Press TV interview with Julian Assange on US war leaks

Press TV interview with Julian Assange on US war leaks
Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:58:19 GMT

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=136708

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks

The following is a Press TV interview with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks regarding the recent US war leaks in Afghanistan.

The interview was conducted on July 29, 2010.

Press TV: These leaks that have come out over the last few days, from your perspective, what is the most shocking thing? I guess you have no time to go through all of them yourselves. But what is the most shocking thing you have noticed?

Assange: Well the entire team of the New York Times and Der Spiegel have only gone through in detail about 2,000 of these reports. That's about 2 percent of the total. So we really need everyone who has some knowledge and interest in these matters to pull through the material. That is why we released a lot.

Now my broad takeaway looking at this six-year history of war is that the thing that stands out is the squalor of war. It's the everyday events that are occurring that adds up to kill the most people. It is a child killed there, a girl killed somewhere else, a village hit by a bomb, some troops hit by friendly fire, which is occurring continuously throughout this period.

Press TV: The daily horror of war?

Assange: The daily horror and the numbers are going up and up and up as time has gone by. So we can see that this has affected; we can see the stories behind the deaths of 20,000 people in this material. We added up the numbers and it was 20,000 people in the reports since 2004, which have been killed. Now there are some specific incidents to mention. The big numbers are the problems. For example, Task Force 373, US special forces assassination squad that has been working its way down. As assassination list called a Priority Effects List. How do people get on that list? Is there any jurisdiction or oversight? No. We have seen examples of how people get on to the list. Regional governors who are unhappy with some persons, a political opponent, maybe a genuine Taliban leader nominate them to go on that list. Then US general have also said for example to the brother of Karzai that if he doesn't behave he will be put on the list.

If I can actually simplify like all journalists do and look at some of the headlines, some of this stuff from the Guardian for example that is coming out is saying civilian deaths are being unreported. Is it possible to definitely discern that the US military is not talking about the civilians who are being killed because of this conflict?

Assange: Most of the civilian deaths in this material have not been reported. We are not talking about the number of civilian deaths. The aggregate figures for the last few years have seemed to have been reported. The problem is when we actually go down through these reports, which I used to create those aggregate figures, or numbers that occur every year. We see that the reports lie. So the figures released by the Pentagon are built up out of hundreds and hundreds of lies. Also these small events of five people killed or seven children killed in case of the Task 373 raid; these kills are not released to the media. The big kills do tend to be released. They are hard to cover up because there are too many people involved. The media usually gets wind of that. But the smaller kills in total kill far more people.

Press TV: What do you make of the US government's response that you know effectively you're kind of putting coalition lives at risk, or you're giving suckers to the enemies?

Assange: Whenever we expose the abuses of an organization we always seem to distract away from the important message, which is the abuses being exposed. But in this case, all the material is at least seven months old. There is six years worth of material but it ends at the beginning of 2010. So there's nothing in there on immediate tactical significance.

Press TV: Do you only expose big organizations; the governments, the US military? Do you hate the US military? Why don't you maybe expose some of the smaller organizations that abuse power as well?

Assange: We do! In fact we have exposed the assassinations in Kenya and we won the 2009 Amnesty Human Rights Award. We've exposed secret state censorship in China, and are in fact banned by the Chinese government into that filter. We did the same thing for Thailand and Thailand has in fact put up a fire wire to stop people from going to our website.

Press TV: Your personal integrity has been questioned. People say that you are against this war. So can I ask you what do you think of this war and do you want it to end as soon as possible?

Assange: Well what person would like a war to continue? We can see that wars sometimes need to be fought for defensive purposes when there is an aggressor. But nobody in their right mind would want a war to continue if there was a genuine, peaceful solution. This war continued for the past nine years. We can see for the past six years, which is two-thirds of that time that the violence has been escalating. 16,000 IED [improvised explosive device] events that we added up, 2,000 civilians killed from those IEDs together with the civilians killed by US military. This war is going to a bad place.

Press TV: But do you think that America should pull out of Afghanistan and the coalition NATO?

Assange: My personal opinion, which is not the opinion of the organization, is that they shouldn't immediately pull out. They would lead to an overrun and a collapse but rather a deal should be structured with the various players involved to permit a gradual withdrawal back to some parts of Afghanistan.

Press TV: How good do you think this material actually is. Even if all of the intelligence leaks are genuine, and ultimately it's the CIA's opinion isn't it? It's not a factual record of what happened.

Assange: It's a factual record of what was said at the time internally. So that is quite important as we can see what messages were being passed up from the American military to the political leadership. Now, there are reports in there from many informers that are paid by the US military. Those reports were not always accurate. In some cases they were completely outlandish. For example there was a report that said Osama Bin Laden was meeting every month in Afghanistan to have tea with so and so. I mean just completely outlandish reports that did not sound true. On the other hand, there are a number of other reports from the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] that are so numerous and also correlate to the public record that there does seem to be something in them.

Press TV: One thing that I found surprising and maybe Iranians would find surprising was the alleged support for the Taliban the Iranian government was giving them. Obviously Tehran would deny this and I think a lot of people would say, “look Shia Iran and Sunni extremists-Taliban are not natural bedfellows.” Do you find that report credible?

Assange: There are a variety of former reports in there. The US military when it deals with source frequently will give them a credibility rating. So for some, it has internally reported high credibility and for others low credibility. What I read in relation to Iranians was the importation of a system, which is like a shoulder firing rocket system. By itself, that report is not enough to make any observation. You need to correlate this material with other data.

Press TV: Do you fear for your personal safety now? Are you going to set foot in America? Do you fear that Wikileaks is an organization that may get shut down at some point?

Assange: Well I've been advised by my lawyers and by senior US national security reporters to not enter into the US states in relation to a previous matter; a previous leak we did. I assume that work itself to the political system in some months time will disappear. How this particular leak falls out still remains to be seen.

Press TV: And finally I would like to ask you about investigative journalism. You're a computer hacker aren't you? You're not a journalist by trade. You've come up with this...

Assange: I was a computer hacker when I was twenty, but I wrote my first book when I was twenty-five.

Press TV: Well, what I'm trying to say is that you've come up with this massive scoop. What aren't journalists holding their governments to account? Do you feel that they are not holding their governments to account? You know, in the way you have done.

Assange: Well clearly WikiLeaks, although, it's a small operation; we only have five full-time staff but we do have 800 volunteers. We have been able to draw attention and expose significant crimes in the world. And why hasn't the mainstream press done this? So there is something missing. And that's a niche we are filling. Why are we filling it because other organizations are not.

Press TV: Why aren't they doing that?

Assange: It seems to be that they are too close to the existing power structures of their country or they are in the cashed up classes of society depending on the nation where the organization is based. As a sort of transnational organization with people in many different countries, we're able to step above that.

Press TV: Julian Assange, thank you very much for your time.

Assange: Thanks.

NM/AKM