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The award-winning
investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger is one of
many high-profile public supporters of Julian Assange and his
organization WikiLeaks. Pilger has attended Assange’s court proceedings
in London and has offered to contribute funds for his more than $300,000
bail. Pilger’s latest film, The War You Don’t See,
includes interviews with Assange. Pilger says that WikiLeaks is
revolutionizing journalism and galvanizing public opinion to stand up to
global elites. [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re continuing with John Pilger, the famed Australian filmmaker who has lived in Britain for decades. John, your film, The War You Don’t See,
premiered last night on ITV in Britain and in theaters throughout
Britain. The film features your interview with Julian Assange. This is
an excerpt.
JOHN PILGER: In the information that you have revealed on WikiLeaks about these so-called endless wars, what has come out of them?
JULIAN ASSANGE:
Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military or
intelligence apparatus insider documents, what I see is a vast,
sprawling estate, what we would traditionally call the
military-intelligence complex or military-industrial complex, and that
this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more and more
secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled. This is not a
sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement
of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players, all working
together and against each other.
AMY GOODMAN: That is an excerpt of the new film that premiered last night in Britain, The War You Don’t See.
John Pilger, you know Julian Assange. Talk more about what he’s saying
and about the media’s coverage of what WikiLeaks has done, from the
release of the Iraq war logs to those in Afghanistan to now this largest
trove of U.S. diplomatic cables ever released in history, John.
JOHN PILGER: Well,
what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is doing is what journalists should
have been doing. I mean, I think you mention the reaction to him. Some
of the hostility, especially in the United States, from some of those
very highly paid journalists at the top has been quite instructive,
because I think that they are shamed by WikiLeaks. They are shamed by
the founder of WikiLeaks, who is prepared to say that the public has a
right to know the secrets of governments that impinge on our democratic
rights. WikiLeaks is doing something very Jeffersonian. It was Jefferson
who said that information is the currency of democracy. And here you
have a lot of these famous journalists in America are rather looking
down their noses, at best, and saying some quite defamatory things about
Assange and WikiLeaks, when in fact they should have been exploiting
their First Amendment privilege and letting people know just how
government has lied to us, lied to us in the run-up to the Iraq war and
lied to us in so many other circumstances. And I think that’s really
been the value of all this. People have been given a glimpse of how big
power operates. And they’re—it’s coming from a facilitator, it’s coming
from these very brave whistleblowers. And in my film, Julian Assange
goes out of his way to celebrate the people within the system who he
describes as the equivalent of conscientious objectors during the First
World War, these extraordinarily courageous people who were prepared to
speak out against that slaughter. All the Bradley Mannings and others
are absolutely heroic figures. There’s no question about that.
In my film, I also went to Washington,
and I interviewed the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Bryan Whitman, the
man who’s been in charge of media operations, as they call it, through a
number of administrations. And I asked him to give a guarantee that
Julian Assange would not be hunted down, as the media was describing it.
And he said he wasn’t in a position to give that guarantee. So, I think
we’re in a situation here, Amy, where people have to speak out. This is
a very fundamental issue, and the people we need to speak out most of
all are those with the privilege of the media, with the privilege of
journalism, because this is about free information. This is about
letting us know truths that we have to know about if we are to live in
any form of democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: The nationwide warning that has gone out has been remarkable, John. Democracy Now!
obtained the text of a memo that was sent to employees at USAID,
thousands of employees, about reading the recently leaked WikiLeaks
documents. The memo reads in part, quote, "Any classified information
that may have been unlawfully disclosed and released on the Wikileaks
web site was not 'declassified' by an appropriate authority and
therefore requires continued classification and protection as such from
government personnel... Accessing the Wikileaks web site from any
computer may be viewed as a violation of the SF-312 agreement... Any
discussions concerning the legitimacy of any documents or whether or not
they are classified must be conducted within controlled access areas
(overseas) or within restricted areas (USAID/Washington)... The
documents should not be viewed, downloaded, or stored on your USAID
unclassified network computer or home computer; they should not be
printed or retransmitted in any fashion."
It’s gone out to agencies all over the
government. State Department employees have been warned, again, not only
on their computers where they’re blocked at work, but at home. People
who have written cables are not allowed to put in their names to see if
those cables come up. Graduate schools, like SIPA at Columbia
University, an email was sent out from the administration saying the
State Department had contacted them and that if they care about their
futures in government, they should not post anything to Facebook or talk
about these documents.
And then you have Allen West, one of
the new Republican Congress members-elect, who called for targeted news
outlets that publish the cables. In a radio interview, Congressmember
West—well, Congressmember-elect West, called for censoring any news
outlets that run stories based on the cables’ release. This is what he
said.
ALLEN WEST:
Here is an individual that is not an American citizen, first and
foremost, for whatever reason, you know, gotten his hands on classified
American material and has put it out there in the public domain. And I
think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which
enabled him to be able to do this and then also supported him and
applauded him for the efforts. So, that’s kind of aiding and abetting of
a serious crime.
AMY GOODMAN: And
speaking of crimes, another Congress member, longtime Congressmember
Peter King from here in New York, has called for the classifying of
WikiLeaks as a foreign terrorist organization. I did my column this
week talking about "'Assangination': From Character Assassination to
the Real Thing" and the calls of Democratic consultants like Bob Beckel
on Fox Business News for Julian Assange to be killed. He said he doesn’t
agree with the death penalty, so he should be "illegally" killed, maybe
taken out by U.S. special forces. John Pilger?
JOHN PILGER: Look, Amy, I thought you were reading out there several passages from 1984.
I don’t think Orwell could have put it even better than that. Surely,
we mustn’t think these things. I’m thinking it at the moment. So if I
was over there, I must be guilty of something, and therefore I should be
illegally taken out.
Look, there’s always been—as you know
better than I, there’s always been a tension among the elites in the
United States between those who pay some sort of homage, lip service, to
all those Georgian gentleman who passed down those tablets of good
intentions all that long time ago and a bunch of lunatics. But they’re
powerful lunatics. They’re—perhaps "lunatics" is not quite right.
They’re simply totalitarian people. And up they come in anything like
this. I see—I read this morning that the U.S. Air Force has banned
anybody connecting with it from reading The Guardian. So, everyone is banned from doing things and banned from thinking and so on.
They won’t get away with it. That’s the
good news. They are hyperventilating, and they’re hysterical, and so be
it, but they won’t get away with it. There are now two genuine powers
in the world. We know about U.S. power. But that great sleeper, world
public opinion, world decency, if you like, if I’m not being too
romantic about it, is waking up. And the scenes outside the court
yesterday went well beyond, I think, just the WikiLeaks issue. It is
something else. WikiLeaks has triggered something. And I don’t think it
will be the proverbial genie being stuffed back in the bottle, either.
So, you know, world opinion is—when it stirs, when it moves, when it
starts to come together collectively to do things that are important to
us all, it’s a very formidable opponent to those totalitarian people who
you’ve just quoted. So I’m rather more optimistic.
The immediate thing is to free Julian
Assange. And I’m hoping that will happen tomorrow at the High Court. I
should just add, you know, Mark Stephens was very eloquently describing
the case. But, you know, the absurdity of this case is that a senior
prosecutor in Sweden threw this thing out. And I’ve seen her papers. And
she was left—she leaves us in no doubt there was absolutely no evidence
to support any of these misdemeanors or crimes, or whatever they’re
meant to be, at all. It was only the intervention of this right-wing
politician in Sweden that reactivated this whole charade. So, in a way,
it is perhaps symbolic of the kind of charades, rather lethal charades,
that we’ve seen on a much wider scale in relation to the invasions of
Iraq and Afghanistan and other issues that have involved the deaths of
literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world. So, what
we’re seeing is a rebellion. Where it will go, I’m not quite sure. But
it’s certainly started, I can tell you. AMY GOODMAN:
John Pilger, I’d like to ask you to stay with us as we talk about the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we talk about the power of the U.S.
government. This week we reported on the sudden death of Richard
Holbrooke, who has played such a key role through four Democratic
administrations, from Vietnam to Yugoslavia, from Timor to Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Iraq. And we’d like to talk about his legacy and about U.S.
foreign policy. You have done a number of documentaries related to the
areas where he worked, and we’re also going to be joined by Jeremy
Scahill.
I also want to say, when you talk about
a wave of reaction against what has happened to Julian Assange, I
mentioned Columbia’s graduate school called SIPA that warned students
not to post things to Facebook or deal with these issues raised by
WikiLeaks, but there has been a reversal. Clearly, the administration at
Columbia has been seriously embarrassed, and the dean there has now
issued a new statement saying that he encourages the discussion of
issues, wherever those issues may take one. John Pilger, stay with us.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
Source: Democracy Now!
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