LONDONDont forget to tell them about my appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court, Julian Assange tells me in a door-knob-one-more-thing moment as Im leaving the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has taken refuge for the last two years. The embassy is just a flat in a building stuck behind Harrods. An entire floor in the back of Harrods facing the embassy has been offered by Qatar to Englands security service MI5 and the local NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters, to spy on one little man, the WikiLeaks publisher, proof if any that national security has little to do with the Assange story.
Hans Crescentin the Knightsbridge area of London is now the cobblestone intersection of many worlds, a modern Casablanca overcrowded with shoppers, spies, bums, London police, weird guys loitering, troubadours, too many men sitting in the same parked Mercedes, a tall Russian man yelling in his cell, a suspicious earpiece spiraling around his neck, two women nursing the same coffee for hours, one of them rushing towards me for a light and staring a little too long into my eyes, and four gigantic London police vans lined up for no reason. There was, no doubt, less intelligence on the ground at Abbottabad.
We were surprised after entering the embassy to see two smiley London police officers standing right in front of the apartment door of the Ecuadorian ambassador. If Mr. Assange were to put one foot out of this door he would be jumped immediately and extradited to Sweden, perhaps then to face rendition to the U.S. The appeal to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom that Mr. Assange wants me to tell the world about is his latest attempt at challenging the constitutionality of the non-retroactive clause, dubbed the Assange clause. It was inserted last-minute in the new law voted into parliament, barring extraditions for persons without charges after a growing number of British officials started to realize that their attempt at destroying Mr. Assange by extraditing him to Sweden with no official reason, was slowly making a mockery of their authority. In sum, England is desperately trying to extradite a man who has not as of yet been charged of any crimes, while writing a whole new law to restore some respectability, affirming that from now on, the country wont be able to extradite anyone without charges in order to please the White House. Heres what brought us to this Kafkaesque point.
Julian Assange created a website in 2006 called WikiLeaks that would allow for worldwide whistleblowers to post anonymously, even to the site administrators, revelatory and incriminatory documents that could be used as checks and balances to states and corporations who until then acted as terrorists and criminals with total impunity since the fifth column was naively being viewed as the Fifth Estate.
Last weeks revelations that Ken Dilanian, a LA Times and Chicago Tribune reporter assigned to cover the C.I.A. was submitting his pieces to the agency for approval right before publication in exchange of access, Julian Assange told The New York Observer last Sunday at the small Ecuadorian Embassy under siege in London, is a typical quid pro quo that exemplifies the state of the press nowadays. Most news organizations in America who used to be family owned are now run by corporations so vast and diversified that their portfolio bottom line and quarterly shareholders dividend targets force them to change their business plans and have their journalists become government press secretaries in order to gain administrative favoritism. When Julian Assange needed an official voice to disseminate the millions of for your eyes only intel that Chelsea Manning gave him, he called Bill Keller at The New York Times, the same publication that had whitewashed Judith Millers use of the Defense Intelligence Agencys Ahmed Chalabi plant when time came to spin about the W.M.Ds.
I get things done, Mr. Assange told me.
When you say things like I get things done, you come across as a corporate power thirsty narcissist, I said.
WikiLeaks, despite some obvious setbacks, is still fully operational, he replied.
At the peak of the COINTELPRO response, things looked gloomy. On orders from the White House, Visa and MasterCard cut the flow of contributions to WikiLeakseven PayPal joined the boycott, which is striking since it is owned by eBay, which was founded by Pierre Omidyar, who now backs Glenn Greenwald and his information disseminating website The Intercept.
But why not following your own advice from your first book Cypherpunks and do what the Weather Underground did, hit and hide? I asked. Why stay in the limelight for so long? Was it fun?
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Free Julian Assange: An Exclusive Interview with the Wikileaks Founder
