Assange interviewed by Democracy Now

There was an amazing interview conducted by Amy Goodman in London last Saturday. Since I don’t watch television news or read American newspapers these days (we have temporarily stopped the Denver Post but will resume this fall), I don’t know if it got any coverage here. I can only say … not very damned likely. The interview featured philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Assange. Žižek’s comments were animated by a heavy accent and constant involuntary arm movements, and so he was very hard to follow. Fortunately, Democracy Now transcripts all of their shows, so I was able to read his remarks. But I was most interested in Assange.

Below are a few of the more interesting comments from Assange:

And we worked together to statistically analyze this with various groups, around the world, such as Iraq Body Count, who became the specialists in these areas and lawyers here in the U.K. who represented Iraqi refugees—to pull out the stories of 15 thousand Iraqi civilians, labeled as civilians by the U.S. military, who were killed and were never before reported in the Iraqi press, never before reported in the U.S. press, world press even in aggregate—even saying today 1,000 people died. Not reported in any manner whatsoever. And, yeah just think about that—15 thousand people whose deaths were recorded by the U.S. military, but were completely unknown to the rest of the world—that’s a very significant thing.

Imagine that when they tore up the ground at the World Trade Center they found an additional 15,000 victims? How many more countries would we attack? But news that Wikileaks exposed the deaths of 15,000 new victims not reported in newspapers received no coverage here. And a statistician might have a field day. Opinion Research Bureau estimated Iraq casualties to be around 1,200,000 (in 2007!).

Finding 15,000 unreported in one fell swoop might be all there is, but it could also well be that the US his hiding bodies somewhere, perhaps in mass graves. They might be using gas ovens to incinerate them. I don’t know.

The only way you can easily make an impact is push information about the world to many, many people. So, the mainstream press has developed expertise for how to do that. And it’s competition also for people’s attention. So, if we had several billion dollars to spend on advertising across the world, if we could get our ads placed, we wouldn’t easily be able to make the same impact as we did. And we don’t have that kind of money.

So, instead we entered into partnership with over 80 media organizations all over the world, including many good ones that I wouldn’t want to disparage. To increase the impact and push our material into over 50 different countries endemically. That has been, yes, subverting the filters of the mainstream press.

But an interesting phenomena has developed amongst the journalists who work in these very large organization that are close to power and negotiate with power at the highest levels, which is the journalists having read our material and having been forced to go through it to pull out stories have themselves become educated and radicalize. And that is an ideological penetration of the truth into all these mainstream media organizations. And, that to some degree, may be one of the lasting legacies over the past year.

That is exciting. I remember my own jolt-to-awakening, completely unexpected. If it happens inside media organizations, well, let’s just say it is damned exciting.

[Amy Goodman] Bill Keller of the New York Times said “arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial”.

[Julian Assange] Well, after Bill Keller said that I was thin-skinned it doesn’t really leave much ground for reply does it? Sarah Palin also, once on Twitter, complained about my grammar, which is really the biggest insult for me. Calling for a drone attack is perfectly understandable, correcting my grammar from Sarah Palin, that’s a real insult.

I clipped that just for the humor of it.

…power that is completely unaccountable is silent. So, when you walk past a group of ants on the street and you accidentally crush a few, you do not turn to the others and say “Stop complaining or I’ll put a drone strike on your head”. You completely ignore them. And that is what happens to power that’s in a very dominant position. It does not even bother to respond, does not flinch for even an instance.

Yet we saw all these figures coming out and speaking very aggressively. Bill Keller, in a recent talk, as a way of perhaps legitimizing why he was speaking with me, said “if you have a dealing with Julian Assange, you’re fated to sit on panels for the rest of your life explaining what you did.” No, actually that’s a choice made by Bill Keller, a choice to twist history and whitewash history, and adjust history on a constant basis. Why? Why expend energy doing that? Why not just knock off another pager of the New York Times? Because, actually, these people are frightened of the true part of history coming about and coming forth. So, I see this as a very positive sign.

I’ve never heard it put better … the example of ants. That is how power operates, and the noisy ones we hear all day long do not have real power. They are just actors. There is amazing power entrenched on Wall Street and in London’s banking district. We don’t hear from them. We are merely the ants who did not get crushed. And the interesting thing is that American elections are the ants speaking, and power wishes us well, but doesn’t care about that.

So by all reports, this is a young man [Bradley Manning]of high moral character and when people of high moral character are pressured in a way that is illegitimate, they become stronger and not weaker. And that seems to have been the case with Bradley Manning and he has told U.S. authorities, as far as we know, nothing about his involvement.

We need a Cablebate for the CIA, we need a Cablegate of the SVR, a Cablegate of the New York Times, actually. All the stories that have been suppressed and how they’ve been managed. Once we’ve gotten that type of volume and concretize and protect the rights of everyone to communicate with each other, which – to me – is the basic agreement of civilized life. It is not the right to speak. What does it mean to have the right to speak if you’re on the moon and nobody is around. It doesn’t matter. Rather the right to speak comes from our right to know.

The two of us together, someone’s right to speak and someone’s right to know, produce a right to communicate, so that is the grounding structure for all that we treasure about civilized life…

I think the distortion by the media of history, of all the things we should know so we can collaborate together as a civilization, is the worse thing. It is our single greatest impediment to advancement, but it’s changing. We are routing around media that is close to power in all sorts of ways, but it’s not a forgone conclusion, which is what makes this time so interesting.

That we can wrest the Internet, we can wrest communication mechanisms that we have with each other into the values of the new generation that has been educated by the Internet. Has been educated outside of the mainstream media distortion, and all those young people are becoming important inside those institutions.

The battle for control of the Internet has been fascinating to watch. It is somewhat akin to an alien that keeps having babies even as Sigourney Weaver is trying to kill the mother. They didn’t know back when they talked about the “Information Superhighway” that a tool had been invented that would one day free Tunisia from American grip, and even, if only almost, Egypt.

I do want to talk about what it means when institution — the most powerful institutions from the CIA to news corporation are all organized using computer programmers, system organizers, technical young people. What does that mean when all those technical young people adopt a certain value system and they’re in an institution where they do not agree with the value system and yet actually their hands are on the machinery.

Because, there has been moments in the past like that. And it is those technical young people who are the most Internet educated and have the greatest ability to receive the new values that are being spread and the new information and facts about reality that are being spread outside mainstream media distortions.

The American media plays a hands-off role when it comes to abuses by governments that are under our control. But when a government as gone “rogue”, that is, is not under dominance by the US, the media is free to report all that goes on there that does not reflect badly. So we know when there are abuses in Iran, and we are hearing all about the abuses of the Syrians, but Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, or the new uprising in Egypt … not so much. Assange here is talking about political prisoners in Egypt who could not get any attention from Western Media while Mubarak was in power:

So for those 20,000 political prisoners in Egypt, they could gain no traction in the Western press, and yet others such as in Iran we hear about all the time. It’s very interesting that Egypt was perceived to be a strong ally of Israel and strong ally of the United States in that region, so all the political and human rights abuses that were occurring every day in Egypt simply did not get traction.

He goes on to talk about how these prisoners carried on a strike to gain conjugal visits from their wives, a sex strike, and how the western media showed some interest in that due to the salacious nature, but that too quickly dissipated.

You know, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, actually I spoke to Daniel Ellsberg last night, he told me an incredible story about that, but did you know the New York Times had a thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers one month before Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times? Fresh news. Amazing stuff.

So, on December sixth last year, these, uh, MasterCard, PayPal, The Bank of America, uh, Western Union, all ganged up together to engage in an economic blockade against Wikileaks, and that economic blockade has continued since that point.

So it’s over six months now, we have been suffering from an extrajudicial economic blockade that is occurred without any process whatsoever. In fact, the only two formal investigations into this, one was on January thirteen last year, by Timothy C. Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, who found that there was no lawful excuse to conduct an economic blockade against Wikileaks. And other, was by a Visa subsidiary, who was handling our European payments, Teller, who found that we were not in breach of any of Visa’s bylines or regulations.

Those are the only two formal inquiries. And yet, the blockade continues, it’s an extraordinary thing, that we have seen that Visa, MasterCard, Western Union, and so on, are, instruments of U.S. foreign policy, but, instruments of U.S., of not U.S., as in a state operating under laws foreign policy, but rather instruments of Washington’s patronage network policy. So there was no due process at all. And so, over the past few months, you know we have a number of cases on, so we’ve been a bit distracted, but over the past few months we have build up the case against Visa, and MasterCard, under European law.

It is indeed telling that these three companies are dovetailing their efforts with the US Government to shut down Wikileaks. Ya think?

There’s the big future, there’s the deep future that one can long for. So that is a future where we are all able to freely communicate our hopes and dreams, factual information about the world with each other and the historical record is an item that is completely sacrosanct. That would never be changed, never be modified, never be deleted, and that we will steer a course away from Orwell’s dictum of ‘he who controls the present controls the past.’

That is something that is my life long quest to do. And from all- from that justice flows because each, most of us have an instinct for justice and most of us are reasonably intelligent and if we can communicate with each other, organize, not be oppressed, and know what’s going on then pretty much the rest fall out. So that is my big hope. In the short term, it is that my staff stop hassling to tell me to go.

It ended on a high note with 2,000 well-wishers sending him back to detention for a crime for which he has not even been formally accused. Power is at work behind the scenes there. Real power. How do I know? Because they are so quiet.
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Watch the entire two hour interview here.