Assange interview with John Pilger

[Zenaan Harkness]

The Secrets of US Election: Jullian Assange Talks to John Pilger
http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-secrets-of-the-us-election-julian-assange-talks-to-john-pilger

This interview was filmed in the Embassy of Ecuador in London - where
Julian Assange is a political refugee -  and broadcast on 5 November
2016. 

John Pilger: 

What's the significance of the FBI's intervention in these last days of
the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?

Julian Assange:

If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively
America's political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the
former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified
information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable.  The
FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us.  But
Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's investigation, so
there's anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.  We've
published about 33,000 of Clinton's emails when she was Secretary of
State.  They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which]
Clinton has kept about half - 30,000 -- to herself, and we've published
about half. 

Then there are the Podesta emails we've been publishing.  [John] Podesta
is Hillary Clinton's primary campaign manager, so there's a thread that
runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as
they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals
and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover up of the
Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led
to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.

John Pilger:

The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that
Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and
its emails.

Julian Assange:

The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy
hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything.  Hilary Clinton
stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence
agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications.
That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.  

WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we
have published ten million documents, several thousand individual
publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got
it wrong.

John Pilger:

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.

Julian Assange:

And twelve million dollars from Morocco ...

John Pilger:

Twelve million from Morocco yeah.

Julian Assange:

For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].

John Pilger:

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.

Julian Assange:

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.

John Pilger:

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.

Julian Assange:

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.

John Pilger:

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.

Julian Assange:

Yes.

John Pilger:

That's extraordinary.

Julian Assange:

I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I
see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions,  tormented literally
to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the
reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people
and a network of relationships with particular states.  The question is
how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network?  She's a
centralising cog. You've got a lot of different gears in operation from
the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and
Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. 

She's the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs.
She's the smooth central representation of all that, and 'all that' is
more or less what is in power now in the United States. It's what we
call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant
Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was
formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a
representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.

John Pilger:

Didn't Citybank supply a list .... ?

Julian Assange:

Yes.

John Pilger:

 ... which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.

Julian Assange:

Yes.

John Pilger:

So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United
States?

Julian Assange: 

If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could
see it had become very close to banking interests.

Julian Assange:

So I think you can't properly understand Hillary Clinton's foreign
policy without understanding Saudi Arabia.  The connections with Saudi
Arabia are so intimate.

John Pilger:

Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya?
Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us, told you
about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of
the mayhem now in Syria, the ISIL jihadism and so on, and it was almost
Hillary Clinton's invasion.  What do the emails tell us about that?

Julian Assange:

Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's war. Barak
Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it?  Hillary
Clinton.  That's documented throughout her emails. She had put her
favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there's more than 1700
emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that
we've published, just about Libya. It's not that Libya has cheap oil.
She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan
state -- something that she would use in her run-up to the general
election for President.  

So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock
that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's the chronological
description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the
Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya;
jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and
migrant crisis. 

Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the
destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows,
but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the
movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean
and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all
problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa -- previously people
fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya policed the
Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011
by Gaddafi:  'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to
bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to be floods of
migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly
what happened.

John Pilger:

You get complaints from people saying, 'What is WikiLeaks doing?  Are
they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?'

Julian Assange:

My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say
that?  Because he's had every establishment off side; Trump doesn't have
one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you
can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms
companies... big foreign money ... are all united behind Hillary
Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists
themselves.

John Pilger:

There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians.
Some people say, 'Well, why doesn't WikiLeaks investigate and publish
emails on Russia?'

Julian Assange:

We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate
to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come
out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our
[Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court
cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political
persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.

John Pilger:

Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election?  Do you have a
preference for Clinton or Trump?

Julian Assange:

[Let's talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American
mind and in the European mind?  He represents American white trash,
[which Hillary Clinton called] 'deplorable and irredeemable'.  It means
from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective,
these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them.
Because he so clearly -- through his words and actions and the type of
people that turn up at his rallies -- represents people who are not the
middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming
to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the
class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in
any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how
the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes
absolute sense.

John Pilger:

I'd like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you
refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London.  Now Ecuador
has cut off the internet from here where we're doing this interview, in
the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned
about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign.  Can you
talk about why they would take that action and your own views on
Ecuador's support for you?

Julian Assange:

Let's let go back four years.  I made an asylum application to Ecuador
in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result
was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The
embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive
police operation which the British government admits to spending more
than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago.  Now there's
undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various
kinds -- so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in
the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million
people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping
on the side.  So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to
do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is
in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the
political heat as a result of the true information that we have been
publishing.  

WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this
embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we
publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a
number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is
through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It
means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation;
[they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of
intense interest to the American people and others about an election.

John Pilger:

Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.

Julian Assange:

I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then
be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In
Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the
Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what
would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has
refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we
know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has
requested since at least 2000.  So over the last fifteen years, every
single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been
extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won't happen].

John Pilger:

People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.

Julian Assange:

Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they're
adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are
adaptable.  They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being
involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue
on. So in my situation, frankly, I'm a bit institutionalised -- this
[the embassy] is the world .. it's visually the world [for me].

John Pilger:

It's the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn't it?

Julian Assange:

It's the world without sunlight, but I haven't seen sunlight in so long,
I don't remember it.

John Pilger:

Yes.

Julian Assange:

So , yes, you adapt.  The one real irritant is that my young children --
they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That's a
hard, hard adaption which they didn't ask for.

John Pilger:

Do you worry about them?

Julian Assange:

Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.

John Pilger:

Some people would say, 'Well, why don't you end it and simply walk out
the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?'

Julian Assange:

The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has
looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal,
adversarial litigation. [So it's] me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the
U.K.  Who's right?  The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being
arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has
occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and
Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse.
It is the United Nations formally asking, 'What's going on here?  What
is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should
recognise his asylum.' [And here is] 

Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, 'No, we're
not going to [recognise the UN ruling], so leaving open their ability to
extradite.  

I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this
situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn't
suit the Western establishment narrative -- that yes, the West has
political prisoners, it's a reality, it's not just me, there's a bunch
of other people as well.  The West has political prisoners. Of course,
no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or
detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don't call
them political prisoners in China, they don't call them political
prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don't call them political prisoners in
the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have
that kind of self-perception. 

Julian Assange:

Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged
with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm
prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that
the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole
thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found
that I should be given asylum.  Those are the facts, but what is the
rhetoric?  

John Pilger:

Yes, it's different.

Julian Assange:

The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been
charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already
previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that
the police made it up.  

[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally
found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that
Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found
that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sbT3_9dJY4