Front Burner - Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney on the Julian Assange arrest

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

On Thursday, Julian Assange was arrested and taken out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Oscar winner Alex Gibney made a film about Assange in 2013, and talks to us about the Wikileaks founder's last few years.

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You start killing when you're in your late teens or early 20s. Uncover. The Village. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. At about 10 in the morning in London yesterday, Julian Assange was led out of the Ecuadorian embassy in handcuffs. Wearing a long grey beard, Assange managed to flash a thumbs up, despite the shackles binding his hands. And given what his lawyer said just a few hours later, Assange couldn't have been surprised. He wants to thank all of his supporters for their ongoing support. And he said, I told you so. Assange now faces a single count of conspiracy to hack a classified U.S. Defense Department computer. This arrest ends a nearly seven-year

period where Assange was holed up in that Ecuadorian embassy in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden. Assange has been on the radar of international authorities for publishing Thank you. about Assange by making the film We Steal Secrets the story of WikiLeaks. So just quickly, let's get caught up on why Assange was even in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place. In late September of 2010, Julian Assange hightailed it out of Sweden, where prosecutors had just reopened an investigation into allegations that he raped a woman. Two women who slept with him say he molested them and had sex without a condom. Assange denied these charges. He headed to Britain, so Swedish authorities issued an international arrest warrant. Julian Assange went along with his lawyer to a London police station where he was arrested on an Interpol warrant.

After surrendering to police, both sides fought it out in court. Assange was desperately trying to avoid being extradited to Sweden. Swedish prosecutor in its representations to the British courts say he didn't need to provide a single shred of evidence. And in fact has provided nothing. He lost. His appeal is accordingly dismissed. And then at what seemed like this last-ditch effort, he walked into the Ecuadorian embassy in central London.

He asks for asylum. It's been a pleasure to meet you, Julian, at least in this way. And cheer up. Welcome to the club of the persecuted. British police, hoping that he would come out, stationed armed guards right outside the doors. They stayed there round the clock. For nearly three and a half years, it cost the Brits $21 million.

By August of 2012, he's granted asylum by Ecuador. And while the story took all these twists and turns along the way, he stayed there, inside the embassy, until yesterday. The reason why Ecuador has terminated asylum is because of the repeated breakage of his obligations under the asylum treaty norms. His initial arrest yesterday, it was for jumping bail. But British police say he was also arrested at the request of the United States. This is important. They want to extradite him to face that conspiracy charge I mentioned earlier.

Pending receipt of a request for extradition to stand trial in the United States on charges relating to computer offenses. That charge is related to an attempt to access a classified U.S. government computer with former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010. They say Assange helped Manning to try and crack a password that would have allowed her to infiltrate Pentagon computers and that this unsuccessful attempt came after Manning had already provided Assange with, quote, hundreds of thousands of classified records related to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. OK, let's get to our interview with Alex Gibney. Mr. Gibney, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Delighted.

So first, can I get your reaction? So what did you think seeing the news today? I was surprised. There had been some advance warning about his issues with Ecuador. And when we talk about this advance warning, can you take me through that? Well, Julian Assange himself had tweeted that his asylum was going to be revoked. And there had been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about whether or not Julian Assange had actually hacked into the account of the president of Ecuador. Right. Like essentially the guy that's

been harboring you. That's right. Exactly. And that allegedly a Spanish outfit was putting that material up for auction. Finally, two days ago, Wikileaks, Mr. Assange's allied organization, threatens the government of Ecuador. My government has nothing to fear and does not act under threats. Ecuador is guided by the principles of law, complies with international law, and protects the interests of Ecuadorians. So whether or not that's true, I guess we'll find out in the days ahead. But it certainly is very much in line with a kind of wild and crazy stuff that's happened with Julian Assange in the past. Right. And so I want to talk about some of that wild and crazy stuff. And if we

could do a quick rise and fall of Julian Assange here. So back in 2010, Assange won a ton of plaudits, especially after the release of documents and video with private Chelsea Manning, who at the time was an anonymous source. It's the worst kind of thing. And WikiLeaks has done a great service to our country by exposing that. They detest Assange because he's telling the truth. What Assange is doing is real journalism. And that included the collateral murder video, which was footage of a U.S. airstrike that showed soldiers laughing at casualties on the ground. Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards. Two of those casualties turned out to be Reuters reporters. I remember watching this video at the time. It was incredibly chilling.

Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield. What was the impact of all of this at the time? I mean, the impact was extraordinary because he had established two things, one which I think turned out to be more important than the other. You know, this whole idea of the anonymous dropbox, the more important innovation, which was kind of transnational publishing of documents on the web. You know, in the case of, for example, he published some very damaging and important, but important to the public information about the financial crisis in Iceland, which couldn't published in Iceland. And so by publishing them on a server outside of Iceland's jurisdiction, it played a very important role. We released this report and the national TV station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air, like out of a movie. Injunction landed on the

news desk and the newsreader was like, this has never happened before. What do we do? Well, we just show the website instead for all that time as a filler. And we became very famous in Iceland. Right. And this came before the collateral murder video, right? And that was before collateral murder. Yes. And the collateral murder video was shocking. And I think had, you know, much of the world properly appalled by how war is conducted. And it was a very valuable publication, as were the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs, publication, as were the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs, the State Department cables.

They offered a huge insight sometimes into war crimes by the Obama administration, and also into the way the U.S. conducted its business. Now, in many ways, it was hugely valuable, both as a kind of precedent in terms of how to publish material, but also revealed some important information. Should say, though, that he also came in, well, he came in for some hysterical criticism from people who just don't like any secret documents to be revealed at all. I think he came in for some proper criticism for his failure to redact properly, in many instances, putting people at risk. Whenever you have the potential for names and for operations and for programs to be out there, it has a potential to be very harmful. They put our military at risk. They put our spies at risk. They put our diplomats at risk.

He got it best right on the Iraq war logs. That's where he had a group of people working with him that really thoroughly looked through those war logs and properly anonymized them so that nobody would be put at risk. No sources who were in the war logs would be put at risk. He didn't do a good enough job on the Afghan war logs. A number of people were Afghan informants were at risk because they were named. And then in the State Department cables, there were no redactions whatsoever. All of the 251,000 documents are now available online, uncensored for the world to see. Cables like this one giving the name and other personal details of a man who allegedly cooperated with U.S. officials against Al Qaeda. Now, there was a lot of toing and and fro-ing about how and why those were released, but we do know that Julian Assange, prior to their full release, was handing them out like party favors, which was very irresponsible. At the same time, he's still working with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian.

To search a quarter million pages, The Guardian built a database. The download was shared with The New York Times and three European papers, doling it out in bits. So it's also clear that these journalists, these organizations think that he's still worth working with, right? Well, at the very beginning, I mean, when they were working with him over the Afghan war logs and then the Iraq war logs, that's very much the case. But already in the process of working with them, relations were very fractious. And Julian wasn't much inclined to listen that

well to some of the warnings that journalistic organizations were trying to give to him about how to do this properly. But yes, you're quite right in saying that he had a number of important partners who were helping him and who were also publishing with him. So, you know, the idea that Julian was a renegade in terms of publishing information that was important to the public, that's not true. You know, the New York Times, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, and many other organizations were partnering with him. We'll be back in a second. At Franklin Templeton, we help you invest in companies that believe good enough is never

far enough. Reach for better. Franklin Templeton Investments. It feels like the tables start to turn for Julian Assange around 2016. During the presidential campaign, WikiLeaks released private emails from John Podesta, the Hillary Clinton advisor, and Trump publicly becomes this fan of Julian Assange. WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks. This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable. It tells you the inner heart. You got to read it. It's been amazing what's coming out on WikiLeaks.

And it's interesting to me watching your documentary, which you made in 2013, so earlier. It feels like you too were skeptical about Assange before a lot of other people. And so can you tell me about how your perspective on him has changed over time? I mean, I will tell you that when I started the documentary, which was back, I believe, in 2011, and ultimately, I believe, was released in 2013, I started it in a way as a kind of praise poem to Assange. I found him to be incredibly heroic and brave. And indeed, maybe the first 40 minutes of that film is kind of a praise poem to Assange WikiLeaks. He walked out that door as the sort of aging student hobo. By the time, you know, he'd made this 50-yard walk, he was a rock star. But what I found troubling were a number of things. One was the way in which

he failed to rigorously redact some of the documents that he was publishing, and so started to, very early on, to violate some key journalistic principles. And then the whole way that he handled accusations of sexual molestation and rape in Sweden, I found very objectionable. He never was willing to be held to account for those. He was unwilling to go back to Sweden. Ultimately, that's what landed him in the Ecuadorian embassy. And also he went on a campaign of vilifying the Swedish women. Assange says the allegations have more to do with WikiLeaks.

His lawyers agree. There are clearly powerful state actors who would like to see him inconvenienced and distracted from getting the cables out. You know, Julian Assange has always maintained that this was essentially a smear campaign, almost revenge from his many enemies, and that these allegations are just false. Yes, and Julian's free to say that. But the fact was that the Swedish women didn't feel that way, and the Swedish justices didn't feel that way. So I think, you know, particularly now in the era of the Me Too movement, I think we would take a rather different view of that. Just to vilify women for being part of accusations seems, you know, completely unreasonable. If the charges are unfounded, then that'll be part of the legal process.

And that'll be part of the legal process. Early on, you know, a number of WikiLeaks members and supporters urged Julian to go and make this a personal matter, to keep it separate from WikiLeaks. But it was Julian Assange himself who intently made it a part of WikiLeaks as if, you know, charges against him personally were, of course, part of WikiLeaks. But that's not necessarily true. In fact, I donaks. That's not necessarily true. In fact I don't think it's true at all. And the other thing that was very reprehensible and hasn't gotten enough attention was that he ultimately leaked or gave certain State Department cables to a man named Israel Shamir. He gave State Department cables to the father of a guy who was a key witness in the Swedish rape case.

And Israel Shamir then used those cables and passed them on to the head of Belarus, who used them to oppress, you know, human rights activists. Right. So that's the kind of shoddy, narcissistic self-dealing that unfortunately Julian was capable of. So those were some of the early signs for me that triggered me to believe that he was not the avatar of the most responsible kind of publishing secret documents. So then is it fair to say that in 2016, when you see this massive email dump around the U.S. election? It's a drip, drip, drip of distraction, with campaign chair John Podesta's hacked emails now being released on a daily schedule by Julian Assange. That you're not surprised to see it? Surprised to see it?

I wasn't surprised, you know, because it was clear that, first of all, all the leaks from WikiLeaks were not anonymized or properly edited at all. There was a lot of material having to do with people's social security numbers and personal information that should never have been in the public domain. And that was very consistent with some of the terrible things that he'd been doing already. He published the Sony hack emails. Scripts were stolen, but so were hundreds of thousands of embarrassing emails from top executives with disparaging comments about each other and several top line movie stars like Angelina Jolie. Right. You know, they had been leaked elsewhere. But widely thought to have been hacked by North Korea, essentially. And then he's also seen as helping to meddle in the French presidential election. And it's also clear that he did some terrible things in terms of spreading vicious rumors about, say, Seth Rich. And Seth Rich was a young man who was murdered in Washington, D.C., but trying to indicate that perhaps he had been a source of some of the materials for WikiLeaks. Our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks.

and often very significant risks, is a 27-year-old that works for the DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington. In a way that's terribly irresponsible and possibly connected to Russian disinformation campaigns. And this has widely been debunked as a bizarre conspiracy theory, essentially.

Right, but it was one that Julian was very happy to push. So, yeah, he's coming across as a bad actor. That said, there was material in some of those leaks that was of public interest. You know, the way that the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, was putting its finger on the scale for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. It was legitimately newsworthy and other news organizations picked it up. So, you know, this is where you get into tricky territory with Julian Assange, because when you get into legal jeopardy, you know, you have to separate out legal accusations from issues of whether or not you believe he's a good or a bad publisher. It's not illegal to be a bad publisher. And so one has to be

careful. And I think one has to be careful now at this moment in terms of how we assess the attempts by the U.S. to extradite Assange and also the charges themselves. Do you think Julian Assange is a journalist? Would you classify him as a journalist? No, I would classify him as a publisher. I know that the United States has charged him and they want Britain to extradite him to the U.S. to face charges related to the leak with Chelsea Manning. But he wasn't actually charged with espionage, which is what some press freedom people were really worried about. What do you make of the nature of the charges today? The nature of the charges are very specific, and they relate to 2010 when he was getting material from Chelsea Manning. And they relate to an exchange between them. And we only know some of the exchange, perhaps the federal government

has more than has been made publicly available. But it was an exchange in which you're going back and forth over whether or not Assange can help Chelsea Manning to crack a password that would allow Chelsea Manning to get into more US networksS. networks without using her own password, even though by that time, a lot of documents had already been passed to Julian that had been downloaded with Chelsea Manning's password. Why do you think he's not facing more serious charges now in the U.S.? Well, I think because the U.S. government, even under the Trump administration, has concluded, like the Obama administration concluded, that you can't charge Julian Assange for publishing secret documents and not start to charge the New York Times for doing the same thing. of where this heads next? Is there more at play here? Will we be seeing additional charges?

You know, in the end, does Julian Assange end up in a U.S. jail? I don't know. I mean, ironically, had Julian gone to Sweden, if the U.S. was willing to extradite him, which I don't think they would have been willing to at the time, he would have been far safer in Sweden than in the United Kingdom. The extradition treaties between the US and the UK are more favorable to extradition in the UK than they are in Sweden. But I think that there will be a big legal battle over extradition. And Julian Assange, I'm sure will be afforded competent counsel as he always has been, because Julian Assange does represent, for better or for worse, I would argue for both, probably, kind of the cutting edge of some important journalistic principles. So I expect him to be well represented in the UK,

and I expect the extradition process to be difficult. Ecuador's actions recognize that the UK criminal justice system is one in which rights are protected and in which, contrary to what Mr. Assange and his supporters may claim, he and his legitimate interests will be protected. That said, the problem for Julian Assange is that he's dealing with a US administration that doesn't care as much about precedent and the rule of law as prior administrations. But we'll see. Mr. Gibney, thank you so much. Thank you very much. So that's all for this week. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show was produced by Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, and Imogen Burchard.

Associate producer, Matt Alma. With help from Carol Park and special thanks to Mika Anderson. And a shout out to John Turner for the Alex Gibney assist. Derek Vanderwyk does all the sound. The executive producer of FrontBurner is Nick McKay-Blocos. I'm your host, Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening and see you Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.

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