Assange: Clinton
is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO
& TRANSCRIPT)
Published time: 5
Nov, 2016 05:59 Edited time: 5 Nov,
2016 06:35
Australian journalist
and documentary maker John Pilger (L) and Julian Assange, Founder and
Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks © Reuters / Dartmouth Films
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 this last week of the US election campaign in the case against Hillary
Clinton?
Julian Assange: If you go to the history of the FBI, it has
become effectively America's political police. And the FBI demonstrated
with taking down the former head of the CIA over classified information
given to his mistress [that] almost no one was 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 is anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak. Well, we
have published quite a number of different sets of emails, so, about 33,000
of Clinton's emails while she was Secretary of State. They come from a
batch of just over 60,000 emails. In those 60,000 emails, Clinton has kept
about half, 30,000, to herself, and we have published about half. And then there
are the Podesta emails we've been publishing. Podesta is Hillary Clinton's
primary campaign manager. So, there's a thread that runs through all of
these emails. There is quite a lot of "pay for play," as they
call it – taking… giving access in exchange for money for many individual
states, individuals and corporations – combined with the cover-up of
Hillary Clinton's emails while she was Secretary of State has led to an
environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.
‘Russian
government not the source of Clinton leaks’
JP: But the Clinton campaign has said that
Russia is behind all of this. It says 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-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for
everything.
JP:Yeah.
JA: Hillary Clinton stated multiple times –
falsely – that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the
source of our publications. OK. That's false. We can say that the Russian
government is not the source, yes. WikiLeaks has been publishing for 10
years. In that 10 years, we've published 10 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:All the emails that give evidence of access for
money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefitted from this and how she is
benefitting politically are quite extraordinary. I'm thinking of where the
Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a
million-dollar check and many other examples. Can you…?
JA: …Or $12 million from Morocco.
JP:...$12 million from Morocco... yeah.
JA: ... for Hillary Clinton to attend.
JP:In terms of the foreign policy of the United
States, that's where – for me, anyway – where the emails are most
revealing, where they show the direct connection Hillary Clinton and the
foundation of jihadism, of ISIL in the Middle East. Can you talk something
about that? What the… how the emails demonstrate this connection between...
those who are meant to be fighting the jihadist ISIL are actually those who
have helped create it.
JA: There's an early 2014 email from Hillary
Clinton, so not so long after she left [her job as] Secretary of State, to
her campaign manager John Podesta. That email, it states that ISIL, ISIS is
funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar – the governments of Saudi Arabia and
Qatar. Now, this is a… I actually think this is the most significant email
in the whole collection...
JP:Mmm.
JA: …And perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money
is spread all over the place, including into many media institutions, all
serious analysts know, even the US government has mentioned or agreed with
that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS, funding ISIS. But the
dodge has always been, that's… what… it's just some rogue princes using
their cut of the oil money to do what they like but actually the government
disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi
and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.
JP:The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the
Bahrainis – particularly the Saudis and the Qataris giving all this money
to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and
the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi
Arabia.
JA: Under Hillary Clinton, and Clinton emails
reveal significant discussion about it, the largest ever arms deal in the
world was made with Saudi Arabia – more than $80 billion. In fact, during
her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from United States in
terms of the dollar value doubled.
JP:Doubled. And of course, the consequence of that is
that this notorious terrorist jihadist 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: Look. Hillary Clinton is just a person. 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. You know, they faint as a result of going on
and going on with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of
people, and a network of relationships also with particular states. The
question is, how does Hillary Clinton fit in this broader network? She's
this centralizing cog, so that 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, and so on. She's is the, if you like, the centralizer that
interconnects all these different cogs. She's 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 you call the establishment, or the DC consensus,
and its influences. In fact, one of the most significant Podesta emails
that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed – and half the
Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from Citibank. It
is quite amazing.
JP:Well, it is… Didn’t Citibank supply a list?
JA: Yes.
JP:…Which turned out to be...
JA: Which turned out to be...
JP:…to be mostly 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.
It wasn't so close to oil interests but it was very close to banking
interests.
JP:Yeah. Yeah.
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 that anyone else's war was
Hillary Clinton's war. Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the
person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented
throughout her emails. She had… She put her favored agent in effect, Sidney
Blumenthal, onto that. There's more than 1,700 emails out of the 33
thousand of Hillary Clinton's emails we published just about Libya. It's
not about that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi
and the overthrow of the Libyan state something that she would use to run
in the general election for president. So late 2011, there's an internal
document called the "Libya Tick Tock" that is produced for
Hillary Clinton, and it's all the... it's a chronological description of
how Hillary Clinton was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan
state. As a result, there are around 40,000 deaths within Libya. Jihadists
moved in, ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis,
because not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing
Syria, destabilization of other African countries as a result of arms
flows. The Libyan state itself was no longer able to control movement of
people through it. So, Libya faces on to the Mediterranean. So, it had been
effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So, all problems, all
economic problems, the civil war in Africa... Previously, the people
fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the
Mediterranean. And that was said explicitly at the time, back in 2011, by
Gaddafi: what do these Europeans think they are 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 that is exactly what happened.
‘Trump won’t be
permitted to win’
JP:You get a lot of complaints from people saying,
“What is WikiLeaks doing, are they trying to put Trump into White House?”
JA: My analysis is that Trump would not be
permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he’s had every establishment
offside. Trump doesn’t have one establishment – maybe with the exception of
the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. But banks,
intelligence, arms companies, big foreign money, etc. – it’s all united
behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well: so, media owners and even
journalists themselves.
JP:The accusations that WikiLeaks is in league with
the Russians and you hear people saying, “Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks
investigate and publish emails on Russia?”
JA: We have published over 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. And our documents have gone on to be used in quite a
number of court cases, refugee cases of people fleeing some kinds of
claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to
back up.
JP:Do you take yourself a view of the US election? Do
you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?
JA: Donald Trump – what does he represent in the
American mind and in the European mind? He represents American “white
trash,” deplorable and irredeemable. Basically, the same thing. It means,
from a… establishment or educated, cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these
people are, you know, like the rednecks, and you can’t… like, they are
just… you can never deal with them. And because he so clearly – through his
words and actions and the type of people that turns up at his rallies –
represents the people who are not the upper-middle-class-educated, there is
a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with that, a social fear that
lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting
in any way Trump, including criticizing Clinton. And if you look at how the
middle class gains its economic and social power, it makes absolute sense.
‘US attempting
to squeeze WikiLeaks through my refugee status’
JP:I’d like to talk about Ecuador, a small country
that has given you refuge and has given you asylum in this embassy in
London. Now, Ecuador cut off the Internet from here, where we’re doing this
interview, in the embassy for the clearly obvious reason that they were
concerned about appearing to intervene in the US 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 go back four years ago. I made an
asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy because of the US extradition
case. And the result was after a month, I was successful in my application,
and then the embassy has been surrounded by the police. Quite an expensive
police operation, which the British government admits they’re spending more
than 12.6 million pounds – they’ve admitted that over a year ago. And now
there’s undercover police and there’s robot surveillance cameras of various
kinds. So, there has been a quite serious conflict right here in the heart
of London between Ecuador – a country of 16 million people – and the United
Kingdom. And the Americans, who’ve been helping on the side. So, that was a
brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the US election
afoot. The Ecuadorian election is in February next year. 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 its embassy or the territory of Ecuador. We publish from
France, we publish from Germany, we publish from the Netherlands and a
number of other countries. So, the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is
through my refugee status. And this is really intolerable: When you try and
get at a publishing organization, to try and prevent it 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: So, 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’ve already been
previously cleared, etc. So, we’re 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. And they have extradited
100 percent of people that the US has requested since at least 2000. So,
over the last 15 years, every single person that the US has tried to
extradite from Sweden has been extradited. And they refuse to provide the
guarantees. So, it’s… yeah.
JP:People often ask how you cope with the isolation
here.
JA: Look, one of the best attributes of human
beings is that they are adaptable. One of the worst attributes of human
beings is that they are adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses.
They adapt to being involved themselves in abuses. They adapt to adversity
and continue on. So, in my situation… frankly, I’m a bit institutionalized.
This is the world – visually, this is the world.
JP:It’s a world without sunlight, for one thing…
JA: It’s a world without sunlight, but I haven’t
seen sunlight in so long like I don’t remember it. So, yeah, 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 adaptation, which they didn’t
ask for.
JP:Do you worry about them?
JA: Yeah, 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 UN has looked into this whole situation.
They spent 18 months in formal adversarial litigation: me, at the UN,
versus Sweden and the UK – who is right? The UN made a conclusion – I’m
being arbitrarily detained, illegally, deprived of my freedom. What has
been… occurred, has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom
and Sweden must obey. It is an illegal abuse. I mean, the United Nations
formally asking what’s going on here, what’s your legal explanation for
this. He says you should be… you should recognize his asylum. Sweden
formally writing back to United Nations, says “No, we’re not going to,”
leaving open their ability to extradite. I just find it absolutely amazing
that the narrative about this situation is not put out publicly and 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. No state
accepts to 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, the UK or Sweden.
It’s absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception. But here
we have a case. Talking about the Swedish case, where I have never been
charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared 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: Different.
JA: The rhetoric is pretending, constantly
pretending that I have been charged with a crime, never mentioning that I
have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman
herself says that the police made it up, trying to avoid that the UN
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.
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