Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/10/23 Kevin Gosztola: They Lied About Iraq and Now They’re Lying About Assange

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Scott talks with Kevin Gosztola about a project he’s working on documenting the lead-up to Iraq War II as well as his brand new book about Julian Assange. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Gosztola has been writing about each day since mid-February, documenting the lies that the Bush Administration and their allies pushed exactly twenty years ago to the day. Scott and Gosztola talk about some of those lies before moving on to the current lies being told about Julian Assange. Gosztola talks about why he wrote this book and what sets it apart from some of the others already out.  Discussed on the show: March To Iraq War, 20 Years Later Guilty of Journalism by Kevin Gosztola Scott’s interview with Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s brother Ithaka (IMDb) The Trial of Julian Assange by Nils Melzer  “Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks” (Yahoo News) Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.” He is the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. Follow him on Twitter @kgosztola. 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

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show you guys guess what i got kevin costola on the line and he wrote a brand new book and i know i'm going to love it i'm sorry i haven't had a chance to read it and it might be a little while

but i'm going to read it and i already looked at the table of contents and it looks like It's just absolutely fantastic, as I could have anticipated. It's called Guilty of Journalism, the Political Case Against Julian Assange, by Kevin Gostola. And, of course, he's at the dissenter and at shadowproof.com, of course, as well. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Kevin? Hey, thanks for talking with me again. Hell yeah, happy to have you here.

And proud of you for this great achievement. I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to look at it, but it looks absolutely fantastic. this great book about Assange, and I want to talk about it with you in a minute. But first, I want to talk with you about this really cool project that you have going on about Iraq War II. And a good friend, some guy I've never met before, on Twitter tweeted at me, hey, are you aware of what Got Stollis doing over here on Iraq War II? And no, I was not. So thank you, random Twitter person, for pointing this out to me. You're doing kind of a day by day of how they lied us into war. when did this start?

And you're doing it, am I right? Like in real time, on this day, 20 years ago, this was what Ari Fleischer said and that kind of deal, am I right? Yeah, exactly. So with the power of archives and databases and all the information we have at our fingertips, you know, I can go back and pull transcripts from...

There were two flagship shows. You know, Bill Donahue had been fired from MSNBC, so there's no more anti-war views. You had Countdown Iraq, which I guess at some point became Countdown with Keith Olberman, but Countdown Iraq. And then on CNN, it was Showdown, Iraq. And these were our programs every evening.

So we get some really good warmongering from those shows. And then you have the officials themselves who did their own press conferences. There were UN Security Council meetings, presentations. And then he also can follow some of the people who came forward, like we had Catherine Gunn, who had the leak to the observer about the NSA spying on delegates to force to strong-armed people into voting for a war resolution. And then you have like Jimmy Carter came out against going to war in Iraq. and then you've got diplomats working under Colin Powell who were resigning. So I'm following all of these things just to give people a recap about the march to the Iraq invasion.

I started this middle of February. It was just for the paying subscribers of the dissenter. And then when we got to March, I expanded it out. And it's there for everyone who subscribes to, you know, free and paid portions of the newsletter. Okay, great. And again, that's at the decenter.org. And how old were you back then, Kevin? Back then, I was in high school.

I was a 15-year-old. Actually, you're talking to me on my birthday. Oh, yeah, happy birthday. Yeah, so I'm 35 now, 20 years to go. I was going through high school. It was my freshman year in high school. And, you know, I can remember. I can remember standing in the cafeteria

and seeing the CNN broadcast put on the small television and everyone's giving like a play by play of what's going to happen as the bombs fall in Iraq. This was post March 19th at this point. And so yeah, I mean, a lot of everything that I understand about the world, much of it comes from what they did with the Iraq war. And I'll carry that on to the war in Ukraine. Why I didn't believe that Vladimir Putin was going to invade Ukraine was because the government that lied us into war in Iraq was telling me that they were going to invade Ukraine. And they weren't giving me any tangible evidence. And I didn't believe these U.S. intelligence agencies because they had lied about weapons of mass destruction.

And I thought they were lying about Putin's plans. But as you know, they made a self-fulfilling prophecy. They basically egged Vladimir Putin on to send troops into Ukraine and they got the war they wanted you got that right um but you know on a rock war two as well i mean i'm really glad that you're doing this i don't know if people are that interested it really does seem so long and far away long ago and far away now i knew when i published my book enough already that like i better really hurry because with the decade changing to the 2020s and now biden coming in even though it's same old Biden. It really just, the end of Trump put a real capstone on the end of Bush Obama era. That just whole time period is just over, even though we still do have troops in Iraq and Syria and Somalia

and, you know, special operations guys across North Africa. And luckily finally left Afghanistan, but only in 2021. And, but, you know, look, I was born in the shadow of Vietnam and I'm 10 years older than you, I guess. And, um, but to me, like the Korean War might as well have happened before World War I, but the same difference to me. It was all black and white footage as a long, long time ago. Now, I know there are a lot of people who, in their conception, Iraq War II is just ancient history. It's something that either they didn't live through or they weren't paying attention to at the time, or if they did, still, they're just over it because it was so long ago, but it just seems to me like it's so important because more than anything about, like, what you just said there,

the dishonesty of the government their not just willingness but their ability to lie this country into war and they didn't stop in Iraq they lied us into Libya and lied us into Syria I guess they didn't even bother lying us

into Somalia or Yemen because nobody cares but hell they lied about Afghanistan that the Taliban weren't willing to deal when of course they were you know and lie about everything yeah and just the stories that they

were spinning about what Saddam Hussein and his regime would do as the whole world, basically. There's only like Spain and Tony Blair with the UK that's actually on board with mobilizing people for war. I think they also got Mexico, but as far as like security council voting members, because they decide they were going to go through at first day, the way they're going to get to do this regime change operation is they're going to get. the backing of the UN Security Council until that failed.

And as it becomes clear, they're not going to get the resolution that they want in mid-March. They're trying to set this deadline of like March 17th for disarmament. And then when Saddam doesn't obey it, they're going to use that as a justification to deploy hundreds of thousands of troops into Baghdad. And you start hearing all these wacky things from the press and Bush. officials like they've got a drone that can go around and crop dust people with chemical weapons things like Iraq has developed something modeled off of South African cluster bomb technology that they're able to use and just all this everything was being disproven by Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector. We were finding out that they had destroyed chemical

weapons that they had in the 90s. They weren't finding the anthrax. All that, everything they said about aluminum tubes and buying uranium from Niger, it was turning out to be complete and total lie. And yet they just kept going and making up new stories that they could feed us. And I actually think it's really important for people to remember what the government was doing then and how they They were feeding this information to the press as we follow the war in Ukraine because just because it's not the U.S. who is an occupying force in Ukraine, just because we're on this, like, the dynamic is different with Ukraine, it doesn't mean that the U.S. government isn't deputizing journalists to feed us lies about the conflict.

Yeah, seriously. And I'm glad that you mentioned the crop dusters here because that's today's. report from March 10th, 2003, at DeCenter.org, I mean, you guys really should look at this. It's such a great time capsule. They're like, yeah, no, Saddam Hussein is going to fly his balsa wood and string drones across Jordan, across Israel, the Mediterranean, possibly take a shortcut across, you know, France and Spain and Portugal, and then the Atlantic Ocean. And then he's coming to your town and say, I don't know, Bethesda Maryland. And he's going to spray you with chemical and germ weapons until you die.

And I went recently, did a good dive and found a bunch of great pictures of this, as I remember from the time laughing my absolute ass off, that you have to go and buy plastic sheeting and duct tape and wrap all your windows and doors to protect you from Saddam Hussein is about to attack. Him and Al-Qaeda are going to use these drones to spray us all with, chemicals and germs. And people did that. And I got a bunch of great pictures of people in full panic mode, you know, like a COVID mode at the Home Depot with getting their plastic sheeting and duct tape. And I know at least one guy they said died because he suffocate. He wrapped his entire house

in this stuff and died. And it's especially like, you can't, it's just true, right? These Democrat women who believe whatever they're told from TV news that just gets so terrified of Putin or whatever it is. And it just all ran straight to Home Depot and like, what's the upper limit on how much duct tape I need right now to protect me from the Saddam Osama alliance? And they just had no problem scaring people's moms and sisters with this crap. Like they just, it was fine with them, you know? I shouldn't be too sexist about it. There were plenty of stupid men who fell for it too. It's just that's who's in the picture.

is these 30-something-year-old NPR listening white women, you know? Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing was just the relentless effort to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda when he had open, like, well-known differences with Osama bin Laden. Like, they weren't going to work together at all. And he, and just lying about the presence of people in the country. And then also the other thing, the day before, I believe on March 9th, I highlighted Condoleez-R-R-Rice. And Condoleez-Rice was on Face of the Nation, and she invokes a detainee that the CIA tortured

who said that Saddam would use chemical and biological weapons. His name was Al-Libby. It turns out that he gave entirely. false confession, because it's when you torture someone, and Saddam did not have these weapons, but she's going around using this. And I think they even weren't entirely sure if he was reliable. But what the government did then is they were torturing people that the CIA had in their custody. And anytime they got them to say something that was useful to supporting regime change in Iraq, they ran with it. And they fed it to people who worked in these departments, to

repeat and then they also gave it to New York Times or the Washington Post or any of these friendly journalists that I would say and I showed, actually go back to March 6th I don't know if you remember this but there was a scripted press conference that George W. Bush

did. Yeah, I watched it live. I watched it live and the word scripted there comes right out of his mouth. A reporter tried to ask a question out of turn and Bush has stopped. This is a scripted and then he says to the other guy okay go ahead you

yeah and that was the press playing their role they were on primetime all of them were afraid to say anything that challenged George W. Bush and you see John King you see David Gregory you see these people who now have these big platforms

on the establishment media or corporate media programs however you want to refer to them and and then my favorite is April Ryan making an appearance towards the end. Of course, she got a lot of notoriety for the question she would ask Donald Trump. But she asked George W. Bush about his faith and how he's getting through this and what guides you spiritually, George W. Bush, as he's out there making this case for war that is built entirely on lies that should be questioned. She's just happy to be

part of this. And they skip over Helen Thomas, who's there and they know her as this person who opposes the U.S. starting conflicts. So they just don't want her to be able to ask any questions and ruin their primetime show. Yeah. I love this report from yesterday, 20 years ago, the 9th, as you point out here, with this Sheikh Alibi stuff. And Condoleezza Rice, I mean, this is such a blatant lie. It's not fair that she didn't add, stupid, at the end of her statement when she says, Zarqawi is in Iraq, and we know that Saddam knows he's there because we told him he's there. But then meanwhile, she's defining Iraq broadly when she knows good and well.

Saddam does not control Kurdistan where Zarqawi was hiding. But this is just an obvious light of hand. Like, she and her staff must have discussed this. Before she went on, we're going to go out there and we're going to tell those idiot losers, suckers that we hate the American people a damned lie right to their face. And we're going to tell them Zarqawi is in quote unquote Iraq when we know good and God damned well that is in practice a lie. And Saddam Hussein has no ability to reach out and touch this guy whatsoever. You know, correct me if I'm wrong, correct me. But I believe that Zarqawi doesn't really appear in Iraq until the invasion or even after.

No, he was there. No, no, no, he was in Kurdistan. And part of it is, and you'll find this probably too, is in fact, I remember one time, I should have to all these in one place, I may have in the longer version of enough already. But I remember one time being impressed with how many different really good stories there were from different reporters. who talked about how the military begged Bush. It started with Jim McLehlesheski at NBC News was the first one.

And there's a couple by him about it, I think, but you can find a bunch of these with a military, Tommy Franks, was begging Bush, let me kill this guy now before the war starts. But of course, no, they needed their talking point. Sarkali, even though he's not loyal to Osama,

and even though he's not loyal to Saddam, well he is a jihadi and he's in quote unquote i roll iraq and that's enough for powell and bush to drive a war through and so they had to keep him there and then he did become they of course they way over blew his role in the war and tried to make it sound like all resistance was you know this terrorist madman foreigner from jordan not local iraqis but it is still true that he and his men were a absolute menace to american forces and their allies during that war and civilian Shiite populations and everybody else. And so, you know, the cynicism with which they used that.

I mean, and look, we're talking about Franks and his guys came to Bush over and over again. I believe CIA, too, because they had guys in the country already before the war. And they were ready to wrap him up before the war, and Bush wouldn't let them. I mean, he could be convicted and put in prison for life just for that one small aspect of this. you know the treason that that represents against the enlisted guys in this war who got blown up by zarkawi's men is just you know it knowing that he was going to do this he could have wrapped up zarkawi and his guys with one small team you know what i mean before the war began but yeah it's a hell of a thing and just that's what gets me is the how blatant this lie is

you know what i mean oh zarkawi is in iraq she says come on kankan Belizea. I know you know you're lying to me. You know, come on. Right. And then at this point, we also have Colin Powell who knows he's been caught. There were forged documents about uranium from Niger. They were given to the atomic energy agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency. They've been caught. And now he's he's acting like, oh, well, maybe the aluminum tubes. We know what they'll be used for. Remember, there was also this thing about magnets. That was also something that Powell was fearmongering over,

that Iraq had these magnets that could be used for creating weapons of mass destruction. They're caught, and they just, you know, double down and hope that the world will move on and not call them on the lies. And, you know, eventually they got to go ahead with their operations anyways. Yep. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good.

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That's Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. Casali is C-A-S-A-L-Rick-Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. I mean, I remember, in fact, you could still. find this. If you go and look at anti-warre.com in the wayback machine and then go, I'm almost certain it would be September the 20th of 2002. One of the top, it's not even one of the top, well, it's in the top section, it's like in the middle of the top section. And I remember reading this at the time. Washington Post, Joby Warwick interviews David Albright, the guy who was constantly

falsely accusing Iran of things. And Joby Warwick from the post interviews David Albright. right. And they just completely debunk this aluminum tubes crap. And they talk with experts from the energy department and everywhere else. And they just say, look, this is not the same quality stuff that you would use for a centrifuge. Never mind the idea that somehow Saddam Hussein is going to hide a Manhattan project in Iraq. We're out in broad daylight in front of everyone with no tree cover, no nothing anywhere. You know, the whole thing is completely preposterous. But then, so that was all the experts. That was in September. I think almost certainly it's the 20th of 2002. It might have been in the post on the 19th, posted on the 19th, and anti-war.com's front page

on the 20th, if people go to the way back machine there. And then I remember just, I just spent the rest of 2002 and the first three months of 2003 against the 19th is the invasion, right? So it was, you know, six months later, might count that right, I'm going, just my jaw dropped the whole time. They're just going to keep talking about aluminum tubes the whole time anyway. It doesn't matter that the Washington damned post already debunk this. The CIA Post already said this is not true, and they just keep going anyway. They don't care. And then, as you said, the inspectors got there, and they went, oh, here are the tubes.

They're using them for rockets, just like they were before in the 90s when they used these exact same kind of tubes for Ketusha rockets. Uh-huh. And they, here we are. And then what they do, as you say, they just keep right on, right on. Debunked in the post, nothing. How about debunked by the weapons inspectors who were holding the damn tubes in their hands? Nope, I'm still going to use it anyway Because TV's just not going to tell the American people

Right, you might have read that in the telegraph Or something on your Lexis nexus Fancy little search engine thing there But let me tell you something That was not the headline on Fox News that night Or on the top of the hour news on KLBJ AM 590 With Mark Caesar who fired ABC And replaced them with the Fox News Hawks instead

Nobody got to hear that Nobody got to see that And an aluminum too You know Dave Chappelle goes oh an aluminum tube like what are you talking about dude you gotta do all of this stuff to turn that into all of a sudden

now we're talking about nuclear weapons and get the hell out of here aluminum tube yeah see sorry I'm ranting all over your interview but that's what happens when we start talking about Iraq War II I'm still mad at the time at the time they weren't going to stop with Iraq right

they got six or seven countries they're going to go blow through and try and topple their regimes. And so Iraq was the first and right, Afghanistan's still a conflict and an occupation, but they've got plans for several countries. Well, the list was Libya, got them. Somalia did them. Lebanon, well, we had some problems there.

That was really mostly, you know, destroy Hezbollah, is what they were talking about there. um which that didn't work the Israelis tried and then of course Syria and uh of course they gave that a shot and it which led to the caliphate which they then had to destroy oops and then uh iran oh in Sudan they broke off south Sudan i don't know if that counts as a regime change in the capital but um they broke off CIA stole south Sudan away from the rest of Sudan and then uh iran they haven't gotten around to yet pers is a little too big to bite off and chew for the Pentagon so far, you know, although after all

this tough talk against Russia, they're going to start looking at Iran like it's not that big of a deal, right? We could take them. Yeah, yeah, but they really want a conflict over Taiwan. That's what they really want. They want, that's the I think that's the showdown that you've got the whole

war machine salivating over. Yeah. Well, you know, this keeps coming up and I, I got to say, you know, playing with boats in the bathtub is one thing. Actually losing ships to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the bunch of 20-year-olds on board, that could be a problematic problem. And them Chinese, they got a lot of sea-skimming missiles,

and I don't really know what more you need to know than that. Imagine an American president. Imagine Joe Biden after losing an aircraft carrier. What's he going to do, resign and humbly apologize, or he's going to know. nuke somebody. Yeah. And then once U.S. soldiers are dying, it's all over. They're not, you know, they'll, they'll have to pull back.

I mean, one of the reasons why the war in Ukraine gets to go on the way it is with our proxy forces is, it's not U.S. kids. It's not young 18, 19-year-olds getting blown up by Russian military forces. Yeah. I know. In fact, a friend just sent me one today for my collection. It's going in the book. Was it Kyle? Had sent me.

Oh, the Russian army is being chewed up by the Ukrainians. We're having the Ukrainians do that right now, in a sense, for us. So, you know, these disposable heroes, these Ukrainian soldiers, they're not all Nazis, by the way. There's enough Nazis we should not be helping them. But that didn't mean they all are Nazis who might as well, you know, better off dead anyway, kind of thing um but they're they just cynically talk about just using these guys up um lindsay graham of course there's got to be the worst that you know we just we love it this way what a great dynamic harmonian weapons and they got to do all the dying not us ha ha ha just to the last ukrainian

it's the last ukrainian yeah and then who was it one of these senators said right down to hand to hand combat in the trenches like this all this fantasy stuff about you know the world wars happening only i don't have to be there but i can still really enjoy it you know i don't know there's actually been a couple of good anti-war world war world war one movies that i think you could watch and you have come out in recent years and get the experience but with a little bit different take than just how glorious yeah all right well anyway look Listen, a record two sucks, and I'm glad that you're shining this spotlight on it, and especially I'm glad the way that you, and I guess it sounds like whoever's helping you,

have done all this great research in such a systematic way. I'm a little bit jealous and concerned that maybe I need to go and dig through all this stuff and poach a lot of things, and then I don't know what I'll do with them all. But I love great collections of facts and footnotes and crazy claims by these goons, the way that you have them here, man. This is really great stuff. I'm absolutely certain now that I know about it to go back and read every day worth

and I hope people will it's at the dissenter.com the March 2 Iraq War you should call it Iraq War 2 I'm trying to get that going Iraq War 2 yeah you're right it's sort of a generational thing where I'm showing my youth because I didn't live through the Gulf War in the 90s so operation yellow ribbon we call it very important for America's self-esteem for our military in our national security state and their money.

I'll tell you what, I interviewed Julian Assange's brother earlier today. And good guy. Watch this movie, Ithaca that they made about it. And you came up, as you always do such a good job on this. And your new book is called Guilty of Journalism. I was digging through the table of contents here. And it really looks like the way you... you've categorized this thing is just what i like i want to go through chapter one charges and

allegations chapter two manning's court martial chapter three how the u.s government viewed wiki leagues and then on like that espionage act the cia's war on wiki leagues um and it's got a forward by abby martin who i admire and um i know what kind of substance that you have brought to this story for well over a decade now. So I know that this is just going to be killer. You want to talk a little bit about what made you decide to go ahead and start collecting your, it's not a collection of articles. I don't want to say that, but what made you decide to turn from writing articles to going ahead and putting out a book about this? Yeah. So I was thinking of how imminent and likely is that Julian Assange could be put on trial in the United States. And I realize that I'm not

writing the first book on Julian Assange. There's actually a couple really good books out there. Like Neil's Meltzer's book, The Trial Against Julian Assange, A Story of Persecution, is pretty much the gold standard, especially in his, he was using his position as the UN Special Rapporteur on torture to dig in and show the abuses of power by Ecuador's government. Sweden by the United Kingdom and also the United States. And I think the neglect of Australia as well, because Julian Assange is an Australian citizen and they basically have abandoned their citizen. And you can go to Declassified Australia and read from Kelly Tranter,

a attorney who put in some freedom of information requests. They say that Julian Assange has declined to get counselor assistance while he's in Belmar's prison. Well, that's not true. They just haven't been helping him when he wanted them to be a, monitor and speak up for his rights while he's being kept in indefinite detention, essentially. So I recognize that Julian Assange could be brought here very soon. I wanted to put together this book that gave people a guide to, well, I know all about the indictments and the allegations that the U.S. government has made, much like we have discussed all of the lies and everything

that has been said about why the U.S. needed to go to war in Iraq. We've got a litany, an absolute laundry list of lies that have been told about Julian Assange and how he's not a journalist and how he's a hacker and how. And so I go through all of this. I particularly stay focused on the indictments themselves. And I use my reporting because my distinction, I'm not the only one saying this. Andrew Coburn at Harper's Magazine, Pentagon Papers, whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, have both gave me the distinction of being one of the only reporters who covered both the Manning court martial as well as Julian Assange's case. So what I think people need to see is that when you observe the Julian Assange prosecution, it's important to look back at how military

prosecutors went after Manning because Manning was accused of the very similar offense to Julian Assange. They're actually being, if you look at the Julian Assange case, now they're saying Assange conspired with Manning. And so if you look at the case that Manning went through, you can see that they weren't talking about Julian Assange in the same way, or they weren't talking about WikiLeaks in the same way that they do now. They didn't refer to WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service, as Mike Pompeo dubbed them. And so I think that's important to bring into it. And then I do look at Russiagate later in my book. I really focus on the CIA's war on WikiLeaks and and then the FBI's role and try to bring all that in. So we see the security

services and the way that they've generated the pressure to charge Julian Assange. Because, you know, no matter your own political affiliations and viewpoints about these presidents, whether it be Barack Obama or Donald Trump. The fact of the matter is that there weren't any indictments that were handed down when Obama was president. Now, Eric Holder, as Attorney General, did not shut down the grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks, which is a problem because it was revived when Jeff Sessions took over as Attorney General under Donald Trump. But the person who indicted on his watch, that was Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and Donald Trump. was president. And so, uh, this is, this is something that, uh, you know, I think everyone has to

grapple with is like, what was the reason? Why did the justice department go and charge Julian Assange? We're talking about things that happened in 2010 and 2011. Why now in 2019, all of a sudden, was he getting charged with these crimes? And it was because the CIA was angry that they had had their Vault 7 materials exposed, that they had shown the world how the CIA can engage in offensive cyber warfare. They can hack into your smart televisions, your smartphones, your encryption apps, do whatever they want to compromise. They might plant malware. They have ways that they can engage in cyber attacks, and then they can give it fingerprints and identification marks that make it look like it comes from different countries that are not really

behind the attack so they could make it look like Russia or China or Iran had committed the cyber attack and not the CIA. So we learn all about these tools thanks to WikiLeaks and it really makes them angry. And then they are plotting their own sort of revenge operations that they can carry out on Assange. And that makes the Justice Department afraid so they're motivated to get these indictments and roll them out before we see like a rendition where Julian Assange's kidnapped and brought to the U.S. or another more horrific thing that was considered was could they poison him in the embassy? What kind of accidents? These all go back to the manuals that were on the books in like the 1950s when they were plotting regime change against Guatemala. And they talked about

how they could make someone look like they had committed a suicide like by falling out of a part window. And in fact, it was really a CIA hit operation. Hmm. And then, so I'm sorry, were you kind of hitting there that you think that they hurried up and indicted him? Someone at Justice was trying to protect him from the CIA, just cutting his head off? Yeah, actually, that's the substance in the Yahoo News reporting that was done by. Okay, I guess I didn't remember that part, that it was really the Justice Department intervening in a way to prevent the worst from happening. Yeah, there was a panic. And the CIA, whether, in my view, it's intentional. I think they know exactly what they're doing. I think, or not. But unfortunately, because of the secrecy of our government, we're not going to know for like 25 or 30 years. And by that time, Julian Assange could actually be dead. And he may not really ever know the truth of what was happening in those moments to him. But they were really afraid that something was going to happen where,

they would just go in and snatch Julian Assange out of the embassy. They talked about leaving the door open and going in to take him and bring him back to the United States for a trial. And I think they knew that if they didn't have charges against Julian Assange, they weren't going to be able to justify keeping him in their custody. So there were meetings in the National Security Council of the Trump administration, there were Justice Department officials who were panicked. And, you know, they, like, Mike Pompeo is an unhinged figure. I mean, his book, never give an inch. He calls Julian Assange a rapist for publishing these files about the CIA and I think any other files

about the wars and whatever. And so, but I think there's certainly, like, there's, in my mind, there's really something wrong about Pompeii i think it's truly a sociopath by the way i mean are you saying he actually calls him a rapist for the publication or just because he's mad but he's referring to this bogus uh story out of sweden no he calls him um he calls him uh here i actually one second i'm going to do something on what pompeo wrote because he did he's got two pages in his book that he wrote that he put this together because he's going to run for president, I think.

And so in it, he doesn't just call Julian Assange a rapist because he was accused of rape, although that sort of happens. But he says, my reaction, and he's referring to Vault 7, my reaction was that an inside had raped America. The man ultimately at the helm of this operation was indeed an accused rapist, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which I regard as a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors such as Russia. So, yeah, he said the exposure of the CIA files was a rape.

Hilarious. When all it showed was what criminals they are and what kind of murder they get away with, that's all. Well, yeah, we never had any conversation. There was never a democratic discussion where we talked about CIA be engaged in all of this. And should we maybe think of the blowback if it's discovered? I mean, if Russia figures this out or China figures us out or Iran, I mean, what sort of retaliation are we going to go through? We never had any discussions.

Yeah, well, let me ask what you think is going to happen now. I know he's not like the very last stage of appeal available to him, right? or the government is at their last stage of appeal in the judge said that he could go free one or the other there where we're at right now is it's a total state of legal limbo where he's punished by process and we've been waiting now for eight or nine months to find out if the appeals court in the United Kingdom will give Julian Assange a day in court on this appeal because the extradition was approved by the UK and he would be put on the plane were it not for the fact that he still gets to appeal his extradition and argue he's a journalist. He's being accused

of a political offense. The extradition law is not being interpreted correctly. And so you should not hand me over to the U.S. for this trial. And I don't know. I'm not sure what's going to happen we have no indication from the high court of when they're going to hear this case. And then he did put, and he filed some kind of an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, but I don't know how they can hear his case when he's still waiting for these other courts to step in and listen to his complaints about the way this case has been handled by the British government, which is a total client state. working for the U.S., just as they did on the Iraq War, when they aligned and Tony Blair was doing everything that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney asked him to do to further the operations, the military operations there. And it's no different now. And that's also the way that they're working as they further the proxy war in Ukraine. So they put the diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and U.K., before the human rights or the liberty or the safety, however you want to view it, of Julian Assange. And they do not really care if global, it's important for people to know, we have a global coalition of civil liberties, human rights and press freedom organizations around the world, continent to continent, that say this is a tragedy and a farce and they won't stop it.

and the UK keeps pressing on. And so I think it's really bleak, but I don't know if Julian Assange, I can't tell you when he's going to be brought to the United States. I legitimately have no idea. And I know that Australia could do a part, they could play a part where they stood up for their own citizen and told Biden. And there's going to be some kind of a meeting in the next few days in Australia with Joe Biden, I believe, they could raise the issue and tell him that they need to free Julian Assange and end this case right now. But they're not going to. And they're not going to because they're one of the five eyes country and they're getting a lot of military equipment to fortify their country against China. And they are being told that they need to do

this because the U.S. is going to engage in a new, uh, a new, uh, plan of constant provocation. I mean, they already do, but they're going to escalate their provocations of China much the same way they escalated their provocations and encircled Russia. And so Australia is hamstrung and doesn't feel like there's space for them to raise the case of Julian Assange because they're in this, you know, they're in this paradigm where they are expected to be an ally that helps the U.S. fight China. So Julian Assange, again, Um, he, he loses. He doesn't get any help from anyone who should be able to end this. I mean, much the same way that he should have been freed, uh, years ago, uh, uh, he should

have been set free with a pardon from Donald Trump, but, uh, Mitch McConnell, um, and other Republicans like Mark, Marco Rubio threatened Donald Trump. I don't know if you know this story, Scott, but on the last few weeks that he was in office, he was considering a pardon. He was considering a pardon of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, too. And they said, if you pardoned Julian Assange, we're going to vote to impeach you because they had an impeachment vote coming up. And they basically got him to back down. Yeah. The day they voted to convict him in the Senate should have forbid him from being able to run for president again, I guess presumably.

Removed him from office the hard way. So, yep. Hell of a way to go down in flames there. Hey guys, check out my new sponsor. It's Peacehawk Coffee at Peacehawk.comfee. First of all, business, you have to drink coffee in the morning, and you want it to taste good. Well, Peacehawk coffee is the best from around the world. But then, just as important, Peacehawk Coffee donates at least a dollar of every pound sold to worthy foreign aid organizations like Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation.

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writing and podcasting. And we've also got a ton of other great writers, too, like Walter Block, Richard Booth, Boss Spliet, Kim Robinson, and William Ben Wagonin. We've published eight books so far, including my latest, hotter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons, and Keith Knight's new Voluntarius Handbook. And we've got quite a few more great ones coming soon. Check out Libertarian Institute.org slash books. It's a whole new era. We libertarians don't have the power, but we do have enough influence to try to lead the left and the right to make things right. Join us at Libertarian Institute.org. Yeah, the poor guy. I don't know. I talked to his brother earlier today, and he says, you know, I guess he's doing a little bit better because I didn't know,

did you know this part? I had never heard this. I don't think. It wasn't any complaint of ours or the United Nations or Nils Melser or anyone, it was the inmates of the prison all got together and organized and protested the treatment of Assange and demanded that he be given proper treatment and let out of solitary confinement. And that was who got it done, was the local prisoners in the jail that said,

this guy, you got to let him out of there. Yeah, I recall that. They did a little bit of this thing, which actually happened to man. where they were, oh, your mental health, oh, you might be suicidal, oh, we're going to keep you. Yeah, suicide precautions means we lock you naked in a cell alone, you know, and no blanket.

And then, yeah, and these are people who are accused of highly violent, maybe even terroristic offenses, but even they can tell that Julian Assange is to be a defendant. Yeah. well so and I guess that means at least he's not as suicidal and like completely losing his mind he can only lock somebody in solitary for so long and what the hell this guy has gone through for being a journalist it's just incredible you think that he killed somebody you know the way they um I know you covered this at the time the way that they kept him when he was in court

they made him sit in his plexiglass cage and all this stuff like somehow he had smuggled the suicide bomb in there and was a danger to the people in the room and all this is and just just to only like for the public relations spectacle of the thing to make him look like, wow, he must really be dangerous or else why do they have him locked up like that, you know? Like he's Hannibal Lecter or something on a dolly with a face mask and everything. Yeah, and I've always objected to the way they talk about him as a fugitive because he saw asylum in the Ecuador embassy. his attorney Michael Ratner who was on the WikiLeaks legal team no longer with us

he he he knew exactly what the ploy was what Sweden was up to how they were planning to go after Assange everything he said would happen basically happened and so yeah I it's the shredding of the Magna Carta basically. As I was watching, I, you know, went to a legal hearing in London. I got to follow the legal argument. I saw Julian Assange kept behind that glass box and they made a plea to the judge to allow him to sit with his legal counsel, his lawyers, so that he could hear clearly, so he could participate in his defense so that he would be able to know what these things. things were that the prosecutors were saying about him on behalf of the United States, but she said no. And I don't, I confess as somebody who at least has that amount of liberty or sees that amount of liberty in the United States, I don't really understand how the UK, the UK gets off not letting people who are accused of crimes sit with their lawyers.

Like they keep them off to the side. Even, I mentioned Catherine Gunn earlier when she was accused of exposing. I'm sorry, you cut out a little bit. You mentioned who? I mentioned Catherine Gunn earlier. Oh, uh-huh. And, you know, she was kept in this glass box or this like case off to the side or this cage off to the side. You know, her attorneys, which actually, Gareth Pierce is at the firm, is with the firm that is also, she represented

Catherine Garner had some involvement in it. She's also, she, she was, is on the Assange legal team now, has been an advisor. She's a lot older. She's in her 80s. And anyways, Catherine was kept off to the side and ostracized. And what it does is it really isolates you, makes you feel like you have done something criminal. Obviously, that's the goal. And these people who, she's a whistleblower. He's a journalist. And I really think that it's really important. I mean, one of the few things I'll get in here before we wind down is that I made it the first words that I printed in the book. I wrote, Julian Assange is a journalist. And that's a deliberate choice on my part. I do not have any interest in debating. There are a lot of people who I think

are good, well-meaning people who they say, well, it doesn't matter what you think of Julian Assange. He may not be a journalist to you, but we can all agree that he engaged in the act of journalism. And I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that because I think that that actually makes it easy for the government to advance its arguments that delegitimize Julian Assange, that demonize him, that slander him, that make it harder for us to see him as something that should, who should be defended. And so I just, I throw that all out the door.

And I, I even use the committee to protect journalists own definition against them. Because this, this little outfit, which, you know,

isn't the worst organization, but they've got it wrong. They won't put Julian Assange in the jail journalists index that they do annually, because they've got people on their board, I guess,

who are part of the press who hate him. Unbelievable. They got people like, Lester Holt and others who are on their board and so they won't list him in the index

but they'll list the like dissidents in China and Iran and other places like North Korea who are being attacked and that's fine I don't have a problem with that but you should have Julian Assange listed their own criteria says that if you engage

in you know the like people don't understand that Julian Assange isn't just someone who public documents he was also a commentator he was also involved in writing articles sure and it says in the committee to protect journalists's own definition that somebody like that should be protected because julian assange was engaged in conversations about nsafe surveillance he did work on google well you know kevin they say yeah but he hacked and he encouraged and he crossed the line that other journalists don't cross what about that

Well, yeah, it's good that you ask me because that's a good part of my chapter on the Manning Court Marshall, where we bring out that that password cracking conspiracy that is alleged is, you know, as much of a lie is the idea that weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq because Chelsea Manning didn't need to have access to any of the files because she already had access. She already had a security clearance. Manning was able to move around the computers. The idea that anonymity was needed, she could download any of those files, and nobody in her unit would have told her that she was violating her ethics or whatever she's expected to follow. And the fact of the matter is the reason why Manning wanted, the reason why Manning wanted to be able to crack this password. We know this. I know this from being one of the only journalists to follow the court martial. I remember this being a big thing during. This was always something that David Coombs, who was the defense attorney for Manning, he always mentioned this. It was like, did soldiers download unauthorized music onto their computers? They go, yeah. Anybody from the military who was there from the unit, he'd asked this question. Did soldiers download unauthorized software to their computers? Yeah, all the time. Unauthorized movies. Yeah. Okay. And the point being that this was not supposed to happen. But the way you could do this is if you were able to basically like circumvent the security and get it so you could download this and the unit would not be able to track that you were loading this computer with all sorts of files and software that were not supposed to be, I guess, loading the memory of this computer.

Unlike the liberated files, which did belong on that computer. Yeah, right. And so I guess you remember, this is Baghdad. This is Baghdad where it's hot and dusty and everything probably was like running like crap. And so this was what was going on. This was why Manning wanted to be able to anonymously have access to the computer. So like any user, they could put material on their computer that they're supervisor wouldn't you be able to tell they were downloading onto their computer. Right. And so that's why she asked Julian Assange about it if she, in fact, even had any communications with Assange, which I go to great lengths in my book to not say that it's a given that communications or chats happened. Yeah, we don't really know that that was Assange, do we?

That's correct. Because, and this is in the extradition case now. This was in the court martial that they did. didn't ever put a witness on the stand that authenticated the chats who could prove that Assange was on the other end. I know that there's some claim of some unnamed person who maybe knew Assange that the U.S. government's going to trot out in the event of a trial and use them to claim that Julian Assange talked with Manning. But the fact is, we have never been able to prove. they have never been able to prove

without a doubt that that person was Assange and not somebody else working for WikiLeaks. And there were others and we know there's others because those associates were targets of the CIA. We know that and they were targets of the FBI. And so

yeah, just I make sure that people see Julian Assange as a journalist because it's important that he's not just, you know, some publisher or activist or whatever else label you want to affix to him so that you don't have to treat him like the person he has. Because like, we talked about this before.

I mean, there's no such thing anyway. This is all just made up. Everybody has freedom of speech. Everybody has the freedom of the press. You don't have to be the press to have freedom of the press. Just press something. True. And you have it. That's it. And, you know, this is the United States of America. God dang. I have to put up this crap. And he's a U.S. person as long as is they're trying to put their federal just department clutches on him. And that means he's protected by the First Amendment. That's true. That's it.

They have no jurisdiction to do this whatsoever other than Woodrow Wilson's blatantly unconstitutional law. Yeah. New York Times General Counsel, James Goodall, who was part of, you know, trying to stop the Nixon administration from going after the media when they were publishing those papers from Ellsberg. He actually, I had a conversation with him once and, you know, he agreed with me when I made the point, which is what you're saying here, is that, okay, he's not a U.S. citizen. So why should he have to follow the espionage act? Okay. But if they are going to charge him under the espionage act, shouldn't he get the same due process rights that every American has when they are accused of violating a crime that is on the books in this country? That's right. Yeah. And the whole bill of rights should apply to him there. Absolutely. All right, listen, and that's the way it was. Go ahead. Well, just to put an exclamation point on it, that's the way it ended up being with many of the war on terrorism detainees who are at Guantanamo. Eventually, they recognized that those people, as much as they wanted to keep them out of our legal system, the only way they were going to be able to deal with them was to give them those Bill of Rights as well.

Right. All right, listen, man, such great work on both counts here. I hope people will go and look at the dissenter and this great day-by-day coverage. Maybe I'll try to ask Kyle or one of the guys to see if we can start blogging this at anti-war.com and point people's eyeballs at it too. Really great stuff there.

And I'm really proud of you for putting this book together. I'm really grateful for all the great journalism that you have done on the issue of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Manning, for that matter, and all of the files and all the different aspects of it over what this 13 something years now or more. So thank you very much for that

and thank you again for your time on the show, Kevin. All right. Thanks for the support. All right you guys. That's Kevin Gostola. He's at Shadowproof and the dissenter and the book is called Guilty of journalism. The political case against Julian Assange.

The Scott Horton show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. APS Radio. com, antiwar.com, Scotthorton.org, and libertarian institute.org.