ROYCE AKERS: I'm Royce Akers, editor of VICE Australia.
And I'm here today with Julian Assange in the embassy of
Ecuador in London.
Thanks for you time, Julian.
JULIAN ASSANGE: You're welcome.
ROYCE AKERS: So it's a day after they ruled on the
Bradley Manning case.
Were you surprised by the verdict?
Or was it something you were expecting?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I was not surprised by the verdict.
We succeeded in an important component yesterday, which was
to knock off the aiding the enemy charge, which was a
potential death sentence.
Now, there's still a lot of work to do.
We have won the battle about this, but we
have to win the war.
He's now facing 136 years for sentencing for 20
convictions--
five convictions for espionage.
That's the first time a US military whistleblower who is
an alleged journalistic source has been
convicted for espionage.
Here, we have a case where, as far as the government is
concerned, there's been no victims.
No one has come to harm.
No evidence was [INAUDIBLE] of that.
There was no claim of that.
The only claim was that he was a whistleblower giving
information to the public via a media organization.
It cannot be the case that when a journalist's source
gives the information to the media for noble reasons that
they are charged with espionage.
There's no relationship with a foreign power.
It is an attempt to set a precedent to shift how
journalism is done in the United States to make the
security services uncriticizable in practice.
I said much earlier on that this was a show trial--
141 prosecution witnesses, over 20 of them
giving secret testimony.
Guantanamo reporters have said was more secret than the
actions in Guantanamo Bay.
So this was never a fair process.
He was never treated in a fair way.
He was locked in a cage in Kuwait.
He was stripped naked.
He was deprived of his glasses.
The UN even formally found against the United States a UN
special [INAUDIBLE]
for torture [INAUDIBLE].
This is an example of the collapse of the rule of law in
the United States.
And why does it do that?
Why does the United States destroy its
reputation like that?
Why is it engaged in such self flagellation to do that?
Because the desire for authority is much higher than
the desire for morality.
The desire to be seen as a vicious authority that can
terrorize people is higher than the desire to be seen as
an authority that commands respect as a
result of its integrity.
That tradeoff has been made.
It's also be made in the Edward Snowden, where the US
has fanned out preemptive extradition requests, where it
has denounced Edward Snowden from meeting with
human rights groups--
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch--
in Moscow, denounced him for speaking, not just for leaking
documents, but denounced him for even speaking about these
issues with White House correspondent Jay Carney.
There's another example.
ROYCE AKERS: A lot of people know you for your maybe run
ins with the American government and
big European banks.
And now you're running--
JULIAN ASSANGE: Quite a few other states as well.
ROYCE AKERS: And quite a few other states.
And now you're that you're running for Australian senate,
is that a shift of focus for you?
JULIAN ASSANGE: No.
It's another exploration.
So Plato said that the penalty for not being involved in
politics is being ruled over by your inferiors.
His basic view point is correct.
that if you do not engage yourself as part of the
political system, then other people who have other
interests will engage themselves in
the political system.
And they will make the laws and they will deploy the
assets of nation states accordingly.
And we saw that as a publisher with Australia where the
Australian government publicly stated that it had started a
whole of government task force against WikiLeaks and me
personally involving ASIO, the domestic intelligence service;
ASIS, the external intelligence service; the AFP,
the equivalent of the Australian FBI; the Department
of Defense; and the attorney general's office.
It then proceeded to try and cancel my passport.
And it provided intelligence to the United States about me
and the WikiLeaks organization, which is an
Australian publisher.
ROYCE AKERS: If some people see your Senate run as maybe
there's some sort of payback aspect to it, would that be
accurate at all?
JULIAN ASSANGE: I think that there might be a little bit of
payback aspect to it, yeah.
That's right.
But we don't want it to happen again.
We don't it to happen again to WikiLeaks.
We don't want it to happen again to other Australian
journalists.
We don't want it to happen again to any Australian
publishers.
And we don't want the broader aspect to happen again.
And the broader aspect is corruption of purpose where
representatives say that they're being elected to
represent Australian interests, but they're
actually engaged in feathering their own nests or
representing interests of a foreign state or a big
corporation.
I have been in the business for many years of
understanding states, bureaucracies quite complex
that involve millions of documents, really big
organizations and their interlinkages, and to bring
the professionalism that we have developed in WikiLeaks to
the Australian Senate.
I think that's very exciting.
ROYCE AKERS: Let's say you get into the Senate.
You obviously have a relationship with the US
government.
Can you foresee any ramifications?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE]
pretty interesting.
So if I am elected to the Senate, then I should take my
seat by next September.
So there will be the new question is
there some grace period?
Let's say this situation with the United States and Britain
is resolved.
The Senate has an opportunity to give me some grace over a
month, two months--
have [INAUDIBLE], actually.
And what it do that?
Would the two major parties actually do that?
The answer is probably no.
And that's very interesting.
As far as the United States is concerned, well, I don't think
it really matters.
They see Australia as an information quarry, as an
unsinkable aircraft carrier to put their marines and troops
and landing pads and [INAUDIBLE] bases--
those aspects are still there.
ROYCE AKERS: What are some issues that you are looking
forward to applying that expertise?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Mostly issues in information asymmetry, and
that's what I've been involved in for 20 years and what
WikiLeaks has been doing.
And information asymmetry is when--
say when you go to a drug dealer and you're looking for
some pure drug, and in fact, you get something that is cut
with some poison.
That's also the case now with government secrecy.
So you have government organizations accumulating
information and restricting it.
And the result of their accumulation and restriction
from the Australian public is that they have
an increase in power.
Every issue flows from this.
One of the attacks that is used on us is oh, well, you're
just concerned with just one thing as a party.
So are the Democrats.
As originally formed, they're concerned with democracy.
Yeah.
We're concerned with transparency, justice, and
accountability.
And everything derives from that.
Everything in government derives from that.
So for example, I started WikiLeaks because I understood
that simple, direct engagements in
politics don't work--
that everything that is politically possible is
defined by what is possible to report in the media, that we
live in a mediaocracy which means that presently, spin
masters are those people who rise to the top.
And that is something to do with the nature of media
reporting, the lack of diversification media
ownership in Australia, the constraints on good quality
investigative journalism.
There are a few number of reporters and the few number
of media outlets--
VICE is actually a rather good, new
addition to that in Australia.
So is Crikey.
So is The Conversation.
But that needs to be massively increased.
And there's a proper way to do that.
And the proper way to do that is to provide incentives for
all Australians to be able to produce content.
We can turn tens of thousands and perhaps up to 100,000
Australians into people who are
producing content for Australia.
ROYCE AKERS: Do Australians have cause for concern about
Australian intelligence agencies?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
The big problem Australian intelligence agencies is that
they're not Australian intelligence agencies.
That's the big problem.
I like intelligence agencies in theory.
It has the word "intelligence" in it, right?
That's a good start to actually try
and understand something.
The German intelligence agency, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND, is a federal news service.
So it's the idea that you might understand the world.
But because of the secrecy, that basic idea, which is a
good idea of understanding the world, becomes corrupted very,
very quickly.
And in the case of Australian intelligence agencies, it has
meant that they are subordinate to the US system.
ROYCE AKERS: You addressed the crowd and you detailed a plan
to help fund arts out of the defense budget.
Am I correct in saying that?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
That's right.
Our military shouldn't be wasted on absurd Hollywood
fantasies--
chasing around refugees.
And they shouldn't be wasted fulfilling missions for a
foreign power, in the case of the United States.
The export of Australian film into the information and so on
is one of the things that allows other countries to
develop a rapport with us.
And the United States has done this very, very successfully
and extremely aggressively across the world.
And Australia should be doing it-- not the way the United
States does it.
We can do it in a much more efficient manner.
ROYCE AKERS: So Hugh Jackman could be seen
as a military asset?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, Hugh Jackman is a military asset.
ROYCE AKERS: Who do you think's going to win the
Australian election this year?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah--
no one good.
No one good is the answer in relation to PM.
If you have a choice of someone who knows the system,
knows how to play it, do you elect them even though they're
an insider?
Or do you elect someone who's an outsider to the system and
not contaminated by it, say in the case of Gillard or in the
case of Barack Obama?
But then what happens?
They don't know the thing.
And so they have to suck up to it.
They're scared of its power.
They don't understand the parts.
They don't have any levers that they can pull.
And so they're very, very quickly completely captured by
it, which is what happened to Barack Obama and to Gillard.
Rudd--
he's already part of it.
But he's not fooled by it.
There's no need to be.
He's already a part of it.
That's why you need people like me who are experts in it
but are not part of it.