Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tiff w/ The Intercept …

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AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange from inside Ecuadors Embassy in London, where he has political asylum and has been living for more than two years.

AMY GOODMAN: In a nutshell, Julian, if you would, can you summarize the releases of documents since the "Collateral Murder" video was released in the spring of 2010? For people who arent keeping up on things, and even if you are an avid viewer of the media or reader of the media, especially in the United States, they may know who Julian Assange is, the publisher of WikiLeaks, but actually what it is you have released, the substance of these documents, could you just go through them?

JULIAN ASSANGE: WikiLeaks has been publishing since 2007. We have published material from every countryalmost every country in the world and about every country in the world. We are now up to just over eight million individual documents that we have released during that period. Now, the heat in the debate with the United States arose in 2010. We have had heated debates with other countries, and weve had major court cases in the United States in relation to our fight with Swiss banks and so on. In 2010, the number of documents and publications that we were releasing, each one after another, ended up erecting a grand jury against us by the DOJ, National Security Division. And so, we entered into a major media conflict with the U.S. government.

So, going in order, they are "Collateral Murder," a documentary that we produced based on the tape from an Apache helicopter mowing down 12 to 18 people in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, and very clearly engaged in the murder. And the murder was an unarmed man, wounded, crawling in the gutter, and good Samaritans came to rescue him, and all of them were killed, and two children came away with serious injuries.

Then the Afghanistan War Logs, now, these came at a very important moment in 2010, where Michael Hastings had justthe late Michael Hastings had just released a report on McChrystal, and these publications came not long after that.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash. And that shifted the debate about Afghanistan. Early in 2010, it was: What can we do to win in Afghanistan? After the Hastings article about McChrystal and WikiLeaks war logs, the result was: There was no longer a debate about can we win in Afghanistan; it is how were we going to get out of Afghanistan. So it was quite an important shift.

Then, with the Iraq War Logs, which were published in October 2010, which in some ways has been one of our best analytical works, we worked together with not just other media organizations, but a number of statistical organizations to work out what the kill count was for Iraq, and combining with other figures, and we ended up with more than 100,000 civilian casualtiesin fact, 15,000 new, completely undocumented civilian killsand documenting U.S. involvement and approval of Iraqi torture centers within the police and many killings of civilians at checkpoints and some political issues and so on. And that produced a number of inquiries and has fed into cases that have been taken by Iraqis, and that has now ended up with an ICC filing, International Criminal Court filing, against the British military.

If we then move on, in December of that year, we started the release of Cablegate, the more than 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from all around the world from 1966 to 2010. And that is the largest compendium of diplomacy that has ever been released. Its about 3,000 volumes of material. As a sort of history of how the modern world behaves in practice, its extremely important, and it fed into the Tunisian revolution quite directly. In fact, Ben Alis propaganda minister, after the government fell, said that the WikiLeaks releases about Tunisia is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.

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Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tiff w/ The Intercept ...