Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Thursday, May 28, 2015
Stories:
In 2013, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks played a pivotal role in helping National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden leave Hong Kong for Russia. During the U.S. hunt for Snowden, Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane was forced to land in Austria for 14 hours after Spain, France, Portugal and Italy closed their airspace under pressure from the United States over false rumors Snowden was on board. Assange gives the inside story on why that plane was targeted.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I spoke to him inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has taken refuge for nearly three years. In 2013, Assange played a pivotal role in helping National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden leave Hong Kong for Russia. During the U.S. hunt for Snowden, Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plan was forced to land in Austria for 14 hours after Spain, France, Portugal and Italy closed their airspace under pressure from the United States over false rumors Snowden was on board. I asked WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to talk about what he knew about the incident.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Let’s go back to 2013. There was a worldwide manhunt for Edward Snowden—at a particular moment in time, the largest manhunt the world has ever seen, more resources put into it over that two-week period than any other manhunt. The manhunt for Osama bin Laden over an expanded period is, of course, larger, but over that short period, because of the abilities now of the National Security Agency and the incredible paranoia by the U.S. deep state, the general intelligence community, which is about 100,000 strong, vast resources were put into trying to grab Edward Snowden or work out where he might go, if he was leaving Hong Kong, and grab him there.
So we worked against that, and we got him out of Hong Kong and got him to Russia, and we were going to transit through Russia to get him to Latin America. Now, the U.S. government canceled his passport as he was en route, it seems, to Moscow, meaning that he then couldn’t take his next flight, which had been booked through Cuba. And at that point, there became a question of, well, how else can he proceed? If he can’t proceed by a commercial airline, are there other alternatives? And so, we looked into private flights, private jets, other unusual routes for commercial jets, and presidential jets. Now, we managed to get some intelligence on the U.S. government thinking of the different types of jets and that they were concerned that the presidential jets might be difficult for them, from a legal perspective. In fact, from a legal perspective, they are flying embassies. They’re protected under the Vienna Convention. And no one has a right to go into the presidential jet. So, in assessing these options, President Maduro, for example, had already made an offer of asylum. I’m not sure if it was public by that stage, but it became public shortly after. And yeah, so we thought that and a few other presidential jets were a possibility, but we—particularly concentrating on—I don’t want to mention all the nations involved, but Latin American nations who were not Bolivia. There was an oil conference on in—there was an international oil conference in Moscow that week. Edward Snowden and our journalist, Sarah Harrison, still in the Moscow airport in the transit lounge, and so we thought, well, this is an opportunity, actually, to send Edward Snowden to Latin America on one of these jets.
Now, I thought and, in fact, advised Edward Snowden that he would be safest in Russia, that the ability to protect the borders of Russia was significantly stronger than Venezuela’s abilities, for example, to protect its borders or Brazil’s ability to protect their borders or Ecuador’s ability to protect their borders. But he was very worried about the optics. He didn’t want to be accused of being some kind of Russian spy, so he really didn’t want to be in Russia, because he didn’t want that kind of propaganda attack to distract from the revelations, even though it would place him at some increased risk.
So it’s the week of the oil conference. A number of presidential jets are flying back, and we are considering one of these. And so, we then—our code language that we used deliberately swapped the presidential jet that we were considering for the Bolivian jet. And so we just spoke about Bolivia in order to distract from the actual candidate jet. And in some of our communications, we deliberately spoke about that on open lines to lawyers in the United States. And we didn’t think much more of it. We had engaged in a number of these distraction operations in the asylum maneuver from Hong Kong, for example, booking him on flights to India through Beijing and other forms of distraction, like Iceland, for example. We didn’t think this was anything more than just distracting.
But the U.S. picked up a statement, a supportive statement made in Moscow by President Evo Morales, and appears to have picked up our codeword for the actual operation, and put two and two together and made 22, and then pressured France—successfully pressured France, Portugal and Spain to close their airspace to President Evo Morales’s jet in its flight from Moscow to the Canary Islands for refueling and then back to Bolivia. And as a result, it was forced to land in Vienna. And then, once in Vienna, there was pressure to search the plane.
So, it’s really a quite 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, and respecting the rule of law, the Vienna Convention. Just a phone call from U.S. 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 in demanding this urgent favor to close the airspace, which was humiliating to those Western European countries, and they got it wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you spoken to President Morales about what happened?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I’ve spoken to his ambassador and conveyed what had happened. Interestingly, the ambassador to the United Kingdom was involved in Portugal, so he was actually—at that time, in 2013, he was involved in the whole incident.
AMY GOODMAN: Because Portugal closed its airspace, too.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Portugal, Spain and France closed their airspace. Some other things happened. Some preemptive extradition requests were sent out, for example, to Iceland, which we got hold of and published. So there was—the U.S. was pressuring countries where flights might go through or land or refuel. And as a result of that operation, then it became clear that in fact it was too dangerous to—at that moment, at least, to take any flight out of Moscow. And this is what then led to his eventual asylum. It wasn’t just the removal of the passport, which removed his ability to use commercial flights. It was that the U.S. was closing airspace and acting in a manner where you would have to assume that they—you know, if a flight went past the United States—not over U.S. territory, but past the United States—there might be some kind of interdiction.
AMY GOODMAN: This is an odd situation. The U.S. is spying on your conversations. They pick up information from your conversations with lawyers, and then they force a president’s plane down on the ground.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, the U.S. should apologize to Evo Morales, to Portugal, to Spain, to France. Portugal, Spain and France should apologize to Evo Morales for not following the law. But we can’t predict when other countries won’t follow the law. We can’t predict that other countries engage in some criminal operation, unprecedented criminal operation. But in some ways, while it was unfortunate for President Morales, it was also a very good thing to have seen, because it revealed the arrogance of Western Europe towards Latin America. It revealed the arrogance and hypocrisy of the United States in pressuring Western Europe in that way. It revealed the nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States.
And this became the key ingredient in Edward Snowden’s asylum application, because, you know, you could debate about, well, will he receive a fair process in the United States? You know, there’s no system of law there, and will he receive a fair process or not? But after that happened, at a legal level, in terms of asylum law, it was very clear that there could not be a fair process. It was very clear he could not receive asylum in Western Europe. That was meaningless. And at a political level, the Russian government had to react. And it didn’t have any—it couldn’t react by handing him over. It would look weak and unprincipled. It only had one other card it could play, which is to accept his asylum.
AMY GOODMAN: Were you shocked when the U.S. forced down President Evo Morales’s plane?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes and no. I didn’t—we didn’t expect that they would do that. But we had seen from what they—Snowden was shocked—that we had seen in our battles over the past few years that similarly illegal conduct occurred. For example, they flew a private jet with six FBI agents and two prosecutors illegally into Iceland to interrogate people and commission them to try and steal information from us. So, we had seen this type of illegality before.
AMY GOODMAN: On that point, very quickly, on Iceland, the FBI flew into Iceland without asking the government’s permission?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The U.S. flew a private jet with six FBI officers and two prosecutors—one from New York and the other one, we believe, from Alexandria, Virginia, where the ongoing WikiLeaks grand jury is taking place—into Iceland under false pretenses, pretending that they were investigating a hacking threat to the Icelandic government. Once there, they then started interrogating an informant. Now, this informant had approached the U.S. Embassy with information. Now, it’s interesting to speculate exactly why the approach was made, whether it was because of a fear of threatened prosecution or a desire for financial reward, but then started interrogating them, taking them around hotel rooms in Iceland.
The interior minister of Iceland found out about what was going on and ordered that the FBI leave. They said they would. They didn’t. And then a second order was put in. And then they fled Iceland under fear of arrest and, at that point, then got the informant to fly to Washington, D.C., where they interrogated them for another five days and then tried to use them to infiltrate a part of WikiLeaks. And they then met in Denmark on two occasions, and money was handed over in exchange for information, $5,000.
Now, subsequently, that informant has confessed doing that, has been prosecuted in Iceland for fraud, embezzlement and other crimes, being pursued by us and by some other Icelandic businesses where this person was involved in embezzlement. Now, importantly, this is the FBI’s star witness in the case against WikiLeaks. So their star witness has gone from just being a witness to being someone who’s now in prison, who has confessed to fabricating letters for me—from me as part of a fraudulent operation, and other businesses in Iceland, and is convicted of other crimes and has additional crimes that are outstanding.
AMY GOODMAN: And he is in prison currently in Iceland?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is the star witness against you in the espionage case in the United States?
JULIAN ASSANGE: In the espionage case.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know he’s the star witness?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it seems, from other records where the U.S. government speaks obliquely about that operation and how valuable it was to them, that it was, you know, of extreme value to them.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, I want to end where we started, and that’s you right here in the Ecuadorean Embassy. You have been here now for years. Do you expect ever to leave?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s, you know, a geopolitical situation. It will depend on the geopolitics. There’s a number of nations involved who have relationships with each other. U.K. has a relationship with the United States. There’s domestic things happening here in the United Kingdom which are concerning, on the one hand. The U.K. says it will arrest me regardless. It refuses to reveal whether U.S. has already put in an extradition request. It says it will pull out of the European Court of Human Rights within a hundred days. I think it’s going to find it harder than what it is saying politically. It is engaged in this crazy adventurism in Libya.
It is introducing new legislation to say that it’s not enough anymore to follow the law. This is the incredible rhetoric coming out of the prime minister’s mouth, and the home secretary, who’s responsible for policing, police, that it’s not enough anymore to follow the law, it’s not a matter of introducing new laws to make new crimes, but people who make statements, which are perfectly lawful, need to be stopped; otherwise, criticism against the U.K.'s foreign policy could lead people into—it's a stepping stone to domestic extremism. And so, once people are named as someone who is leading to domestic extremism, a gag can be put on them, where everything they say has to have pre-publication review by the government. Meetings and meeting places can similarly be banned. You have to submit your agenda to what you’re going to do at that meeting and so on. This is not a matter of incitement. There’s already laws about incitement: You can incite one—someone to commit murder, incite someone to commit terrorism—these are already offenses. But it’s speaking about matters which are not offenses, and they have no intention to make offenses, so that’s a very strange thing. That is—you know, it’s not rhetoric that we expect to hear post-World War II in northern Europe. But we’re hearing it now.
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has taken refuge for the past three years. If he steps outside the embassy, he’ll be arrested. To watch part one of our exclusive interview, visit democracynow.org, where he talks about leaked drafts of the TPP—that’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership—the recent disclosures of a British nuclear submarine whistleblower, who says it’s harder to get through airport security than to get onto a Trident nuclear weapons submarine, and Assange talks about secret details of a European Union plan to use military force—in other words, blowing ships up—to curb the influx of migrants from Libya.
Five years ago this week, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was arrested in Kuwait and charged with leaking classified information. Weeks later, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of internal logs from the war in Afghanistan. It was one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history. Major articles ran in The New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel and other outlets. Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley, and Julian Assange soon became household names. While Manning was sentenced to 35 years in jail, Assange has been living for the past three years inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has political asylum. Assange faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. Here in the United States, a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs and State Department cables. In Sweden, Assange is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. "Look at Thomas Drake, for example, NSA whistleblower ... The pretrial process was both the deterrent, the general deterrent, and it was the penalty," Assange said. "And the same thing is happening here in the WikiLeaks process, where we have no rights as a defendant because the formal trial hasn’t started yet. The same thing has happened with me here in this embassy in relation to the Swedish case: no charges, no trial, no ability to defend yourself, don’t even have a right to documents, because you’re not even a defendant."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Five years ago this week, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was arrested in Kuwait and charged with leaking classified information. Weeks later, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of internal logs from the war in Afghanistan. It was one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history. Major articles ran in The New York Times, in The Guardian, Der Spiegel and other outlets. Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley, and Julian Assange soon become household names.
While Manning was sentenced to 35 years in jail, Assange has been living for the past three years inside Ecuador’s Embassy in London, where he has political asylum. Assange faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. Here in the United States, a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing leaked Afghan and Iraq War logs and State Department cables. In Sweden, Assange is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have ever been filed. Earlier this month, Sweden’s Supreme Court rejected his appeal to lift his arrest warrant. Swedish prosecutors are reportedly preparing to travel to London to interview Assange after refusing to do so for years.
On Monday, Democracy Now! went to London to interview Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean Embassy. When we were inside, British police asked the Ecuadorean Embassy to hand over our identification. That’s unusual. Local police aren’t supposed to ask people for ID entering foreign embassies, so we refused. In part two of our exclusive interview, Julian Assange began by talking about the latest developments in the U.S. case against him.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, the latest information is from the 4th of March. Now, we know, as a result of warrants that were issued to our journalists’ Google accounts, that the charges are espionage; conspiracy to commit espionage; the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is computer hacking; conversion, which is theft of government secrets; and general conspiracy. We don’t know how many of each one, but we know that these are the charge types. This is what has been used to apply for warrants. We know that there are several more warrants that Google has. Google has admitted publicly that it is still gagged about the other warrants that have been applied.
Now, on the 4th of March, there was a case in federal court where EPIC, which is a Electronic Privacy Information Center, NGO based in Washington, D.C., has been litigating to try and see whether the U.S. government is illegally surveilling our supporters. And their case has become unexpectedly important. There are some 500 information requests from the media and us, that have been blocked by the U.S. government, into what has been happening with WikiLeaks. And they’ve been blocked under the excuse that to release such information would be to help us resist the prosecution, and that they want to use that in the prosecution, and therefore they can’t release it to anyone. Now, the FBI has admitted that they have more than 42,135 pages just in the FBI file. There’s the DOJ file. There’s the grand jury file. And they’re not going to release a single sentence, not a single paragraph. But they have to explain themselves. And in explaining themselves, they’ve revealed some important things, that the investigation is being run by the DOJ National Security Division, and it’s being run by the DOJ Criminal Division, and that there is responsive documents in the DOJ extradition unit. So, we see the flavor of the prosecution from this, but also many other things. But this is the most recent one, from the 4th of March.
Now, importantly, we lost that case. Or rather, EPIC lost that case to get those documents, because the court accepted that to release any information about the WikiLeaks prosecution would affect the WikiLeaks prosecution, that we could use this to defend ourselves. And the argument used is quite incredible. So, we argued that—the argument used to restrict all information about the pending WikiLeaks prosecution is quite incredible. It is that not only would any information be—if released, assist us, even saying that we’re no longer interested in that particular person, we’re interested in this one, but that the court doesn’t have a right to, itself, make this determination. So, the government says that we need to keep all this information secret about the WikiLeaks investigation—tens and tens of thousands of pages, not a single sentence can be released—because it would help—would help WikiLeaks, would help me.
And then, so we say, and EPIC, who’s litigating the case, says, "Well, that’s absurd. Surely, out of tens of thousands of pages, there’s one sentence that can be released under the FOIA." And they say, "No, we’re the experts on our own investigation, and that’s what we say." And then, so we say, "Well, we want the court to look at the documents and say whether they can be released or not, whether they would truly affect the investigation." And then the government argues, "The court does not have a right to make this assessment. This is a question of a national security fact. Either it is a fact that the information held by the DOJ and held by the FBI would—about WikiLeaks, would affect national security or not. And it is the government that is best placed to determine this fact, not the court." And so, in the judgment, the judge states that it is necessary to show, quote, "appropriate deference to the executive on matters of national security," and therefore she is simply going to defer to the government’s claim without looking at the material at all. This is incredible, that you have the judiciary—the whole purpose of the judiciary is it is not to defer to the executive; it’s meant to be an independent assessor.
And if you look at what would happen in a normal criminal case, say, a murder case, there’s a question of DNA in the murder case. So the government would bring their witness and say, "We believe the DNA shows that this person was at the murder scene." And the defense would go, "We have an expert. He is much more eminent than your expert. He has done a bigger study. And he says that, in fact, no, this is quite incorrect. It is that you simply have incompetent procedures." And then the court would allow these experts to battle it out and make a determination on which one was the most credible. That is not permitted here. The court doesn’t say, "Let’s hear your expert." The court doesn’t say, "Well, I, the judge, will look at these documents, and I will judge them." Rather, it’s necessary to show appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security. So all that’s necessary for the government is to claim that this is a national security fact, information—any information released about WikiLeaks will harm national security. Its investigation into us, its spying on us, its spying on our supporters—any of that information, if it’s released, will harm national security and will compromise the pending prosecution of WikiLeaks.
So, what has happened here, at a much more interesting and structural level, is a front loading—a front loading of the deterrent and penalty phase. You have a classical view of the criminal process and the deterrent process. Someone is accused of something, you charge them with a crime, it goes to trial, you convict them or they’re acquitted. Let’s say they’re convicted. Then the sentence is both the penalty, and it is the deterrent. OK. Now, what has happened in these whistleblowing cases is that has been flipped. If you look at Thomas Drake, for example, NSA whistleblower, it’s been seven years. There was no penalty, no—he didn’t go to prison at all, in the end. And they just plea deal down to a slap on the wrist. It was—the pretrial process was both the deterrent, the general deterrent, and it was the penalty. And the same thing is happening here in the WikiLeaks process, where we have no rights as a defendant because the formal trial hasn’t started yet. The same thing has happened with me here in this embassy in relation to the Swedish case: no charges, no trial, no ability to defend yourself, don’t even have a right to documents, because you’re not even a defendant.
AMY GOODMAN: And the investigation, U.S. investigation, has gone on for how many years?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s gone on for just over five years.
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has taken refuge for the past three years. Coming up, Julian Assange will speak about the new ICWatch database, which culls personal details from LinkedIn publicly posted by former members of the U.S. intelligence community. You’ll also hear the inside story about why it’s believed the U.S. forced down the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2013 during the hunt for Edward Snowden. You may be surprised. Stay with us.
On Wednesday, WikiLeaks added more than half a million U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 to its Public Library of US Diplomacy database. The documents include diplomatic cables and other diplomatic communications from and to U.S. embassies and missions in nearly every country. "1978 actually set in progress many of the geopolitical elements that are playing out today," Assange said. "1978 was the beginning of the Iranian revolution … the Sandinista movement started in its popular form … the war period in Afghanistan began in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We return to our exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. I spoke to him inside the Ecuadorean Embassy on Memorial Day, where he’s taken refuge for the past almost three years. On Wednesday, WikiLeaks added more than a half a million U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 to its Public Library of US Diplomacy database. The documents include diplomatic cables and other diplomatic communications from and to U.S. embassies and missions in nearly every country. I asked Julian Assange to talk about the significance of the documents.
JULIAN ASSANGE: The U.S. State Department cables. 1978 was a very interesting period. These cables have come through the State Department system, international archives. We have sucked them all out and put them into our system, where we now have more than two million cables in the collection, all indexed. So, 1978, a very interesting time period. We have deliberately released all 400,000 at once to everyone. So, no one’s had an opportunity to cherry-pick, and we haven’t done that, either. What we have done is identified broad areas which are very interesting.
For example, 1978 actually set in progress many of the regional elements, the geopolitical elements, that are playing out today. For example, 1978 was the beginning of the Iranian revolution. It wasn’t until 1979 that it succeeded, but the push against the Shah started in 1978, with demonstrations and killings in response. Similarly, Nicaragua in 1978, the Sandinista movement started in its popular form as a result of a killing of a newspaper editor and was complete within two years. Afghanistan, the war period in Afghanistan began in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since. It was—the Soviet-friendly government came in in 1978, the assassination of the previous president, the rival of Soviet special forces towards the end of the year.
1978 saw the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. And while you might think, "Oh, well, that just concerns Vietnam and Cambodia," no, this is an important consequence of the Vietnam War and how Cambodia was used and became a Chinese and American proxy in relation to Vietnam. So China, the U.K., U.S. supported Cambodia against the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese prevailed, but the conflict also led to a finalization of what had started under Kissinger’s rapprochement with China—a decisive move to configure China against the Soviet Union and onto the U.S. side of the Cold War conflict. And this war with Vietnam is something that facilitated Brzezinski’s visit to China and the eventual normalization of relations which occurred shortly after.
AMY GOODMAN: When it comes to Afghanistan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an interview with a French newspaper, talked about the arming of the mujahideen, of Osama bin Laden and others, saying, "What’s a few riled-up Muslims?"
JULIAN ASSANGE: It was Brzezinski’s—the moment of history that Brzezinski is the proudest of is in fact Afghanistan and creating a Vietnam for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by arming the mujahideen and bin Laden. And that—
AMY GOODMAN: So that the Soviets would have their own quagmire.
JULIAN ASSANGE: So the Soviets would have their own quagmire, which they did. And that started in 1978.
WikiLeaks has begun hosting a new database called ICWatch, built by Transparency Toolkit. The site includes a searchable database of 27,000 LinkedIn profiles of people in the intelligence community. Organizers say the aim of the site is to "watch the watchers." WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange talks about how the database could be used to help identify individuals connected to the U.S. kill list, formally known as the Joint Prioritized Effects List, or JPEL.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, can you talk about ICWatch and what it is?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, ICWatch is a database of more than 27,000 profiles of people associated with the U.S. intelligence community or intelligence industry, so that includes people who work for government and people who work for private industry. It was created by a little journalism startup, a great bunch of guys, called Transparency Toolkit. And so they launched this a couple of weeks ago. This information was all originally in the public domain, or seemingly in the public domain, from LinkedIn, so these are CVs of people involved in various intelligence activities. By searching LinkedIn for key works, so they used, for example, the National Security Agency documents or names of special task forces or the, say, Joint Priority Effects List, the assassination program in Afghanistan, these were scraped out and then linked together so you can easily see, for example, who claims that they had worked at the National Security Agency at some stage or on various code-worded projects that the National Security Agency uses. As a result of doing that, they faced counterattack. And the counterattack was some quite serious death threats from—
AMY GOODMAN: This is for Intelligence Community Watch, ICWatch—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —for creating it, for indexing what already is in the public domain.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Indexing what was already public. An example of one of those death threats, from Washington, D.C., from a counterintelligence operative, who was also a former marine, saying that he would hunt them down and kill them no matter where they were in the world, and there’s no place in the world that they can hide.
AMY GOODMAN: As specifically what is quoted in your press release, "I promise [that] I will kill everyone involved in your website. There is nowhere on this earth that you will be able to hide from me."
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. So I think that—and there was a number of other such threats.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know who this is?
JULIAN ASSANGE: We have the email that it was sent from. Now, I think this—it actually perfectly explains why the U.S. intelligence community must itself be scrutinized. What do we have in that statement? Murderous criminal arrogance, and it’s somewhat megalomaniacal, as in "there’s nowhere in the whole world you can hide," and vengeful. So—and I should add one further point: and deeply incompetent to, A, send such a message at all, but, B, this is a counterintelligence person. This is a person whose job it is to not allow secret information out. That’s their job. But they let that information—they themselves put that information on LinkedIn. They themselves are irritated about their own incompetence, to the degree where they get threatening to kill people involved with a journalism project.
AMY GOODMAN: So, this is an intelligence analyst, you say, in the Washington, D.C., area who put this information, his own, on LinkedIn. Have you handed this email over to the federal authorities in the United States to investigate the death threats?
JULIAN ASSANGE: They have handed the information over to their lawyers to take the next step. And there’s a question about whose side of the matter the federal authorities might be on, and would they use the investigation as, in fact, a way to investigate the criminal death threat, or would they actually use it as an excuse to investigate ICWatch.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about—you have something like 140,000 entries here. So what are you doing with this, and how are people using it?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, as a result of those death threats, ICWatch came to us and said, "Can you make sure that this information will be protected?" They were also attacked electronically. So we, if you like, put ICWatch into the WikiLeaks system. It’s merged with all the other 8.3 million records. And so now it’s really quite powerful, and it is providing information on a lot of very serious programs that we didn’t know anything about. It’s also a great way for journalists to get people to talk to, because these are individuals, named individuals, saying that this year they worked in this particular program. And so, as a source of witnesses for prosecutions and for journalists, it’s a great resource.
I’ll give you an example, JPEL. If you search, go to WikiLeaks-dot—sorry, go to ICWatch.WikiLeaks.org and search for JPEL, or Priority Effects List. And that’s a name that is used for the U.S. assassination program in Afghanistan. We first revealed that in 2010, that that name was being used, and a task force associated with it, Task Force 373, but it has continued on and expanded in various ways. It has also brought in some NATO partners. That’s the joint aspect of it. But in the ICWatch information are individuals saying that they nominated 600 people to the JPEL. As a result, 37 of them were killed or captured. Others saying that they were directly involved in nomination for the purpose of kinetic targeting.
So, the U.S. has kind of made a bit of a legal—the Pentagon has made a bit of a legal ruse in terms of how it describes these assassination lists. They always say it’s a kill/capture list. And this is to create some kind of ambiguity, which is you go in to capture them, but they resist, and then they’re killed. But, in fact, in practice, it has come out that they’re destroying them; there’s no actual attempt to capture. And here we have evidence, confessions even, because it’s the individual concerned who has written the information, saying that, no, the purpose was always kinetic targeting involved in hundreds of nominations. There’s around 50 entries talking about—you know, bragging on their CV about how they were involved in these programs to assassinate people. Similarly with interrogations and detainee operations, people bragging on their CVs about how they oversaw 3,000 different interrogations, including of high-value detainees, high-value targets.
And new National Security Agency programs that we had not previously been aware of, even in the Snowden documents, because they give a list of codewords which they worked on. We know these ones, which is how we found the entry, but these programs we don’t know about. The CVs are great. I mean, you read a CV, and it’s all in context—the individual, what they did at the key dates, and giving the range of their work. So it’s not just some information about a particular keyword, but in context of the rest of the work they did that year and how the process integrates, what agencies they dealt with. So they brag about that they were liaising with the CIA and the DIA in relation to these assassinations.
AMY GOODMAN: And they talk about drone programs, being involved with drone targeting.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Thousands of references to—and some 8,000 references to people involved in UAVs, which is unmanned aerial vehicle, which is what is used inside the military to describe drones. There are more than 8,000 people involved in various aspects, from maintenance, manufacturing, targeting, intelligence feedback from drones.
AMY GOODMAN: Spying?
JULIAN ASSANGE: And spying, yeah, visual spyings, spying on radio signals, telephone signals.
AMY GOODMAN: So perhaps if you have job openings, you might be concerned that someone actually who’s applying for a job might actually be a spy.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I think that there’s a real question. If you look at some of these CVs, OK, for some people, they were involved in assassinating people, interrogating people, and then they’ve moved on. And where have they moved on? So they’ve moved into police. They’ve moved into careers advice at universities. So, you could be, you know, faced with a police interrogation, and that interrogator is someone who tortured people in Guantánamo Bay. I think there’s a real question about what the effect is on U.S. society, when you have all these people who have become used to torturing and killing people coming back and integrating back into society. And as far as I’m aware, no program to help them reintegrate and help them mobilize as they come back in. There’s a lot of debate about whether Guantánamo detainees could be brought to New York to be trialed. Are they too dangerous after the way that they’ve been treated in Guantánamo Bay? Or they’re an irritation to the United States. Are they too dangerous to have on U.S. soil? But I think the same question needs to be asked: Are Guantánamo Bay interrogators, are black site interrogators, are people involved in assassination programs too dangerous to be brought back in and enter into the police force or enter into university administrations or enter into the DOJ?
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, talking about ICWatch—that’s Intelligence Community Watch—speaking inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has taken political refuge for the past three years. Coming up, Julian Assange will talk about the inside story about why the U.S. forced down the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2013 during the hunt for NSA contractor Ed Snowden. Stay with us.
Yemen: At Least 80 Killed on Deadliest Day of Saudi-Led Strikes
Saudi-led airstrikes have killed at least 80 people in Yemen, marking the deadliest day of the two-month bombing campaign to date. The strikes battered the Yemeni capital Sana’a and the Bakeel al-Meer area near the Saudi border, where residents told Reuters at least 40 people were killed, most of them civilians. Arab planes and ships blasted Yemen’s largest military port in the city of Hudaydah, marking the worst attack on Yemen’s navy since Saudi Arabia launched its offensive on Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels in March. Saudi-led planes also targeted a car thought to be carrying Houthi leaders in central Sana’a. An eyewitness said the strike destroyed homes and injured residents.
Haj Hassan: "This is shrapnel that hit working men, not targets, not military bases. We must distinguish between the two. We must maintain our good senses. This was an attack on everything; this is an attack on the whole nation. What fault is it of the children and the women inside the homes?"
Concerns are mounting over the fate of a U.S. citizen held in a Yemeni military prison after a Saudi airstrike hit the compound where his attorneys believe he is imprisoned. The Guardian reports the U.K. human rights group Reprieve has asked the Obama administration to seek proof of life for Sharif Mobley, a father of three from New Jersey who has been detained in Yemen since 2010.
Video Appears to Show ISIL Spared Ancient Ruins in Palmyra
The self-proclaimed Islamic State has released new footage showing the renowned ancient ruins in the Syrian city of Palmyra apparently intact and unharmed. Despite international fears after ISIL seized the city last week, activists say ISIL has vowed to spare the structures and destroy only the statues. On Wednesday, ISIL reportedly shot dead nearly two dozen people accused of supporting the Syrian regime in the city’s Roman amphitheater.
GOP Sen. Rand Paul Blames Republicans for Existence of ISIL
Kentucky senator and Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul has blamed the Republican Party for the existence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Speaking on MSNBC, Paul pointed the finger at "hawks" like Senator Lindsey Graham.
Sen. Rand Paul: "ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS. These hawks also wanted to bomb Assad, which would have made ISIS’s job even easier. They created these people. ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved — they loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They just wanted more of it. But Libya is a failed state, and it’s a disaster. Iraq really is a failed state or a vassal state now of Iran. So everything that they’ve talked about in foreign policy, they’ve been wrong about for 20 years."
India: Death Toll from Heat Wave Tops 1,400
The death toll from a heat wave in India has topped 1,400 with scorching heat expected to continue. In the hardest-hit southern state of Andhra Pradesh, temperatures hit 47 degrees Celsius — or 117 degrees Fahrenheit — while the death toll topped 1,000 in that state alone.
U.S. Unveils Sweeping Indictment over Decades of FIFA Corruption
The Justice Department has unveiled a sweeping corruption indictment against 14 soccer officials and marketing executives accused of exchanging $150 million in bribes and "corrupt[ing] the business of worldwide soccer." Among those arrested in connection with the probe is Jack Warner, former vice president of soccer’s governing body, FIFA, who is accused of taking a $10 million bribe to cast his ballot for South Africa to host the 2010 World Cup. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the corruption dates back to at least 1991, when soccer officials, including the then-presidents of two regional soccer confederations under FIFA, solicited bribes from sports marketers for commercial rights to their soccer tournaments. The indictment Lynch unsealed features 47 counts, including racketeering charges typically reserved for drug cartels and the Mafia.
Loretta Lynch: "The 47-count indictment against these individuals includes charges of racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies spanning two decades. In short, these individuals, through these organizations, engaged in bribery to decide who would televise games, where the games would be held and who would run the organization overseeing organized soccer worldwide, one of the most popular sports around the globe."
Longtime FIFA President Sepp Blatter is not named in the indictment, and Lynch declined to comment on whether he is under investigation.
Nebraska Becomes 1st GOP-Led State to Ban Executions Since 1973
Nebraska has become the first Republican-controlled state to ban the death penalty in more than four decades. Republican Governor Pete Ricketts had vetoed the ban on executions, but lawmakers from both parties overrode his veto by a vote of 30 to 19. Independent Nebraska Senator Ernie Chambers celebrated the move.
Sen. Ernie Chambers: "Had not the conservative faction decided that it’s time for a change, there’s no way that what is happening today would be taking place. This will be a shining moment for the Nebraska Legislature."
Nebraska is the 19th state to ban executions and the first conservative state to do so since North Dakota in 1973. In a statement, the Death Penalty Information Center said, "The efforts and arguments of Nebraska conservatives are part of an emerging trend in the Republican Party, evidenced by the involvement of conservative Republicans in legislative efforts to repeal the death penalty in other states, such as Kansas, Kentucky, South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming."
U.S. Appeals Court Rejects Arkansas 12-Week Abortion Ban
A federal appeals court has struck down an Arkansas law banning abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. The ruling upholds an earlier decision against the 2013 law, which was among the most extreme abortion bans in the country. In a statement, the ACLU said, "This law was about banning abortion, plain and simple. Other states looking to pass similar laws should pay close attention."
Santorum Launches Presidential Bid; Pataki to Announce Today
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has launched his second bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Santorum was the runner-up in the 2012 nomination race, after winning the support of evangelical Christians. Santorum announced his bid in Pennsylvania at Penn United Technologies — a company which makes equipment for the oil and gas industries.
Rick Santorum: "Working families don’t need another president tied to big government or big money. And today is the day — today is the day we are going to begin to fight back. I am proud to stand here among you and for you, the American workers, who have sacrificed so much, to announce that I am running for president of the United States."
The Republican presidential field is set to get even more crowded today as former three-term New York Governor George Pataki is expected to announce his bid.
Chelsea Manning Pens Detailed Account of 5-Year Imprisonment
U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has marked five years since her arrest by publishing her most detailed account of her trial and imprisonment to date. Writing in The Guardian, Manning describes how she was initially held in a "hot, desert cage" in Kuwait, and threatened by Navy guards with "interrogation on a brig on a U.S. cruiser off the coast of the horn of Africa, or being sent to the prison camps of Guantánamo Bay." Manning also describes her nearly year-and-a-half-long battle to receive hormones for gender dysphoria. She announced her transition to living as a woman in 2013 after she was sentenced to 35 years in prison for giving secret files to WikiLeaks. Manning also discussed her motivation for releasing the documents, including information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She wrote, "Once you come to realize that the co-ordinates in these records represent real places, that the dates are our recent history and that the numbers represent actual human lives — with all of the love, hope, dreams, hate, fear and nightmares with which we all live — then you cannot help but be reminded just how important it is for us to understand and, hopefully, prevent such tragedies in the future."
Norway Divests Oil Fund from Coal over Climate Change Concerns
Norway is divesting from coal over concerns about its impact on climate change. The Norwegian Parliament has reached a unanimous deal to divest its $900 billion sovereign wealth fund from companies which generate more than 30 percent of their revenues from coal. The fund, which is the largest of its kind in the world, is made up of taxes from oil profits. The Parliament is expected to formally adopt the divestment plan on June 5.
EPA Unveils New Rules to Protect Drinking Water for Millions
The Obama administration has issued new rules aimed at protecting the drinking water of millions of Americans. The rules seek to end confusion about which waterways are protected from pollution under the Clean Water Act, specifying protection for up to 60 percent of the nation’s streams and millions of acres of wetlands which were not clearly designated before. The group Environment America called the rules "the biggest victory for clean water in a decade," while Republican House Speaker John Boehner blasted them as "a raw and tyrannical power grab."
Pentagon Admits It Accidentally Mailed Live Anthrax to Labs
The Pentagon has acknowledged it accidentally sent live anthrax spores to up to nine laboratories across the United States and to a U.S. military lab in South Korea. The labs were supposed to receive inactive samples for research, but got live spores instead. Anthrax exposure can be fatal, but the Pentagon says there are no known infections to date.
South Carolina: Cop Indicted for Killing of Unarmed 68-Year-Old Black Man
In South Carolina, a grand jury has indicted a white police officer who fatally shot an unarmed 68-year-old African-American man in his own driveway. Former North Augusta police officer Justin Craven was indicted on a lesser felony charge of firing his gun into an occupied vehicle, after a grand jury previously refused to indict him for voluntary manslaughter. Authorities say Craven chased Ernest Satterwhite to his home, then fired repeatedly through Satterwhite’s car window almost immediately after he stopped in his driveway. Craven claimed Satterwhite reached for his gun. Police have refused to release dashboard camera footage of the shooting.
Ex-Death Row Prisoner Paula Cooper Dies of Apparent Suicide
And an Indiana woman who drew international support when she was sentenced to death at the age of 16, and was later released from prison, has been found dead of an apparent suicide at the age of 45. Paula Cooper became the youngest person on death row in 1986 after her conviction for killing Ruth Pelke, an elderly Bible teacher. Her case drew calls to spare her life from people around the world, including the victim’s grandson, Bill Pelke. Shortly before her release for good behavior in 2013, Cooper told The Times of Northwest Indiana she looked forward to starting a new life.
Paula Cooper: "When I get out, I mean, I don’t care if I have to sweep floors, wash dishes or flip hamburgers; I’m going to take whatever I can get, you know, just to get on my feet and show people that I deserve a chance."
Paula Cooper was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in Indianapolis on Tuesday.
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"The Pre-charge Punishment of Julian Assange" by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
Tucked away on a side street in one of London’s toniest neighborhoods, just across the street from the sprawling department store Harrods, sits a brick, Victorian-era apartment building that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Julian Assange, the founder and editor of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, walked into this embassy on June 19, 2012, and hasn’t stepped foot outside since.
Ecuador granted him political asylum, but the United Kingdom refuses to grant him safe passage to leave the country. Instead, the U.K. wants to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions about allegations of sexual misconduct, although charges have never been filed. For close to three years, he has remained a prisoner in the embassy, denied even the hour of sunlight daily that most prisoners are guaranteed. For two years before that, he was either jailed or under strict house arrest in England, all without charge. When I went to London to interview him in the embassy this week, Assange asserted his belief that this pretrial phase is serving as both punishment and deterrent, and that Sweden is acting as a surrogate for the United States, which wants him jailed to stop the work of WikiLeaks.
Nevertheless, WikiLeaks continues, releasing groundbreaking information about potentially catastrophic conditions in Britain’s nuclear-weapons submarines, full chapters of the secret and intensely controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty, and more. It was from within the embassy that Assange helped National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden escape Hong Kong after releasing millions of documents detailing U.S. government surveillance programs. En route to political asylum in Latin America, Snowden became stranded in the Moscow airport only after the United States canceled his passport. Russia then granted him temporary political asylum.
When the sexual-misconduct allegations surfaced in late 2010, Assange waited in Stockholm for the prosecutor to question him, then the charges were dropped. He had government permission to leave the country. It was only after he traveled to the United Kingdom that the charges were resuscitated by a second prosecutor. This second prosecutor, Marianne Ny, has had years to question Assange, either in person in London or via video link. Instead, she insisted that Assange be forcibly extradited, until a Swedish court ruled that she should interview him in London. She has now indicated that she will, but so far has not said when.
Assange, his lawyers and his supporters are concerned that, if he were extradited, Sweden would hand him over to the United States, where all signs point to a secret grand-jury investigation of him and WikiLeaks. “Julian would have gone to Sweden a long time ago had he gotten a guarantee from Sweden that they will not forward him to the United States for standing trial on the espionage charges,” said Assange attorney Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner explained: “Sweden has never been willing to give that guarantee. And Sweden has a very bad reputation of complying with U.S. demands, whether it was sending some people from Sweden to Egypt for torture or whether it’s guaranteeing people who are asylees in Sweden that they won’t be deported.”
Vice President Joe Biden called Assange a “high-tech terrorist,” and elected officials and pundits from both major parties have said publicly that he should be assassinated. Assange told me: “The U.S. case against WikiLeaks is widely believed to be the largest-ever investigation into a publisher. It is extraterritorial. It’s setting new precedents about the ability of the U.S. government to reach out to any media publisher in Europe or the rest of the world, and try and achieve a prosecution. They say the offenses are conspiracy, conspiracy to commit espionage, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, computer hacking, conversion, stealing government documents.” The espionage charges, if they materialize, could come with the death penalty. Sweden, like most European nations, cannot extradite a person who might thereafter be put to death.
The statute of limitations will expire in August on all but one of the potential Swedish offenses for which Assange is wanted for questioning. The Swedish Supreme Court declined to quash the arrest warrant lodged against him in late 2010, in a 4-1 vote. Justice Svante Johansson, dissenting, wrote that Assange’s de facto detention was “in violation of the principle of proportionality.” Sitting across from me in the conference room of the small embassy that has for three years served as his home, his refuge and his jail, Assange told me, “We have no rights as a defendant because the formal trial hasn’t started yet. No charges, no trial, no ability to defend yourself ... don’t even have the right to documents, because you’re not even a defendant.” His skin is pale from years without sunlight, matching his prematurely white hair. But his resolve is unbroken, and the leaks he originally sought to publish when he founded WikiLeaks almost 10 years ago are still reaching the light of day.
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