Liberty Report Flashback: Julian Assange Speaks Out...
We hope you enjoy these highlights from Julian Assange's interview on the Ron Paul Liberty Report on Apr. 27, 2017. You can watch the entire interview here: https://youtu.be/QwkrtpXp-wg
We hope you enjoy these highlights from Julian Assange's interview on the Ron Paul Liberty Report on Apr. 27, 2017. You can watch the entire interview here: https://youtu.be/QwkrtpXp-wg
We hope you enjoy these highlights from Julian Assange's interview on the Ron Paul Liberty Report on Apr. 27, 2017. You can watch the entire interview here: https://youtu.be/QwkrtpXp-wg
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
But I would like to first introduce Julian.
Julian, thank you for being with us today.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
It's good to be with you again.
You're different than the Washington Post and the New York Times.
You're not a publisher because you were a participant in obtaining this information, and they've thrown that out there.
But I just want to hear how you answer that charge.
Well, it's completely false.
They tried this in the trial of Chelsea Manning in 2013, and it failed.
It was not accepted by the military courts.
They attempted to use it in order to get an extra charge up against the then Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, and did not succeed.
And the evidence that they tried to present was really very pitiful.
It was that in 2009, Wikileaks had a web page, and on that web page, we had collected nominations from police, private investigators, journalists, et cetera, about what kind of documents that they would be most interested in seeing come to the public.
So that was called the WikiLeaks Most Wanted 2009.
It wasn't something that we had asserted that we wanted.
It was just collecting a list of what other people said that they wanted.
And of course, that included all sorts of documents.
And the U.S. government argued that there was one of the types of documents that was on that page, Chelsea Manning subsequently leaked to us, and therefore this was some kind of conspiracy.
So it's really very indirect and didn't stand up in the case.
But of course, the average national security reporter is usually engaged in a much closer relationship with their sources, cultivating them over a long period of time, speaking to them when the source says, you know, I heard that this terrible thing happened.
And then the reporter goes, well, that's interesting, but can you prove it?
Do you have a document about it?
And so Pompeo, and it looks like the DOJ, is trying to redefine that kind of conversation that occurs every day between journalists and their sources as conspiracy to commit espionage and therefore outlaw it.
Daniel, that's chilling.
I think, Julian, you mentioned earlier on the strange coincidence of the new assault on Wikileaks with the Vault 7 releases.
Vault 7 Revelations00:08:56
Why is the CIA so upset about these Vault 7 releases?
Well, I just go back for a little while.
You know, in the democratically aligned press, like the Washington Post and CNN, this assault on us by the CIA and apparently the DOJ is being framed as a Trump administration initiative.
But the reality is this was going on under Obama for years and years.
This is why I have asylum here.
There was a Pentagon war room of more than 120 people publicly admitted operating 24-7 back in 2010 and then it was very large FBI inquiry spraying out search warrants trying to install informers bribing people flying people to Washington flying illicitly plane loads FBI officers to Iceland to interrogate people etc.
Extremely large.
Now, because of the political relationship that the Democrats have with their base, by about 2000 and not long after I had asylum, so by about mid-2012, they perceived that it didn't benefit them politically to talk the case up.
But a lot was happening beneath the surface and continued to happen.
Now, this new Republican administration, perhaps because of the nature of the Republican base and because of the rhetorical assaults about them being proximate to Russia, have now decided that it benefits them politically to talk up the conflict with WikiLeaks and the DOJ.
So that's why it's been raised up so much.
The other reason is yes, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Vault 7 publications.
Well, we have published previous documents about the CIA, but only, you know, maybe 10 or 20 documents previously.
And it's very rare to see an actual fresh document leaked from the CIA with CIA led ahead.
Extremely rare.
There's reports about maybe some CIA official says something, or maybe a particular line in a document seen by a journalist says something.
But for an actual document, it's extremely rare.
Now, Vault 7 is the largest ever series of publications about the Central Intelligence Agency in its history, thousands of times larger than anything that has appeared before, and is on track to be the largest intelligence publication ever.
So that is, of course, deeply humiliating to the Central Intelligence Agency and its relationships to others, to other intelligence agencies like MI6 and in its relationship, say, with the National Security Agency and with the FBI.
So it needs a way to get away from that humiliation.
And of course, the public and tech companies also don't like it very much because we're revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency created an enormous hacker force, produced hundreds of viruses, which it then went around hacking and installing in people, developing methods even to install these into cars and to telephones and so on, and probably lost control of close to the whole lot of them.
Thereby, and covered it up.
So lost control last year of all of this.
It's flowing around some intelligence contractors at the very least.
And they covered it up and they didn't tell Apple or Microsoft or other affected members of industry about it.
And the public, of course, wasn't told.
It's quite interesting if it was also concealed from President Obama.
Anyway, so they have quite a lot to be concerned about in terms of possible prosecution of CIA officers, defunding of certain parts, general lowering of prestige.
And the CIA is a very competent organization.
I mean, this is the organization, let's look at it.
This is the CIA is the organization that gave us Iraq, Al-Qaeda, the destruction of democracy in Iran, Pinochet, the destruction of Libya, the effective rise of ISIS, and the Syrian civil war.
So this is an organization that goes around engaging in actions which are either deeply incompetent or which, even from the perspective of American power, counter to its purposes.
Yeah, I'm constantly fascinated by the relationship between Wikileaks and the mainstream media in the U.S.
And you mentioned the Washington Post.
And of course, they've accused Wikileaks of being, its core mission is not transparency, but undermining U.S. national security, yet they gladly publish your documents.
But I think the thing that we haven't addressed yet that I think is very important, and I'm sure you're aware of this, it's the ongoing demonization of Russia in the United States.
Anyone who questions the national security state is an agent of Putin.
Trump is an agent of Putin.
We're all agents of Putin if we don't go along with this business.
But the Washington Post, especially its editorial page, which, as you know, has a very neoconservative bent under Fred Hyatt, it talks about Wikileaks has close ties with Russia's intelligence services.
This was proven by the intelligence community's report about the DNC hack.
Of course, we know about the DNC hack that the forensic investigation was done by an organization called CrowdStrike.
The Washington Post wrote about that quite a bit.
But strangely enough, when CrowdStrike was very discredited a couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post neglected to mention that part.
So maybe if you could address these charges that Wikileaks is colluding with Russian intelligence services.
Yeah, it's very mischievous to see that in certain media.
It, of course, is false.
But there's no allegation, no official allegation from the U.S. government that there is any evidence of Wikileaks colluding with Russia or even that Wikileaks is colluding with Russia, but they can't find the evidence.
That just simply doesn't exist.
And in fact, it has been stated multiple times.
Barack Obama, in his last speech, said that there's no evidence of Wikileaks colluding with Russia.
James Comey within the last month has stated that if the Russians did anything, they didn't do anything directly with WikiLeaks, unlike DC Leaks and Gustav 2.0.
And James Comey, sorry, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence under Obama, stated just before the transition that the U.S. intelligence community had no insight into how Wikileaks obtained its publications,
when it obtained them, or the sequencing or timing as to how we did our publications.
So there you have it directly from Barack Obama and the head of the FBI and the head of national intelligence that there's no collusion that they can discern between Wikileaks and the Russian state.
So when you see reportage in the media suggesting otherwise, this is something that is even going beyond what U.S. intelligence is saying.
I don't think U.S. intelligence is particularly credible.
We all know that they're not particularly credible and they definitely have an angle that they want to push for for their own political and institutional reasons.
But they're not saying that WikiLeaks colluded with Russia in any way.
Give Us More Info!00:00:35
Julian, we're going to have to go, but I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
But can you give our viewers any information where they can get more information and follow what you're doing?
Is there a website or if they want to help out?
Do you have a suggestion for what they can do for you?
Yeah, thanks for that.
They can follow our Twitter account at Wikileaks.
It's twitter.com slash WikiLeaks.
And then they can also look at Justice for Assange, that's with a numeral for justiceforassange.com, which is about my own personal situation.