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Transcript
SOURCE
http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3
TRANSCRIPT
[for quotations, confirm audio]
INTERVIEW
JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS
INTERVIEWED BY:
Kostas Ephemera
The Press Project Podcast
On: Monday, 20th October 2015
AUDIO SOURCE
http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3
Hi, I'm Kostas Ephemera from the Press Project, and I'm speaking to you from the Embassy of Ecuador.
I'm here with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and he's agreed to give us some answers for the Greek audience.
The first question is: through the work of WikiLeaks & people like Edward Snowden, people now know that the system is corrupted. Although we've had movements like the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, they don't seem to last. Why is that?
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
The visible, apparent failure of Occupy Wall Street to produce a clear result has discouraged people, at least in the West, from engaging in large, mass gatherings.
However, a great many lessons and networks did emerge from Occupy Wall Street and have continued on in other areas.
More generally, the problem of mankind has always been its lack of understanding about how the world actually works, and the first task of human beings is to educate themselves and each other. That is what has led to all the advances that mankind has achieved.
Further advances in relation to how to restructure society or how to produce better institutions can only occur as a result of:
(a) new information which further reveals how modern human institutions actually behave; and
(b) the conveyance of that information into people's heads, in an accurate manner.
The problem of (a) is the problem of secrecy. The problem of (b) is the problem of media accuracy.
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
OK, you spoke of the media. When you started WikiLeaks, you collaborated with some of the biggest international media, but after a while they backed off. Why?
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
Well, all institutions eventually become defined by their own quest for power, regardless of how they start.
Large media organisations have been around for a long time and are powerful and, so, their management and ownership class, has learnt how to exploit that power by doing favours for other power groups that are around them, or defending their own social class or their shareholders directly.
The only exception is when the organisation is small, or where it has an ideological leader that has firm control over the organisation's destiny, or, perhaps, where its business model is populist and directly relies on its readers.
2:56
As a result of our publications, we have contracts with more than a hundred and ten (110) different media organisations around the world, and in a number of different publishing projects, we've given all those hundred and ten (110) media organisations exactly the same material and, so, we're able to compare results.
And we can see the geopolitical biases, cultural biases, the political interference from owners, the political interference from the management class, and redaction and censorship, for political purposes or because of fears of legal costs, or because of cultural sensitivities.
For example, The Guardian newspaper, El Pais, Le Monde & The New York Times, extensively redacted material in the diplomatic cables publication, for reasons other than protecting people from retribution, whereas The Hindu newspaper (which is the highest quality English newspaper in India), only redacted two cables.
4:07
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
*** [???] the dictum "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" works, after all, for the system.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
First of all, the national security state is very powerful.
In the United States, the Defence Department alone feeds ten percent (10%) of the US population in terms of its salaries and direct contracts.
That ten percent (10%) of the population has a social group on its periphery. It's people they are related to. For example, they have good friends, business partners. It maybe extends to thirty (30%) or forty (40%) percent of the entire US population.
Media proprietors tend to have many business interests and, so, those business interests intersect with the national security state.
So there has been suppression of the story, first of all.
Secondly, it is a complex story about spy agencies and it involves the interception of nearly the entire world.
It's not easy for people to imagine such a thing and still believe in it.
This interception is a lot like the concept of god: it is invisible; intangible; knows what you're doing; knows what everyone is doing; it seems that one has to take it on faith.
The fact is, strangely, mass surveillance is the first god in that respect, that has been proven to exist, that even atheists can believe in.
5:53
But-- atheists can say they believe in, but, really, most people don't believe in things they haven't directly seen themselves, because most people don't see direct -- they don't see the National Security Agency or GCHQ spies under their bed -- they don't understand the danger.
6:17
But I'm pleased that they don't understand the danger, because if everyone understood the danger, the response wouldn't be to stop mass surveillance: the response, by most people, would be become extremely conformist.
Now, this old result of 'nothing wrong'. So what is it?
'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.'
That encodes within it exactly the problem.
People try and guess what it is that these powerful agencies might consider wrong, and they are not sure where the boundaries are, and so they adjust their own behaviour and start to self-censor. But it's intellectually bankrupt.
7:00
In the end, even if you are a baker, not involved in any politics at all, its not simply a matter of arbitrary injustice might trip you up anyway, because of confusion and incompetence in the national security state. But it is necessary to protect forces in society that keep society honest.
For example, human rights activists, journalists, and opposition politicians.
These are all involved in preventing society collapsing due to corruption or incompetence.
And if those elements can't operate, then society will decay.
7:46
And it will even affect 'the baker' when society does decay.
So it's not just about you.
It is about this professional class of people who are involved in trying to holding government to account.
If they can't hold government to account, government will go bad.
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
Oh, yeah.
Lately, governments are becoming more aggressive, while their people find it harder to control them.
Are conspiracy theorists not wild enough anymore?
8:11
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
The US government is prosecuting me for conspiracy to commit espionage and general conspiracy.
And the government has conspiracy theories about the people, and even laws called 'conspiracy'.
It is interesting if you look at some conspiracy. You know, some unfounded paranoid conspiracy theories, spread around by people about the capacities of the National Security Agency and some other national spying services, they were not paranoid about.
8:46
I knew that at that time, and we know even more now.
But the bigger concern is where all of that is going.
I like to joke that the only thing that has saved mankind is bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence, because massive spy agencies like the National Security Agency that are intercepting nearly all the world's electronic communication, of nearly every person, would completely dominate the Earth if they were not corrupt, if they were not bureaucratic, and if they were not incompetent.
But, fortunately, secrecy breeds incompetence and corruption, and these are very large secret organisations, so they are also very corrupt ones -- corrupt and incompetent.
The problem is that the commercial sector like Google and Facebook are not corrupt or incompetent, as traditionally defined.
They are in a highly competitive commercial market and so they have become extremely efficient at collecting information, and the security agencies then simply stick their fangs into the big corporate players and suck the information out from there.
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
Let me ask you something different.
Greece, now, has a left-wing government with very friendly relationships with Ecuador and with *** [???]
How would you like to ask Greece for political asylum?
10:08
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
I would be very interested to hear of such an offer from Greece, as we know there's a lot of support from the Greek population, and it would be a legally and politically important gesture here in Europe.
It's an interesting question [whether] the true nature of Greek power permits such an action or not.
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
Why do you think Greek government is powerless to offer you asylum?
10:33
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
If I had been Cyprus, what would I have done in this conflict with the troika?
I can see that there's different arguments for going different ways, but what I would have found most interesting would be to use the conflict to create an intense unity within Greece and, provided you have control over the police, the army and the law, and you have a healthy population and no natural disasters, you can do a lot.
But there is really that question.
And you effectively create a war-time footing, which has effectively been a problem like war for Greece, and Greece has survived much harsher circumstances in war, so there's no reason to believe it couldn't survive a conflict of that type and, in fact, a number of good things might come out of that conflict -- but only if you have control of the police and the army. And, I think, the reality is that Syriza did not have full control over those three services, so that was not an option.
11:42
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
In Greece, we have suffered and continue to suffer the results of austerity.
Does the TTIP mean such kind of austerity for the whole of Europe?
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
TTIP is the US-EU portion of a much grander project.
That grand project [is] the three t'd agreements: TTIP, TISA, and TPP.
It's a project to create a new grand enclosure, a modern form perhaps analogous to the partition of Africa or the construction of the European Union -- a new economic and legal regime that will incorporate fifty-two (52) nations -- 1.6 billion people -- and, most importantly, two-thirds of global GDP.
It has been constructed politically by playing the China card.
So whenever something that radical and that large occurs, it's because it has the backing of several powerful forces.
In this case, it has the backing of the major US multinationals, who have been always trying to achieve agreements like this.
But it has also managed to get the backing of the US national security class, who view it as a strategic way of isolating China, India and Russia.
13:07
By playing that China card, they've also scared much of the establishment in Western Europe to coming into the system, and a lot of the South-East Asian countries like Australia.
It is the most radical construction of an international regime since the construction of Europe [ie the European Union], and it cements once and for all, international and neoliberalism [interests?] into those fifty-two (52) countries, in a binding international treaty which is exceedingly difficult to withdraw from -- much more difficult than Greece withdrawing from Europe [ie the European Union].
13:45
It covers nearly every aspect of the economy: transportation, all services -- and services make up about seventy-five percent (75%) of the European economy, so that means all internet services, banking services, consulting engineers and accountants. In fact, it covers everything that you can't drop on your foot.
[Laughter]
14:10
It arises -- let's go back to World War II.
After World War II, the US had fifty percent (50%) of the global GDP and it started to construct some international institutions to deal with that and the Bretton Woods system, the WTO [World Trade Organisation] and, eventually the WTO became an institution with its own goals to expand, and it included India, Brazil, Russia and China.
And the WTO became too democratised for the United States and there was several rounds of negotiation in the WTO in the 2000s, called the Doha Rounds, to negotiate some mutual lowering -- lower of tariffs and other mechanisms -- and the the US didn't like where things were going. So it effectively created a negotiation outside the WTO with its allies that it could push around, and the result is those T-3 agreements.
So, as negotiations originally started in Doha show, [the US] set up this legal and trading system covering two-thirds of global GDP. So its multinationals get what [they] want and, also, to isolate China.
15:35
To my mind, the single most significant issue is that it locks in, for at least decades, the US model of global multinational-led neoliberalism -- this radical new form of international neoliberalism -- which means that if Greece elects a different government, or Syriza wants to go a different way, it can't. It's too late. There's clauses in the treaty, such as if the government tries to introduce new legislation it will be penalised.
16:25
It may even be seriously anti-economic.
It does introduce the establishment of a great many new monopolies for the US pharmaceutical and copyright industries, which is anti-economic.
But just having such an invasive level of regulation for ninety-seven percent (97%) of industry in an international trade agreement suggests that it will calcify around economic activity.
17:01
It's very hard to change this international agreement, and as industry changes and new inventions come onto the scene, and there's new ways of working and new ways of trading, countries which have signed up to this treaty system will be bogged down in this international regulation.
17:22
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
One last question.
These days, the refugee crisis is the main issue for all Euro summits, but the people who participate in those meetings are the very same leaders of countries who sold their weapons, or, actually, their armies actively contributed to the bombing of the refugee countries.
What are your thoughts on that?
17:40
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
Well, it's a moral disgrace, you know, that the US is not taking Syrian refugees, and that the UK has said it will take only four thousand (4,000) per year over five (5) years.
It's no surprise to anyone. But, I mean, the situation comes about as a result of US, UK and French policy in the Middle East, together with the behaviour of US regional allies in the Middle East -- Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
But we published cables, including in my new book -- The WikiLeaks Files -- showing that the US has been trying to overthrow the Syrian government since at least 2006 and has very serious plans to do that; was trying to make the Syrian government 'paranoid,' trying to get it to 'over-react' by instilling that fear and paranoia, trying to make it worried about coups; trying to stir up sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shi'ites; trying to make its efforts to stop the originator of ISIS -- the ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq -- to make Syria look weak, and the fact that it was trying to crack down on terrorists at all, pushed that as an example of Syrian government not having full control over its territory, to encourage the government overthrow; trying to stop foreign investment in Syria and secretly funding a variety of NGOs in Syria and, also, *** [???], using Saudi and Egypt to help push that along.
There's an interesting question: what is even in it for the US, this result?
19:37
Well, it's not about the US population as a whole, of course.
It's about the particular factions that pushed for it -- whether they have a benefit -- and, of course, the CIA perceives they have a benefit. They create a problem and then they're given a greater budget to clean 'the problem' up.
Similarly, with the contractors, arms dealers and arms manufacturers: if there's no 'problem', then their budgets are cut. So they create problems.
It's also part of a grand area strategy to, you know, weaken Hezbollah, to allow Israel greater control over Golan Heights and maybe a buffer zone as well; to knock out a regional ally of Iran; to knock out the last Russian base, that's left outside the former Soviet Union, in Tartus; to create a path for a gas pipeline [with] a proposed path from Qatar to Saudi, up through Syria to Europe, which will compete with Russian gas.
20:39
So there's like, as I said before: like most significant changes that happen in the world, they happen because significant forces come together, and with multiple motivations.
It's what we see here.
But an easily predictable disaster. But from the US perspective there's nothing for them to dislike about having Europe flooded with Syrian refugees.
In fact, we have an interesting speculation about the refugee movements. We looked through our cables.
So the speculation was this: occasionally, opponents of a country will engage in strategic depopulation -- which is, to decrease the fighting capacity of a government, you try and get people to flee the country.
21:28
In the case of Syria, it is predominantly the middle class that is fleeing, because it is the most able to flee -- it has the language skills, money, some connections, and that's the engineering class, the management class, the bureaucratic class, precisely the class that is needed to keep the government functioning, and encouraging it to flee Syria -- for example, Germany saying that they will accept any refugees and by Turkey taking nearly two (2) million refugees, it does significantly weaken the Syrian government.
22:09
So we looked for other recent precedents of that.
In 2007, the Iraqi government made a formal demand of Germany to stop encouraging migration from Iraq to Germany.
Now, in that case clearly Germany wasn't trying to collapse the Iraqi government, but nonetheless the Iraqi government was feeling the same effect, that it was weakening its governing capacity.
Sweden, in the Iraq war, is documented in the cables as making its contribution to the Iraq war, as it said to the United States, the acceptance of the Iraqi refugees was part of its contribution.
So, regardless of whether there is design behind it, the forces engaged in trying to overthrow the Syrian government must be happy with the results.
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
We have the same effect of brain-drain from Greece due to the economic crisis now. Or the brains go.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
Exactly.
So, the result is to weaken.
As a political asylee myself, I'm not suggesting at all that Syrians shouldn't be treated kindly as refugees.
But we should understand that engaging in the situation that causes depopulation of a country does encourage its collapse.
Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project
Thank you very much.
--- end audio ---
More
Article by Kostas Ephemera
(Greek)
USA DOD Beneficiaries
Therefore, 10% of that estimate total population is equal to 32,258,300.6 Americans
-- ie over 32-million US citizens benefit directly from US Dept of Defence.
Adding estimates of periphery associations, perhaps up to over one-third of the total US population would benefit, either directly or indirectly, from the US Dept of Defence.
Troika = European Troika / tripartite committee led by European Commission (Eurogroup) with European Central Bank (ECB) & the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - representing the European Union (EU) in its foreign relations, particularly re common foreign policy & security policy -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_troika
Syriza - a left-wing political party in Greece, originally founded in 2004 as a coalition of left-wing and radical left parties. It is the largest party in the Hellenic Parliament, with party chairman Alexis Tsipras serving as Prime Minister of Greece -- ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriza
Bretton Woods system -- landmark system for monetary and exchange rate management established in 1944 - ref: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brettonwoodsagreement.asp
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