An eye-opener ! Julian Assange & John Pilger -- two great aussies living in self-exile...
Assange: Clinton is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT)
RT : 5 Nov, 2016
Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most
incendiary interviews ever in a John Pilger Special, courtesy of
Dartmouth Films, in which he summarizes what can be gleaned from the
tens of thousands of Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks this year.
John Pilger, another
Australian émigré, conducted the 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian
Embassy, where Assange has been trapped since 2012 for fear of
extradition to the US. Last month, Assange had his internet access cut
off for alleged “interference” in the American presidential election through the work of his website.
‘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. Hilary 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 & 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 Hilary 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.
JP:That's extraordinary.
‘Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition’
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 Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She's a
centralising cog. 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 centraliser 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 City Bank. This is quite amazing.
JP: Didn’t Citybank 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.
JA: 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 favoured 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
destabilisation 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 let 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 organisation; [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 institutionalised -- 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
recognise his asylum.’ [And here is]
Sweden formally writing back
to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we're not going to [recognise the UN
ruling], so leaving open their ability to extradite.
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.
