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VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Addresses UN, Confronts US ‘Regime Of Secrecy’

by on Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 5:21 pm EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks

Assange Addresses UN General Assembly

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed the United Nations General Assembly via video chat from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Here he remains confined, having been granted political asylum by Ecuador, but threatened by the UK with arrest and extradition to Sweden (where he is wanted for questioning on sexual assault allegations).

A U.S. grand jury has been building a case against Assange and WikiLeaks on espionage charges, for publishing whistleblower-obtained classified documents that have embarrassed the US government by exposing a vast assortment of illegalities.

Most Assange defenders suspect that the Swedish extradition request (Note: Assange has not been charged with anything. It is only for questioning.) is simply a ruse to get him into the Swedish legal system, where he would then be immediately extradited to the U.S. to face persecution.

He used his speech to the UN to remind the Assembly about the virtues of liberty, democracy, transparency, and the rule-of-law and contrasted these universal rights with the dark reality he helped to expose as practiced by the world’s most powerful and ‘virtuous’ nations.  

He gave a profile of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning, commending him for taking huge personal risks in his quest for truth and justice, and then condemned the U.S.’s persecution of him, using the findings of the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture to highlight that point.

Then Assange took President Barack Obama to task, by taking the very words he used in his speech to the U.N. and contrasting them with his actual policies, showing a stark contrast between the two. 

The transcript follows the video. 

WATCH:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmQwvgvR1S8[/youtube]

TRANSCRIPT:

Foreign Minister Patino, fellow delegates, ladies and gentlemen.

I speak to you today as a free man, because despite having been detained for 659 days without charge, I am free in the most basic and important sense. I am free to speak my mind.

This freedom exists because the nation of Ecuador has granted me political asylum and other nations have rallied to support its decision.

And it is because of Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that WikiLeaks is able to “receive and impart information… through any media, and any medium and regardless of frontiers”. And it is because of Article 14.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which enshrines the right to seek asylum from persecution, and the 1951 Refugee Convention and other conventions produced by the United Nations that I am able to be protected along with others from political persecution.

It is thanks to the United Nations that I am able to exercise my inalienable right to seek protection from the arbitrary and excessive actions taken by governments against me and the staff and supporters of my organisation. It is because of the absolute prohibition on torture enshrined in customary international law and the UN Convention Against Torture that we stand firmly to denounce torture and war crimes, as an organisation, regardless of who the perpetrators are.

I would like to thank the courtesy afforded to me by the Government of Ecuador in providing me with the space here today speak once again at the UN, in circumstances very different to my intervention in the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva.

Almost two years ago today, I spoke there about our work uncovering the torture and killing of over 100,000 Iraqi citizens.

But today I want to tell you an American story.

I want to tell you the story of a young American soldier in Iraq.

The soldier was born in Cresent Oaklahoma to a Welsh mother and US Navy father. His parents fell in love. His father was stationed at a US military base in Wales.

The soldier showed early promise as a boy, winning top prize at science fairs 3 years in a row.

He believed in the truth, and like all of us, hated hypocrisy.

He believed in liberty and the right for all of us to pursue happiness. He believed in the values that founded an independent United States. He believed in Madison, he believed in Jefferson and he believed in Paine. Like many teenagers, he was unsure what to do with his life, but he knew he wanted to defend his country and he knew he wanted to learn about the world. He entered the US military and, like his father, trained as an intelligence analyst.

In late 2009, aged 21, he was deployed to Iraq.

There, it is alleged, he saw a US military that often did not follow the rule of law, and in fact, engaged in murder and supported political corruption.

It is alleged, it was there, in Baghdad, in 2010 that he gave to WikiLeaks, and to the world, details that exposed the torture of Iraqis, the murder of journalists and the detailed records of over 120,000 civilian killings in Iraq and in Afghanistan. He is also alleged to have given WikiLeaks 251,000 US diplomatic cables, which then went on to help trigger the Arab Spring. This young soldier’s name is Bradley Manning.

Allegedly betrayed by an informer, he was then imprisoned in Baghdad, imprisoned in Kuwait, and imprisoned in Virginia, where he was kept for 9 months in isolation and subject to severe abuse. The UN Special Rapporteur for Torture, Juan Mendez, investigated and formally found against the United States.

Hillary Clinton’s spokesman resigned. Bradley Manning, science fair all-star, soldier and patriot was degraded, abused and psychologically tortured by his own government. He was charged with a death penalty offence. These things happened to him, as the US government tried to break him, to force him to testify against WikiLeaks and me.

As of today Bradley Manning has been detained without trial for 856 days.

The legal maximum in the US military is 120 days.

The US administration is trying to erect a national regime of secrecy. A national regime of obfuscation.

A regime where any government employee revealing sensitive information to a media organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or for espionage and journalists from a media organization with them.

We should not underestimate the scale of the investigation which has happened into WikiLeaks. I only wish I could say that Bradley Manning was the only victim of the situation. But the assault on WikiLeaks in relation to that matter and others has produced an investigation that Australian diplomats say is without precedent in its scale and nature. That the US government called a “whole of government investigation.” Those government agencies identified so far as a matter of public record having been involved in this investigation include: the Department of Defense, Centcom, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the US Army Criminal Investigation Division, the United States Forces in Iraq, the First Army Division, The US Army Computer Crimes Investigative Unit, the CCIU, the Second Army Cyber-Command. And within those three separate intelligence investigations, the Department of Justice, most significantly, and its US Grand Jury in Alexandria Virginia, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which now has, according to court testimony early this year produced a file of 42,135 pages into WikiLeaks, of which less than 8000 concern Bradley Manning. The Department of State, the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Services. In addition we have been investigated by the Office of the Director General of National Intelligence, the ODNI, the Director of National Counterintelligence Executive, the Central Intelligence Agency, the House Oversight Committee, the National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the PIAB – the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

The Department of Justice spokesperson Dean Boyd confirmed in July 2012 that the Department of Justice investigation into WikiLeaks is ongoing.

For all Barack Obama’s fine words yesterday, and there were many of them, fine words, it is his administration that boasts on his campaign website of criminalizing more speech that all previous US presidents combined.

I am reminded of the phrase: “the audacity of hope.”

Who can say that the President of the United States is not audacious?

Was it not audacity for the United States government to take credit for the last two years’ avalanche of progress?

Was it not audacious to say, on Tuesday, that the “United States supported the forces of change” in the Arab Spring?

Tunisian history did not begin in December 2010.

And Mohammed Bouazizi did not set himself on fire so that Barack Obama could be reelected.

His death was an emblem of the despair he had to endure under the Ben Ali regime.

The world knew, after reading WikiLeaks publications, that the Ben Ali regime and its government had for long years enjoyed the indifference, if not the support, of the United States – in full knowledge of its excesses and its crimes.

So it must come as a surprise to Tunisians that the United States supported the forces of change in their country.

It must come as a surprise to the Egyptian teenagers who washed American teargas out of their eyes that the US administration supported change in Egypt.

It must come as a surprise to those who heard Hillary Clinton insist that Mubarak’s regime was “stable,” and when it was clear to everyone that it was not, that its hated intelligence chief, Sueilman, who we proved the US knew was a torturer, should take the realm.

It must come as a surprise to all those Egyptians who heard Vice President Joseph Biden declare that Hosni Mubarak was a democrat and that Julian Assange was a high tech terrorist.

It is disrespectful to the dead and incarcerated of the Bahrain uprising to claim that the United States “supported the forces of change.”

This is indeed audacity.

Who can say that it is not audacious that the President – concerned to appear leaderly – looks back on this sea change – the people’s change – and calls it his own?

But we can take heart here too, because it means that the White House has seen that this progress is inevitable.

In this “season of progress” the president has seen which way the wind is blowing.

And he must now pretend that it is his adminstration that made it blow.

Very well. This is better than the alternative – to drift into irrelevance as the world moves on.

We must be clear here.

The United States is not the enemy.

Its government is not uniform. In some cases good people in the United States supported the forces of change. And perhaps Barack Obama personally was one of them.

But in others, and en masse, early on, it actively opposed them.

This is a matter of historical record.

And it is not fair and it is not appropriate for the President to distort that record for political gain, or for the sake of uttering fine words.

Credit should be given where it is due, but it should be withheld where it is not.

And as for the fine words.

They are fine words.

And we commend and agree with these fine words.

We agree when President Obama said yesterday that people can resolve their differences peacefully.

We agree that diplomacy can take the place of war.

And we agree that this is an interdependent world, that all of us have a stake in.

We agree that freedom and self-determination are not merely American or Western values, but universal values.

And we agree with the President when he says that we must speak honestly if we are serious about these ideals.

But fine words languish without commensurate actions.

President Obama spoke out strongly in favour of the freedom of expression.

“Those in power,” he said, “have to resist the temptation to crack down on dissent.”

There are times for words and there are times for action. The time for words has run out.

It is time for the US to cease its persecution of WikiLeaks, to cease its persecution of our people, and to cease its persecution of our alleged sources.

It is time for President Obama do the right thing, and join the forces of change, not in fine words but in fine deeds.

U.S. Officials Privately Admit They Overstated Damage Inflicted By WikiLeaks

by on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 10:12 pm EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks

Reuters is reporting that Internal U.S. government reviews confirm what many of us had cynically assumed all along: that the US government was intentionally embellishing the damage done to US interests abroad by WikiLeaks documents:

A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.

“I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the official said.

But State Department officials have privately told Congress they expect overall damage to U.S. foreign policy to be containable, said the official, one of two congressional aides familiar with the briefings who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging,” said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials.

Ironically, it is precisely attempts like these — by government officials to mislead the American public — that has made whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks all the more essential to the viability of our democracy.

I suspect this Administration is most concerned about the leaks exposing its own, or its predecessor’s, wrongdoings.  This Administration has gone to great lengths to cover-up and to squash any investigation — any judicial proceeding — against the Bush Administration for its alleged criminal activities.

They have got to be worried that the leaked documents could end up incriminating government officials in such a way as to push the entire topic of government accountability back into the public discourse.

For instance, it has been long reported that WikiLeaks is holding potentially incriminating military documents on Guantanamo Bay, where detainees were allegedly subjected to torture.  What if these documents were to provide an iron-clad case against the highest-levels of the Bush Administration?

The US is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture — a binding agreement ratified under President Ronald Reagan.  The Obama Administration therefore has very clear legal obligations that it has long been evading.  Whenever there are indications or allegations of torture, it is incumbent on the Administration to investigate.  It is NOT merely an option to mull over for its potential political ramifications.  It is the RULE-OF-LAW.

Here are those legal obligations:

A State Party’s Undertakings

Most of the provisions of the Torture Convention deal with the obligations of the States parties. These obligations may be summarized as follows:

(i) Each State party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture. The prohibition against torture shall be absolute and shall be upheld also in a state of war and in other exceptional circumstances (article 2);

(ii) No State party may expel or extradite a person to a State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture (article 3);

(iii) Each State party shall ensure that acts of torture are serious criminal offences within its legal system (article 4);

(iv) Each State party shall, on certain conditions, take a person suspected of the offence of torture into custody and make a preliminary inquiry into the facts (article 6);

(v) Each State party shall either extradite a person suspected of the offence of torture or submit the case to its own authorities for prosecution (article 7);

(vi) Each State party shall ensure that its authorities make investigations when there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed (article 12);

(vii) Each State party shall ensure that an individual who alleges that he has been subjected to torture will have his case examined by the competent authorities (article 13);

(viii) Each State party shall ensure to victims of torture an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation (article 14).

By not only evading their required responsibility to investigate torture, but by aggressively threatening other nations to end their investigations and criminal proceedings, President Obama and his Attorney General are themselves violating international law.

After George W. Bush boasted, during his recent memoir tour, that he authorized water boarding, Amnesty International’s Senior Director Claudio Cordone issued a pointed statement saying:

“Under international law, the former President’s admission to having authorized acts that amount to torture are enough to trigger the USA’s obligations to investigate his admissions and if substantiated, to prosecute him,”

“His admissions also highlight once again the absence of accountability for the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance committed by the USA.” […]

“Under international law, anyone involved in torture must be brought to justice, and that does not exclude former President George W Bush.  In the absence of a US investigation, other states must step in and carry out such an investigation themselves.”

The Obama Administration and the DOJ would obviously prefer to aid and abet the Bush Administration in evading justice in complete secrecy — hidden away from all public scrutiny.

The last thing they want is for WikiLeaks to publish documents that so undeniably incriminate upper level administration officials — either Bush’s, or Obama’s — that they in turn feel public pressure to actually do the unthinkable: to hold the political class accountable to the rule-of-law.

Julian Assange: Western Newspapers Hesitant To Publish Israel-Related Leaks

by on Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 12:28 pm EDT in Middle East, Politics, WikiLeaks, World

In a new, largely unreported Al Jazeera interview (with Julian Assange’s responses overdubbed in Arabic), the WikiLeaks founder reveals that he intends to release 3,700 documents pertaining to Israel.

2,700 of these documents, he said, originate from within Israel, and include “Sensitive and classified documents” on the 2006 military excursion into Lebanon (which resulted in the deaths of over 1,200 Lebanese — mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis — mostly soldiers).

The documents also contain information on Mossad assassinations, including the murder of Hamas militant Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai, as well as “a Lebanese military leader in Damascus by sniper bullets.”

The Peninsula , a Qatari newspaper, translated a small portion of the interview into English.  When the interviewer confronted Assange about an accusation (apparently lodged by a former colleague of his) of having cut a secret deal with Israel not to publish their secret files, Assange responded:

This is not true. We have been accused as being agents of Iran and CIA by this former colleague who was working for Germany in the past and was dismissed from his job after we published American military documents related to Germany.

We were the biggest institution receiving official funding from the US but after we released a video tape about killing people in cold blood in Iraq in 2007, the funding stopped and we had to depend on individuals for finance.

The Jerusalem Post published the following on Assange’s revelation as to why we haven’t seen more Israel-related leaks:

Assange said only a small number of documents related to Israel have been published so far because newspapers in the West that had exclusive rights to publish the material were hesitant to publish sensitive information about Israel …

“The Guardian, El-Pais and Le Monde have published only two percent of the files related to Israel due to the sensitive relations between Germany, France and Israel. Even New York Times could not publish more due to the sensitivities related to the Jewish community in the US,” [Assange] added.

It’s rather astonishing to think that the New York Times would publish sensitive information on its own country, the United States of America, but would refrain from publishing sensitive information on a foreign country, Israel.  What are we to make of that?

This unfortunately will continue to be a huge problem for WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and other whistleblower groups.  By giving the main stream media exclusive rights to the leak information — essentially the power to serve as middlemen between the documents and the discerning public — they are effectively allowing the corporate-owned media establishment to serve as ideological gatekeepers.

And as we learned from the run-up to the Iraq war, and a long string of other failures over the last decade, the establishment media most often chooses complicity over serving as a check on government power.

In the spirit of promoting true transparency, whistleblower groups should never again entrust just a few major publications in the main stream media to play such a vital role.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101223/wl_mideast_afp/usdiplomacywikileaksisraelassange

Time Magazine’s 2010 Person Of Year: People Vote Julian Assange, Establishment Crowns Mark Zuckerberg

by on Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 10:00 am EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks, World

Here’s how Time Magazine’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel, in his letter, leads up to his justification for the 2010 Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Award: There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralizing of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another. Our sense of identity is […]

What The World Has Been Waiting For: Greater Transparency

by on Monday, December 13, 2010 at 2:53 pm EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks, World

WikiLeaks has provided the people of the world with something they have sought since the existence of omnipotent empires: greater transparency.  The group has succeeded in creating a replicable model that utilizes encryption technologies and the world wide web to expose the inner-workings of the world’s most powerful governments and their corporate bedfellows. In pulling […]

Watch: BBC Reports ‘Hacktivist’ Groups Moving From DDoS Attacks To Journalism

by on Saturday, December 11, 2010 at 3:20 pm EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks, World

Here’s an interesting BBC World News America clip that documents how a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack actually works.  The news program then brings on Jeff Jarvis, author and Professor of Journalism at the City University of New York, and Tom Blanton, Executive Director of the National Security Archives.  They discuss WikiLeaks and the hacktivist groups […]

Watch: Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks To US Congress

by on Friday, December 10, 2010 at 2:01 pm EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks, World

Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) — the self-pronounced Libertarian — takes the floor of Congress to defend whistleblower group WikiLeaks and its right to publish the information it has lawfully obtained. This really is a must-watch speech.  Paul calls out his fellow politicians for jumping the propaganda bandwagon and in doing so, jeopardizing America’s 1st Amendment […]

Watch: First Interview With Mastermind Of ‘Anonymous’ Hacker Group

by on Friday, December 10, 2010 at 12:24 pm EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks, World

RT just released an exclusive interview with the mastermind of the ‘Anonymous’ hacker group.  The group has for some time been conducting something of a cyber war using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against anti-piracy groups — including Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).  They refer to their […]

MSNBC Pundits Push False Narrative On WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

by on Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 6:39 pm EDT in Politics, WikiLeaks, World

On MSNBC’s Jansing & Co, host Chris Jansing, The Washington Post Editorial Page’s Jonathan Capehart, and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari attempt to create a fictitious narrative for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.  They claim he’s anti-American, anti-Capitalist, and a hypocrite on his transparency agenda, seeing as how he’s ‘on the run’ from his own personal transparency.  They […]

A Final Nail In The Public Option Coffin: Nancy Pelosi

by on Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 5:36 pm EDT in Healthcare, Politics

The Democratic Party’s betrayal of the Left is effectively complete: Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) showed flexibility Tuesday on the public option, acknowledging the political reality that such a plan probably couldn’t make it through the Senate. A public plan, Speaker Pelosi said at a press conference, is meant to “hold insurance companies accountable and increase competition,” […]