Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/23/23 Andrew Cockburn: How the Media Failed Julian Assange

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

Andrew Cockburn joined Scott on Antiwar Radio to talk about Julian Assange. Cockburn wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine about the hypocrisy of mainstream journalists in their refusal to stand up for the condemned publisher of government secrets. After a quick rundown of who Assange is, why he’s important and where he is now, Cockburn and Scott discuss that Harper’s article.   Discussed on the show: “Alternative Facts: How the media failed Julian Assange” (Harper’s Magazine) “An open letter from editors and publishers: Publishing is not a Crime” (The Guardian) “Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks” (Yahoo News) Scott’s interview with Jeffery Carr about the DNC hack Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. Follow him on Twitter @andrewmcockburn. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, February 23, 2003. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm editorial director of anti-war.com, an editor of the new book, hotter than the sun.

Time to abolish nuclear weapons. You can find my full interview archive. More than 5,800 of them now going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. And you follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. And this is Anti-War Radio on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. I'm Scott Horton.

And next up is the great Andrew Coburn. Andrew is the Washington editor of Harper's Magazine, and his most recent book is called The Spoils of War, and man, he's got this great article. I really hope that you guys will read it and pass it around and show it to naysayers and people who don't know or don't understand or got it wrong or need to find out. It's called How the Media Failed, Julian Assange.

Welcome back to the show. Andrew, how are you, sir? Hey, very well. Very well. I'm delighted to be with you. great to have you back on the show. I'm also so grateful for this piece that you wrote about Julian Assange because I know that pretty much nobody knows what you know about this and the story that you really take us all the way through it. The controversies surrounding this guy and I think you really illustrate why the rest of the media has forsaken him the way that they have. So first of all, just go back for people who are brand new interested in politics starting this week. is Julian Assange, and why should anybody care at all at this point, sir?

Julian Assange is, or has been one of the most important, maybe the most important journalists of our age, because what he's revealed through his organization, WikiLeaks, by publishing a whole enormous tranche of documents that our rulers really, really, really didn't want us to see, is expose how we are ruled. I mean, how the world is run, how we run the wars. He did, he released, first of all, a whole series of an enormous quantity of documents, internal military documents about the war in Afghanistan while it was ongoing, and then the same for Iraq, and then 250,000 internal State Department communications, which revealed, you know, how these people really view the world and how they operate in it.

Without that, we wouldn't know. It's really given us a keyhole into history as it's been happening. And that's why he's so important. And that's why he is so enraged all the powers of the be that operating as a journalist, they pursued him, they framed him. They said he'd committed rape, which he didn't. They said he'd, you know, recklessly revealed the names of people who would thereby be put at risk, be killed by the Taliban or so forth. He didn't.

They said he'd, you know, there's a whole series. They said he'd abused the hospitality of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was forced to police. He didn't. You know, and all that evidence, all the evidence for what I've just said, has been out there, has been readily available for years and has been. studiously and carefully ignored by the mainstream media. Yeah. And so where is Julian Assange now? He is locked up in Belmarsh Prison, which is a maximum security, it's often called British Guantanamo.

It's a maximum security jail in London. And the reason he's there is that the U.S. has requested, demanded, I should say, his extradition, so it can be brought back and changed to this country. and put on trial for espionage, believe it or not, and the British have obligingly locked him up now for three years while this whole extradition case goes forward. And if that succeeds, if he is sent back, then he'll be put on trial in the Eastern District of Virginia,

which is called the National Security Court because the jury pool is all composed of Pentagon contractors and ex-CIA people or current CIA people. More or less where the government brings national security cases because they're pretty much guaranteed a conviction. And if he's convicted, then they'll lock him up in a maximum, in a maximum security jail for the rest of his life, effectively, 175 years, you know.

So, you know, the stakes are very high. And what the press, they're sort of fitfully sort of coming to notice this, But if he's convicted, if this case succeeds, which it probably would, then the whole basis for the First Amendment starts to go away. It means the government can, any time it publish, you publish something, it wants to keep secret, they can try you for espionage and throw you in the pokey for the rest of your life. And that's, you know, so all the people who hold their nose, have been holding their nose by Julian Assange, you know, are going to, you know, could, it's best starting, I think. think some of them in a half-a-half-baked kind of way to realize that, you know, the way, what happens to him can happen to them. Yeah.

All right. It's anti-war radio on KPFK in L.A. I'm Scott Horton talking with the great Andrew Coburn about the heroic Julian Assange. And let's stick with that point right there for a second, because I think this is, this cuts right to the heart of the degeneracy of the American corporate media and all their reports. orders, too, as individuals for this whole time, because what you're saying there is what the Obama administration, their Department of Justice themselves, called the New York Times problem. And as much as they wanted to persecute Julian Assange, they knew they couldn't indict him and

prosecute him. And the Obama government used the Espionage Act against leakers more than all other presidents in all history since Woodrow Wilson combined. But they knew that they can't use it against a leak e and julina as a publisher he's not the guy who stole the secrets he's the guy who received them and published them which makes him no different in principle than the new york times laundering classified secrets that the cia wants out there in order to spin public opinion their way as they do daily and so every reporter knows that they can't pretend that they don't know that and so in other words this is just has been until now a reflection of how much they hate Julian Assange, that they have been willing to even lose their own protections under our sacred First Amendment in order to get him, because essentially they're so jealous of him, because what WikiLeaks has done has blown their model completely out of the water.

And so they just project all of their declining ad revenues onto him. Exactly. I mean, that's exactly right. I think, and you used the right word, they're jealous. They were jealous that he, you know, he came into their little world or the world, you know, back in 2010 and really showed them how to do it. I mean, he was blowing, you know, blowing up stuff and he, you know, what they always like to do, as you well know, is, you know, they negotiate with the government. They basically get permission for what they can publish. about, you know, government quote unquote secrets. And he was blowing out wide open. He was, you know, getting the goods, you know, had excellent sources who trusted him. And, you know, he was putting it out there. And they sort of went along with it for a while, but they were deeply jealous and they sort of hated them, or particularly the New York Times, the really guilty parties of the New York Times and the Guardian, the UK Guardian, who really behaved in a disgraceful, disgusting kind of way towards him.

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and the writer of Poor Things Comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberback. Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney, a hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Oh, yeah, and including just lying about him constantly. But now, so you're kind of hinting there about this new letter that the media, some major media corporations, have finally now come around at the end of last year and said,

Ah, geez, maybe Coburn's got a point here, huh? Yes, well, that's really the work of actually a hero in the story, who is James Goodale. And I'll tell you briefly who he is. Goodale, he's 89 years old now. We owe a lot of what we've had up to now in First Amendment protection as journalist to Jim Goodale because he was the lawyer who basically won the Pentagon Papers case for the New York Times.

If it wasn't for him, they probably would have. caved or gone down, he steered that. He also got basically the Supreme Court judgment that basically protects journalist sources. He also had a hand in Times v. Sullivan, which means, you know, gives us freedom to criticize public figures. So Jim Goodell is a total hero, and he has been campaigning for years of more than more alone in the, you know, establishment, because he, you know, He was a big-time lawyer, to say Assange, you know, we've got to fight for Assange. He's been in Assange's corner for years now, and he's the one who's shamed the New York Times, the Guardian, Levant, El Paise, and Der Spiegel, who originally, all originally worked with Assange

and then kind of turned on him, and he's shamed them into which ensuing this letter. It's still a bit, slightly mealy-mouthed, I've got to say, but the first time that the collective mainstream media has issued a sort of public statement in defense of Assange. So it's something. Yeah. Hey, it is better than nothing. And, you know, if they really want to back down and maybe spring him and let him go home to Australia, something like that, maybe they could hide behind that letter and say, yeah, you're right.

This is essentially the Obama government back in the form of the Biden government. And it was Trump that made the decision to go ahead and prosecute him, the CIA. Pompeo, yeah, he'd just become head of the CIA. And he wanted to show, you know, that he was a bigger, baddest, scoop, spook than anyone. So he came out with a sort of demented, hysterical diatribe against Assange. And really, actually, as I talk about in the piece, a story that was done by Yahoo News, but, again, ignored by everyone else in the media, except for Megan Kelly, of all people, Fox News, that the CIA under Pompeo actually made plans to either.

kill or kidnap Assange. They're going to shoot that way into the Ecuador and embassy and drag him away and run a plane and, you know, do a rendition on him and pack him off maybe to some, you know, black size and torture him. Who knows? But I mean,

if things were that crazy, they're that hysterical. The thing that seems to have kicked that one off was the WikiLeaks revelation of what was called Bolt 7. It was the CIA's hacking techniques, by which they can take over your car and drive it off the road or buy on you through your Samsung TV set.

Just remember, if you've got a Samsung, the CIA is watching. Anyway, they had a whole bunch of other techniques, and that drove them crazy because it revealed, you know, that they were taking advantages or advantage of faults in, you know, various internet connections, not telling the manufacturers like Cisco systems or whoever, or Microsoft, that there was a potential leak in the security and just using it themselves. Well, you know, there was this huge story, too, Andrew, that it's anti-war radio, Scott Horton talking with Andrew Coburn. There was this story about how Assange was negotiating with the CIA that they would figure out how to get the Justice Department to drop the charges if he would promise not to post that Vault 7 stuff. was using it as leverage. But then, I think if I remember it right, his own lawyer spilled the beans to the staff of Senator John Warner, the horrible Russiagate freak and pro-censorship

maniac. And that guy then leaked it to Jim Comey at the FBI, and he intervened and prevented the deal from happening. That's right. Mark Warner. It's exactly what happened. I think that's what happened. I mean, I didn't have the space to really go into that. But I believe that's a big one. So, by the way, and this gets into a major part of your article here, it's at Harper's Magazine, everybody, Andrew Coburn on Julian Assange. And you talk about all these false accusations. There's this giant pile of them. It's like the guy Saddam Hussein or something, or, you know, Trump during Russia Gate.

And this was part of Russia Gate when, in fact, the Mueller report says, you know, I got no chain of custody to WikiLeaks whatsoever. So, that's it. And even crowd strike, the firm that was hired to, supposedly prove that the Russians did it admitted under oath as you write in your article that yeah they can't prove it at all so yeah it turned out you know all the confident um assertion you know they trace the dnc leak back to the russian military intelligence and actually you know thanks to the reality winner leak we have uh the document that shows it's just someone's

hunch at the nsa you know it was a you know no basis for whatsoever and that's such an important point, right? Because, you know, when Rushagate first came out, I interviewed this very famous and prominent computer security expert named Jeffrey Carr. And he said, let me tell you, a forensic expert looking at a server cannot

tell you who hacked into it, because it's just too easy to leave false footprints. There should be one group of people in the world who can have 100% confidence in exactly who hacked it. And that would be the NSA, and here, as you say, in the reality winner, They're like, eh, if you guys say so, to the FBI and CIA's claims, they weren't trying to be impolite, but they weren't the ones making the claim here at all.

Exactly, exactly. What a hoax. All right, I'm sorry for ranting so much. We're overtime, and we've got to go, but everyone, please go and check out this very important article about the political prisoner, the great journalist and hero from WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. The story is called How the Media Failed Julian Assange by Andrew Coburn. That's harpers.org. Thank you so much, sir. Hey, thank you, Scott.

All right, you guys, and that's it for anti-war radio for today. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I edited the book Hotter Than the Sun, and you can find my full interview archive at Scott Horton.org. I'm here every Thursday from 230 to 3 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week. Thank you.