIDEO (58:29)25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin [YouTube] [Archive]
Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Schmitt) report on the year’s activities, in “WikiLeaks v The World: Free information, censorship, the media and you.“ In their summary (on the video header) they note:
“Especially we have found the 4th estate as 'the' supposedly independent control over the state, inherently important to any society and its development, is clinically dead, bankrupt and headed in a dangerous direction. While the number of reportage is increasing with bloggers and other new media, the number of genuine reportage, let alone investigative journalism, is rapidly decreasing.
This today goes [hand] in hand with censorship even in the free world and its media becoming daily routine and increasingly easy.
Wikileaks has developed mechanisms that can actively help to address this problem and as has been proven from experience, lead to change and reform. We have found these mechanisms and others in their effectiveness only depend on the awareness and involvement of the public, on our all 'making use of them'.”
There is a focus on censorship from about 35:00.
♦ 2009
2009 (no further date info) VIDEO (3:59)Interview of Julian Assange “The Pentagon wanted to close us'' by Luca Galassi of PeaceReporter (location not stated) [YouTube]
Discusses risks to whistleblowers and journalists.
2009 Aug 13-16VIDEOS (Panel (x9) and workshop (x1) at HAR (Hacking At Random) Tech Conference in the Netherlands. Panel [YouTube PLAYLIST] Workshop [YouTube]
Julian Assange appears on the panel videos in Parts 3 (Intro) 4 (censorship) 5, 6 (economic censorship) & more. [YouTube PLAYLIST] (In part 9 the topic of using child porn as an excuse for censorship is addressed.)
On the workshop video, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Schmitt) speak about tyranny and opposing it, the history of WikiLeaks and civil disobedience, including in Iceland.[YouTube]
2009 Sept 7 VIDEO (33:13) Ars Electronica in Austria [AEC] Julian Assange was a winner of an award of distinction in the category ‘'Digital Communities’.
2009 Nov 17 VIDEOS (x6) New Media Days Conference “The Subtle Roar of Online Whistle-Blowing”
See The Revelations of WikiLeaks (from Consortium News) “No. 1—The Video that Put Assange in US Crosshairs” by Elizabeth Vos
“Manning described the events that led up to her decision to submit the footage to the press in leaked audio of her testimony during her 2013 court-martial.
She said Reuters’ inability to get the footage via a freedom-of-information request contributed to her decision to leak it. “The most alarming aspect of the video for me, was the seemingly delight of bloodlust they [the pilots] appeared to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging with, and seemed to not value human life in referring to them as ‘dead bastards,’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.”
“WikiLeaks: Assange Recalls Past Efforts to Block Site” [Daily Motion]
2010 April 26 VIDEO (17:51) & TEXT Julian’s speech to the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway [YouTube] [Transcript]
This covers extensively the problem of digital records, including whole archives disappearing from the internet, and what this means for our shared knowledge and understanding of history. Julian speculates about the future of censorship. He also talks about the related perversion of meaning.
See also this clip from the end of the Oslo speech: [YouTube clip]
“So, in this broader framework of what we do, it is to try and build a historical record, an intellectual record, of how civilisation actually works in practice, now, from the inside, everywhere, in every country around the World. Because all our decisions, individual decisions, our political decisions, are based upon what we know. Humanity is nothing but what we know and what we have. And what we have can be replaced, and degrades quickly. And what we know is everything, and it is our limit of what we can be.
So before we embark on any particular political stratagem, we first have to know where we are because, if we do not know where we are, it is impossible for us to know where we are going. Likewise, it is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they are going on. So I ask you to think about the words of Machiavelli; think about them in their negative, when he said,
“Thus it happens in matters of state, for knowing a far-off, which is only given a prudent man to do, the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured, but when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow until everyone can recognise them, there is no longer any remedy to be found.”
So secret planning is secret, usually, for a reason: because, if it is abusive, it is opposed. So it is our task to find secret abusive plans and expose them where they can be opposed before they are implemented. Because if they are exposed by the implementation, by people suffering from that abuse, then the abuse has already occurred and it is too late.
2010 April 26 VIDEO (1:04:07) Interview with JA at the Oslo Freedom Forum by Hans Lysglimt [YouTube] (Lots of background noise)
MAY
2010 May 16VIDEO (17:51) SBS's Dateline “The Whistleblower” [YouTubePart 1] [YouTubePart 2]
Mark Davis, who made this, travelled with Julian Assange, so the documentary includes a lot of direct speech. It includes Julian’s visit to Oslo, together with Julian childhood, early hacking, NASA, and Iceland banking, among other things.
2010 May 31 TEXT Raffi Khatchadourian “No Secrets” [The New Yorker] Includes extensive quotes collected in person by the writer. Discusses the creation and public presentation of the Collateral Murder video.
The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.”
After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.
JUNE
2010 June 21 VIDEO (3:28:03) ALEV Panel discussion in Brussels “(Self) Censorship: New Challenges for Freedom of Expression in Europe” [YouTube]
This is a seminar on the legal and political questions surrounding freedom of expression. Defamation law, source protection, safety, libel shopping and the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative are discussed. At the timestamped start of the video Julian talks about the redaction of history, and gag orders supporting censorship. The modern ‘Ministry of Truth’. See also Julian Assange on UK Libel laws at 1:56:55.
2010 VIDEO (24:29) Journeyman Pictures “Is Wikileaks a Force For Good or a Force For Chaos?” [YouTube]
Contains clips from Julian Assange, and focuses on his youthful hacking at one point, as well as on Iceland. Also looks at the background to Collateral Murder, on which Daniel Ellsberg comments. The Adrian Lamo video is included. Reporting by Andrew Fowler and produced by ABC Australia. It seems to have been made in 2010 before the Cablegate files were released, although this YT version was uploaded July 2016.
2010 July VIDEO (19:33) TED: “Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks” [YouTube]
9 July 2010 EVENT: “A real free press for the first time in history’: WikiLeaks editor speaks out in London” [Editors blog: Journalism.co.uk]
Event held at the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School at City University London. Focus is on scientific journalism, and on a new “privatised censorship”. Report contains some direct quotes.
19 July 2010 EVENT: Matthew Bell “Wanted by the CIA: Julian Assange - Wikileaks founder” [Belfast Telegraph]
While this reads like an interview, it is actually another report on the 9 July 2010 event held at the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School at City University London.
Given the less-than-truthful implication that “quotes” are responses to interview questions, and the sparcity of the author’s resume, one might question the accuracy of some of the “quotes” in this article - all the more so given that none of them are mentioned in the first report of this event (above), and that there seems to be no audio or video record of the event.
See The Revelations of WikiLeaks (from Consortium News) 2019 May 9 “No. 2 —The Leak That ‘Exposed the True Afghan War’” by Elizabeth Vos
2010 July 25VIDEO (4:38) The Guardian “Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: 'They show the true nature of this war’ ” [YouTube] [Guardian]
“If journalism is good it is controversial by its nature. It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses, and when powerful abuses are taken on there is always a back reaction. So we see that controversy and we believe that it’s a good thing to engage in. In this case it will show the true nature of this war, and then the public from Afghanistan, and other nations, can see what's really going on - and take steps to address the problems.
The significance of this material is both the overarching context - that is, it covers the entire war since 2004, and individual events, which are also significant or a threat of events. So those include something like Task Force 373, a US-based assassination squad that goes around Afghanistan killing people on a “kill or capture” list. It includes significant events where many people were killed - for instance we are looking at an event that killed 181 people at once by an AC130 gunship.
It includes detail about how the war is supported in various ways, so how the political class in Kabul interfaces with US military and intelligence, how the corruption is spread through their community, but also how the war is mediated by Pakistan and possibly by Iran. The nearest analog is the Pentagon Papers which was released in the early 70s. That exposed how the United States was prosecuting the war in Vietnam. […]
2010 July 26 (YT video undated) VIDEO (5:07) The Guardian clip of the press conference at The Frontline Club “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - 'There appears to be evidence of war crimes’ ” [YouTube]
Julian Assange: “The real story of this material, the real story of this material, is that it's war. It's one damn thing after another. It is the continuous small events: the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces, the maimed people ….”
See also full conference 26 July 2010 from The Frontline Club [YouTube Part 1] and special event re the launch 27 July 2010 [YouTube Part 2] These may have actually been the same day, as Julian Assange has very similar clothes on.
2010 Aug 1 VIDEOS (x3) SBS (AU) “Inside Wikileaks” documentary Reporter Mark Davis. One month after Bradley (Chelsea) Manning was arrested. (Republished 22 May 2012 by Journeyman Pictures [YouTube] )
This video covers “the bunker” in the Guardian (London) where journalists from three other press organisations are working on the leaked material.
It focuses on the publication of the Afghan War Logs, and material from this piece was used by Mark Davis in 2020 when he rebutted the prevailing smear (from the Guardian and NYT) that accused Assange of not redacting or otherwise carefully managing the safety issues inherent in this data. For that rebuttal, see [Twitter Moment]
2010 Aug 22 VIDEO (7:45) Al Jazeera: Wikileaks founder slams sexual abuse charges[YouTube]
EXCERPT JA: It is clearly a smear campaign, and we can see in the material that the allegation was withdrawn six hours later. The only question is - who was involved?
Q: And who do you think is involved?
JA: Well, we can have some suspicions about who who would benefit, but without direct evidence, I’m not going to make a direct allegation. But other people are making those allegations.
Q: All right. Well the Swedish authorities, Mr Assange, have withdrawn the rape charges … the arrest warrant for rape anyway, but you are still under investigation for claims of sexual molestation. What’s your reaction to this?
JA: We have no … I have no details on what that is about. I cannot imagine any event where that would be credible.
Q: Have the Swedish authorities been in contact with you?
JA: No they have not.
2010 Aug VIDEO (21:49) “Inside WikiLeaks” Hobo Media [YouTube] Republished as “What motivated Julian Assange” by Journeyman Pictures Timestamps 00:00 Intro (Includes Afghan War Logs) 03:50 The Bunker 13:08 Ninja Life 14:44 Assange’s Press Conference 21:49 ENDS See also clip from 10:03 [Tweet]
Assange: “What our experience is, is that we get attacked when people don't like the message. We get attacked, not in proportion to what ever we're doing wrong or doing right, but in proportion to the impact that our material is having. They will attack the messenger and try and discolor the message - by proxy. Interviewer: You're the messenger. Assange: Yeah, and we're the messenger. Interviewer: Well you're the messenger, quite specifically. Assange: Yeah, well that's true. My function in WikiLeaks is to take all the heat.”
[YouTubePart 2] John Sloboda (Iraq Body Count) More than 100,000 people have been killed, 80% civilians Phil Shiner (Public Interest Lawyers. London Pending legal action related to unlawful killings, unjustified force, etc. Relevance of the European Convention. (Girl in yellow dress.) Torture or abuse by Iraqi guard or other forces. UK & US complicit. Killings and torture of Iraqis in UK custody.
[YouTube Part 3] Gavin McFayden (Chair), Daniel Ellsberg compares his experience to the WikiLeaks disclosures. The role of Chelsea Manning. The origins of the war were lies, and this was an illegal war of aggression. Craig Murray, presents the Sam Adams Award to Julian Assange. Phil Shiner is asked about the girl (10:15).
[YouTubePart 4] Continued Q & A. Julian Assange on US non-action. Phil Shiner on the importance of a UK Judicial Review. The importance of an official, detailed interrogation guide. The complicity of the UK press.
[YouTubePart 5] Continued Q & A. Julian Assange on portrayal of the War Logs by the press. Process of redaction with this release. Human Rights groups have been very helpful. ”I must say in that process the Human Rights groups were very helpful and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism was also helpful. But none of the mainstream presspartners, in fact, provided ANY assistance whatsoever to the demands to get 400,000 very serious documents into the public record, and into history where they can have ongoing effect. The Pentagon also refused [to assist with harm minimisation].” On lessons from Iraq. “Iraq was a bloodbath on every corner.” Why are two months missing? (Unknown) There are no top secret records and many others are not included too. So this is only a partial picture. Phil Shiner on press coverage or rape and torture in war. British Colonial savagery. Press are silent “because we just don’t want to face ourselves”. Racism.
[YouTubePart 6] Daniel Ellsberg. “Wikileaks becomes even more indispensable.” Encourages more leaking. Short film explaining the analysis of some of the documents.
2010 Oct 23 VIDEO (3:47) “WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs: Torture, civilian death toll revealed in latest leak” [YouTube, now censored by YT] [DailyMotion] Topics: Contaminated weapons. Cancer rates. The "white phosphorus children"
Images of babies with birth defects and cancer in Fallujah, Iraq after alleged use of white phosphorus munitions by the US (& other pollutants). SOURCE RT video.
2010 Oct 23 The Guardian “Iraq war logs Frago 242 -- a licence to torture” [YouTube] [Guardian] This is part of the release. Julian does not appear in it.
2010 Oct 24 VIDEO (8:17) “Julian Assange to RT: WikiLeaks gives 'most accurate picture of war'” [YouTube, now censored by YT] [DailyMotion]
Screengrab from “Julian Assange to RT: WikiLeaks gives 'most accurate picture of war'” SOURCE: RT interview (preserved by DailyMotion)
2010 Oct 26 VIDEOS (x2) Aljazeera: “The Secret Iraq Files”
[YouTubePart 1] Interview with Assange (see above 22 Oct)
[YouTubePart 2] Findings: The state and role of Al Qaeda: “Al Qaeda is a parasite that feeds on social instability and political turmoil” US attitude to Iraqi PM. Danger to is life.
2010 Oct 26 VIDEO Democracy Now: “WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on Iraq War Logs, “Tabloid Journalism” and Why WikiLeaks Is “Under Siege”
2010 (Exact date unknown) VIDEO clip in John Pilger's "The War You don't See" comments on The Military Intelligence Industrial Complex [YouTube at 1h15m08s]
JP: Independent and stateless, it represents a landmark in journalism. Wikileaks has released hundreds of thousands of secret pentagon documents that describe the wholesale killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the information that you have revealed on WikiLeaks about these so-called endless wars, what has come out of them?
JA: Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military or intelligence apparatus insider documents, what I see is a vast sprawling estate - what we would traditionally call the military intelligence complex or military-industrial complex - and that this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled.
This is not a sophisticated conspiracy, controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players, all working together and against each other to produce an end result which is Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia, and to keeping that going.
You know we often deal with tax havens and people hiding assets and transferring money through offshore tax havens. So I see some really quite remarkable similarities. Guantanamo is used for laundering people to an offshore haven which doesn't follow the rule of law. Similarly Iraq and Afghanistan and Colombia are used to wash money out of the US tax base and to back arms companies.
JP: What you're saying is that money and money making is at the center of modern war and it's almost self-perpetuating?
JA: Yes. And and it's becoming worse. […]
NB The film goes on to show the secret US document recording the US intention to destroy Assange and WikiLeaks. [YouTube from 1:19:09, masked by YT]
2010 (Exact date unknown) VIDEO (1:08:28) “John Pilger in conversation with Julian Assange” [Vimeo] A later copy is at [YouTube]
This is the full interview, from which the clip was taken for John Pilger’s documentary "The War You don't See" (see above) was taken.
See The Revelations of WikiLeaks (from Consortium News) “No. 6 — US Diplomatic Cables Spark ‘Arab Spring,’ Expose Spying at UN & Elsewhere” by Elizabeth Vos
2010 Nov 29 TEXT Forbes “An Interview With WikiLeaks' Julian Assange” by Andy Greenberg [Forbes]
DECEMBER
2010 Dec 3 [TEXT] “Julian Assange answers your questions” [The Guardian] [archived]
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, answers readers' questions about the release of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables:
EXCERPTS: Q: How do you think you have changed world affairs? And if you call all the attention you've been given-credit ... shouldn't the mole or source receive a word of praise from you?
A: Julian Assange: For the past four years one of our goals has been to lionise the source who take the real risks in nearly every journalistic disclosure and without whose efforts, journalists would be nothing. If indeed it is the case, as alleged by the Pentagon, that the young soldier - Bradley Manning - is behind some of our recent disclosures, then he is without doubt an unparalleled hero.
Q:The State Dept is mulling over the issue of whether you are a journalist or not. Are you a journalist? As far as delivering information that someone [anyone] does not want seen is concerned, does it matter if you are a 'journalist' or not?
A: Julian Assange: I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time. However, it is not necessary to debate whether I am a journalist, or how our people mysteriously are alleged to cease to be journalists when they start writing for our organisaiton [sic]. Although I still write, research and investigate my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists.
Q: Tom Flanagan, a [former] senior adviser to Canadian Prime Minister recently stated "I think Assange should be assassinated ... I think Obama should put out a contract ... I wouldn't feel unhappy if Assange does disappear." How do you feel about this?
A: Julian Assange: It is correct that Mr. Flanagan and the others seriously making these statements should be charged with incitement to commit murder.
2010 Dec 3 TEXT John Perry Barlow (co-founder of EFF [Tweet]
“The first serious info war is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.”
2010 Dec 7 TEXT Assange OpEd “Don't shoot messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths” in The Australian [archived]
“WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win."
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public. […]
KEY EVENT
♦ 2010 Dec 7 (9:30am) Julian Assange is arrested in the UK
2010 Dec 7 TEXT “The arrest of Julian Assange: as it happened”[The Guardian]
Excerpts: 10.41am: As of last night Assange had still not been told of the full allegations against him, his lawyer Jennifer Robinson explained in a video to be published on our site. [Video published but since removed.]
11.28am: WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said the arrest would not derail the release of the cables. "This will not change our operation," he told the Associated Press news agency.
11.54am:The New York Times reports on how the US have been going after Assange over the separate issue of the leaked cables.
Justice department prosecutors have been struggling to find a way to indict Assange since July, when WikiLeaks made public documents on the war in Afghanistan. But while it is clearly illegal for a government official with a security clearance to give a classified document to WikiLeaks, it is far from clear that it is illegal for the organisation to make it public.
The Justice department has considered trying to indict Assange under the Espionage Act, which has never been successfully used to prosecute a third-party recipient of a leak. Some lawmakers have suggested accusing WikiLeaks of receiving stolen government property, but experts said Monday that would also pose difficulties.
3.32pm: "This case is not about WikiLeaks," district judge Howard Riddle told the court, according to my colleague Sam Jones, who was there.
Riddle refused bail on the grounds there was a risk he would fail to surrender. He rejected the prosecution claim that bail should be rejected on the grounds of Assange's safety.
John Pilger, Ken Loach, and Jemima Khan were among six people in court willing to offer surety. They all offered at least £20,000. An anonymous individual offered surety of £60,000.
4.14pm: Charles Arthur, the Guardian's technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.
5.30pm: With perfect timing an email arrives from Philip Crowley at the state department:
The United States is pleased to announce that it will host Unesco's World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from 1-3 May in Washington, DC.
5.58pm: Meanwhile, the Pentagon has changed its tune on the impact of the US embassy cables. Last week the US defence secretary Robert Gates declared there would be no long-term impact from the WikiLeaks revelations. Today, though, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan says there are indications of foreign governments "pulling back" from dealings with the US since the cables began to be published.
7pm: The best joke of the week – so far – comes from Ben Yarrow's Twitter account (with a hat tip to @janinegibson): Freedom of Speech - priceless. For everything else, there's MasterCard. [NB: This was eventually turned into a video in June 2011]
7.51pm: Last question being taken at Obama's press conference – and not a single journalist raised WikiLeaks or the US embassy cables. But why ask about the biggest story of the year when you can instead talk inside baseball about Republicans versus Democrats?
2010 Dec 10 - VIDEOS (x4) Swedish TV (SVT) Documentary "WikiRebels" Rough cuts [YouTube playlist]
Julian Assange (from Part 1) “Every release we do of material has a second message, and that is - we set examples: if you engage in immoral and unjust behavior, it will be found out. It will be revealed. And you'll suffer the consequences.”
Julian Assange (from Part 3), commenting on motives of US gun ship shooters in Collateral Murder:
“Why do it? Well there's two reasons. 1) Because it's fun to kill people. If you've been in that environment, removed from all the effects of killing people for a long time, it's a video game and we get a high score. 2) The other is they brag after a kill streak about how many people they kill. Go back to base and go “Hey, killed 13 today!”
Julian Assange (from Part 4), re the Swedish preliminary handling of the sexual abuse allegations:
“Clearly it is a smear campaign of some kind. Well I came to Sweden as a refugee - a refugee publisher involved with an extraordinary publishing fight with the Pentagon, where our people were being detained and there was an attempt to prosecute me for espionage. So I'm unhappy and disappointed with how the Swedish justice system has been abused.” Commentary follows: Assange says he never forced anyone to have sex and that the judicial system has been misused. He implies that he's a victim of personal revenge and US pressure.
The ensuing tension in WikiLeaks between Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Schmitt) is explored. Schmitt and several others leave WikiLeaks (and eventually provided what he said were copies of internal documents to the media).
Screengrab from WikiRebels (2010) Part 1 [YouTube]
2010 Dec 11 VIDEO (6:13) TYT: “Anonymous Strikes Back for WikiLeaks! (Operation Payback)” [YouTube]
Describes the sex charges against a wide range of men who have made leaks or criticised their governments.
2010 Dec 11 (republished by WikiLeaks. Original date around the time of the Iraq War Logs - in October.) VIDEO (3:22) “Larry King and Julian Assange” (with Daniel Ellsberg) [YouTube]
Calling his latest document dump "the most extraordinary history of a war to have ever been released in our civilization," Assange dismissed the questions on his personal life as "tabloid journalism." "It should be obvious that these things are not in balance and not proportionate," he added during a separate, live interview with CNN veteran journalist Larry King. "It is not right to bring in sensational and, in fact, false claims [about a] relatively trivial matter, compared to the deaths of 109,000 people... CNN should be ashamed of doing that. And you, Larry, you actually should be ashamed, as well."
2010 Dec 16 VIDEO (2:45) “Assange wins bail battle” [YouTube]
2010 Dec 17 VIDEO (1:34) AP “WikiLeaks Founder Fears U.S. Indictment” [YouTube]
2010 Dec 22 VIDEO (15:11) “Exclusive Julian Assange Interview With Cenk Uygur” (12/22/10) [YouTube]
Lengthy discussion about whether Assange is a journalist, and the role of the press. “Digital McCarthyism”. Response to Joe Biden’s allegation that he is a “high tech terrorist” - “Whoever the terrorists are here, it is not us.”
2010 Dec 22 VIDEOS (x2) “Sir David Frost Interviews Julian Assange”
[YouTubePart 1] On the right to secrecy, Bradley Manning, possibility of Julian ending up in a US prison, original motto and aim of WikiLeaks: “Courage is contagious”, why WikiLeaks appears to have a focus on the US: “We can only publish what people give us.”
[YouTubePart 2] Managing institutions, who is running the campaign against WikiLeaks (financial embargo etc), the Swedish situation,
In Part 1: On possible harm from the leaks: “We don't need to go to hypotheticals. We have a four year publishing history. During that time we have published millions of documents. We can see what actually happens in practice in the 21st century with our organization, with me as editor-in-chief, And what we see is that there is not a single instance of anyone being physically harmed by what we've done.
There's not even a single incidence of a government alleging that we have. Not even the Pentagon allege that. In fact the Pentagon admits that it cannot find a single incidence of anyone being harmed.”
2011 Jan 15 VIDEO (21:35) Arjen van der Horst - foreign correspondent (Holland): “Unedited interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange” [YouTube]
“We are an activist organisation in only one particular sense, that is we believe in the rights of the people to know what is going on, and the rights of the press not to be suppressed, that priorrestraint should not be a factor in publishing. [NB See “The D-Notice: A Very British Way Of Censoring The Press” on that topic.]
And the historical record shouldbe sacrosanct. Once something is published, there shouldn't be a way for people to use pressure to take it out of the historical record - as we're seeing so much in the UK.”
The progress of the rollout of the Diplomatic Cables and the effect of Cablegate on diplomacy, are also discussed at length. Threats to Julian’s life. Other attacks on WikiLeaks. Legal attacks by banks.
2011 Jan 30 VIDEOS (27:31) 60 Minutes : “Julian Assange: The 2011 60 Minutes Interview” interviewed by Steve Kroft [YouTube] Some quotes & commentary [blog]
Originally published in two parts [YouTube (14:59) Part 1] [YouTube (13:15) Part 1] NB Australians have reported that YouTube restricts them from seeing this video. Abridged version published by Stella Assange in 2024 [YouTube]
2011 Feb 13 VIDEO (48:55) SBS (AU) “Extended Interview with Julian Assange” with Mark Davis [YouTube]
Mark Davis is one of the most credible journalists reporting on Assange. He spent very long periods of time with Julian, at quite critical times. NB Australians have reported that YouTube restricts them from seeing this video.
2011 Feb (Exact date not known) VIDEO (13:12) “In Conversation With Julian Assange (2011)” with Mark Davis [YouTube] Journeyman Pictures version
This is a documentary looking at Julian during the first extradition hearings. It uses clips from the full interview (above).
2011 March 1 TEXT “WikiLeaks statement [re Israel Shamir] that was given to, but not used by, the UK satirical current-affairs magazine, Private Eye” [TwitLonger]
2011 March 7 TEXT “Wikileaks Editorial - 100 Days of Cablegate” [WikiLeaks]
“This week marks the hundredth day since Wikileaks released the first batch of the Embassy Cables – the most significant revelation in geopolitical history. […]
These early releases have already helped to change the world and our perception of it: the Tunisian revolution has removed a dictator of 23 years, we now know Arab countries urged America to take military action against Iran, why China cracked down on Google, that the UK government offered to “protect US interests” during its Iraq war inquiry, that key figures in the Sweden worked with the US to hide extensive intelligence co-operations from the Swedish parliament, how the Yemeni government agreed to cover up US airstrikes on its soil, and that US diplomats were ordered to become spies and steal the DNA and other information from UN staff and NGO’s
But the work has only just begun. To date, just over 2% of the cables have been published, all redacted by media partners to minimise possible, though unlikely, harm to innocent individuals named within. Wikileaks intends to continue this process until all cables have entered into the public domain where they can inform all of us.
That is why phase two of the Embassy Cables project formally begins today. In the start of November, Wikileaks had five partners., we now have over 50 from every corner of the globe. Influential publications, activist groups and charities are being giving access to hundreds – or in some cases thousands – of cables relevant to their regions or causes.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, spokesman, officials and senators lined up to condemn Wikileaks’ efforts to let the world know the reality of US foreign policy, often ignoring Wikileaks’ protections of sources, and ‘forgetting’ Wikileaks is a journalistic organisation protected by the First Amendment. For its part, the State Department refused outright to detail any concerns they might have with the material.
Words weren’t enough for the US government: multinational corporations, including Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon, Swiss Post Finance, Money Bookers, and others have cut off Wikileaks after pressure by the State Department and hawkish senators—all entirely outside any judicial or even administrative process. Publicly declared task forces into WikiLeaks have been created at a range of US agencies, including the CIA, FBI, State Department, and even a 120 man unit at the Pentagon. Young volunteers who have merely supported our efforts or related causes are routinely detained and have their phones and computers seized at US borders. One alleged source, Bradley Manning, has now been kept in severe solitary confinement conditions for more than 280 days. US military law permits a maximum pre-trial detention of 120 days.
These attempts have not, and will not stop our continuing revelations to the public. In the wake of the attacks on us first hundreds, then thousands, of courageous individuals and companies from around the world chose to join us in our struggle against censorship. Every cable that Wikileaks publishes is now automatically reproduced on more than 1,800 websites. The truths contained within these cables cannot be suppressed. […]
2011 March 14 VIDEO (7:15) Australian PM “Julia Gillard on Q&A answering Julian Assange” [YouTube]
This one is well worth watching - especially since new light has since been cast on the PM’s responses.
2011 March 15 VIDEO (57:14) CAMBRIDGE UNION: “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking to The Cambridge Union”[YouTube]
“I understand that this union was founded in 1815 as a result of censorship here at Cambridge University. Students needed a place to speak about the matters of their concern in that time and so founded the Union as a place where Provosts were not permitted. And this badge up here [points] reminds people that when they leave this hall they are entering back into the big bad world of Cambridge …”
Assange goes on to speak about Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, also the Chair of the Cambridge Union Board of Trustees. who spoke in the same hall the previous month, including in his speech (on “how much secrecy does the state need?”) extensive comments about WikiLeaks. [Dearlove was in his role as head of MI6 during the invasion of Iraq. He was blamed by the Iraq Inquiry for providing unverified intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.]
Assange then focuses on “the privatisation of censorship”, citing the removal from YouTube of a video response to the Dearlove address made by a WikiLeaks supporter.
“[This is] where the field of public discourse occurs on private lands - when it occurs on the internet - and that archives that are historically important - important to all of us, and become our intellectual record - are no longer something that is safe, and no longer something that we can build our discourse on (and indeed build our civilization on) because they are being ripped out from under us at the very moment we are trying to cite them. George Orwell said that “he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.” [… He gives a Soviet example of censorship …]
“All over the world, information of historical importance and political importance - that which we build our civil and political life on - is disappearing because it is in centralised in archives owned by private companies.”
2011 March 22 TEXT Julian Assange “The behaviour of guilty men” [The Hindu]
Julian Assange speaks to NDTV Chairman Prannoy Roy on the impact of WikiLeaks worldwide, the consequences, the challenges the network faces, the significance of the India Cables, the partnership with The Hindu , freedom of speech versus privacy, and why governments should be more open. Naturally, this interview focuses a lot on cables related to India.
APRIL
2011 April 5 & 11 TEXT “WikiLeaks is the intelligence agency of the people” [New Statesman]
“In an exclusive essay for the New Statesman, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, argues that the whistleblowing website is a return to the days of the once-popular radical press. He also discusses why the New York Times dislikes the website and reveals the biggest threat to WikiLeaks today.
“WikiLeaks is part of an honourable tradition that expands the scope of freedom by trying to lay ‘all the mysteries and secrets of government’ before the public,” writes Assange, who compares WikiLeaks to the pamphleteers of the English civil war and the radical press of the early 20th century. “We are, in a sense, a pure expression of what the media should be: an intelligence agency of the people, casting pearls before swine.”
Assange argues that the New York Times‘s hostility to WikiLeaks stems from the newspaper’s illiberal tradition of failing to back organisations or figures that challenge established elites. He highlights the newspaper’s failure to support the American pacifist and anti-war campaigner Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for ten years for making an anti-war speech in 1918.
“The New York Times, true to form, had been calling for [Debs’s] imprisonment for more than two decades, saying in an editorial of 9 July 1894 that Debs was ‘a lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race. There has been quite enough talk about warrants against him and about arresting him,’ ” writes Assange. “Seen within this historical perspective, the New York Times‘s performance in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, and its hostile attitude to WikiLeaks today, are not surprising.” …”
NB The full article in The Statesman: Julian Assange “Of the people and for the people” (11 April 2011) is available only in print. See text images in this tweet.
2011 April 8 VIDEO (3:16) 5th Annual Logan Symposium, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism “WikiLeaks vs New York Times: US Press "In a Bubble"?[YouTube]
“WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and New York Times executive editor Bill Keller debate Assange's remark that the United States press cares little about events that happen outside its borders. "The U.S. press is interested in the United States, it is not interested in what happens outside the United States," says Assange. "It is a goldfish bowl of constant self-referral and self-reporting."
This session was also discussed in April 9 “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, NY Times Feud at Logan Symposium” [Media Shift]
2011 April 9 VIDEO (11:12) New Statesman/Frontline Club debate on the motion: "This house believes whistle-blowers make the world a safer place." [YouTube now private] Clip of Julian Assange speech [YouTube]
Assange discusses the leaked “Rules of Engagement” and the impact of the Diplomatic Cables leak on India.
Speakers for the proposition were Julian Assange; Mehdi Hasan, senior editor (politics) of the New Statesman; Clayton Swisher, head of al-Jazeera's transparency unit.
Speakers for the opposition were: David Richmond, former director for British defence and intelligence and member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Board; Bob Ayers, former director of the US department of defence information systems security programme; Douglas Murray, author and political commentator.
UPDATE 2011 April 11 VIDEO (10:29) ABC News (Australia) Interview on 7:30 [YouTube]
[1:24] Q: “The US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has basically said that the impact of WikiLeaks has been overstated: that it was a little awkward and embarrassing for the US, but that it basically hasn't had any effect on foreign policy. What's your response?”
JA: “Of course, the hype that the Pentagon has always drummed up, and the White House has always drummed up in response to bona fide scrutiny of its national security sector is to say “"Well, the end is nigh, people are going to die!”
No official from the US government or anywhere else has claimed that anyone has come to physical harm as a result of what we have done. Certainly, politicians have been embarrassed and lost elections, and officials have lost their jobs. But that is not the end of the world.”
[3:36] Q: “In a book about you that's recently been released by two Guardian journalists, David Lee and Luke Harding, they say they had an exchange with you last July. They wanted you to redact the names of informants mentioned in the Iraq War Logs, and they claim that you said “Well, they’re informants, so if they get killed they've got it coming to them. They deserve it.” Did you say that?”
JA: “No, and we are suing them for libel, and we have witnesses that show that that is a libelous claim. And it is an ongoing dispute. So there's a lot of vitriol in the top end of the news business, and a lot of backstabbing, and unfortunately we happen to be on the receiving end of it from this individual.
Q: “So you're saying that that statement was completely fabricated?”
JA: “It is completely fabricated.”
2011 April 16 VIDEOS (x6) The Hindu (N Ram) interviews Julian Assange
[YouTube Part 1] PM Manmohan Singh's reaction to the India Cables
[YouTubePart 2] The pro-U.S. tilt in India's Foreign Policy as exposed by WL
[YouTubePart 3] The nexus between U.S. International Policy and Big Business
[YouTubePart 4] The systemisation of unjust practices
UPDATE 2011 (exact date unknown) VIDEO (0:39) Assange on Modern Warfare [YouTube] This clip was loaded 5 April 2024 to YouTube by a channel called Free Assange. No context, source or date (apart from 2011) was provided. Visually, it would appear to be situated about here (April) in the timeline.
“While most people had their first glimpse of what modern warfare looks like this century with the release of the Collateral Murder video, and see that - while you could barely see a helicopter up in the sky - it could, as a result of modern technology, see you in a quite intimate manner and kill you.
As war becomes increasingly computerised, human decision making is increasingly removed from it, and so moral accountability is also removed.”
MAY
2011 May 2 VIDEO CLIP (2:54) RT “Facebook, Google, Yahoo spying tools for US intelligence” [YouTube now censored] [DailyMotion]
2011 May 2 VIDEOS (x2) RT interview by Laura Emmett
I’m personally very sad about the YT censoring of these videos as there are very good quotes in them. The interview closed with:
RT; And finally, Julian, who do you consider to be your No. 1 enemy?
JA: Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone – it’s not understanding what actually is going on in the world. It's only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organizations that try to keep things secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In this latter category, it is bad media. It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is… we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.
One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means that basically populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don't willingly, with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we also have a peaceful environment.”
2011 May 20 VIDEO (6:18) TripTV (Brasil) Interview with Julian Assange [YouTube]
In English with Portuguese subtitles. Some quotes:
Quotes from TripTv (Brasil) interview with Julian Assange at Ellingham Hall. London (April 2011)
2011 May 24 VIDEO (55:39) PBS (hostile) documentary “WikiSecrets” [YouTube] [PBS]
This (hostile) documentary, with reporter Martin Smith, focuses on Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and the way the ‘Collateral Murder‘ and the later leaks came about.
It interviews Adrian Lamo, who handed Manning in for the leak, but was published before Lamo’s death (14 March 2018) from undetermined causes. [Autopsy Report]
It also includes slanderous allegations by David Leigh of The Guardian, discussed by me elsewhere. [THREAD]
Comments by Nick Davies, also of The Guardian, about Julian Assange’s alleged unconcern about making redactions in the leaks have been roundly refuted by journalist Mark Davis, who was there at the time. [THREAD].
The broadcast leans heavily of the disaffected WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Schmitt) shortly after he left WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks were concerned that this might become a hostile product, so they recorded, and then published, much of the raw footage of the PBS April interview with Julian Assange used in its making. See [YouTube] and [Transcript]
2011 May 26 FILE Julian Assange Conference Call [Download Options]
Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg and others discuss Bradley Manning detainment, freedom of the press, and other issues during a conference call.
2011 May 31 VIDEOS (x2) Interview for For Belfast Telegraph
[YouTubePart 1] Impact of the Cables leak. US reaction. Irish publications.
[YouTubePart 2] Impediments to good journalism, Julian’s legal situation, Obama
2011 May & June TEXT - Hans Ulrich Obrist “In Conversation with Julian Assange”
I will discuss matters raised in these interviews in my next series.
[E-Flux Part 1] “I was interested in tracing his work back to its beginnings. I was not interested in his court case or private life, but in his public work as the voice of WikiLeaks, and the experiences and philosophical background that informs such a monumentally polemical project.”
[E-FluxPart 2] “Assange responds to questions posed to him by artists Goldin+Senneby, Paul Chan, Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk), Martha Rosler, Luis Camnitzer, Superflex, Philippe Parreno, and Ai Weiwei.”
JUNE
2011 June 21 VIDEO (1:00) Parody of the Mastercard advertisement. [YouTube] [Vimeo]
WikiLeaks parody of MasterCard ad... “Priceless” Ad for @wikileaks by Ralph Nadar which was challenged by Mastercard for alleged copyright violation. The court found it "sufficiently a parody for the purposes of a fair use analysis, and consequently, is transformative."
NB The idea for this ad came from a Tweet mentioned in the Guardian live updates on the day of Julian’s arrest (7 Dec 2011).
2011 June 23 VIDEO (3:12:23) ANON SCAN: “When Google Met Julian Assange” [YouTube] A transcript was release 19 April 2013 [Archive transcript]
Audio from the meeting which produced the book. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen (of Google) requested the meeting, to discuss ideas - they said - for their book (“The New Digitial Age”) published 23 April 2013.
JULY
2011 July 2 VIDEO (2:00:21) “Julian Assange in conversation with Slavoj Zizek moderated by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman” [YouTube] [archive.org]
AUGUST
2011 Aug 16 VIDEO Julian’s pre-recorded speech at the Voltaire Award. [YouTube] [Tweet]
“A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.
Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world.
For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do.
WikiLeaks has commenced pre-litigation action against the Guardian and an individual in Germany who was distributing the Guardian passwords for personal gain. […]
WikiLeaks advanced its regular publication schedule, to get as much of the material as possible into the hands of journalists and human rights lawyers who need it. WikiLeaks and its partners were scheduled to have published most of the Cablegate material by November 29, 2011 – one year since the first publication. Over the past week, we have published over 130,000 cables, mostly unclassified. The cables have lead to hundreds of important news stories around the world. All were unclassified with the exception of the Australian, Swedish collections, and a few others, which were scheduled by our partners.
WikiLeaks has also been in contact with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty at a senior level. We contacted the US embassy in London and then the State Department in Washington on 25 August to see if their informant notification program, instituted last year, was complete, and if not, to take such steps as would be helpful. Only after repeated attempts through high level channels and 36 hours after our first contact, did the State Department, although it had been made aware of the issue, respond. Cliff Johnson (a legal advisor at the Department of State) spoke to Julian Assange for 75 minutes, but the State Department decided not to meet in person to receive further information, which could not, at that stage, be safely transmitted over the telephone.”
OCTOBER
2011 October 8 VIDEOS (x3) at ‘Stop The War Rally’ in Trafalgar Square
[YouTube] “Julian Assange - OCT8 Antiwar Mass Assembly”
“Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press, what is the average death count attributed to each journalist?
When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries, then who are the war criminals?
It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists. Journalists are war criminals.
2011 October 15 VIDEOS (x2) Occupy (London)
[YouTube] “Julian Assange : WikiLeaks founder speaks at Occupy London”
[YouTube] “Speeches by Mr. Assange on 15th Oct. 2011 in London”
2011 October 15 TEXT Julian Assange OpEd “'Who wouldn't shout with the stakes so high?'” [SMH]
There is such irony in the SMH publishing this piece. It describes the double-crossing of Julian and WikiLeaks by The Guardian, and the scurrilous behavior of many people in the legacy media.
But this extract is from “Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography” - a work that Julian Assange disavowed and refused permission to publish. So it amounts to a second double-cross.
2011 Oct 28 TEXT Julian Assange and Jennifer Robinson “Play ball, not Bolt, in free speech debate” [SMH] [archived]
“It might seem unusual to take a stand for a bloke who has called you a ''patronising, supercilious racist git'' when that very same man has just been prosecuted for ''race hate speech'' - but the conviction of Andrew Bolt ought to raise alarm bells for all who believe in freedom of expression.
However much you disagree with Bolt, the ''hate speech'' law under which he was prosecuted is more offensive than he is. […]
Hate speech laws in Australia are a form of censorship, backed by sanction and justified by the perceived need to protect historically persecuted minorities and maintain racial harmony. Leaving aside the empirical question of whether they actually achieve those purposes (the experience in Victoria suggests otherwise), different approaches taken by different governments reveal the danger of putting the state in charge.
In the US, the First Amendment guarantees the right of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to march through the streets. The law sanctions speech only if it incites violence. Rather than flourishing, the Klan and neo-Nazis have been withered by the robust criticism that such protections afford their critics.
Commonwealth nations such as Australia, Britain and Canada take a very different approach. This month, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the most significant test of hate speech laws in decades. Bill Whatcott, an anti-gay activist, says he believes that homosexuals spread filth and disease because the Bible says homosexuals are full of ''sin and depravity''. Convicted under hate speech laws and fined $17,500, Whatcott has appealed.
Whatcott ought to win his appeal but many will disagree simply because they disagree with his views. […]
Free speech must protect all speech, however offensive. Debates that offend the ''ordinary'' or ''typical'' Australian are precisely the debates we need. It is precisely when the majority shares a view that it needs to be challenged, because if it is wrong, then we are all imperiled.”
2011 VIDEO (26:22) Documentary with Andrew Fowler “Wiki-Whacked” - “Blowing the Whistle on Julian Assange (2011)” [YouTube]
Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Schmitt) revealed as the person who had given the connection between the password (revealed by The Guardian journalists) and the file that it opened, to a German newspaper.
Screengrab from “Blowing The Whistle on Julian Assange“ (2011)
2011 Nov 11 VIDEO (0:58) “Julian Assange 'considering next step' after extradition ruling” [YouTube] [Daily Motion]
Statement after losing his appeal to the High Court.
“I have not been charged with any crime in any country. Despite this, the EuropeanArrest Warrant [EAW] is so restrictive that itprevents UK courts from considering the facts of a case - as judges have made clear here today …”
2011 Nov 28 VIDEO (6:29) “Comments on WikiLeaks Winning Major Australian Journalism Prize [The Walkley Award]” [YouTube] [Transcript] Includes clip from Assange acceptance speech:
“We journalists are at our best when we share with activists and lawyers the goal of exposing illegality and wrongdoing, when we help to hold others to account. This award is a sign of encouragement to our people and other people who labor under difficult conditions in this task.
Our lives have been threatened. Attempts have been made to censor us. Banks have attempted to shut off our financial lifeline. An unprecedented banking blockade has shown us that Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, the Bank of America and Western Union are mere instruments of Washington foreign policy. Censorship has, in this manner, been privatized.
Powerful enemies are testing the waters to see how much they can get away with, seeing how they can abuse the system that they are integrated with to prevent scrutiny. Well, the answer is, they can get away with too much. I expected the hate speech on Fox News, but not the calls by U.S. senators for the extrajudicial assassination of myself and my staff. Neither did I expect that the United States would aggressively undermine its own Constitution to persecute me and my organization. But I can understand the Washington elite’s reaction. Washington is waging a war against the truth. It was, after all, the truth about Washington and their friends that we revealed. […]”
The above video contains a short clip from Julian’s (prerecorded) acceptance speech. The audio for the full speech is also available, but with very poor visuals. [YouTube]
2011 Nov 30 TEXT WikiLeaks statement “Guardian's "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies" Documentary: Guardian hacks continue PR war against WikiLeaks” WikiLeaks]
“The Guardian has continued its war on WikiLeaks with three new attacks over 48 hours--five days before Julian Assange's final extradition appeal judgement in the High Court and a UK Parliamentary debate and vote on extradition abuses (both Monday, December 5).
While it is often counter-productive to divert resources to dealing with PR attacks head-on, we provide here a revealing window into the behind-the-scenes realities that WikiLeaks has to deal with every day as a result of its high profile. While many attacks come from "traditional" enemies -- the organizations WikiLeaks has exposed -- others come from opportunists trying to work an easy socio-political sector -- apparently saying what they believe these powerful enemies would like to be said, in the hope of preferment or relief in other areas. Others still, in fear of their reputations or the legal process, seek to whitewash past opportunism before natural moral or legal redress.
It should be noted that while WikiLeaks has many supporters among Guardian journalists, the editor (Alan Rusbridger)'s brother in law, David Leigh, cannot in practice be prevented from abusing the Guardian's resources and reputation.
-# On November 29 2011: 'The Guardian Documentary' WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies' which aired yesterday at 10pm GMT -# On November 29 2011: The Guardian´s Nick Davies makes libelous statements to the official inquiry investigating the Phone Hacking scandal-about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. -# On November 30 2011: junior Guardian employee and David Leigh assistant (James Ball) releases a hostile book about WikiLeaks […]
DECEMBER
RELEASE ♦ 2011 Dec 1 EVENT WikiLeaks issues Release #1 of the “Spy Files”
“On Thursday, December 1st, 2011 WikiLeaks began publishing The Spy Files, thousands of pages and other materials exposing the global mass surveillance industry.
2011 Dec 5 VIDEO (1;12) “Julian Assange: 'The long struggle for justice continues'” [DailyMotion]
“The WikiLeaks founder celebrates being granted the right to appeal to the Supreme Court against his extradition to Sweden on rape charges.” [ODN] NB There were never any “charges”, only allegations.
IMAGE: Julian Assange outside the UK High Court (5 Dec 2011) SOURCE: Screengrab from video.
♦ 2012
JANUARY
2012 Jan 18 TEXT Michael Hastings “Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview” [Rolling Stone]
EXCERPT How expensive has the legal battle been? We have many legal cases. This personal case, the Swedish extradition case, I have to pay for myself. I don’t think that is right. Actually, I think the organization should pay for it.
Why? 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. They spread rumors that I’m living in a mansion, they spread rumors that I’m homeless. Two years ago, fabricated documents were spread saying that I traveled first class and lived in a castle in South Africa, and I’ve never even been to South Africa. 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.”
NB The author of this piece, Michael Hastings, died in an (unexplained) car crash 18 June 2013 (see PART 3 of this series).
FEBRUARY
2012 Feb 3 TEXT “Julian Assange case: QCs square up over 'judicial authority” [The Guardian]
Dinah Rose QC argues, on appeal to the UK Supreme Court, against the extradition of Assange to Sweden, about the meaning of 'judicial authority” in UK extradition law. [Daily Mail YouTube]
NB The injustice of the Court’s decision on that point was so manifest that the UK Parliament later changed the law on this point - but did not make the change retrospective, so the change did not benefit Julian Assange.
MARCH
2012 March 1 “Premiere of Europe`s Last Dictator” [Vimeo]
Premiere night of Europe`s Last Dictator at The Old Vic Tunnels in London. Interviews with Dr. Irina Bogdanova, Julian Assange of Wikileaks and filmmaker Mathew Charles on this film about Belarus. Production by Mathew Charles and Juan-Luis Passarelli of Daffodil Media.
2012 ?? (Date unknown -Republished 3 Aug 2015) VIDEO (17:48) “ZDF - Exclusive Interview with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange” [DailyMotion] NB The background suggests this video was made while Julian was still in home detention outside London.
Julian discusses his youthful activities on the internet “An exploration of how great powers operate …” and the impact of the introduction of computer crime laws (some of which he explains as criminalising victimless crimes - making all that is not expressly permitted denied). The rights of institutions v rights of people. The contribution of WikiLeaks to change in the Middle East. The current state of Julian and WikiLeaks.
IMAGE: Screengrab from ZDF interview (published 3 Aug 2015) SOURCE: DailyMotion
2012 May 30 Decision handed down by the Supreme Court. [YouTube]
The appeal was rejected and the decision of the High Court to allow the extradition was upheld. Assange’s lawyers were given two weeks to make further points related to a key part of the decision which had not been litigated. Such submissions did not eventuate as Assange chose instead to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
JUNE
KEY EVENT
♦ 2012 June 19 - Julian Assange enters the Embassy
Julian Assange enters the London Embassy of Ecuador, seeking asylum. Ecuador agrees to seriously consider his application.
2012 June 19VIDEO (2:36) Assange enters the embassy [YouTube]
2012 June 22 AUDIO (1:33) “Julian Assange gives radio interview from Ecuadorian embassy” [YouTube]
AUGUST
KEY EVENT
♦ 2012 August 16 - Ecuador grants Julian Assange asylum
2012 Aug 16 TEXT “Ecuador grants Julian Assange asylum in dramatic standoff” [RT] Article include a VIDEO.
“Ecuador has granted political asylum to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The decision comes almost two months after the world-famous whistleblower came to the country’s embassy in London seeking protection.
“We have decided to grant political asylum to Mr. Assange,” said Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino. “We believe that his fears are legitimate and there are the threats that he could face political persecution.” The announcement was met with celebrations outside the Ecuadorian embassy as the WikiLeaks founder's supporters began chanting "Hands off Ecuador" and "Assange freedom fighter."
Patino admitted that Julian Assange’s rights are endangered, as he is at high risk of extradition from Sweden to the US. Moreover, Assange’s home country will not provide him with adequate legal protection, he said. “We think [Assange’s] extradition is viable to a country outside the EU,” Patino said at a press conference at the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry. “Judicial evidence clearly demonstrates that given an extradition to the US, Mr. Assange would not have a fair trial, he could be judged by special or military courts, and it is not unlikely to believe he would be treated in a cruel and degrading way, that he would receive a life sentence or death penalty, with which his human rights would not be respected.” “Ecuador has confirmed Assange does not have enough protection from Australia where he holds citizenship,” Patino said. Patino also reiterated Ecuador's offer to allow Sweden to interview Assange in their embassy in London, which was turned down. “We trust that that the UK will offer as soon as possible the guarantee for the safe passage of asylum for Mr Assange and they will respect those international agreements they have signed in the past,” he concluded.
Julian Assange has called Patino's statement a "significant victory", but said that his struggle continues as "the unprecedented US investigation against WikiLeaks must be stopped," reads a press-release at WikiLeaks website. His mother, Christine Assange, tells RT she has been hopeful all the time as Ecuador has a strong record of protecting political refugees.
The UK Foreign Office says it is “disappointed” with Ecuador's decision, but says it does not affect Britain's legal obligation to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to Sweden. "We remain committed to a negotiated solution that allows us to carry out our obligations under the Extradition Act," read the FCO's Twitter following Patino's statement. "Under our law, with Mr Assange having exhausted all options of appeal the UK authorities are under binding obligation to extradite him to Sweden. We shall carry out that obligation." Earlier in the day, the British government has stated is has absolutely no intention of letting Assange reach the South American country. The UK said that it will do everything in its power to block Assange’s passage to Ecuador. UK authorities sparked a scandal when they announced they were prepared to raid the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to apprehend Assange, effectively revoking the embassy’s diplomatic immunity.
In the first part of his speech, Ricardo Patino extensively reprimanded the approach saying that such an act would be interpreted as “hostile and intolerable,” and an attack on Ecuador’s sovereignty that would provoke a dramatic diplomatic response." "I will hit you hard, but if you behave I might not," the Ecuadorian foreign minister said reminding that UN and Vienna Conventions prohibit violating diplomatic space.
2012 August 19 VIDEO (44:46) “Julian Assange Speech at Ecuadorian Embassy” [YouTube] - See also context for speech [Daily Motion] [Full transcript]
“I am here today because I cannot be there [points to the crowd] with you today. But thank you for coming. Thank you for your resolve. Your generosity of spirit on Wednesday night, after a threat was sent to this embassy and police descended on this building, you came out in the middle of the night to watch over it. And you brought the world's eyes with you.
Inside this embassy, after dark, I could hear teams of police swarming up into the building through its internal fire escape, but I knew there would be witnesses. It is because of you that the UK did not throw away the Vienna conventions the other night. It is because the world was watching. And the world was watching because you were watching.
So the next time somebody tells you that it is pointless to defend those rights that we hold dear, remind them of your vigil in the dark before the Embassy of Ecuador. Remind them how, in the morning, the sun came up on a different world.
A courageous Latin American nation took a stand for justice, and so to those brave people: I thank President Correa for the courage he has shown in considering and in granting me political asylum, and I also thank the government and in particular foreign minister Ricardo Patiño - who upheld the Ecuadorian Constitution and its notion of universal citizenship in their consideration of my Asylum. And to the Ecuadorian people, for supporting and defending this constitution. […]”
IMAGE: Julian’s first speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy. SOURCE: Screengrab from [YouTube]
Julian went on speak about Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and other whistleblowers, and to demand their immediate release. He finished with a statement which would become a catch cry (for #Unity4J as well as others):
“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”
2012 August 29 VIDEO (2:08:08) Gama TV [ES] “Rafael Correa / Julian Assange: Breaking the silence (Exclusive interview)” [YouTube] This video is all in Spanish (including dubbed words for Julian) with no subtitles.
2012 Sept 26 TEXT Statement from WikiLeaks “Background for UN Talk - Ongoing Investigation into WikiLeaks” [WikiLeaks]
“Ahead of Julian Assange's address to the UN on Wednesday 26th September 2012 we are publishing some facts about the US investigation and Grand Jury into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. This includes facts on the investigation and legal cases into Assange and WikiLeaks and the persecution of the organisation, its founder and associates by US officials and government departments.
2012 Sept 26 VIDEO (18:36) “Julian Assange Address to UN General Assembly” [YouTube] [Transcript] [More info]
OCTOBER
2012 Oct 26 VIDEO (3:57) “Wikileaks' Julian Assange: U.S. records hide 'missing' prisoners” [YouTube]
“Policies of unaccountability… leads to policies of impunity.” Julian Assange talking about wikileaks publication of Guantanamo detainee manuals and the failure of the media in reporting on the matter. Also discusses living in the embassy, and the Swedish charges.
NOVEMBER
2012 Nov 29TEXT Julian Assange OpEd “Two Years of Cablegate as Bradley Manning Testifies for the First Time” [Huff Post]
DECEMBER
2012 Dec 16 TEXT “WikiLeaks declares war on banking blockade” [WikiLeaks]
This statement announces the launch of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an initiative of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
“Co-founder John Perry Barlow, former Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, the actor John Cusack and others, will crowd-source fundraising and support for organizations or individuals under attack for publishing the truth. It aims to promote "aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption and law-breaking in government".
2012 Dec 20 VIDEO (12:45) “Assange: Christmas Message, December 20th 2012” [YouTube]
This was Assange’s second “speech from the balcony”. [Transcript]
2012 (exact date unknown) VIDEO (1:32:38) Cameo in documentary “Shadows of Liberty: How media manipulation and censorship work" [YouTube] [ShadowsOfLiberty]
2012 VIDEOS (x12) “The Julian Assange Show” [YouTube playlist]
Many of the people interviewed are (or have been) imprisoned and even tortured, as they fight for freedom in their countries. They all give very moving interviews.
Among many important issues, the three freedoms - of expression, movement, and of economic interaction - are central to all these interviews.
The original YT channel (from RT) has now been censored by them. These links are to an ALT playlist:
Julian was also interviewed (16 April 2012) about the creation of this series by RT [Daily Motion]
2012 BOOK “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet” [WikiLeaks shop] By Julian Assange With Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann
Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the widespread use of strong cryptography (writing in code) as a route to progressive change. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of and visionary behind WikiLeaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since its inception in the 1980s.
“The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.
While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.”
2012 In DOCUMENTARY FILM “Free Speech Fear Free” [Website] [Vimeo]
Although this film was released in 2016, the interview with Julian Assange appears to have been filmed in 2012 (footage was collected over 5 years).
The Executive Producer of this documentary film was Susan Benn who, by 2024, was also the sole surviving Trustee of the Courage Foundation. That foundation was started in 2014 by Julian Assange and others partly in response to the plight of Edward Snowden.
CLIP 1 (from 8:23) “Our ability to communicate is important because from it derives everything that we think about as civilised in a civilisation …”
CLIP 2 (from 16:53) "If the law is put in charge of the right to communicate, then the law is put in charge of the law. Which is inherently corrupt"
CLIP 3 (from 49:02) "Technology makes it cheaper to communicate to more people in more places ... However technology is also unfavourable to freedom of expression. It permits mass spying ..."
♦ 2013
JANUARY
2013 January 16-17 “Delivery for Mr. Assange - !Mediengruppe Bitnik” [YouTube]
Julian communicates via cards at the end of this excercise in reverse surveillance.
See also a description of the whole 2 day excercise (in French) at “Une caméra, acheminée via un colis postal en 2013, a permis à Julian #Assange de s'exprimer brièvement par des écrits face à l'objectif depuis l'ambassade d'Équateur”[substack]
2013 January 25 VIDEO (21:09) “Julian Assange | Sam Adams Awards | Oxford Union” [YouTube]
The version shown below is the “official version” released after the awards by the Oxford Union. The original version had a different background, and can still be seen on the WikiLeaks video channel. [YouTube]. They state there:
“In an attempt to highlight the importance of whistleblowers, Julian Assange chose to have WikiLeaks' Collateral Murder footage as background for his speech at the Sam Adams Awards, an award dedicated to whistleblowers. The ceremony was organized by the Oxford Union. As a result of the video playing in the background and unsuccessful attempts to vet Julian's speech, the Union pulled the live stream from the event and spent two days substituting the US Army massacre footage with their logo. The Union claimed they feared that the US government would take legal action concerning "copyright" of the Apache gun camera footage. Wikileaks advised the Union that by law and practice the US government does not claim copyrights on footage or documents that it produces, the Union still decided to censor the video.”
In this very powerful speech, Julian outlines the deeper “cultural war” taking place using, as an example, the messages promoting a US war with Iran inserted into the film about WikiLeaks (The Fifth Estate) currently being filmed by Hollywood. He speaks passionately about the “war for control of the internet”.
FEBRUARY
2013 Feb 3 TEXT “Yoko Ono Award: Acceptance speech for the Yoko Ono Courage Award” [TwitLonger]
Rules of Engagement; Doing right; The plot to kill Press TV (Iran); Propaganda via Hollywood (film about WikiLeaks) ; analysts must be responsible to the public;
2013 Feb 8VIDEO (12:11) “Julian Assange on Bill Maher” [YouTube blocked re copyright] Original memory-holed. ALT copy [Rumble]
Discusses Swedish case (briefly), Obama’s kill lists, WikiLeaks’ criteria for publishing, and the US process of building a case against WikiLeaks, including the banking blockade.
2013 Feb 17 TEXT John Keane “Lunch and dinner with Julian Assange, in prison” [The Conversation]
Contains various quotes: eg
“Truth is I love a good fight. Many people are counting on me to be strong. I want my freedom, of course, but confinement gives me time to think. I’m focussed and purposeful.” […] “Never, ever become someone’s victim is a golden rule”
Re Julian’s ten days in solitary confinement, in the basement of Wandsworth Prison, in south-west London, in late 2010: “I had expected to be completely out of my depth. But I felt no fear. I was tremendously enthusiastic about the challenge to come. I learned to adapt on my feet.”
In a discussion on the nature of courage: “I quote Aristotle at him: courage is the primary virtue because it makes all other virtues possible. “Yes, and that’s what’s worrying about present-day trends. We’re losing our civic courage.” So where does courage come from, I ask? What are its taproots? Some people evidently draw breath from spiritual or religious sources, I say. He frowns. “My case is quite different. It’s hardship that makes or breaks us. True courage is when you manage to hold things together, even though most people expect you to fall to pieces.” […] He goes on to explain that although courage may or may not be a quality within human genes, a good measure of it is always learned. Courage is cultivated. It’s infectious. “Women on average have more of it than men,” he says. We discuss examples: on our list are Raging Grannies, Pussy Riot and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. “They’re consequently much more adaptable than men. The world of men is structured force.”"
This conversation is an interesting precursor to the establishment of The Courage Foundation (17 June 2014) which had Julian Assange as one of its initial trustees.
The rest of the article focuses on Assange’s proposed WikiLeaks Party in Australia, and his run for Senate in the 2013 elections
2013 Feb 24 VIDEO (20:49) “Wikileaks Cables Revealed Mexico's 'Suppressed History': Assange” [YouTube] [Article]
The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange , said this Sunday that the various cables he leaked about Mexico contributed to revealing "part of the suppressed history", in addition to thanking La Jornada for its " incredible support " for their dissemination. after reaching an agreement .
In the presentation of the book Mexico in WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks in La Jornada , within the International Book Fair, in the Mining Palace, Assange linked from England to comment on the work.
"La Jornada has been one of the two best organizations with which we have published the cables," said Assange, noting that more than 110 media outlets around the world have taken them up again.
2013 April 9 VIDEO (10:01) “Julian Assange & Wikileaks - 2013 Global Exchange People's Choice Award” [YouTube account terminated]
Julian's acceptance speech read by Daniel Ellsberg. See also a TEXT version [Global Exchange]
2013 April 10 TEXT “Talking With Julian Assange” Medea Benjamin [Counterpunch]
This focuses on the trial of Chelsea Manning.
2013 April 19 TEXT “Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt” [WikiLeaks] [Archive]
The audio of this 23 June 2011 meeting was released earlier. [YouTube]
MAY
2013 May 10 (released 5 Sept) AUDIO (54:18) “Julian Assange Speaks with Dr. Cornel West May 10, 2013 Ecuadorian Embassy, London” [YouTube]
“We have to understand what is the lifeblood of democracy, and the lifeblood of democracy is information. In fact, it's the one area where duly elected government (and you can argue about whether the US government is duly elected) is not, and should not, be able to make decisions about what information people have.
That was recognized early on by framers of the US Constitution (Madison and so on) by mandating - not that the press or the rights of the people should be protected by law, but something much more significant: that no law is to be made in relation to the right of the people to communicate. And that is because every law, every regulation, every Constitution, comes about as the result of people communicating. They’re distillations of people communicating. They are a secondary phenomena to people communicating.
So if you ask yourself what regulates the law? What regulates mandate? What regulates constitutional change? It is regulated by the people communicating. Other matters - legislation and so on - are derivative of peoplecommunicating. And the only way to hold government to account and modify its behavior, and produce an educated body politic, that is able to control its controllers, is through the free and robust communication.
Government must not be in charge of regulating what the people know about government - that would be a self regulation.”
[…]
[As a child] “I was of the last generation before internet, and I was educated by libraries. Many, many libraries. I came to understand that what makes us civil and what makes us just, is education. Fundamentally, it is education. And you see that in their workers movement in London in the early 20th century, the primary struggle is always for education.
It is for people to see themselves with a sense of perspective, and the flight for knowledge is the fight for education. One cannot be free, one cannot be at liberty. until you understand your environment, you understand the other actors in your environment, you understand where society is heading …”
2013 May 23 TEXT “"We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks" - The annotated transcript” [WikiLeaks]
WikiLeaks objected strongly to the making of this film (which came to be called “The Fifth Estate”) - at least in the way it was being made. This transcript notes many of the objectional aspects of the script.
There is also an explanatory note which emphasises that “Neither Julian Assange nor anyone associated with WikiLeaks agreed to participate in this film. Any footage of Assange or WikiLeaks’ staff was taken from stock footage.”
Julian Assange also had some correspondence with Bernard Cumberbatch (who played Julian in the film) asking him not to participate in it. This is discussed in an interview at 13 Oct 2013 (below).
2013 May 29 VIDEO (38:53) “Wikileaks' Julian Assange on Democracy Now! Full” [YouTube]
[Transcript 1] Stratfor Hacker Jeremy Hammond Guilty Plea Part of Crackdown on Journalism, Activism
[Transcript 2] U.S. Probe of WikiLeaks & “Show Trial” of Bradley Manning Aims to Scare Whistleblowers
[Transcript 3] Meeting with Google, Responds to Anti-WikiLeaks Attacks from New Film to Finances
JUNE
KEY EVENT
2013 June 3 TEXT “Wikileaks: Assange Statement on the First Day of Manning Trial | Monday 3rd June 2013” [WikiLeaks]
EXCERPT “It has been three years. Bradley Manning, then 22 years old, was arrested in Baghdad on May 26, 2010. He was shipped to Kuwait, placed into a cage, and kept in the sweltering heat of Camp Arifjan.
"For me, I stopped keeping track," he told the court last November. "I didn't know whether night was day or day was night. And my world became very, very small. It became these cages... I remember thinking I'm going to die."
After protests from his lawyers, Bradley Manning was then transferred to a brig at a US Marine Corps Base in Quantico, VA, where - infamously - he was subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment at the hands of his captors - a formal finding by the UN. Isolated in a tiny cell for twenty-three out of twenty-four hours a day, he was deprived of his glasses, sleep, blankets and clothes, and prevented from exercising. All of this - it has been determined by a military judge - "punished" him before he had even stood trial.
"Brad's treatment at Quantico will forever be etched, I believe, in our nation's history, as a disgraceful moment in time" said his lawyer, David Coombs. "Not only was it stupid and counterproductive, it was criminal."
The United States was, in theory, a nation of laws. But it is no longer a nation of laws for Bradley Manning. […]
We no longer need to comprehend the "Kafkaesque" through the lens of fiction or allegory. It has left the pages and lives among us, stalking our best and brightest. It is fair to call what is happening to Bradley Manning a "show trial". Those invested in what is called the "US military justice system" feel obliged to defend what is going on, but the rest of us are free to describe this travesty for what it is. No serious commentator has any confidence in a benign outcome. The pretrial hearings have comprehensively eliminated any meaningful uncertainty, inflicting pre-emptive bans on every defense argument that had any chance of success. […]
“This is not justice; never could this be justice. The verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience.”
2013 June 7 (republished) VIDEO (1:33) AP English “Assange comments on US data mining, Manning trial” [DailyMotion]
2013 June 10 VIDEO (10:29) “Julian Assange Lateline Interview 06/10/2013” [YouTube]
Discusses Bradley Manning, Australia, PM Julia Gillard, Sweden, Edward Snowden (prior to escape from Hong Kong), Jemima Khan’s verbal attack. Includes powerful comment on the extent of Australian consular assistance (or the lack thereof).
2013 June 13 VIDEO (1:22:05) “ISEA2013, Sydney - Julian Assange Keynote Address” [Vimeo]
Julian Assange presented a Special Keynote speech at the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2013), presented by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) at the University of Sydney on Thursday 13 June 2013.
Among other things, Julian discusses the creation and meaning of the WikiLeaks logo / symbol. Art as “Finding the essence of things.”
He says that, in relation to WikiLeaks, the essence might be “The more economic [and political] power that is put into suppressing something, the greater the signal that it gives off that, perhaps - if it is released - it will change the world.”
Assange also talks about Edward Snowden, still in Hong Kong, and the “pipelines” of information flow disclosed by his revelations. Obama’s actions (“corruption”) in this sphere. He reads from his 2012 book “Cypherpunks.”
2013 June 18 VIDEO (3:21) “365 days on ice: Assange still holed up in Ecuador's London Embassy” [Daily Motion] See also [RT article]
This video also records the visit of Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño to the Embassy. From the article: “Mr Snowden is as good an example of a hero as any. He has performed an extremely courageous act," Assange said lauding him for exposing America's "creeping mass surveillance state".
"What we don't want to see is him ending up the same way as Bradley Manning -- detained without trial, abused in prison and now facing life imprisonment."
While Assange is seeking to flee the UK, he believes “The British Government should be offering Mr Snowden asylum, not excluding him from their borders.”
“I am sure if you asked the people of the UK what they wanted, they would be in favor of protecting Mr Snowden. The UK doesn’t want to say no to the US under any circumstances – not in my case, and not in the case of Mr Snowden,” he continued.
If Snowden ever made his way to the single story mansion black just around the corner from Harrods department store, he might find more than one supporter.
“If he [Snowden] wants to ask asylum from the Ecuadoran government, he can do it,” Patino said from London on Monday, “and we, of course, would analyze it.”
[See also Democracy Now (12 June 2013) “Is Edward Snowden a Hero? A Debate With Journalist Chris Hedges & Law Scholar Geoffrey Stone” [YouTube]
IMAGE: Screengrab from RT interview “364 Days On Ice” (18 June 2013) SOURCE: DailyMotion
2013 June 22 VIDEO (4:32) “Ciaron O'Reilly reads out Julian Assange speech Ecuadorian Embassy 22.06.2012” [YouTube] [Transcript]
Anniversary speech made by proxy (Ciaron O'Reilly) due to security concerns (Originally scheduled date 16 June 2013 - The anniversary of Julian’s asylum.)
2013 June 30 VIDEO (15:10) ABC “Julian Assange Interview 2013 On Edward Snowden on 'This Week': "Asylum is a Right We All Have" [YouTube]
Snowden is still in parts unknown at this point (with a “cancelled passport” [ie he was in Russia], and relevant publications have not yet occurred. Discussion of the rise of the national security state. This interview has a long preamble. Also includes a clips from John Kerry and Jesselyn Radack.
JULY
2013 July 3 TEXT Christophe Deloire & Julian Assange OpEd “America's whistleblower persecution sullies the US constitution” [The Guardian]
EXERPT “Beyond the necessity of providing a legal shield for whistleblowers, the protection of privacy is a matter of clear public interest, especially in the realm of freedom of information. Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, noted in a report last June that "arbitrary and unlawful infringements of the right to privacy … threaten the protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression".
The confidentiality of written and oral exchanges is essential to ensuring the exercise of freedom of information. But when journalists' sources are compromised, as happened in the case of the Associated Press; when the United States abuses the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that has been invoked a total of nine times against whistleblowers, six of these cases under the Obama administration; when the government tries to silence WikiLeaks by imposing a financial embargo on the organization and by subjecting associates and friends of Julian Assange to abusive searches when they enter the United States, when the site's founder and his colleagues are threatened with US prosecution, more than American democracy is threatened.
Indeed, the very model of democracy that the heirs of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are responsible for upholding has been robbed of its essence.
By what right is the United States exempt from principles that it demands be applied elsewhere?
2013 July 8 TEXT Julian Assange OpEd “How cryptography is a key weapon in the fight against empire states” [The Guardian]
“Cryptography can protect not just the civil liberties and rights of individuals, but the sovereignty and independence of whole countries, solidarity between groups with common cause, and the project of global emancipation. It can be used to fight not just the tyranny of the state over the individual but the tyranny of the empire over smaller states.”
2013 July 20 TEXT An Interview “'Worst thing anyone's said? That I was so mean to their cat it turned psychotic': Inside the head of... Julian Assange” [Daily Mail]
EXCERPT What is your best character trait? “My stubbornness. WikiLeaks wouldn't exist without it. Broadly it also means I keep promises and hold fast to my principles.”
What is your worst character trait? ‘'My stubbornness. Almost every bother imaginable in my life has been a result of my refusal to compromise.”
What do you think about the U.S. secret surveillance programme Prism and the CIA man who revealed it, Edward Snowden?
It’s clear proof of the transition of the Western world to a surveillance dystopia. Prism is beyond the worst nightmares of Orwell and the greatest fantasies of the Stasi. Obama has taken on what Bush began and decided to ‘do it properly’. Snowden is a hero who stands accused of everything from spying for the Chinese to being rude to his neighbours.
2013 July 26 VIDEO (9:39) “Julian Assange speaks at Splendour In The Grass” [Vimeo]
In an address to Australia, Julian speaks (unflatteringly) about the media. Related policies of the WikiLeaks Party are discussed.
2013 July 29 VIDEO (6:26) CNN “Julian Assange: Manning is a hero” [YouTube]
Speaking on the eve of a verdict in the Bradley Manning case. Also addresses Edward Snowden (and includes a clip from Diane Feinstein accusing Snowden of given info to China and Russia). Julian’s lawyer Barry Pollock speaks in this interview. Julian discusses the seriousness of the “aiding the enemy” charge.
2003 July 31 VIDEO (8:38 &18:55) Democracy Now “"Bradley Manning Has Become a Martyr" - WikiLeaks' Julian Assange on Guilty Verdict” [Transcript]
[YouTube Part 1/2] Prelude looks at the Manning verdicts. Then Julian joins in. “We said at the beginning of this process that this was a ‘'Show Trial’.”
[YouTube Part 2/2] More on Manning case. Then on Snowden situation (still in Moscow airport). “These young men have risked their lives for all of us. That makes them heroes.” Also discussion of Assange’s situation.
AUGUST
2013 Aug 1 VIDEO (13:22) Vice “Julian Assange Talks Chelsea Manning and the Media in Rare Interview” [YouTube]
This interview has a focus on Australian issues.
2013 Aug 5 VIDEO (11:41) WSJ “Jullian [sic] Assange Interview | Julian Assange Confident of Australian Senate Seat” [YouTube]
2013 Aug 6 VIDEO (15:56) “Wikileaks founder Julian Assange talks about escaping embassy | 60 Minutes Australia” [YouTube]
2013 Aug 25 VIDEO (6:52) “RAP NEWS | A Game of Polls - feat. Julian Assange” [YouTube] Julian appears at 3:34. See also song clip only [YouTube] And no, that isn’t really Julian singing. But it sure sounds like him.
SEPTEMBER
2013 Sept 5 VIDEOS (x4) “Julian Assange talks to Ron Paul”
[YouTube Part 1] The Wikileaks Party (AU elections)
[YouTube Part 2] What motivates JA? Safeguards in publications
[YouTube Part 3] Most surprising things in the library
[YouTube Part 4] The challenge of leadership at a distance
2013 Sept 6 TEXT: Sandi Keane “Julian Assange on Wikileaks and the election” [IndependentAustralia]
“The following is the full exclusive interview, where he discusses how he might get back to Australia and the prospects of the WikiLeaks Party.
IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, Julian Assange said that if Victorians vote him into the Senate this Saturday, thanks to proposed changes in the U.K.’s extradition laws, we may actually see the fighter for justice, transparency and independent media take his place on the red leather benches come July 2014.
This new disclosure from the man holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy stems from the planned scrapping of the U.K.’s extradition treaty in relation to the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). The modifications, due to come into effect in between January and June 2014, will prevent the use of extradition for purposes other than prosecution. Remember, Julian Assange has not been formally charged with any offence. The EAW was simply for questioning.
Under the proposed new rules, according to Assange, Swedish prosecutors would have to interview him on UK soil, not in Sweden. There being no case to answer, as he insists, he would be free to leave the U.K.
“If I’m lucky enough to be elected, I’m not due to take my seat until July 2014. The Constitution gives me at least two months’ grace after that. So the timing may all come together,” he said.
2013 Sept 16 VIDEO (1:38:22) “Ideas at the House: Panel - The War on Whistleblowers and Their Publishers” [YouTube now censored] [archived video] Location: Sydney Opera House, Australia
Assange discusses Whistleblowing, Chelsea Manning, Whole system problems
Panel: Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, David Coombs (Chelsea Manning’s lawyer), Alexa O'Brien, Robert Manne, Bernard Keane (MC)
See also TEXT “Greenwald, Assange speak on fight for free information” [GreenLeft]
OCTOBER
2013 Oct 11 VIDEO (33:30) TEXT RT “Assange: ‘Snowden safe but journalists dealing with him at risk’” [YouTube now censored] [RT Transcript] NB: A Facebook copy of the video is available via the RT article.
EXCERPT Q: “How have you viewed the revelations by Snowden and the impact they have had on Latin America and the reaction from these Latin American governments?
A: “Ninety-eight percent of Latin American telecommunications to the rest of the world - that means SMS, phone, email etc. - passes through the US. That’s a function of the geography of the Americas, and as a result the US has what its intelligence agencies call a ‘home field advantage’, where they can easily intercept these communications that pass through them, index them, store aspects of them forever, and therefore gain understanding of how Latin America is behaving, where it is moving, its economic transfers, the activities of its leaders and major players.
That permits the US to predict in some ways the behavior of Latin American leaders and interests, and it also permits them to blackmail. Nearly every significant person in Latin America is blackmailable by the US, because the US has access to those telecommunications records that have passed through the US, as well as other records it has obtained within LA by planting fiber optic taps, surveillance equipment at embassies and DA bases. Even one of those revealed in Ecuador as a result of Snowden`s leaks.
So you have a situation where the US has mapped out the entire community structure, the relations between every individual who has any chance of having any influence in Latin America. And is able to shift and play off different parties against one another. If you say that it is true then why did Maduro win the Venezuelan presidential election? Why did president Correa win with a significant majority in the Ecuadorean elections, given the US attitude towards these two states?
Well it`s not a function of the US not having enough intelligence data about Latin America, it’s a function of the US taking its eye for a 10 year period off Latin America, and putting its eye on the Middle East and to a degree on to Asia as well. And during that period a number of Latin American states have developed an increased independence from the US and its activities and now unfortunately the US is turning its interests back to Latin America. But unlike 10 years ago, it has a worldwide mass surveillance apparatus to detect nearly every single person. […]”
2013 Oct 13 VIDEO (10:26) “Julian Assange 'This Week' Interview: WikiLeaks Founder Discusses 'The Fifth Estate,' Edward Snowden” [YouTube]
Note that this film was most definitely not approved by WikiLeaks - see the detailed comments they mad about a range of elements in the script (particularly the “Iran connection” within which the film is cast - see May 2013). [WikiLeaks]
Julian then goes on to discuss Edward Snowden, and the state of the world:
“What type of place is Western democracy going to be? Is it going to be a place with a collapsing rule of law, with mass surveillance of entire populations - all the practical elements of a totalitarian regime? We don't yet have a totalitarian regime, but we are getting pretty close in the practical elements. Is that going to cross over into something else?
That would be a hard place for an investigative organisation like WikiLeaks to work in. It is a hard place for Glenn Greenwald - he's now in effective exile in Brazil. Laura Poitras is in effective exile in Germany. Sarah Harrison, a UK citizen, is in effective exile in Russia, Edward Snowden in asylum in Russia. Me in asylum here. The West is becoming a place where the best and the brightest who hold the government to account are ending up in asylum or in exile in other countries. We've seen that before, with dictatorships in Latin America, with the Soviet Union, and it's time it stopped.”
Multi_Viral is the fifth studio album from Puerto Rican band Calle 13, released on March 1, 2014. It marks the band's debut release via their new independent label, El Abismo, since they parted ways with Sony Music Latin. The album won Best Urban Music Album at the 15th Annual Latin Grammy Awards and Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album at 57th Annual Grammy Awards.
An interchange with the singer from Puerto Rico. Among other things, they discuss how to survive as a well known musician when the MSM won’t support your work. They also discuss the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership). This conversation is conducted partly in Spanish.
2013 Dec 29 VIDEO (31:37) “Sysadmins of the world, unite! a call to resistance” [media ccc.de]
Session with Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange and Sarah Harrison (who is introduced as “the woman who saved Edward Snowden’s life” and who receives a deafening and sustained applause). Harrison reports on WikiLeaks’ activities for the year. Julian appears at 6:43 (but disappears quite quickly - well it’s skype!) He return - briefly - at 15:07 and then 16:45 (but what was said in the meantime was also interesting).
“High Tech workers are the class that are in the position to pull the levers of society. Without them, things like NSA would cease operating tomorrow. […] These workers have power that is an order of magnitude greater than the industrial workers of the past ...”
“Go into the ballpark and get it out …” “This is the last free generation …” “We are all becoming part of the state, whether we like it or not. So our only hope is to determine what sort of state it is that we are going to become part of ... taking concrete and robust action …”
One of interesting features of this video is the warm and irreverent banter that occurs between the three WikiLeaks people.
2013 (exact date unknown) VIDEO (0.49) “Para el pueblo lo que es del pueblo - Piero ~ Julian Assange ~ Bianca Jagger - Londres 2013” [YouTube]
Julian dancing and singing !!!!! If I am not mistaken, John Pilger and Ricardo Patiño are also part of the dancing line-up.
♦ 2014
JANUARY
2004 Jan 2 AUDIO (4:34) BBC4 “Thought for the day by Julian Assange” [BBC4 at 2:57:31] [YouTube] Quotes:
FEBRUARY
2014 Feb 10 VIDEO (14:33) “Julian Assange: Counter-terrorism strategies targeting Muslims will affect the wider population” [YouTube]
2014 Feb 18 AUDIO (32:32) “Julian Assange on Being Placed on NSA “Manhunting” List & Secret Targeting of WikiLeaks Supporters” [DemocracyNow] Includes transcript
MARCH
2014 March 8 VIDEO (1:01:57) “Julian Assange - SXSW - March 8 2014” [YouTube]
JUNE
2014 June 9: TEXT - “REDDIT: I am Julian Assange, founder, philosopher, original coder, organizer, publisher and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Ask Me Anything” [Reddit]
EXCERPT QUESTIONS Hi Julian, I have 2 questions.
First, what do you do to stop yourself going mental with boredom? From my understanding, you cannot leave the embassy or you'll be arrested, so you've basically placed yourself under house arrest. What are you day to day activities?
Second, (and I don't mean this to sound inflammatory), why did you start a website to leak classified information? Surely you can understand that many things kept confidential are for the reasons of national security, and releasing secret documents puts lives and international relations at risk? ANSWERS
I only wish there was a risk of boredom in my present situation. Besides being the centre of a pitched, prolonged diplomatic standoff, along with a police encirclement of the building I am in and the attendant surveillance and government investigations against myself and my staff, I am in one of the most populous cities in Europe, and everyone knows my exact location. People visit me nearly every day. I also continue to direct a small multinational organisation, WikiLeaks, which is a serious logistical and occupational endeavour. I barely have time to sleep, let alone become bored.
Confidential government documents we have published disclose evidence of war crimes, criminal back-room dealings and sundry abuses. That alone legitimates our publications, and that principally motivates our work. Secrecy was never intended to enable criminality in the highest offices of state. Secrecy is, yes, sometimes necessary, but healthy democracies understand that secrecy is the exception, not the rule. "National security" pretexts for secrecy are routinely used by powerful officials, but seldom justified. If we accept these terms of propaganda, strong national security journalism becomes impossible. Our publications have never jeopardized the "national security" of any nation. When secrecy is a cover-all for endemic official criminality, I suggest to you, it bespeaks a strange set of priorities to ask journalists to justify their own existence.
2014 June 18 VIDEO (28:38) “Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) l'entretien exclusif - Le Grand Journal” [YouTube] English with French subtitles.
2014 Aug 18 VIDEO (26:30) “RT: LIVE Press Conference” [YouTube now censored] See also TEXT “Assange plans to leave embassy 'soon', no details given” [RT] [Guardian]
2014 Sept 15 VIDEO (2:06:07) “The Moment of Truth” [YouTube]
Ed Snowden & Julian Assange speak (via satellite) to a very full house in the Auckland Town Hall prior to NZ election. Key topics: Global surveillance, NSA spying from NZ & of NZers. NZ’s role in the Five Eyes (US, UK, CAN, AU & NZ) group.
Julian Assange speaks about New Zealander Nicky Hagar’s role as a pioneer in unmasking the covert activities of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies. He also mentions Kim Dotcom (on the NZ panel) with whom he shares a prosecutor (in Virginia). Glenn Greenwald is also present in NZ on the panel.
Kim Dotcom’s lawyer in NZ’s “political trial” against Dotcom, discusses the TPP (which WikiLeaks leaked). “One of the chips John [Key] has begun to give [away in negotiations]is your [NZ’s] rule of law.” One of the things “your Law Society … complains of is the ways in which the govt is using emergency-type or speedy powers to pass legislation.” His comments on “armed attacks on citizens” (in the context of the US extradition request for Kim Dotcom) is well worth listening to - as a forerunner to the later capture of Julian Assange (and actions against anti-mandate protesters).
In fact the whole panel seems to be quite prescient. Well worth watching in full.
2014 Sept 22 VIDEO (32:15) Afshin Rattansi interview “RT: Julian Assange: 'Orwellian horror' of Google Glass, & in bed with state dept” [YouTube censored] [BitChute] [Rumble]
Julian Assange with Afshin Rattansi (Sept 2014) SOURCE: BitChute
2014 Sept 24: BOOK "When Google Met WikiLeaks" by Julian Assange [OR Books]
[Vimeo] Book launch at at Babycastles Gallery in NYC
[YouTube] Book launch “M.I.A and Julian Assange vs. Google”
“When Google Met WikiLeaks presents the story of the encounter between Julian Assange and Google's Eric Schmidt. Both fascinating and alarming, it contains an edited transcript of their conversation and extensive, new material, written by Assange specifically for this book, providing the best available summary of his vision for the future of the Internet.”
2014 Sept 28 VIDEO (7:57) “Julian Assange: Bitcoin is Much More Than Just a Currency” [YouTube] See also TEXT “Julian Assange Speaks in Nantucket — as a Hologram” [Time]
2014 Sept 29 VIDEO (36:18) Telesur “Ep 10. Interview with Julian Assange | Imaginary Lines” [YouTube]
“In an exclusive interview with Imaginary Lines host Chris Spannos, from his temporary residence inside the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, Wikileaks founder and chief whistleblower Julian Assange discusses the United States, NATO, Internet, and Google. Assange has just written a fascinating new book "When Google Met Wikileaks", which discusses the two radically different and counterposed conceptions for the Internet and indeed the world.”
2014 Sept 29 AUDIO (35:06) “Julian Assange on Q” [YouTube]
“In a Canadian broadcast exclusive, controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange joins Jian Ghomeshi on the phone from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been living for nearly two years. Despite his physical confines, the publisher continues to joust with his ideological opponents on the world stage. His latest book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, is a scathing take on what he alleges are the internet giant's geopolitical ambitions and what he sees as a business model built of "free service traps". Assange also reflects on his polarizing public image, accusations that he's a terrorist, the sexual assault allegations against him and how his ongoing confinement has affected him personally.”
OCTOBER
2014 Oct 30: TEXT “'When Google Met Wikileaks' (Excerpt)” [TruthDig]
DECEMBER
2014 Dec 4: TEXT - NYT “Opinion: Who Should Own the Internet? Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society” [NYT]
2014 Dec 6 VIDEO (1:07:34) “Julian Assange Logan Symposium” [YouTube] & [YouTube (1:26:37) repeats a part of the session at the end] See also live commentary [The Guardian]
The intersection between the carceral state and surveillance state.
[1:02:41] “Someone who perceives that they have engaged in a act of moral criminality towards you then is very highly motivated to do everything possible to destroy you, before natural justice can be engaged. So if someone … Basically you can sum it up - murderers will murder to cover up murder, and having murdered once will murder again, and having murdered twice will murder three times, and so on. There's greater and greater motivation to do the wrong thing…
In this particular case I and WikiLeaks were the moral witnesses to the immoral and illegal - in terms of contract law - what the Guardian did, and those key figures in the Guardian. So in order to prevent a lawsuit, in order to prevent a reputational assault, the Guardian did everything possible to have me imprisoned and extradited, and to undermine the value, the credibility, of my testimony on what the Guardian had done.
Now there's many fine people in the Guardian, many fine journalists journalists that have not succumbed, or didn't succumb at the time, to those institutional pressures. But nonetheless, there were key figures like David Leigh, the brother-in-law of the editor, who was obsessed in pushing this line. He's fortunately gone now. I worked with Alan Rusbridger on something else. But you know it's one of these things where a leadership position might change a bit, but you still have these this horrible middle layer of spucks (??) in an institution, that is sucking up to what they perceive the leadership's desires to be. So we still get these occasional nasty, ridiculous quite frankly, stories coming out of the Guardian in order to preserve what they think is their reputation in this interorganisational reputational conflict.
2014 Dec 24: TEXT - Newsweek "Why I founded WikiLeaks" [NewsWeek]
This is an excerpt from the book "When Google Met WikiLeaks"
♦ 2015
MARCH
2015 March 2 VIDEO (4:30) “Assange - en bref” [YouTube]
This is a shortened version of a longer Swiss RTS interview (dubbed in French) available at at [YouTube]
2015 March 12 VIDEO (33:54) “Talk with Assange - AMBULANT Documentary Tour” [Vimeo] (With Spanish subtitles)
Focuses on Mexican issues and questions, & IC (& Google / FB) surveillance issues. Q & A at the end does not include the questions.
“Mexico does have a special ability to affect the US. If you look at the number of Spanish speakers now in the US … As the largest Spanish language speaker, Mexico has a type of leadership with Spanish language Americans that I think is really very important …”
“We have lost the fight against censorship as an aberration - that is absolutely clear to me. Censorship is now the norm, not the exception.” [Mentions social media.] “Jurisdictions are all getting connected together.” “The internet has become a fixed target.”
2015 March 23 VIDEO (1:59:28) “Western persecution: Is the UN Human Rights Council equipped to protect refugees from the West?” [YouTube] Clip of JA speech (30:28) [YouTube]
APRIL
2015 April 15 (1:07:37) VIDEO “15th April Julian Assange” [YouTube]
Commonwealth Lawyers Association conference 15 April 2015 With lawyer Jennifer Robinson and Adriana Edmeades (Privacy International) Focuses on surveillance law and practice, including what surveillance means for lawyer-client privileged communications.
2015 April 20 TEXT “Assange: How 'The Guardian' Milked Edward Snowden's Story” [Newsweek]
EXCERPT “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (Guardian/Faber & Faber, 2014) by Luke Harding is a hack job in the purest sense of the term. Pieced together from secondary sources and written with minimal additional research to be the first to market, the book's thrifty origins are hard to miss.
The Guardian is a curiously inward-looking beast. If any other institution tried to market its own experience of its own work nearly as persistently as The Guardian, it would surely be called out for institutional narcissism. But because The Guardian is an embarrassingly central institution within the moribund "left-of-center" wing of the U.K. establishment, everyone holds their tongue.
The Snowden Files positions The Guardian as central to the Edward Snowden affair, elbowing out more significant players like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for Guardian stablemates, often with remarkably bad grace.
I am referred to as the "self-styled editor of WikiLeaks." In other words, the editor of WikiLeaks. This is about as subtle as Harding's withering asides get. You could use this kind of thing on anyone.”
2015 May 27-28 VIDEO (58:56) Democracy Now Full Show [DemocracyNow]
[Democracy Now transcript Part 1] Interview - Despite Congressional Standoff, NSA has Secret Authority to Continue Spying Unabated
[Democracy Now transcript Part 2] Interview - The Trans-Pacific Partnership: Secretive Deal Isn’t About Trade, But Corporate Control
[Democracy Now transcript Part 3] Interview - British Nuclear Sub Whistleblower William McNeilly Revealed Major Security Lapses
[Democracy Now transcript Part 4] Interview - Europe’s Secret Plan for Military Force on Refugee Boats from Libya
[Democracy Now transcript Part 5] Interview - As Julian Assange Faces Swedish Legal Setback, New Details Come to Light on U.S. Case Against Him
[Democracy Now transcript Part 6] Interview - WikiLeaks Releases 500K U.S. Cables from 1978 on Iran, Sandinistas, Afghanistan, Israel & More
[Democracy Now transcript Part 7] Interview - The Kill List: ICWatch Uses LinkedIn Account Info to Out Officials Who Aided Assassination Program
[Democracy Now transcript Part 8] Interview - “Pretrial Punishment”: Julian Assange Remains in Ecuadorean Embassy Fearing Arrest If He Leaves
[Democracy Now transcript Part 9] Assange on the Untold Story of the Grounding of Evo Morales’ Plane During Edward Snowden Manhunt. Also the Iceland story. [YouTube]
“So it's really quite an extraordinary situation, that reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States, and what it claims are its values of human rights and asylum and the rights to asylum and so on. And respecting the rule of law or the Vienna Convention. Just a phone call from US intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight - which has immunity. And they got it wrong. They spent all that political capital …” […] “While it was unfortunate for President Morales, it was a good thing to have seen. because it revealed the arrogance of Western Europe towards Latin America, and revealed the arrogance and hypocrisy of the United States in pressuring Western Europe. In that way it revealed the nature the relationship between Western Europe and the United States.
And this became the key ingredient in Edward Snowden's asylum application.
JUNE
2015 June TEXT “Why Google is a political matter:A conversation with Julian” by John Keane [The Monthly]
“Google pretends it isn’t a company,” says Assange. “The world’s biggest and most dynamic media conglomerate portrays itself as playful and humane. But Google is not what it seems. It’s a deeply political operation. We must pay attention to how it operates, and prepare to defend ourselves against its seductive powers of surveillance and control.” […] “What we must grasp is the tendency of digital information systems to connive with concentrated power,” he says, voice lowering. “The case of Google shows that knowledge is power, it proves that we’re hurtling at high speed towards a world worse than those in the dystopias of Jack London and Yevgeny Zamyatin, or Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.” Then down comes the heavy gauntlet. “I think it’s misguided to be looking to Google to help get us out of this mess.” He pauses. “In large part, Google has put us in this mess. The company’s business model is based on sucking private data out of us and turning it into a profit. So I do not think it’s wise to try to ‘reform’ something which, from first premises, is beyond reform.”
2015 June 8 BOOK “Supernerds (English Edition): Conversations with Heroes” by Angela Richter, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden [Amazon]
2015 June 11 TEXT Interview by Seung-yoon Lee (PART 1 of 3) “Western Civilization Has Produced a God, the God of Mass Surveillance” [HuffingtonPost]
In part one, Assange talks about how we now live in surveillance society, if Facebook and Google are spying on us and how on earth WikiLeaks out-smarted the United States to rescue Edward Snowden from Hong Kong.
2015 June 15 VIDEO (20:00) Live video feed during the "Yes Men Are Revolting" movie [YouTube] Is WikiLeaks an artform?
2015 June 25 TEXT Interview by Seung-yoon Lee (PART 2 of 3) “Julian Assange: Mainstream Media Rife With Censorship” [HuffingtonPost]
In part two of the series, Assange reflects on media -- how it works, whether there is hope in new media models and citizen journalism and whether he prefers Rupert Murdoch or Eric Schmidt.
Julian Assange: “"It would be nice to live in a world where people didn't have to deal with an organization that is not compromised in any manner whatsoever, but we don't live in that world. People have to use cars and they have put to petrol in their cars, and that petrol is made by Shell or BP."
JULY
2015 July 5 TEXT Notes by John Keane “Julian Assange on Google, surveillance and predatory capitalism” [The Conversation]
Image included in the article (provided by Sunshine Press)
EXCERPT “I ask Assange whether he thinks Google is becoming a 21st-century version of the Honourable East India Company. At its peak, the English joint-stock company accounted for half the world’s trade, dominated such commodities as silk, salt, cotton, tea and opium, and ruled large areas of India with its own private armies and administrative apparatus. “It’s worse than the East India Company,” he replies. “From memory, the company ruled according to a royal charter, but the government owned no company shares and had limited control over its activities, which were backed by a huge standing army. Google’s different. It’s trying to keep quiet about its actual politics. It’s in a state of public denial about its global ambitions, and its deep entanglement and collaboration with the American government.”
So the charge is that “liberty loving” Google secretly sails with the navy, not the pirates. Google, Assange says, is now a master of “back-channel diplomacy for Washington”. When Google Met WikiLeaks details the many ways the corporate communications giant shapes decisions and non-decisions in the political scene.
“Three years ago, Google finally joined the ranks of top-spending Washington lobbyists,” Assange tells me. “It’s a list usually stalked by such giants as the US Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petro-carbon leviathans. Google is now at the top of the company list.” It annually spends more on lobbying than such military aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing.
2015 July 10TEXT Interview by Seung-yoon Lee (PART 3 of 3) “Julian Assange: 'It's Quite Funny Having Been Called a Mossad Agent, a CIA Agent and a Cat Torturer'” [HuffingtonPost]
Julian Assange: “The treasures of human history belong to all of humanity. They are our collective history. Anything of significance in one country is of significance to others, because of the interconnections between people. It affects everyone eventually. And it is the height of arrogance for a journalist to say that, "No, I have decided, in this particular case, to remove this piece of human history from the world."
2015 July 20 TEXTSpiegel Interview with Julian Assange 'We Are Drowning in Material' [Spiegel]
“Julian Assange, 44, talks about the comeback of the WikiLeaks whistleblowing platform and his desire to provide assistance to a German parliamentary committee that is investigating mass NSA spying.”
AUGUST
2015 Aug 18 VIDEO (8:22) “WikiLeaks - The US strategy to create a new global legal and economic system: TPP, TTIP, TISA.” [YouTube]
This is a Wikileaks mini documentary and appears on their own channel. Julian Assange appears at 3:02 and 7:30. Also includes John Pilger, Matt Kennard and Clare Provost
2015 Aug 31 TEXT Julian Assange “War won't serve Australia's cause” [The Age]
EXCERPT ”We must remember the lessons of Iraq - when Australia was led into war by the US/British war machine masquerading its propaganda as ''intelligence''. Then, as now, we were fed on a diet of fear mongering about chemical weapons. And then, as now, the war machine is pre-empting the fact-finding missions of the UN, rendering its job impossible.
What Australian interests are served by going along with a US-led intervention in Syria? The answer is none. The case for intervention has not been made.”
SEPTEMBER
2015 Sept 8 BOOK LAUNCH “The WikiLeaks Files:The World According to US Empire” by WikiLeaks with Introduction by Julian Assange [Verso]
The WikiLeaks Files exposes the machinations of the United States as it imposes a new form of imperialism on the world, one founded on tactics from torture to military action, to trade deals and “soft power,” in the perpetual pursuit of expanding influence. The book also includes an introduction by Julian Assange examining the ongoing debates about freedom of information, international surveillance, and justice.
An introduction by Julian Assange—writing on the subject for the first time—exposes the ongoing debates about freedom of information, international surveillance, and justice.
With contributions by Dan Beeton, Phyllis Bennis, Michael Busch, Peter Certo, Conn Hallinan, Sarah Harrison, Richard Heydarian, Dahr Jamail, Jake Johnston, Alexander Main, Robert Naiman, Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Linda Pearson, Gareth Porter, Tim Shorrock, Russ Wellen, and Stephen Zunes
[YouTube] VIDEO (6:30) 7 Sept 2015 “Julian Assange and The Wikileaks Files - Newsnight” BBC
[YouTube] VIDEO (1:42:07) 20 Sept 2015 “Jeremy Scahill And Julian Assange Discuss The Most Important Documents Released By WikiLeaks” in NY. The Assange introduction is discussed at 47:32. From 49:58 Assange talks about the strange phenomena of US academics not citing the cables in their analyses of relevant people or events. Turns out, the were forbidden to do so by the major journals in which they would want to publish. [Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney confirmed that when, in a 2018 Unity4J vigil, she described having to practically rewrite her doctoral dissertation to avoid the use of such references.]
Book Launch in London (29 Sept 2015) with Julian Assange (via videolink), John Pilger and Richard Gizbert. It appears that no video of this session has survived, but a transcript of John Pilger’s speech is available. [Verso]
John Pilger: “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.
That is the remarkable achievement of this anthology, which reclaims our memory. It connects the reasons and the crimes that have caused so much human turmoil, from Vietnam and Central America, to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, with the matrix of rapacious power, the United States. …
[YouTube] VIDEO (1:30:43) “Julian Assange” at the Wheeler Center, Melbourne, Australia, with host Andrew Fowler. (30 Sept 2015)
This occasion was the launch in Australia of “The WikiLeaks Files”.
[1:23:37] “We just have to understand that our capital is Washington. The capital of Australia is DC. That's the reality. So, when you're engaging in campaigns, just engage directly with DC, because that's where the decisions are made. That's what I do, and that's what Wikileaks does - we engage directly with DC. We engage directly with Washington. And that's what Australian should do.”
[Going Underground RT] VIDEO (29:24) “Assange on 'US Empire', Assad govt overthrow plans & new book 'The WikiLeaks Files' (EXCLUSIVE)”
Screengrab fromAfshin’s Rattansi’s “Going Underground” on RT
OCTOBER
2015 Oct 5 VIDEO (35:26) “Nasheed Press Conference - Amal Clooney ” [YouTube]
Explanation of how the UNWG on Arbitrary Detention works
2015 Oct 9 PODCAST (23:29) “US Waging 'Lawfare' in Bid to Control the World” [RNZ] [Partial Transcript]
EXCERPT “In an interview with Radio NZ, Assange explained the academic concept of "lawfare", which describes how one state can technically acquire territory and exert influence over others by applying its own laws in overseas countries.
The concept explains that intricate legal developments are used as a substitute to a military occupation in order for countries like the US to control certain decisions and outcomes in overseas states.
The WikiLeaks chief said the US investigation of himself and others involved in leaking sensitive government information is a prime example of Washington engaging in lawfare, which is enabled through a series of international institutions and agreements like the TPP, as well as the cooperation of allied states not willing to question and stand up to the US.
2015 Oct 17 VIDEO (1:25:11) “Despair and Defiance - Senator Scott Ludlam in Conversation with Julian Assange” [YouTube]
Held at the “Festival of Democracy” held at Sydney University
Screengrab from video of Julian Assange with Scott Ludlam (Oct 2015) SOURCE YouTube
NOVEMBER
2015 Nov 15 VIDEO (1:14:55) “Julian Assange | Cambridge Union” [YouTube]
This speech focuses on the changing structure of the press, particularly since the advent of social media. It begins, though, with one of Australia’s bravest journalists: Wilfred Burchett who reported accurately on the USA’s use of atomic bombs in Japan in the closing weeks of WW2.
Burchett’s journalistic truthtelling made him extremely unpopular in government circles in several countries - it is not difficult to see parallels to Assange’s own story.
2015 Nov 23 VIDEO (1:56:26) “Europe is Kaput. Long live Europe! - Slavoj Žižek, Yanis Varoufakis and Julian Assange - full event” [YouTube]
2016 Feb 5 VIDEO (1:14:02) “Assange Press Conference” [YouTube]
Julian Assange appeared (by video link) at the London press conference for the announcement of the opinion of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention [UNWGAD]. They found that he had been arbitrarily detained, should be allowed to go free, and should be compensated.
See also 2016 Feb VIDEO Going Underground Interview (EP 303) with Melinda Taylor, lawyer involved in presenting the Assange case to the UNWGAD [Rumble 2:47-14:08]
2016 Feb 5 VIDEO (2:09) “Julian Assange speaks from balcony of Ecuadorian Embassy” [YouTube]
“This is a victory that cannot be denied. It is a victory of historical importance. Not just for me, for my family, for my children, but for the independence of the UN system.
There have been comments from Philip Hammond, the Foreign Minister of this country, today saying this changes nothing. Philip Hammond, as an individual I think he's a perfectly nice person, but we must understand that those comments are merely rhetoric …”
2016 Feb 9 TEXT “A vote today for Hillary Clinton is a vote for endless, stupid war” by Julian Assange [WikiLeaks]
“Hillary didn't just vote for Iraq. She made her own Iraq. Libya is Hillary's Iraq and if she becomes president she will make more.
I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgement and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. Her personality combined with her poor policy decisions have directly contributed to the rise of ISIS.
Pentagon generals objected to destroying the Libyan state. They felt Hillary did not have a safe post-war plan. Hillary Clinton went over their heads. Libya has been destroyed. It became a haven for ISIS. The Libyan national armory was looted and hundreds of tons of weapons were transferred to jihadists in Syria. Hillary's war has increased terrorism, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians and has set back women's rights in the Middle East by hundreds of years. Having learned nothing from the Libyan disaster Hillary then set about trying do the same in Syria.
Hillary publicly took credit for the destruction of the Libyan state. On hearing that the country's president had been killed by her handiwork, she became wild-eyed and gloated "We came, we saw, he died!". In the momentary thrill of the kill, she had aped, of all people, Julius Ceaser [sic].
Hillary's problem is not just that she's war hawk. She's a war hawk with bad judgement who gets an unseemly emotional rush out of killing people. She shouldn't be let near a gun shop, let alone an army. And she certainly should not become president of the United States.”
NOTE: This statement is accompanied by a video of Hillary Clinton hearing that Gaddafi had been murdered in Libya - “We came, we saw, he died.” (YouTube]
2016 Feb 9 VIDEO (10:10) “Julian Assange on DiEM25” [YouTube]
Julian Assange at the founding of DIEM25, where he announces the statement from UNHRC reprimanding Sweden (and others) for not obeying treaty law (a reference to the UNWGAD decision. He discusses what he sees as the key problems in Europe, and the need to grapple with them.
“Otherwise, winter is coming to Europe. War is coming to Europe. The end of Europe is coming to Europe."
MARCH
2016 March 11-12 VIDEO (1:20:38) “LoganCIJ16: Fighting the Global Arena” [YouTube] See outline of the Berlin symposium here: [cage.ngo]
The Logan Symposium: Julian Assange, David Mirza Ahmad, Alison Macrina, Jérémie Zimmermann
“On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton's private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton.
The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. More PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016, and a set of additional 995 emails was imported up to February 2, 2018.”
APRIL
2016 April 1 VIDEO (1:19) “Digital Dissidents: The warriors of the digital age fighting side by side for transparency and privacy in the digital world” [Vimeo]
“An in-depth look at the most famous whistleblowers of the 21st century and what drives them to speak out.”
2016 April 10 VIDEO (9:12) “Julian Assange on the Panama Papers - The Listening Post (Feature)” [YouTube]
2017 April 11 TEXT Julian Assange “WikiLeaks has the same mission as The Post and the Times” [Washington Post]
“I have given up years of my own liberty for the risks we have taken at WikiLeaks to bring truth to the public. I take some solace in this: Joseph Pulitzer, namesake of journalism’s award for excellence, was indicted in 1909 for publishing allegedly libelous information about President Theodore Roosevelt and the financier J.P. Morgan in the Panama Canal corruption scandal. It was the truth that set him free.”
MAY
2016 May 30 VIDEO () Brussels seminar "The Art of Leaking: Behind the Scenes in the Julian Assange case” [YouTube, now private] [PDF]
JUNE
2016 June 7 VIDEOCLIP (5:26) “Google is working directly with the Hillary Clinton campaign” [YouTube]
This seems to be clip from “The New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream International Media Forum” [Sputnik]
2016 June 12 VIDEO (7:42) ITV PESTON on SUNDAY: “Julian Assange Says 'More Clinton leaks to come' (Excerpt)” [YouTube now gone] [YouTube ALT source] [ITV]
2016 June 23 VIDEO (7:22:56) “Brexit Club Live Stream” [YouTube]
In order of appearance: Julian Assange (and Embassy Cat) Vivian Westwood Afshin Rattansi 0: 46:33 Cenk Uygur (Young Turks) 1:04:22 David Graeber 1:21:29 Pablo Bustinduy (Podemos, Spain) 1:40:56 Ben Griffin 1:53:53 Christophe Marchand (lawyer, Brussels) 2:22:37 Johannes Wahlström (Sweden - "Medistan") 2:37:45 Charlie Skelton (@deYook) (Bildeberg) 3:31:12 Vaughn Smith (FRontline Club) 4:23:20 Yanis Varoufakis (Greece) DIEM25 4:23:20 Craig Murray(Scotland 4:23:20 Naomi Colvin (UK) Courage Foundation 4:23:20 Srećko Horvat (Croatia) DIEM25 5:10:11 Cody Wilsom (US) Bitcoin, Libertarian 6:13:05 What is the future of Europe
Some topics: 0:35:02 TPP info at 1:13:05 The Great Escape (banking blockade) 3:19:13 TTIP
IMAGES: Screenshots from video of “Brexit Club Live Stream“ (23 June 2016). [TL] Julian Assange & Embassy Cat, [TR] Naomi Colvin, Craig Murray & Srećko Horvat, [BL] David Groeber & Ben Griffin, [BR] Vivienne Westwood & Afshin Rattansi. SOURCE: [YouTube]
2016 June 24 VIDEO (1:44:35) “Teleconferencia Julian Assange” [YouTube]
Teleconference with Buenos Aires, Argentina The first question asked was “Where is the cat?”
IMAGE: Screengrab of Julian with Embassy cat (June 2015) SOURCE: YouTube
2016 June 19 VIDEO (2:08:56) “First they came for Assange: Yanis Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat, Bozar, Brussels, June 2016 | DiEM25” [YouTube]
A special event from DIEM 25 Brussels (but also broadcast at the other 9 city conferences held simultaneously) to mark 4 years in the embassy.
♦ 2016 July 22 (a) EVENT First Release of USPodestaemails [WikiLeaks]
EXCERPT “Today WikiLeaks begins its series on deals involving Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. Mr Podesta is a long-term associate of the Clintons and was President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff from 1998 until 2001. Mr Podesta also controls the Podesta Group, a major lobbying firm and is the Chair of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a Washington DC-based think tank. Part 1 of the Podesta Emails comprises 2,060 emails and 170 attachments and focuses on Mr Podesta's communications relating to nuclear energy, and media handling over donations to the Clinton Foundation from mining and nuclear interests; 1,244 of the emails reference nuclear energy. The full collection includes emails to and from Hillary Clinton.
In April 2015 the New York Times published a story about a company called "Uranium One" which was sold to Russian government-controlled interests, giving Russia effective control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for the production of nuclear weapons, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of US government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off the deal was the State Department, then headed by Secretary Clinton. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) comprises, among others, the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy.
As Russian interests gradually took control of Uranium One millions of dollars were donated to the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013 from individuals directly connected to the deal including the Chairman of Uranium One, Ian Telfer. Although Mrs Clinton had an agreement with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors to the Clinton Foundation, the contributions from the Chairman of Uranium One were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons.
When the New York Times article was published the Clinton campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, strongly rejected the possibility that then-Secretary Clinton exerted any influence in the US goverment's review of the sale of Uranium One, describing this possibility as "baseless".
Mr Fallon promptly sent a memo to the New York Times with a rebuttal of the story (Podesta Email ID 1489) …
♦ 2016 July 22 (b) EVENT First Release of USDNC emails [WikiLeaks]
“Starting on Friday 22 July 2016 at 10:30am EDT, WikiLeaks released over 2 publications 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments from the top of the US Democratic National Committee -- part one of our new Hillary Leaks series. The leaks come from the accounts of seven key figures in the DNC: Communications Director Luis Miranda (10520 emails), National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan (3799 emails), Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer (3095 emails), Finanace Director of Data & Strategic Initiatives Daniel Parrish (1742 emails), Finance Director Allen Zachary (1611 emails), Senior Advisor Andrew Wright (938 emails) and Northern California Finance Director Robert (Erik) Stowe (751 emails). The emails cover the period from January last year until 25 May this year.”
2016 July 25 VIDEOS (x3) Democracy Now - with transcripts
[YouTube] [Democracy Now] Julian Assange on Releasing DNC Emails That Ousted Debbie Wasserman Schultz
[YouTube] [Democracy Now] Choosing Between Trump or Clinton is Like Picking Between Cholera or Gonorrhea
[YouTube] [Democracy Now] [16:36} “Assange: Why I Created WikiLeaks’ Searchable Database of 30,000 Emails from Clinton’s Private Server”
AUGUST
2016 Aug 6 VIDEO (47:58) “Julian Assange special: Do Wikileaks have the email that will put Hillary Clinton in prison? (E376)” [YouTube censored] [YouTube ALT copy] [RT] [Going Underground archive Rumble]
A somewhat messy transcript is also available [from blogspot]
2016 Aug 6 VIDEO (33:02) “Jullian [sic[ Assange addressing the Green Party National Convention” [YouTube]
2016 Aug 9 VIDEO (2:02) “Julian Assange on Seth Rich” [YouTube] - See also PART 3 of this series.
"Our whistleblowers are at serious risk of supplying us with material. A 27-year-old man, Seth Rich, who worked for the DNC, was recently murdered. It is unknown why. He was walking on the street in Washington."
It was said in American media that it was a robbery, but according to Assange there is no evidence of that. "We are investigating what exactly happened to Seth Rich."”
2016 Aug 22 TEXT - “When I leave I will visit Rafael Correa” [ElTelegrapho]
Interview EXCERPT Q:Is there a contradiction between being a political refugee and continuing to publish and comment on the political situations of other countries?
A: No, those statements are incorrect. My status as a political refugee in an embassy prevents me from interfering in the internal affairs of the country where the embassy is located, in this case, the United Kingdom. This provision exists to prevent political refugees from using the embassy headquarters where they sought refuge to plan coups. Otherwise, the State that must grant the safe-conduct for a political refugee would not grant it. During my asylum I have not interfered with calls for violence and social disorder in the UK.
I do not know the reasons why there is a kind of disinformation campaign that has circulated in the Ecuadorian media, and although at the moment I cannot take the time required to deny inaccurate information about myself, my actions and WikiLeaks, perhaps I will have to do so more often. It is important to publish rigorous and scientific journalism. There was, for example, a published opinion that cited an old convention from 1939, but that document is not the legal basis on which I was granted asylum, but the Caracas Convention of 1954, which is completely clear on the matter, is published on the OAS website, anyone can read it and it comes after the Montevideo Convention. My asylum was granted to protect me from political persecution derived from my work and my publication of sensitive information, of public interest, for exercising my right to freedom of expression. It would be a complete contradiction if that right were restricted.
There is criticism that WikiLeaks is trying to harm the Democratic Party, how do you respond to this?
They are criticisms that lack substance. We have published similar information from the Republican Party and, before I was in the embassy, I also published about the far-right Party in the UK. The response of the Hillary Clinton campaign is to distract public opinion, diverting attention from the publication that reveals her questionable actions.
Do you fear revenge from Hillary Clinton if she is elected?
The result is already clear, in the opinion of American political analysts, Hillary Clinton will be the president. As I have said in other interviews, both candidates, her and Donald Trump, are a disaster both for her country and for the rest of the world. Why do I say this? […]
2016 Aug 25 AUDIO (38:25) “Julian Assange - An Interview by Radiohost Randy Credico” [YouTube]
This became the first of a long running series (still going) called “Julian Assange - Countdown to Freedom”, and where Julian said (at 21:58):
“I am in love with understanding the world, and sharing that understanding with other people. It’s a bit hard to describe how much I’m in love with that, and have been for many years.”
2016 Aug 26 VIDEO Fox & Friends (12:31) “WikiLeaks: Julian Assange Interview - New Clinton Document Dump Coming, 8/26/16” [YouTube] See also VIDEO (0:53) “Julian Assange Reveals Why He Hasn't Released Information On Trump” [Daily Motion]
“... it's really hard for us to release anything worse than what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth every second day. I mean, it's part of his charismatic appeal that he speaks off the cuff...” [Wikileaks would struggle to] “publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth every single day.”
SEPTEMBER
2016 Sep 6 VIDEO (0:45) Hannity “Julian Assange: We May Start Releasing Hillary Documents Next Week” [YouTube] [DailyMotion]
2016 Sep 8 AUDIO (46:22) “Julian Assange on The Sean Hannity Radio Show (9/8/2016)” [YouTube]
“Julian Assange to Hannity: "Everyone in positions of government, and in WikiLeaks, knows 'c' stands for Classified/Confidential."
2016 Sept 30 TEXT - Michael Sontheimer“'We Believe in What We're Doing'” [Speigel]
“WikiLeaks is now 10 years old. SPIEGEL met with founder Julian Assange, 45, to discuss the whistleblower platform's achievements and whether recent criticism leveled at the site is justified.”
OCTOBER
2016 Oct 3 VIDEO (5:26) “WikiLeaks Top 10” [YouTube]
Celebrating the 10th birthday of WikiLeaks
2016 Oct 4 VIDEO () “Assange speaks at WikiLeaks’ 10th anniversary in Berlin” [YouTube now censored] [DailyMotion from 55:00]
See also RT “Assange: WikiLeaks will publish all US election docs by Nov. 8” which contains a video that has a short clip from the event. [RT]
2016 Oct 6 VIDEODonald Trump declares “I love WikiLeaks” [Facebook]
Unfortunately, later on Trump seems to have forgotten all about him.
2016 Oct 16 TEXT “WikiLeaks says Ecuador cut off Assange’s internet after new Clinton emails published” [RT]
“Whistleblowing site WikiLeaks has confirmed it was Ecuador that cut off Julian Assange’s internet access on Saturday after another batch of leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair was released.
WikiLeaks did not elaborate on the grounds for Ecuador’s London embassy, where Assange has spent more than four years after being granted asylum over fears of persecution over his publications, to restrict the whistleblower’s web access.”
NB All interviews from now to his AMA 10 Jan 2017 are either conducted in person in the embassy, or by phone.
NOVEMBER
2016 Nov 5 VIDEO (24:52) RT “Secret World of US Election: Julian Assange talks to John Pilger (FULL INTERVIEW)” [YouTube, now censored] [Vimeo] [RT Transcript]
EXCERPT ‘Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton’
JP:The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.
JA: And twelve million dollars from Morocco …
JP: Twelve million from Morocco yeah.
JA: For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].
JP:In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.
JA: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
JP: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
JA: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.
JP:Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
JA: Yes.
JP:That's extraordinary.
2016 Nov 8 TEXT “WikiLeaks Statement on the US Elections, by Julian Assange” [WikiLeaks]
EXERPT “We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria, we publish. We had information that fit our editorial criteria which related to the Sanders and Clinton campaign (DNC Leaks) and the Clinton political campaign and Foundation (Podesta Emails). No-one disputes the public importance of these publications. It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election.
At the same time, we cannot publish what we do not have. To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump's campaign, or Jill Stein's campaign, or Gary Johnson's campaign or any of the other candidates that fufills our stated editorial criteria. As a result of publishing Clinton's cables and indexing her emails we are seen as domain experts on Clinton archives. So it is natural that Clinton sources come to us.
We publish as fast as our resources will allow and as fast as the public can absorb it. That is our commitment to ourselves, to our sources, and to the public.
This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election […]
Publishing is what we do. To withhold the publication of such information until after the election would have been to favour one of the candidates above the public's right to know.”
2016 Nov 26 VIDEO (55:58) “Clear, unedited interview with Julian Assange 11/26/2016 led by Youmna Naufal” [YouTube]
“WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange was featured as a special guest speaker at the Free Connected Minds conference organized annually by the May Chidiac Foundation on November 26th, 2016. In this exclusive, he discusses questions about his proof of life, the 2016 US presidential elections, the Arab Spring, Lebanon and more.”
DECEMBER
2016 Dec 15 AUDIO (26:14) “Julian Assange With Sean Hannity | Fox News” [YouTube original now unavailable] UPDATE: [YouTube alt copy]
2016 Dec 23 TEXT Stefania Maurizi “Julian Assange: "Donald? It's a change anyway” [Repubblica]
EXCERPT Q: In these ten years of WikiLeaks, you and your organisation have experienced all sorts of attacks. What have you learned from this warfare?
A: "Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire "international community". We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants"
2016 Dec 27 VIDEO (53:34) “Julian Assange Interview with Fernando Morais on Nocaute TV | December 27th, 2016” [YouTube]
2017 Jan 3 VIDEO (43:12) “Assange tells Hannity: Russia was not our source” [YouTube full interview now private] [YouTube alt copy (38:11)] [FoxNews clip]
See also 2017 Jan 3 VIDEO CLIP (5:25) “Wikileaks' Assange: Governments 'hate transparency. They loathe it'” [Fox] This part of the Hannity interview was summarised by RT in “'Governments loathe transparency, can do wicked things' – Assange” [RT] [archived]
See also 2017 Jan 3 VIDEO CLIP (5:36) “Julian Assange shares advice for the Democratic Party” [YouTube]
2017 Jan10 VIDEO (58:49) “Julian Assange Alive AMA Jan 10th 2017” [Archive]
This was the first appearance of Julian Assange after his internet connection was restored. Some clips:
2017 Jan 24 VIDEO (19:21) “Julian Assange Interview on TheProject 24 Jan 2017” [YouTube]
What happens with WikiLeaks money? Life inside the embassy? The Manning connection? Any Russia connection? And more
2017 Jan 29 VIDEO (10:58) “Julian Assange Interview for ITV's Peston on Sunday [YouTube]
MARCH
KEY RELEASE
♦ 2017 March 7 First Release of Vault 7 (CIA Hacking Tools)
See The Revelations of WikiLeaks (from Consortium News) “No. 9—Opening the CIA’s Vault” by Patrick Lawrence
“Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.
By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.
Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that "There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such 'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of "Year Zero" goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective."
Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the "Year Zero" disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed, disarmed and published.
Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.
2017 March 9 VIDEO (1:28) “Julian Assange: Wikileaks will give details of CIA hacking tools to tech companies” [YouTube]
During a digital news conference on Thursday, Wikileaks' Julian Assange announced that he would give tech companies details of the hacking tools used by the CIA in order to help the companies build safeguards.
APRIL
2017 April 11 AUDIO (19:26) “Julian Assange Radio Interview with Randy Credico on WBAI 99.5 NYC | April 11th, 2017” [YouTube] With John Pilger
2017 April 12VIDEO (41:25) “Full Interview: Julian Assange on Trump, DNC Emails, Russia, the CIA, Vault 7 & More” [YouTube] [DemocracyNow]
2017 April 21 AUDIO (32:03) “As U.S. Preps Arrest Warrant for Assange, Glenn Greenwald Says Prosecuting WikiLeaks Threatens Press Freedom for All” [DemocracyNow]
This video includes an audio clip from the Intercept (at 20:38) where Julian Assange responds to threats from Pompeo:
JULIAN ASSANGE: Pompeo said explicitly that he was going to redefine the legal parameters of the First Amendment to define publishers like WikiLeaks in such a manner that the First Amendment would not apply to them. What the hell is going on? This is the head of the largest intelligence service in the world, the intelligence service of the United States. He doesn’t get to make proclamations on interpretation of the law. That’s a responsibility for the courts, it’s a responsibility for Congress, and perhaps it’s a responsibility for the attorney general. It’s way out of line to usurp the roles of those entities that are formally engaged in defining the interpretations of the First Amendment. For any—frankly, any other group to pronounce themselves, but for the head of the CIA to pronounce what the boundaries are of reporting and not reporting is a very disturbing precedent. This is not how the First Amendment works. It’s just—it’s just legally wrong.
The First Amendment is not a positive definition of rights. It’s a negative definition. It limits what the federal government does. It doesn’t say the federal government must give individuals rights and enforce that. It limits what the federal government can do to take away a certain climate of open debate in the United States. So, the First Amendment prevents Congress and the executive from engaging in actions themselves which would limit not only the ability of people to speak and to publish freely, but would also limit the ability of people to read and understand information, because it is that climate of public debate which creates a check on a centralized governmental structure from becoming authoritarian. It’s a right, from that perspective, for all the people, not just the publisher.
2017 April 25 TEXT “Julian Assange: The CIA director is waging war on truth-tellers like WikiLeaks” [WaPo]
EXCERPT “Mike Pompeo, in his first speech as director of the CIA, chose to declare war on free speech rather than on the United States’ actual adversaries. He went after WikiLeaks, where I serve as editor, as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” In Pompeo’s worldview, telling the truth about the administration can be a crime — as Attorney General Jeff Sessions quickly underscored when he described my arrest as a “priority.” News organizations reported that federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring charges against members of WikiLeaks, possibly including conspiracy, theft of government property and violating the Espionage Act.
All this speech to stifle speech comes in reaction to the first publication in the start of WikiLeaks’ “Vault 7” series. Vault 7 has begun publishing evidence of remarkable CIA incompetence and other shortcomings. This includes the agency’s creation, at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars, of an entire arsenal of cyber viruses and hacking programs — over which it promptly lost control and then tried to cover up the loss. These publications also revealed the CIA’s efforts to infect the public’s ubiquitous consumer products and automobiles with computer viruses.
When the director of the CIA, an unelected public servant, publicly demonizes a publisher such as WikiLeaks as a “fraud,” “coward” and “enemy,” it puts all journalists on notice, or should. Pompeo’s next talking point, unsupported by fact, that WikiLeaks is a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” is a dagger aimed at Americans’ constitutional right to receive honest information about their government. This accusation mirrors attempts throughout history by bureaucrats seeking, and failing, to criminalize speech that reveals their own failings.
President Theodore Roosevelt understood the danger of giving in to those “foolish or traitorous persons who endeavor to make it a crime to tell the truth about the Administration when the Administration is guilty of incompetence or other shortcomings.” Such “endeavor is itself a crime against the nation,” Roosevelt wrote. President Trump and his officials should heed that advice. […]
2017 April 27 VIDEO (27:07) “Julian Assange Speaks Out: The War On The Truth” [YouTube] [YouTube short clip]
The Pompeo attack “WikiLeaks is a hostile, non-state intelligence service … Julian Assange has no First Amendment rights”.
Assange: “The CIA has been deeply humiliated by our ongoing Vault 7 publications.’
2017 April BOOK “How I lost By Hillary Clinton” Introduced and annotated by Joe Lauria. With a foreword by Julian Assange. [OR Books]
MAY
2017 May 19 VIDEO (10:40) “I do not forgive or forget’: Assange responds after Swedish prosecutors drop rape case” [YouTube now censored] [YouTube Short ALT] [RT]
RT: "That is not something that I can forgive … [or] forget" - Assange speaks from the balcony of the London Embassy. Julian Assange speaks following Swedish prosecutors dropping their case on him. He's now said “we will work with US Justice Department” on their case on him.
JUNE
2017 June 11 VIDEO (28:16) “Žižek, Assange & M.I.A. on AI Controlled Social Media at Meltdown Festival (2017)” [YouTube censored] [YouTube] Also a clip [Tweet]
21:25 “I know from our sources deep inside those Silicon Valley institutions, they genuinely believe that they're going to produce artificial intelligences that are so powerful, relatively soon, that people will have their brains digitized uploaded to these artificial intelligences and live forever in a simulation - therefore will have eternal life.
It's like a religion for atheists. They'll have eternal life and given that you're in a simulation why not program the simulation to have endless drug and sex orgy parties all around you. It's like the 72 virgins, but it's like the Silicon Valley equivalent. And what can you do with that? Well, what you can do with that is you can get smart engineers to work for less because they're not just working to increase the profits of Google and Facebook. They're working towards constructing their own immortality and their own infinite pleasure, and not just for themselves but for their whole community and, they perceive, even for all of humanity itself .
That's the vision that they have that makes them makes them work harder, and the dystopian consequences of their work is not what is most present in their mind.
They are aware of the talk, but they engage in rhetorical straw man. So they take the talk about - maybe producing artificial intelligence that is so sophisticated that human beings can't understand what it's doing, is a dangerous thing - and they reframe it into some ridiculous straw man. [So] one day computer becomes conscious it decides it's it's a homicide or maniac and goes around killing everyone. Or we can just put a like a little switch on it [so] that secondary computer program that looks to see where it's becoming homicidal, turns it off.
Of course you could, but that's not how it will happen in practice. In practice, these artificial intelligences are coming into being the same way the children come into being, or rather adults come into being through the process of being children, learning about the world. They are learning machines. Children learn 10 words a day on average, and many other things. So they have intense capacity. But they're not pre-distilled with everything in their brain. They harvest from the world.
Now, us as human beings have been extremely foolish. Surveillance capitalism, as a model, has has meant that we have all been in the process of putting our lives onto the internet or Facebook. We're giving our lives over to these Silicon Valley companies. So these Silicon Valley data stores now have a very, very rich description of reality - as experienced by human beings, and some bits of data that’snot experienced by human beings - like stock market indexes and so on.
And that is what these artificial intelligences are trained on.
[He goes on to discuss Google Translate as an example of serious machine learning.]
2017 June 25 TEXT “Why the Democratic party is doomed” [TwitLonger]
JULY
2017 July 7 VIDEO (0:25) “Assange G20 cyber war talk evacuated by building security and police 07/07/17 8:45pm” [YouTube]
SEPTEMBER
2018 Sept 9 VIDEO (19:12) “Julian Assange Joins Ron Paul Institute Conference 2017” [YouTube]
Julian pays tribute to Ron Paul’s “courageous and principled stance on the war racket”.
He then talks about the incompetence of the CIA.
2017 Sept 23 Interview in “Architects of Denial: The Armenian Genocide” See Trailer[YouTube] Film [YouTube] Review [HuffPost] Quoted by WikiLeaks (24 Apr 2021) [Tweet] and in DEA’s Advent series (25 Dec 2023) [Tweet]
2017 Sept 30 TEXT “Julian Assange on the Emboldening Powers of Westwood” [AnOtherMag]
OCTOBER
2017 Oct 1 TEXT “WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on His Relationship With Vivienne Westwood and Fashion as Protest” [Hypebeast]
AM: I believe she comes to visit often, and you’ve worked together a lot. What are those visits like? JA: Well I see her every few weeks, she’s very bright and tough, one of the toughest women that I have met in the United Kingdom. [...] Over time, as I’ve seen consistency of character, my admiration has increased. Also, her breadth intellectually comes out just like anyone who has breadth or depth that comes out as a result of increased contact.
Has it been impactful for you? That exchange? It’s good to have tough people around me. I need someone to push back and call out my bullshit, that’s a really important thing to have. In terms of her support, for me in my situation, that’s also been quite important. Her connections and people who appreciate her are different, broadly speaking, a different group to the people who are interested in what WikiLeaks publishes. It’s quite important to be able to bridge from your usual support base into another support base. …
2017 Oct 7 TEXT “Wikileaks Founder Blasts Twitter’s Soft Censorship” [BitsOnLine]
2017 Oct 12 TEXT Preface to Stéphanie Gibaud's "La traque des lanceurs d’alerte" (Tracking Whistleblowers). [Amazon] French edition.
2017 Oct 26 AUDIO (5:29:05) “CISL2016: UMET 26-OCT-2016 | Julian Assange LIVE Teleconference” [YouTube at 3:15:32] with Buenos Aires, Argentina See also transcription [Jefferey Jaxen]
NOVEMBER
2017 Nov 10 VIDEO (17:40) Democracy Now “As Catalonia Plans Independence from Spain, Julian Assange Advises Organizers on Secure Messaging” [YouTube]
2017 Nov 11 VIDEO (1:01:01) “A conversation with… Julian Assange - "What if... a large state...” [YouTube] IBA Annual Conference 2017 [Transcription] Interviewer is Mark Ellis.
EXCERPT JA: WikiLeaks is an organisation committed to being the most aggressive publisher in the world, the strongest defender of press freedoms, that has never been accused of censoring one of its sources and has obeyed, scrupulously, its reputation for accuracy and boldness in publishing and having never not published something. We’re not in the business of censoring information. If we get information about an election before an election, we will do everything possible to publish it at the moment when the public is most interested in it. Which is before an election, rather than after. It would be a betrayal of our role before the public to suppress information to the benefit of one candidate or another.
ME: But you recognise, then, that there were consequences in this particular election?
JA: No, not really. We looked at the polling like everyone else did. And, essentially, the whole establishment of the US, except for FOX News, perhaps, was united behind Clinton. So those factors led us to the conclusion that Clinton would win, and our publications wouldn’t make a significant difference... they could well discolour her as she was forming her administration and, of course, she would be likely to take significant extra revenge on us as an organisation for publishing that material in the election campaign. My position and the position of our staff is that, actually, this was a rigorous commitment to principle and that we were entering into a position of danger and significant self-sacrifice by infuriating the person who opinion polls told us had a 90–98 per cent chance of becoming President. Even if we had known that Trump would be elected, as he in the end was, it wouldn’t have changed that at all. If you have principles, you have to live by them. Otherwise they’re not principles. You can’t decide you’re not going to have a principle, just because the situation mildly changes. I disagree with your analysis of the hysteria about the US President and, frankly, the power of presidents in general.
ME: Getting back to that point though – in a sense, the perception that there might be an agenda – it was known that you didn’t have a real like of Clinton. I think that was common knowledge.
JA: I think that was akin to about 50 per cent of the American population, probably the majority of the rest of the world’s population, actually. I don’t know the woman; I’m not in high school; I don’t have dislikes of people that I haven’t met. It’s more... I don’t like their policies, that they might lead to wars, for example.
2017 Oct 30 VIDEO (10:46) “The Pozner interview Познер - Гость Джулиан Ассанж. Выпуск от” [YouTube now censored] [Ru Transcript]
EXCERPT
About special services
The National Security Service and the FSB are big, clumsy machines. They remain very stupid. The desire for secrecy makes people stupid.
About compromising evidence on Donald Trump
I'm sure Trump has his secrets, but he doesn't use email and hasn't been in government. Journalists for all the time managed to find two things on him: a page of a tax return for one year and a recording of a conversation on the bus about his harassment of women.
About Hillary Clinton
We did not cooperate with Russian officials (for the campaign against Clinton - ed. note). Is there a personal rejection of Clinton? She was the main proponent of the destruction of Libya by the US administration. We published a document where she boasts of her role [in Libya's problems] even before the advent of ISIS*. She has always been very belligerent. She adheres to far-right militant radicalism. That was her political ambition: she wanted to prove that she could destroy the state, that she was cruel enough to destroy the state. She killed tens of thousands of people because of her ambitions. What led to the rise of ISIS*.
DECEMBER
2017 Dec 2 VIDEO (2:40:40) The Holberg Debate 2017: "Propaganda, Facts and Fake News" with Julian Assange, John Pilger & Jonathan Heawood" [YouTube]
“New Twitter policy to back war crimes: Free pass given to hyper-dominant armed groups which promote violence. Supporters of weaker groups that resist them using identical tactics are to be eliminated.”
♦ 2018
JANUARY 2018 Jan 10 TWEET Julian Assange (now Defend Assange Campaign) account [Tweet] Julian sends a visual signal that he has now become an Ecuadorian citizen.
JA tweet: Chessboard | Game depicted is from NY game Jose Raul Capablanca v Frank James Marshall (1918). Jose was from Cuba and Frank was from the US. Jose played white and won the match (see chessgames).
“Who would chose [sic] to class themselves among one of the least trusted, most dishonest, craven, careless, cynical, anti-intellectual, power obsessed, herd-like professions in existence whose incompetence & duplicity has led directly to the death and displacement of millions?”
NB This was from Assange’s personal Twitter account, and was a response to a tweet which cannot now be seen. This twitter account was renamed “Defend Assange” after his final gagging, and was then managed by his legal team.
Not long before Assange was released from HMP Belmarsh, this tweet was quoted in a vicious “journalistic” attack on Assange by Michael Ware and Justine A. Rosenthal in The Australian, entitled “Time for justice has passed –’til the scorpion strikes again” (20 April 2024). [archived]
On 9 March 2019, ie after his gagging, one of the team then managing that twitter account posted a slight rewording of the original tweet: “Assange: pseudo-journalists have made journalism "one of the least trusted, most dishonest, craven, careless, cynical, anti-intellectual, power obsessed, herd-like professions in existence whose incompetence & duplicity has led directly to the death and displacement of millions" [Tweet]
This later became a meme, first tweeted by WikiLeaks (26 July 2024): [Tweet]
2018 Feb 28 VIDEO (48:37) “Speech by Mr. Julian Assange at the #ElevateFestival” [YouTube] Austria
Julian begins by discussing the possible bases of fear for most people active around WikiLeaks.
MARCH
2018 March 15 From Julian’s last video (first published 20 Sept 2018) [YouTube]
"States never like to be forced to follow their own rules."
2018 March 27 - The “worm” interchange - Alan Duncan and Julian Assange [
LONDON (Reuters) - Julian Assange was called a “miserable little worm” on Tuesday by a British foreign affairs minister who said the WikiLeaks founder should leave the Ecuadorean embassy in London and give himself up to British justice. [REUTERS]
ASSANGE: As a political prisoner detained without charge for 8 years, in violation of 2 UN rulings, I suppose I must be "miserable"; yet nothing wrong with being a "little" person although I'm rather tall; and better a "worm", a healthy creature that invigorates the soil, than a snake. [Tweet]
♦ 2018 March 28 TWEET Julian Assange is “gagged” by Ecuador. [Tweet]
2018 Sept 20 VIDEO (53:55) “Julian Assange's Last Interview” [YouTube] [Transcript]
This video was produced for "The future of Cyber-security Europe" 15 March 2018 (per Tweet with video):
and published on September 20, 2018 by the World Ethical Data Forum (WEDF), with public streaming by Ruptly and RT (since censored by YT).
It was later republished by acTVism Munich to foster understanding on the issues discussed in this video as well as on the Julian Assange case.
The interview is based on unheard questions, probably sent to him separately.
♦ 2019
APRIL
2019 April 8? AUDIO Smuggled audio file [Facebook video at 1:03:50] A few days before his arrest, Julian Assange managed to have a short audio recording smuggled out of the embassy. The message (published 16 April, during the Tuth Matters: Whistleblowers Award ceremony) said:
“What is occurring … It’s not about this protocol.
What has occurred since March 27 - March 28, it’s about something much more serious. It is the Ecuadorian government positioning itself in order to violate the asylum. Positioning itself in terms of its public discourse.
Gagging me in order to rebut the allegations that it is making public: that it is - apparently - deliberately leaking out to the press: selective scandalous material.
It’s all about setting the ground in order to violate the asylum, to hand me over to the United States.”
♦ 2019 April 10 TWEET from the Julian Assange account [Tweet] This account was later renamed @DefendAssange, and managed by his legal team. As Julian had no access to the internet at that time, he must have dictated the tweet to someone else who sent it out for him.
Who am I? I fought for liberty and was deprived of all liberty. I fought for freedom of speech and was denied all speech. I fought for the truth and became the subject of a thousand lies.
♦ 2019 April 11 TWEET Assange arrested inside the Ecuadorian Embassy [Tweet]
Assange was also told (by Ecuador) that he had been stripped of Ecuadorian citizenship, and had his asylum cancelled. His possessions, including documents and electronic storage devices, were handed over (by Ecuador) to the US.
As he was carried out of the embassy he can be heard crying out: “The UK must resist. The UK must resist.” Or possibly “You can resist. You must resist.” They were the last words heard from him by the public (outside a courtroom) [until 1 Oct 2024].
2019 Oct 21 “Press Release Regarding Julian Assange's Case Management Hearing” [WikiLeaks] Mr. Assange was asked by the magistrate if he had understood events in court and responded:
“I don’t understand how this is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t access my writings. It’s very difficult where I am to do anything but these people have unlimited resources... They are saying journalists and whistleblowers are enemies of the people. They have unfair advantages dealing with documents. They [know] the interior of my life with my psychologist. They steal my children’s DNA. This is not equitable what is happening here.”
♦ 2020
2020 Feb 24 Extradition hearings begin
See Craig Murray’s detailed reports on the hearings via PART 4 of this series.
On the eve of the first hearing, a large crowd gathered to protest the hearings. Kristinn Hrafnsson told them: [YouTube now censored by YT] [Tweet]
“We're dealing with a #DarkForce ... Tell everybody that you know they must side with Assange & fight this extradition.
If they say "I would rather fight for [XYZ]" tell them ... You won't be able to ... They're about to take every right away from you."
2021 Oct 27 EVENT: DAY 1 of High Court hearing [THREAD]
After the High Court hearing, it was confirmed that Julian Assange had experienced a stroke while sitting before the prison cameras. This tragic (and illegal) photo was captured and shared by some anonymous watcher of the event.
2022 April 20 A judge in the UK Westminster Magistrates Court issues an extradition order for Julian Assange. [Tweet]
Richard Medhurst summed up how millions feel about that: [Tweet]
♦ 2023
MAY
2023 May 5 TEXT “A Kingly Proposal: Letter from Julian Assange to King Charles III” [Declassified UK]
“To His Majesty King Charles III,
On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”
Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.
….
NOTE: King Charles III was crowned in Westminster Abbey the following day (6 May 2023). Part of the service included a reading from gospel by The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, Dean of His Majesty's Chapels Royal:
"There was delivered unto him the book ... where it was written, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to ... heal the broken-hearted, preach deliverance to the captives ... set at liberty [the] bruised ... - Luke 4: 16-21
To date there appears to have been no response to Julian’s letter from King Charles III.
♦ The Revelations of WikiLeaks - from Consortium News
Then, of course, there are the contents of the WikiLeaks files themselves, which have Julian Assange’s imprint as a publisher all over them. The redaction (where necessary, for harm minimisation), formatting, indexing, and most of all the sophisticated search facilities (involving more than a million files) created a whole new world of full text, original data, publication. Summaries are also provided as appropriate.
When Consortium News began their series about these publications, not long after Julian Assange’s arrest, they wrote:
Consortium Newstoday begins a series of articles, “The Revelations of WikiLeaks,” that will look back on the major works of the publication that have altered the world since its founding in 2006. This series is an effort to counter mainstream media coverage, which is ignoring WikiLeaks’ work, and instead is focusing on Julian Assange’s personality.
It is the uncovering by WikiLeaks of governments’ crimes and corruption that set the U.S. after Assange and which ultimately led to his arrest on April 11. The “Collateral Murder” video was just the first of many major WikiLeaks revelations that made the journalist one of the world’s most wanted men, simply for the act of publishing.
2019 Apr 23 “No. 1—The Video that Put Assange in US Crosshairs” by Elizabeth Vos
2019 May 9 “No. 2 —The Leak That ‘Exposed the True Afghan War’” by Elizabeth Vos
2019 May 16 “No. 3—The Most Extensive Classified Leak in History” [“Iraq War Logs”] by Patrick Lawrence
2019 July 11 “No. 4—The Haunting Case of a Belgian Child Killer and How WikiLeaks Helped Crack It” by Elizabeth Vos
2019 Sept 23 “No. 5 — Busting the Myth WikiLeaks Never Published Damaging Material on Russia” by Patrick Lawrence
2020 Jan 14 “No. 6 — US Diplomatic Cables Spark ‘Arab Spring,’ Expose Spying at UN & Elsewhere” by Elizabeth Vos
2020 June 24 “No. 7— Crimes Revealed at Guantánamo Bay” by Patrick Lawrence
2020 July 9 “No. 8—Busting the Myth WikiLeaks Published Nothing on Israel & Syria” by Patrick Lawrence
2020 Oct 26 “No. 9—Opening the CIA’s Vault” by Patrick Lawrence
WikiLeaks made their own short summary of key leaks so far on their 10th birthday: 2016 Oct 3 VIDEO (5:26) “WikiLeaks Top 10” [YouTube]
As we have come to expect, YouTube put barriers (see below) in the viewer’s way - presumably related to the scenes from Collateral Murder inside.
You may like to consider a a discussion of the YouTube “community standards” involved in this form of censorship: “A Case Study: YouTube ‘Community Standards’re depicted violence” [Twitter MOMENT]
Wikileaks also have a page with a list of “Top Ten” leaks on each of a wide range of subjects. [WikiLeaks]
♦ Julian speaks …
Julian Assange has not been been able to speak to us, in his own voice, for more than four years (only one video has been published since he was gagged on 28 March 2018 and it was completed before the gagging).
But, like his namesake Julian of Norwich (see PART 1 of this series), his recorded words - a torrent of truth - still speak to us in our current time.
We surely owe it to him not to waste his life, to listen to at least some of what he has left us - before the censors take it all.
♦ 2024
JUNE
UPDATE: Julian Assange was released on bail from HMP Belmarsh on 24 June 2024, flown to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands where he entered a plea - subject to a negotiated plea deal - in that US Federal court on 25 June 2024 and was sentenced to time served. He arrived in Australia on 26 June 2024 a free man.
In the US court in Saipan Julian Assange made the following statements admitting to his “crime” (of committing journalism):
See [Tweet] [Tweet - audio] [Court Listener audio and other files] [YouTube] “AUDIO: Assange statement at Saipan Federal Court guilty plea hearing, 26 June 2024”:
Assange: “Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information.”
“I believe that the First Amendment protected that activity, but I accept that, as written, it is a violation of the Espionage Act Statute.”
“I believe the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction with each other but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all the circumstances.”
UPDATE: From Stella Assange (26 June 2024) [Tweet]
IMAGE: Flanked by his AU/UK and US lawyers, Julian Assange is finally able to kiss his wife Stella Assange as a free man. PLACE: Canberra, Australia (16 June 2024.) LEFT is Jennifer Robinson and RIGHT is Barry Pollack. SOURCE: [Tweet]
OCTOBER
UPDATE: Julian Assange spoke publicly, for the first time, at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe [PACE] on 1 Oct 2024.
This was followed, on 2 Oct 2024, by a Plenary session of PACE which adopted the report and recommendations which emerged from PACE’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.
Most of the links in this compendium can also be accessed via a Pinterest board, and from a spreadsheet (which you can download as a PDF or an EXCEL file). While they are similar lists (made by the same person) there is no promise made that the information in each platform is exactly the same.
This compendium may be further updated as time moves on.
Thanks for reading Full Focus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. A “like“ is always appreciated too.
♦ The author of this article lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
As a long time supporter of Julian Assange, I have become aware that many of those new to the story of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange find it hard to get a picture of the enormity and multidimensionality of the abuse that has gone on here, and what that says about the current state of the world we live in.
The third was another compendium “The Persecution of WikiLeaks: Counting the Cost” covering a wide range of costs incurred by those associated, in almost any way, with WikiLeaks. In particular, it looks at the rollcall of the dead, and lists some of the many whistleblowers and truthtellers who have suffered under this regime of persecution. Read it here.
The fifth documents what was mostly a happy hiatus in this litany of abuse: “The Assange Wedding”. But even on that special day, the apparatus of the state managed to intrude with its petty (and not so petty) cruelties. Read it here.
The sixth compendium “A Chorus of Courage: Speaking Up for Assange”, provides a roll call of many of those who have spoken up for Julian Assange - using their professional &/or personal voices - and provides a little information about their role, together with links to some key statements. This list represents only the tip of the enormous mass of support for Julian that exists - especially at the grass roots level. Read it here.
The seventh compendium “Prizes for Assange: Praise where Praise is Due” celebrates many of the prizes and other awards showered on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks over nearly fifteen years. These give the lie to the vile smears by politicians and stenographers to power in the legacy press - that he "is not a journalist". Read it here.
The eighth compendium “Torrent of Truth: A Timeline of Assange Speech” provides a timeline of many articles and videos that record the direct speech of Julian Assange. While not exhaustive, it provides a fairly comprehensive and accessible overview of his online public life. Read it here.
The ninth part “View from the Other Side: Proponents of Prosecution” is a review of a one hour long podcast from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Australia’s flagship, state funded broadcaster broadcast June 2022. Much of that podcast is preserved and analysed as an exemplar of the kind of misinformation which is spread at the “intellectual” and academic end of the legacy press spectrum. Read it here.
The tenth part was an essay “All Roads Converge … on Julian Assange”. It looks at the place of Julian Assange - as a man, a representative of free speech and a free press, and as a symbol of the values of the Enlightenment - asking why it matters what happens to him. Why is his fate centrally related to the crises - coronavirus, Ukraine, climate - currently swirling around us? Read it here.
This very long essay is also available as an annotated reading, spread over an eight part video series. See more here.
The eleventh contains an annotated TRANSCRIPT of Julian’s first public speech (1 Oct 2024) after regaining his freedom (26 June 2024), plus other details of the PACE context of that speech: “Julian Speaks: a free man among friends, at last”. Read it here.
The SERIES INDEX. This is a one-stop-shop window on the series - listing and linking to all the topics and resources provided within all parts of the archive. See it here.
For those only nowthinking about joining the chorus of courage supporting Julian - please speak up. Your efforts will be appreciated, and you will find yourself on the right side of history. The fight has not ended yet, as although Julian is now free, he still needs a pardon, and safe legal conditions in which to continue his work - when he is well enough to do so.
Many of the reports in this series, while interesting to read for those new to this topic, are mainly intended as ongoing resources: documents to bookmark, dip into, refer back to, and share with those needing sources and perspective, rather than pieces to read at one sitting. The compendia are updated regularly as new events arise, so you might want to check back from time to time.
![La traque des lanceurs d’alerte: Essais - documents (Essais-documents) (French Edition) by [Stéphanie Gibaud]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa597506c-2bdb-44a5-a8b4-54ee30064678_352x500.jpeg "La traque des lanceurs d’alerte: Essais - documents (Essais-documents) (French Edition) by [Stéphanie Gibaud]")
