'Clinton made FBI look weak, now there is
anger'
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.
'Russian government not the source of
Clinton leaks'
JP: 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.
JA: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of
neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for
everything.
Hillary 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.
'Saudi Arabia and Qatar funding ISIS and
Clinton'
JP: 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.
JA: And twelve million dollars from Morocco …
JP: Twelve million from Morocco yeah.
JA: For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].
JP: 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.
JA: 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.
JP: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis,
particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this
money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton is
Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive
arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.
JA: 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.
JP: 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.
JA: Yes.
'Clinton has been eaten alive by her
ambition'
JP: That's extraordinary.
JA: 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 Hillary Clinton fit in this broader network? She's a
centralizing
cog (a 'cog' is a tooth of a gear or cogwheel
or the gear itself.)
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 centralizer 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 Citi
Bank.
This is quite amazing.
JP: Didn't Citibank supply a list …. ?
JA: Yes.
JP: …which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.
JA: Yes.
JP: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the
United States?
JA: If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely,
you could see it had become very
close to banking interests. 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.
'Libya is Hillary Clinton's war'
JP: 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?
JA: 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 favored 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 destabilization 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...
'Trump won't be permitted to win'
JP: You get complaints from people saying, 'What is WikiLeaks
doing? Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?'
JA: 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.
JP: 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?'
JA: 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.
JP: Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you
have a preference for Clinton or Trump?
JA: [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.
'US attempting to squeeze WikiLeaks
through my refugee status'
JP: 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?
JA: Let's 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 organization; [they] try and
prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense
interest to the American people and others about an election.
JP: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.
JA: 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].
JP: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.
JA: 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 institutionalized - this [the embassy] is the world...
it's visually the world [for me].
JP: It's the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn't it?
JA: It's the world without sunlight, but I haven't seen sunlight
in so long, I don't remember it.
JP: Yes.
JA: 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.
JP: Do you worry about them?
JA: Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.
'I am innocent and in arbitrary
detention'
JP: 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?'
JA: 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 recognize his asylum.'
[And here is].
Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say,
'No,
we're not going to [recognize the UN ruling], so leaving open
their ability to extradite.'
JP:
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.
JA: 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?
JP: Yes, it's different.
JA: 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.
