[THS] WikiLeaks revelations only tip of iceberg – Assange

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-revelations-assange-interview/

WikiLeaks revelations only tip of iceberg – Assange

Published: 02 May, 2011, 08:50
Edited: 03 May, 2011, 10:31

UK, London: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange attends a debate on the subject of
whistle-blowing with prominent public figures on secrecy and transparency issues at
Kensington Town hall in central London on April 9, 2011 (AFP Photo / Carl Court)

[video at url above]

The man behind WikiLeaks says his website's revelations are just the tip of the
iceberg. In an exclusive interview with RT, Julian Assange said it is only a matter of
time before more damaging information becomes known.

­The publication of confidential cables proved deeply embarrassing for the US and
other countries.

“If we look at our work over the last 12 months, think about that. All these stories that
have come out actually happened in the world, before 2010, but people didn’t know
about it. So what is it that we don’t know about now? There’s an enormous hidden
world out there that we don’t know about. It exists there right now.”

Assange claims the data released by WikiLeaks is not even the most important and
calls on people not to believe that the information they receive from the media is all
that is happening.

“We only released secret, classified, confidential material. We didn’t have any top
secret cables. The really embarrassing stuff, the really serious stuff wasn’t in our
collection to release. But it is still out there.”

Read more about Laura Emmett's interview with Julian Assange
­"Every war in past 50 years a result of media lies"

RT: Julian, thank you for talking to RT. Now, through the course of your work, you
have some insight into the way that political decisions are made throughout the
world. What do you make of the recent developments in the Middle East and North
Africa at the moment? Do you think that we are seeing genuine social unrest or are
we seeing some kind of orchestrated revolt and if so, who do you think is behind all
this?

JA: There is genuine change in some parts of the Middle East. I mean Egypt is a
clear case. I was concerned at the beginning over the Egyptian revolution: whether
we just saw a changing of the chairs and the maintenance of the same existing
power structure, or whether something was really happening.

But after Mubarak fled Cairo, you saw mini-revolutions occurring in every institution
within Egypt, from Alexandria to Cairo. So, that’s the sort of change that’s hard to
undo.

What’s happening in some other countries is a bit different. The situation in Libya
clearly has an involvement of state actors in it from many different areas. That’s
something that has been driven by state actors. Now, it is normal for neighboring
countries to have interconnections with each other: the activists in different countries,
families in different countries, businesses in different countries, and the states from
neighboring countries. That’s normal.

When outside forces from very, very far-flung countries start to take an aggressive
role in a regional affair, then we have to look a bit more and say that what is going
on is not normal. So, what’s happening in Libya, for example, is not normal.

RT: And social networking, what role, do you think, sites like Facebook and Twitter,
have played in the revolutions in the Middle East? How easy, would you say, is it to
manipulate media like that?

JA: Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been
invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people,
their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the
communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all
accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo – all these major US
organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a
subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to
use.

Now, is it the case that Facebook is actually run by US intelligence? No, it’s not like
that. It’s simply that US intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political
pressure on them. And it’s costly for them to hand out records one by one, so they
have automated the process. Everyone should understand that when they add their
friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies
in building this database for them.

RT: OK, let’s talk about other latest WikiLeaks cables that have been released. They
show the UK as a haven for extremism, with at least 35 Guantanamo detainees
having at least passed through the UK. Is the UK still a haven for terrorists?

JA: You know it has been a haven for terrorists, and it is certainly a haven for
oligarchs and former regime dictators that have come here. I mean, remember the
famous Pinochet trial for the extradition of Pinochet from the UK, which Thatcher
resisted – incredibly, using a lawyer that is involved in trying to extradite me from the
United Kingdom. Now, part of that is, perhaps, good. It’s an example of true
liberalism in the United Kingdom: everyone come here, and we’ll protect you. On the
other hand, there does seem to be a disconnect. Is it really supporting free-speech
activists like me who come to the UK? But, on the other hand, it is supporting people
like sons of Gaddafi.

RT: The Guantanamo information
 why has WikiLeaks released it now? I mean it
seems sort of to be after the fact. Is it because Obama has recently announced his
re-election campaign and obviously closing Guantanamo was one of his main election
promises?

JA: There is a number of reasons why we released it now. The primary one is that we
are a small organization, although a very committed one. Last year we came under
extraordinary attack. All these things continue to go on. And so they’ve really
dampened down our ability to move quickly and publish quickly.

The timing is good. Obama has given up on closing Guantanamo and has decided to
re-open the trial process. And we now have a situation where even the Obama
administration says that 48 of those people still in Guantanamo are completely
innocent and they should be sent somewhere, and they are not being sent
anywhere. So, completely innocent people are incarcerated for years and years and
years with no trial and no hope of relief. No country would agree to house them,
including the United States. But the United States has made them its problem.

The United States was involved in rounding up these innocent people, setting up a
process that was from the very beginning corrupt. There is a reason why they are in
Guantanamo and not on the US mainland and not in an allied country. And that
reason was to hide them and to keep them outside of the law. Just like you have
Caribbean islands engaged in money laundering, the United States is engaged in
people laundering.

RT:Let me talk about your media partners, one of which is The Guardian, with whom
you're now involved in a dispute. But you chose them as your primary English-
language partner for distributing the WikiLeaks cables. And now Guardian journalists
have published this book on WikiLeaks, which you say is an attack on you. How would
you describe, following that, The Guardian’s stance on whistleblowing and media
freedom in general?

JA: They are a publishing organization, and so, of course, they want as much rights
over publishing them as possible, that's a natural self-interest. What they have done
with this cable-cooking in this incredible over-redaction of cables is they have pushed
the right of the people to know to the very, very edge.  And what they are concerned
about is any possible attack on them.

But we have seen this sort of abuse of the material that we have provided several
times. The Guardian is the worst offender, but we saw it also by The New York
Times. The New York Times redacted a 62-page cable down to two paragraphs. And
this is completely against the agreement that we originally set up with them on
November 1, 2010. That agreement was that the only redactions that should take
place are to protect people's lives. There should be no other redaction, not to protect
reputation, not to protect The Guardian's profits, but only to protect lives.

What happens in the West is that there is no border between state interest and
commercial interest. The edges of the state, as a result of privatization, are fuzzed
and blurred out into the edges of companies. So, when you look at how The
Guardian behaves, or how The New York Times behaves, it is part of that mesh of
corporate and state interests seamlessly blurring into each other. The Guardian is
concerned predominantly about being criticized by these powerful interests, about
lawsuits against it driven by oligarchs, driven by people powerful enough to push a
court case forward.

RT: Let’s talk a little bit about you and what you are going through at the moment.
You are currently fighting extradition to Sweden. What are your fears should you be
extradited there?

JA.: The problem is in two parts. The United States is trying to get up an extradition
case for me to the United States. Just today we saw a new subpoena coming out of
the secret grand jury that is operating in Alexandria, Virginia, and it’s trying to get up
that espionage case against us. It is building that case, and whatever country I am
in, once it decides to indict, they will try to extradite me from that country, and
possibly not just me, possibly our other staff.

The other problem with the Swedish extradition is that the process itself has been
corrupted. It was corrupted from the very beginning. We’ve seen corruption in
Swedish media, we’ve seen all sorts of strange actions in relation to how this case is
progressed.

RT: What message do you think you would send to the world, if the UK did turn
around, almost unexpectedly at this point, it seems, and refuse to extradite you?

JA.: It depends on to which country. Here is the sort of calculation that’s going on in
the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom wants to keep its good relationships with
the United States. So, if the UK was to reject the US extradition order, that would
pose terrible problems for it. Similarly, if it was to reject the Swedish extradition
order, that would pose problems for it, because it would look like it was seeking to
harbor me. And this is the sort of difficult situation that Afghanistan faced when it
appeared as if it was harboring bin Laden, and as a result there was an aggressive
response. Any country which appears to be harboring us, as the United States is
trying to conduct its aggressive response, faces political pressures. If the United
Kingdom does attempt to extradite me to the United States, then it faces a difficult
position politically. The bulk of the people in the United Kingdom support us.

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.

RT: Thank you very much.