| To: Retort From: IB 30 July, 2010 A fresh breeze has been enlivening the canicular days of summer here in London, as has the appearance - from behind the curtain - of Julian Assange, cool persona of Wikileaks. Assange has been proving an awkward customer in interview, and not just because of the doctors-make-bad-patients principle. It is most unusual to see the likes of Kirsty Walk seriously flustered, as happened on Tuesday's Newsnight. When did she or Paxman et al. last have to deal with a savvy anarchist using a late-Vaneigemist idiom (a la "Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings: On the Sovereignty of Life") while posing as a "transparency activist". And if you watch Assange's performance in front of the assorted hacks at the Frontline Club <http://frontlineclub.com/>, he frequently responds to the presupposition rather than to the question, above all where the questioner is thinking like a state. When challenged by the smug hectoring moderator, Paddy O'Connell, about his responsibility to the British boys who had given their lives in Afghanistan, Assange responded with "Given to what?" Pressed further by O'Connell, he made allusion to, but did not quote, Einstein's view of the uni(n)formed patriot - "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has
already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake,
since for him the spinal cord would suffice." It is also part of the Assange style to soften his retorts with "That said..." followed in this instance by "...conscripts are also human beings." Perhaps the most interesting exchange involved the matter of his recent celebrity, and the decision by Wikileaks to break cover from behind their formal anonymity. Assange gave a two part explanation: first, the journalistic principle of making and not becoming the news had backfired causing intense efforts at penetrating the organization's anonymity (not merely by state apparatuses); second, a fetish of anonymity exaggerates the dangers and indeed acts as a deterrent to potential whistleblowers who are the raison d'etre of Wilileaks. The crucial anonymity - for the sources - is created technically by Wikileaks engineers ("There's nothing like it on earth") such that Assange and co. do not have the burden of knowing who their sources are. This of course raises important questions about establishing veracity, as Assange acknowledged. Assange gave a pragmatic tactical justification for the gambit of collaboration with the Guardian, NYT and Speigel. The larger question - whether Wikileaks raises, any more than usual under current conditions of spectacle, the possibility of serious destabilization of Empire and Capital - was, of course, not posed to the Ozzie wizard in his appearance at the Frontline Club in Paddington, nor during his transatlantic interview with Amy Goodman, below. Iain ------------------------------------------------ Democracy Now, July 28, 2010 AMY GOODMAN: What do you consider the most
important revelations in the 91,000 documents you published on Sunday? JULIAN ASSANGE: So, everyone’s asking for a specific
revelation that is the most important—you know, a massacre of 500 people
at one point in time. But, to me, what is most important is the vast
sweep of abuses that have occurred during the past six years, the vast
sweep of sort of the everyday squalor and carnage of war. If we add all
that up, we see that in fact most civilian casualties occur in
incidences where one, two, ten or twenty people are killed. And they
really numerically dominate the list of events, so it’s, of course, hard
for us to imagine that. It’s so much material. But that is the way to
really understand this war, is by seeing that there is one sort of kill
after another every day going on and on and on in all sorts of different
circumstances.
AMY GOODMAN: You have said you feel there is evidence of
war crimes here. Can you talk about that? And specifically, what are the
examples that you feel are the most important?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. Yeah, well, these reports can be
quite terse, so I wouldn’t want to prejudge the issue and say for sure
that a war crime has committed—been committed. But some are deeply
suspicious, and there are examples which have been not mentioned in the
Western press but, as we’ve discovered, have been mentioned elsewhere
that are almost surely war crimes.
As an example, in the material, there’s a Polish My Lai. Polish
troops were hit by an IED and the next day went to the closest village,
which I guess they felt had supported the IED attack, and shelled the
village. Similarly, we see something like Task Force 373, a special
forces assassination squad so secretive that it changes its military
code name every six months, working its way down the JPEL, Joint
Priority Effects List, kill or capture list, usually a kill list. And we
have seen events where it has performed secret missile strikes on a
house, from within close proximity, and ended up killing at least seven
children, and a number of other incidences. The report itself about that
says at the beginning that the information about 373 being involved in
that event, together with the use of the HIMARS missile system, this
ground-to-ground missile attack, is to be kept secret even from other
people in the coalition of forces which equal ISAF, I-S-A-F.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel you have accomplished what you
wanted to with the release of these documents?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Not yet. We’ve made a good initial forray:
fourteen pages in The Guardian on Monday, seventeen pages in Der
Spiegel, front page of the New York Times, together with
underlying support. But altogether, the journalistic coalition that we
put around this material to try and bring it out to the public and get
impact for it has read about 2,000 of these reports in detail. There’s
91,000 reports. We really need the public, other journalists and
especially former soldiers to go through this material and say, "Look,
this connects to that," or "I was there. Let me tell you what really
happened. Let me tell you the rest of the detail." And over the next few
days, we’ll be putting up easier- and easier-to-use search interfaces,
the same ones that our journalistic teams use to extract this data.
Already if you go to war diaries—wardiary.wikileaks.org,
you’ll see several different ways of browsing through this. You can
look through some 200 different categories that the US military applied
to these reports. As an example, there’s 2,200 escalation of force
events self-described by the US military.
You have to be careful when reading the material. Reports that are made by military units that were involved in an attack or a counterattack are often biased, just like we know that when a police officer is involved in a shooting and creates the report about that shooting, the facts are likely to be distorted or twisted. Similarly, when a military unit is involved in killing someone who turns out to be a civilian, we see lots of exculpatory language or hiding of facts. And where we know an additional sort of public record or a full investigation has occurred, as an example Kunduz, the bombing that occurred in 2005 which especially the German press investigated in great detail, we can go back and see the initial report that the troops filed about what they did, and we see, instead of civilian kills, no mentions of civilians at all. Instead of over a hundred people killed, we just see fifty-six. And we can see that in report after report. So the sort of corrupt reporting starts on the ground and then moves its way up through the Pentagon and the press relations people and is then put into a politically sort of digestible form. But what you don’t see straightaway is a sort of contradiction by the base material and what is put out in public, although we are starting to see that in different events. But because this internal military reporting specifies where an event happened, which units were involved and when, and were done sort of on the same day, why there is simple cover-ups. They cannot be complex cover-ups in this material. So, by joining together several of these reports together with the public record, we’ve been able to discover the material of the sort of civilian casualty cover-ups or the involvement with the ISI and the Taliban that the New York Times published. We’ve been able to bring this material out, even though any individual report can’t be strictly trusted. AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange. We’ll be back with the founder of
WikiLeaks in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to my interview with Julian
Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times says it
consulted with the White House, showed them the documents to, oh, redact
whatever would endanger people, sources on the ground. How have you—or I
should say, Julian Assange, have you communicated with the White House
at this point?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, there’s quite some disingenuous
messages coming out of the White House in relation to the lead-up to
publication. Our media team didn’t want to all be stepping on each
other’s toes, so we selected the New York Times to be the group
that would approach the White House and try and get what their statement
was on the matter. That said, you know, there is a bit of a difference
between how the Times and the Washington Post was involved
in this issue. But how the American press tends to deal with government
agencies prior to publication and the standards that we have and the
standards the European press has, we don’t see that an organization that
is—we don’t see, in the case of a story where an organization has
engaged in some kind of abusive conduct and that story is being
revealed, that it has a right to know the story before the public, a
right to know the story before the victims, because we know that what
happens in practice is that that is just extra lead time to spin the
story. And we see some sort of pathetic attempts by the White House to
engage in a bit of spin about whether we contacted them or not. In fact,
we did contact them through the New York Times as a coalition.
AMY GOODMAN: And they praised the New York Times.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, they praised the New York Times.
I mean, you have to understand, the New York Times is a
mainstream organization, and it does work within a particular milieu and
particular constraints that appear to be present. But we aren’t totally
happy about the way that the Times has sort of defensively
written. That does seem a little bit unprofessional. So, as an example,
the New York Times stated that it chose not to link to our
website. I mean, it is just ridiculous. The public can see that and
Google it, if they want. If the New York Times, for whatever
reason, wants to not link to WikiLeaks for its own defensive politics,
then it can do that, and it’s perfectly entitled to. But to deliberately
say that that is being avoided smacks of unprofessional conduct, to me.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s been approved by the editor to do that, but
it does seem to be quite pusillanimous to be engaging in that kind of
defensive conduct, instead of pursuing the real meat of the story.
AMY GOODMAN: But it is WikiLeaks that reached out to these
three news organizations—Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New
York Times—to release simultaneously on Sunday these secret
documents, is that right?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, that’s right. Our promise to our
source is that we will try and get the maximum possible impact for their
material. And we could see that this was an issue where we could
actually pull together a coalition of both influential media
organizations and media organizations which have the capacity to engage
in some research. That was a—in itself, that’s an unusual collaboration
to have brought together these four groups, have them exchanging
research data, and all agree on the same publication timeline.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, you mentioned your sources.
Who are your sources?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, obviously, we can’t say, as an
organization that specializes in source protection. We are also
obligated, under the Swedish Constitution’s right to anonymity, to not
reveal our sources. Revealing our sources is, in fact, a criminal
offense in Sweden. And also, that holds for our contractors and computer
programmers. Now, that said, we can see that the material did come from
the United States government somewhere. And that’s obvious from some of
the other material that we have put out over the years. It’s one of the
hopeful things about these sort of publications, is that it’s not just
us exposing abuses of war, it’s not just us exposing corruption in
Africa; rather, it is insiders who are men or women of good conscience
who are deciding to help expose the situation, because they want their
own organizations to be reformed. So there are good people within the
United States government, and supportive of us and our ideals, and those
people step forward to make events like this a reality. Now remember,
we have put in a lot of work into this, and we have had some legal and
surveillance difficulties in the past few months, but the real heroes
behind this material is, of course, our sources.
AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon has announced it is starting a
criminal investigation to find your sources. Your response to that?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. We are concerned that the United
States has not announced that it is going to conduct criminal
investigations into the large number of previously undisclosed civilian
casualty events that are revealed by this material. Why is it that an
investigation is announced to go into the source, before an
investigation is announced to deal with the potentially criminal conduct
that is revealed by this material? The rest of the world is taking
note. There’s fourteen pages in Monday’s Guardian newspaper,
nearly—more than one-third of the entire paper dedicated to this issue;
seventeen pages in Der Spiegel, the most influential publication
in Germany. So, Europe is certainly taking note of the tenor that is
coming out of the White House and to concrete reactions coming out of
this material. It’s clear what the European population wants to see, and
hopefully that’s also what the US population wants to see, which is a
clear response to deal with the problems that are occurring in
Afghanistan, not a clear response to try and stifle or cover up further
allegations of abuse.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, in a memo, a US government
secret memo that WikiLeaks posted in March, marked "unauthorized
disclosure subject to criminal sanctions," it concludes, quote,
"'WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection,
counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army'—or, in
plain English, a threat to Army operations and information." Can you
respond to this?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. This was a 2008 counterintelligence
analysis of us by the US Army. Now, some thirty-two pages—and these
initial headers, you don’t need to worry about. In order for a
counterintelligence agent to be writing a report—analyst to be writing a
report about anything, they have to justify why they are writing a
report with language like that, and the same with the conclusions.
Now, what’s more interesting about that report is the middle. It
says that—it recommends that we be attacked by destroying our center of
gravity—that is, the trust that confidential sources have in us and the
trust that the public has in the integrity of the material that we
release. It goes on to explain examples of why we maybe should be
attacked. And those examples are examples which have embarrassed the US
military, revelations of abuses at Guantanamo Bay, abuses in Fallujah,
and potentially illegal use of small chemical weapons in Iraq. Now, it
says that one of the ways of attacking that center of gravity is by
publicly prosecuting whistleblowers. It even uses that word,
"whistleblower," not US military personnel or other personnel who are
engaging in irresponsible leaking, but rather whistleblowers, people who
are blowing the whistle on abuse. Now, we don’t know whether the
recommendations of that report were treated seriously or were followed.
It’s quite possible that the analyst who wrote that report was not
treated seriously, was viewed as politically too hard to go after us in
that way. But it is concerning that that intelligence analyst felt that
the US Army culture was such that it was even acceptable to produce a
report like that about press criticism and how to stop it.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, what about your safety?
Daniel Ellsberg, the most famous whistleblower in America, who released
the Pentagon Papers, expressed concern about your safety. Can you talk
specifically about what the US government has done, in relation to the
Australian government and in other ways, in dealing with you?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. So, some months—well, between one
and two months ago, there were concerning noises coming out of the US
administration that we were aware of from our sources there. And I was
given warnings, by Sy Hersh and other people who are connected to that
world, to watch my back. Subsequently, we have discovered that the US
administration, according to a well-placed Australian national security
journalist and former diplomat, that an approach was made to Australian
intelligence by the US for them to conduct extensive surveillance and
possibly raids or detainment of our people in Australia. That was
largely rejected, according to this reporter, by the Australian
government for political reasons. It’s quite sensitive for the
Australian government to engage in a cooperation that would lead to an
Australian citizen, especially an Australian journalist, ending up in an
overseas prison or being prosecuted in some way. Within the United
Kingdom, of course, there is fairly extensive surveillance of political
people, people who are viewed as politically sensitive in the United
Kingdom. That said, we do have extensive political and media support
here. And I would be extremely surprised to see any aggressive action by
intelligence within the UK or by overseas intelligence operating within
the United Kingdom. I think that would be unlikely to be tolerated.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian, do you feel you can come into the
United States?
JULIAN ASSANGE: My legal advice is to not attend the
United States, and I cancelled three media appearances in the United
States, including at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference
in Las Vegas. Now, on that same panel that I was due to speak at was
Valerie Plame, the former CIA officer, but also Scott Risen, a New
York Times reporter who wrote a book—
AMY GOODMAN: James Risen.
JULIAN ASSANGE: —revealing some—I’m sorry, yes, James
Risen, who wrote a book revealing some details of some bungled CIA
operations. He also did not speak at that panel for legal reasons
relating to protecting his sources.
AMY GOODMAN: Congress is now rushing to pass a critical
war-financing bill, reportedly as early as today, fearing disclosures
could stoke antiwar sentiment in this country, the WikiLeak exposures.
Your response to this?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Congress should understand that, as a
result of these exposures and what seems to be a general shift in
feeling about the war in Afghanistan, that the population is watching
intensely to what will happen. So I would ask that those—that war bill
of $60 billion worth of funding have its proper airing. If it doesn’t,
we may be pushed into a position where this past nine years will extend
possibly another nine. Maybe right now is the moment to try and
restructure this war in Afghanistan. It’s clear that there’s no easy way
out of the conflict, but it is also clear that the war is escalating on
all sides, that the number of kills going up, both civilian and
military, is unsustainable. Something has to change, and it might as
well be now. And the funding bill can be used as that moment where
change has to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I’d like you to respond
quickly to the responses of the administration, of the Obama
administration: one, that this is old news, that it goes until December
'09, exactly when the Obama administration changed its policy with the
surge.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, so, this is a bit of rhetorical
trickery by the White House. The material goes to December 31, ’09, so
it's valid up to the beginning of 2010, for a six-year period. So it
does cover a sweep of the war which hasn’t yet turned around. Now,
Obama’s policy change came in on the 1st of December, so there is, in
fact, an overlap. We can see some of what happens. But looking back
through the data at successive policy changes—for example, the policy
changes introduced by McChrystal—what we don’t see is a real change to
how things happen on the ground. So a policy change is just words, but
what actually happens on the ground, well, we can see it from this data.
Very little happens. The US military and the soldiers in Afghanistan
are a very, very big ship to turn around. Their interaction with that
environment and with the Taliban and with the local population has its
own dynamic that is independent to the policies that are tried—that
people try and push down from on high. We can see that, as an example,
when McChrystal tried to introduce more metrics, more measurements, of
how civilian casualties were occurring. Fields pop up in the database
around that time. But we see that troops that are causing civilian
casualties simply don’t fill out that field, or they lie about whether
the casualties have occurred, or they misrepresent whether it was a
civilian casualty versus an insurgent casualty. That sort of—that
culture and interaction between Taliban and US forces and other elements
operating in Afghanistan is very difficult to change. And so, we don’t
expect that the situation, as it stands now, some seven months after
this data stopped being collected, would be that different to the
previous six years, which we can see in the material that has been
released.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, the charge that WikiLeaks
releasing these documents is a threat to national security and people on
the ground in Afghanistan?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, this is a nonsense. First of all, whenever we hear this term, "threat to national security," what are we talking about? It’s time people stop responding to that question, unless it’s well phrased. Do we mean the national security, the security of the entire nation of the United States? It is clearly an obvious nonsense that—probably almost any kind of information could be a threat to the national security of the United States. Now, do we mean threats to a few soldiers in Afghanistan? That is a more reasonable question and a serious one. Well, the material is seven months old. It doesn’t talk about particular movements of soldiers now or any ongoing sort of operation that’s going to occur, so it’s not of tactical significance. But it is of significance for investigators. It is of significance for understanding the broad sweep of what is happening in Afghanistan. Remember, it is this data that the US military uses internally to monitor the situation, that it uses to develop those aggregate figures about civilian casualties, Taliban, the ratio between killed and wounded, the ration between killed and detained over time. Now, all that original reporting, unmassaged by the Pentagon press office, is available to academics, historians and the general public to understand that war. AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. I spoke
to him yesterday in London. The war funding bill passed by the House
last night. We’ll be back with Assange in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to my interview with the founder of
WikiLeaks.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, the data that you—the
documents you have withheld, is it some 15,000? And what are you
planning to do with them?
JULIAN ASSANGE: That’s correct. It’s some 15,000 that
sometimes mention the names of informers in Afghanistan. And because of
the security situation there, we want to look at these in a bit more
detail, with a bit closer scrutiny, before we release them. But we will
release them as soon as possible. In the rare incidences where there are
people named who are innocent informers, we will redact those names.
And once the security situation in Afghanistan improves, we will release
the full text of that material.
AMY GOODMAN: So you have released more than 91,000
documents, and you have 15,000 more to go?
JULIAN ASSANGE: There are more than 91,000 documents in
the full collection that we shared with our media partners. We have
released to the public about 76,000, and we will release another 15,000
over the coming months.
AMY GOODMAN: And those who say, particularly the Obama
administration—Robert Gibbs, the spokesperson, said President Obama was
alarmed by this release. Your response?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, organizations that we expose
typically are alarmed by the material we release, that is true. Now, if
we sort of dissect that, Robert Gibbs has not read this material in
detail. The people who know it best at the moment are us and the three
media organizations that we worked with. Other people talking about this
really don’t know what they’re talking about.
AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned the Washington Post. Did
you work with them in releasing these? They’re not included in those
three newspapers.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, they’re not included, although we
have had a subsequent overture from the Post. Last Monday, the Post
produced some really quite fine work by Dana Priest, looking at the
growth in the US sort of intelligence contractor industry. Approximately
900,000 people almost now have top-secret security clearances,
according to the Post, and there’s almost a bit of a shadow state
developing, which the rest of the community is not aware of the work
of. That’s a good sign from the Post.
But we have seen other things that are a bit disturbing. For
example, Dana Priest’s article on the CIA black sites had all the names
of the countries removed from it after a request by the White House to
the editors of the Post. Similarly, it is standard Washington
Post practice, whenever Dana Priest is to reveal a new story showing
significant allegations of abuse, say, by the CIA, to call up the press
office the night before to give them the heads-up, as a courtesy move.
That doesn’t seem like independent journalism to us. It seems to us that
a journalist’s relationship should be with the public, on the one hand,
and with their sources, on the other hand, who are providing them with
information to give to the public. It seems that the Post is
engaging in a sort of an unclear cooperation with the very organizations
that it’s meant to be policing. So we’re a little bit hesitant about
dealing with them.
But the recent Dana Priest article covering the extensive expanse
of money going into the top-secret industry in the United States is
encouraging. So perhaps, if that’s a sign of the movement by the Washington
Post to a more combative form of journalism, then we would be happy
to work with them.
AMY GOODMAN: The total history of the Afghan war, from
2004 to 2010, that you have released in these documents, what isn’t
included? For example, US special forces, CIA?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. Yeah, that’s an important question
you raise. So it is not everything. It is most of what the regular Army
was involved in, where they considered it important enough to report a
significant action. So that is most deaths that the US Army was involved
in, except for the ones that some units possibly didn’t report at all,
because they were trying to cover it up. Now, it doesn’t include most
special forces operations. It does include some, where the regular Army
was also involved in the same operation. It doesn’t include CIA
operations or CIA drone attacks, except, once again, occasionally where
the regular Army was involved in that. It does include, interestingly, a
number of US embassy cables that were sent to the Marines, intelligence
and others who were working in Afghanistan, because the embassies
believed that the information being revealed was relevant to the war in
Afghanistan. It does include a number of reports by informers or reports
by US intelligence on meetings with, say, governors in Afghanistan.
There’s quite a lot of reports about corruption within the Afghani
government, reports about drug eradication and poppy growing and so on.
AMY GOODMAN: Private contractors like Blackwater?
JULIAN ASSANGE: There are a number of references to
private contractors, yes, and some reports fed into the system, not
directly by private contractors, as far as we can tell, but by contact
from private contractors to US Army or US Marines.
AMY GOODMAN: What has come of Bradley Manning, who has
been arrested? Is it true that you are trying to raise money for his
defense? Was he the source, as he said in his email back and forth, his
chatting back and forth, of the video from July 12th, 2007, of the US
military Apache helicopter opening fire on Iraqi civilians?
JULIAN ASSANGE: In relation to a military source, alleged
military source, Bradley Manning, who has been charged with
supplying—the charges don’t say to us, but supplying to someone the
helicopter video showing the killing of two Reuters journalists in
Baghdad in July 2007, he is now being held in Kuwait itself. A bit of a
problem. Why isn’t he being held in the United States? Is it to keep him
away from effective legal representation? Is it to keep him away from
the press? We’re not sure. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason why
he could not be transferred to the United States. We obviously cannot
say whether he is our source. We in fact specialize in not knowing the
names of our sources. But nonetheless, he is a young man being held in
dire circumstances on the allegation that he supplied this material to
the press, and we were the initial publisher of that Iraq video. So we
are trying to raise money for his legal representation. We have
committed $50,000 of our own funds, that if the general public could
contribute or other people could contribute, I know that his military
counsel would find that of significant value. The lawyers that we have
spoken to say that his representation will cost $200,000, assuming that
it’s a regular sort of trial, it goes ahead. People can go to bradleymanning.org, where there
is a grassroots campaign that his friends and family and some internet
activists have become involved to try and support him.
AMY GOODMAN: And for those who say you’re an antiwar
campaigner, and so, though the documents aren’t suspect, because they’re
clearly from the US government, your motives are, what is your
response?
JULIAN ASSANGE: We have clearly stated motives, but they
are not antiwar motives. We are not pacifists. We are transparency
activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce
just government. And that is our sort of modus operandi behind
our whole organization, is to get out suppressed information into the
public, where the press and the public and our nation’s politics can
work on it to produce better outcomes.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you have more documents to release on
Iraq?
JULIAN ASSANGE: We have an enormous backlog of documents,
stemming all the way back to January. During the past six months, we
have been concentrating on raising funds and dealing with just a few of
our leaks and upgrading our infrastructure to deal with the worldwide
demand. So that huge backlog is something that we are just starting to
get through, and this latest Afghan leak is an example of that.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Julian Assange, I know you have to
go, but what gives you hope? You face great risk. What keeps you going?
JULIAN ASSANGE: What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change. They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way. |