Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/31/23 Josh Rushing on the Persecution of Julian Assange

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Journalist Josh Rushing joins Scott to discuss a documentary he produced for Al Jazeera about Julian Assange. Rushing talks about his experience making the documentary, what they focused on and why they produced it now. They run through the many myths people still believe about Assange before getting into the multiple ways he has been targeted by the government and betrayed by many of his fellow journalists.  Discussed on the show: The imprisonment of Julian Assange Scott’s interview with Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s brother The Julian Assange Indictment WikiLeaks: Collateral Murder (Iraq, 2007) The Good Soldiers by David Finkel README.txt: A Memoir by Chelsea Manning “An open letter from editors and publishers: Publishing is not a Crime” (The Guardian) “Alternative Facts: How the media failed Julian Assange” (Harper’s Magazine) “Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks” (Yahoo News) “How Comey intervened to kill WikiLeaks’ immunity deal” (The Hill) ‘I Sold The Iraq War And Regret It’ Mission Al-Jazeera by Josh Rushing Josh Rushing is an American broadcast journalist and photographer. He is a correspondent for the Emmy-winning documentary series, Fault Lines, on Al Jazeera English. He is also a former officer of the United States Marine Corps. Follow him on Twitter @joshrushing 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 all right you guys on the line i've got josh rushing and he made this great new documentary about julian asange and his persecution for aljazeera the imprisonment of julian Assange at Al Jazeera.com. Welcome to the show. How do you do? Thanks for me, Scott. I'm happy to be here. Hey, so I just want to say before we start the show that last night I had the honor of hosting the Q&A

after Julian Assange's father and brother debuted their movie at the Alamo Draft House here in Austin. And I got to meet both of them. And it's John and Gabriel Shepton. And the movie's called Ithaca. And I interviewed Gabriel on the show a couple weeks ago. People can go. Uh, well, I guess you can't see it online yet. Soon you'll be able to, I guess. Um, but it was great because John Shepton, Julian Assange's father said that Julian says hi. And he remembered me. I doubted he probably remembered me. I interviewed him back in 2010 or something like that. And he said, oh, Julian says hi. And, and he was thrilled to know that I was going to be doing this with you tonight. And he told me, you'd done more than 5,000 interviews. And then I was, I'm like, wait a minute,

five thoughts so in other words he's listening to me in prison if he knows i mean it's almost at six now but it's only been five for a couple of years so that means that i you know i wonder if he gets podcasts in there i know he doesn't have the internet but maybe his his dad said maybe the lawyers bring him his favorite podcast or something like that so julian if you're listening we love you man and that's great and anyway there's a lot of people out here fighting for you dude including our guest today so uh welcome the show josh how are you hey i'm i'm good scott i'm good But, yeah, that's cool. You met Gabriel and John.

They're really nice, aren't they? They're good people. Yeah, it was really a great time. It was really fantastic to see them, to see their movie and meet them. And to see, you know, it is such an uphill battle what's going on legally here. But it is really heartening to see how many people do still care about this and are rallying around it. But anyway, so. And I would argue as much as you can care about.

Julian Assange that just, you know, if you believe in the power of the truth or facts or that government should be transparent or held to account, this story is very much about a human being that's suffering under what I think a lot of people could argue government overreach, but it's also about issues that are much, much bigger that affect everyone in the way, really the effect the way democracy can exist or not. All right. So look, to start here, let me ask you, what was it that made you decide to do this?

Or did your editor decide for you? Maybe a little bit of both. Yeah, my executive producer, Leila Illyrian, had an interest in the story for quite a while. And we were watching it thinking, okay, when they extradite Assange to the U.S., that'll be the time for us through this story. And just as a way of backstory,

of my show Fault Lines, it's kind of a documentary style, to get a program on Al Jazeera English. And our job, really, our purview is to cover the U.S. We do a lot of international coverage, but it needs to tie back to the U.S. because we've been in this larger picture of Al Jazeera English. There's a similar show out of Asia and out of Africa, right? And so we were kind of waiting for Assange to be brought, you know, to the U.S.,

and we thought that would be the time to look into this issue. But the more we followed it for literally years, we realized if waiting for the prosecution is kind of missing a big part of this story because clearly what we're seeing is persecution before prosecution. I mean, he had been silenced. He's being held in the UK's harshest prison, Belmarsh. for the originally he was taken there on a charge of having missed a court date um when he went into the embassy what seven eight years ago well longer than that now um he went there to miss the court date basically and claim um political asylum so they when they they carried him out of the embassy they tried him for that and gave him like a 50 week sentence which is the max sentence for that

So he's going on four years or over four years now in Belmarsh, over three years of that without a sentence. He's just simply being held while they figure out the extradition. Now, he can be held anywhere, but he's being held in their harshest prison. And so it occurred to us that if everyone's kind of waiting for like some kind of future prosecution in order to really look into like what's happening here, then the government in a way is winning without winning. they're they've silenced Assange for all of these these years and they're really um yeah so anyway that that's why we we chose to to go ahead and do it now I mean I looking back on it I think we should have done it two three years before we did it honestly um it is such an important

case so that's kind of about the timing of it the importance of it is Julian Assange with he has 18 different charges from the U.S. that he's indicted for. One of those is the Computer Fraud Abuse Act, the CFAAA. The other 17 are espionage charges. And so I think it's helpful to kind of separate these and the two things. And I'd like to discuss them in great detail, but I don't want this first answer to go on too long. But just to say that charging a publisher with the Espionage Act has massive consequences. Just yesterday, the Washington Post came out with a leak of documents from a Russian cybersecurity contractor.

Those documents were given to a journalist in Germany who shared him with Der Spiegel and the Washington Post. There's a precedent now that Putin could charge the journalist in Germany and the publisher of the Washington Post with. espionage act, or whatever the Russian version is, and request an extradition. And the U.S. has set that precedent, clear as can be. The fact that Russia picked up the Wall Street Journal reporter this week and is charging with espionage charges, and at the White House press conference yesterday, they were talking about how outrageous that is. But yet the U.S. has a journalist and publisher right now under the charges of espionage act. And if you look at what read the indictment that you would think this is about spying or something, but it's not.

It's just about what they would say, the handling, the unauthorized handling of classified information. But that's also the classified documents that were Marlago, the classified documents they found at Pence's home, the classified documents they found at Biden's home could also all bring about espionage act charges, but of course they won't. The espionage act has been used almost exclusively in the last 10 or 20 years to go after whistleblowers. Julian Sange is not a whistleblower. He's a publisher. The information was leaked to him, and he published it.

So if you go after someone with Espionage Act for handling, unauthorized handling of classified information, that's something that national security journalists do every day. And so the Obama administration knew that. That's why they didn't charge us on. They called it the New York Times problem. But when the Trump administration came in, they saw that problem as the New York Times opportunity.

They would love to charge reporters with whatever they can. And so there's that element of it, that this is really important consequences. That's one reason. Another reason is I've never, in my many years of reporting, come across a story that well-informed, well-connected people are so misinformed about. Ask someone what Assange is indicted for in Washington, D. and you're much more likely to get something he's actually not than something that he is. Just a short list of things he's not indicted for.

Anything to do with Trump, Russia, the DNC, Clinton, hacking into anything, sexual abuse, any crimes anywhere other than the U.S. And maybe most importantly, for publishing anything that wasn't true. The U.S. doesn't contend that WikiLeaks ever published anything that wasn't actually true. So what is he actually being indicted for? It was for the Chelsea Manning leak. All these charges go back to that singular link. Nothing to do with Vault 7, nothing to do with the CIA, nothing to do with spying. And for that leak that he's being charged for, no one hacked into anything.

Manning had access, authorized access to that information. She downloaded, she leaked it out. She didn't have the, she wasn't authorized to distribute it or to leak it. But that's not hacking. That's leaking. and that could be considered whistleblowing, but it's not hacking. No one hacked into anything.

The documents were leaked. WikiLeaks published them, and that's what all of these 18 charges are about. All right, so I want to go back, Josh, to something that you said there about. All the Espionage Act charges, but then there's this other one under the computer fraud and abuse act,

whichever it is. And so can you get more specific about that? Because I know that what you say is right, that there was no hacking. Manning did all of this and the password, that they were talking about was a side issue

a red herring type of a thing but if I understand it right though this is sort of the crux of the government's case that Assange is not a publisher but somehow had crossed the line into helping Manning break into

the computers which makes him null and void and not the same as a New York Times reporter who receives a leak and publishes it if that's the case then the way to move forward here drop the espionage act charges 17 of them those are the ones they carry 10 years each so that's 170 years worth of a sentence let's set that aside and let's talk about the cf a charge which carries

a max of five years now even they could come to an agreement here without him admitting guilt and without the government giving up their charges um that it's time served and walk away because he's been in belmar for four years but if you look at the heart of the cf a charge i don't think they would win it in court. And I'll tell you why. What they have is there's a Jabber account where Manning is asking someone on the other side of that Jabber account, which is WikiLeaks, can you help me break a password so I can get in as an administrator into my computer rather than as the user that would identify her. And someone, we don't know who, on the other end of that Jabber account, basically says, let me look into it. A couple days later, comes back and says,

no luck. That's it, man. That's what they have. That's it. And so another important thing to understand is most of everything that Manning released to Wikileaks had already been downloaded before that conversation even happened. So you have like, okay, did someone we don't know who, but the government's alleging Julian Assange actually work on breaking into that computer, that government computer with an administrator password, or did they just say, let me see what I can do so they could keep a source on the line for a few more days? And the whole point of getting in as an administrator

wasn't even to access other information. It was to try to cover his tracks, her tracks, Chelsea Manning's tracks. And so that charge is such, like you said, a red herring. But even so, you're going to hold a guy in the harshest prison in the UK for, four years, why you talk about extrading them for a charge that only goes to a maximum of five years anyway?

Well, now, I mean, first of all, I just want to focus on how doubly fake that was, or triply fake. There's no proof it was Assange that Manning was even talking to. The password access help never came. And it was after the fact, I guess it's kind of quadruple, after the fact, but the, and And then the purpose then only was to try to cover up just some trade craft. But again, the person on WikiLeaks side of the conversation never did anything along those lines anyway.

So, but am I right, though, that then their espionage case against him kind of hinges upon that because that's where they're saying this is what made him cross a line and make him no longer a publisher, even though, in fact, many investigative reporters have, you know, openly said that, boy, they badger the hell out of their sources sometimes. Get me more documents. Get me more documents by far crossing lines compared to what they're accusing him of here. But am I right that that's the technicality that they're trying to hang him with? I think that's a legal argument they're trying to make.

Although, if you read the indictment, and I would encourage your listeners to go on and read the indictment. It's online. The indictment for the CFAA is only six pages. It's a really quick and easy read. Then you can also read the espionage indictments as well. but um i have it's been a couple years so i'm trying to refresh my memory here but yeah well i just encourage everyone to do it not not not just you i because i've you know i've been in a number of panels in dc where experts on the stage are talking like they know what they're talking about and they

clearly have not read the indictment um this just happened at georgetown university a few weeks ago this this expert is up there talking saying well they indicted him because he was encouraging others to hack into computers and it's like what indictment did you read it never says that anywhere. It's all specifically about this one case. And the equivalent is, let's say I was doing a story on like a white supremacist group, right? And I've got a source in there. And that source tells me, he's giving me information. And he says, hey, I think I can get more information. Can you help me gain access to this bank? Like, we need the money so we can keep going. And I said, yeah, yeah, let me think about that. Let me see what I can do, right? Let's keep talking

in the meantime. And a few days later, if I talked to the source, I mean, yeah, no luck, I can't help you with the bank. But did you, did you see any of this? Right. I'm just, I'm keeping a source on the line. Now, it would be as if they would then charge me for attempting to rob a bank. And it's like, it just makes no sense. Of all the charges, I actually think the CFA one would be the hardest one for them to win in court once you look at the facts and what they would have to prove. They would have to prove one, it was Julian Assange on the other side of that Jabber account that multiple people had access to. The two, Assange did something to try to attempt to crack this password. Whether it was successful or not, he could be convicted just for attempting to. But as far as we know, there's no

way to prove if they did anything with that information. All they did was come back and say basically no, that they weren't, they weren't able to do it. So it is the flimsy of charges. And what you really learned when you start looking into the Assange case is without a doubt and I can say this objectively as a reporter persecution before prosecution and the other

thing is that he's being punished for things that he's not actually charged with. Yeah, the second point there being the proof of the former that this is really all just holding him without bail, punishing him indefinitely and after all it's not a stretch for any journalist or even

a podcast host of journalists to think, boy, I sure wouldn't like to go to prison for a long time for stepping on these guys' toes the way he did. Not that I'm breaking any stories the way he has, but thoughts occurred to me, as I'm sure it's occurred to you and everybody else, too, that the DOJ getting their hands on you, it's pretty terrifying. You're 100% right. Mission one was to silence Assange, and this is me speculating, but they've done that really well. We weren't allowed to speak to him for our peace. Mission two was to send a message to anyone else willing to publish government secrets that who can protect you? Who can protect you? Because they can do this to him without a

conviction. Who can I even call if they decided they needed to silence me? Yeah. And now what about the process itself as far as all the appeals? I mean, obviously this is kind of how it goes with appeals. There goes your right to speedy process. If it's your own lawyer who's asking for more process all the time. And yet that's obviously the position he's stuck in. But are they deliberately the crown, as they call it, deliberately dragging this thing out and making it take as long as possible? Impossible for me to say, but I would actually guess not. I think the longer this goes, the more it exposes what the governments are doing. And I think that the UK would be happy to pass this along to the U.S. and wash their hands of it. But Assange and his legal team are

taking every opportunity they can to appeal it because they do not believe they'll get a fair trial in the U.S. And when you look at the U.S.'s conduct in this, when you look at the plan to kidnap him, when you look at the discussions to assassinate him, when you look at the fake security team that they put in place in the embassy to record every conversation he had with journalist and lawyers and doctors, he has a lot of really good reason to not trust the U.S. government here as a fair actor and then he'll get a fair trial here. Yeah, that's for sure. And of course, we know it's already baked in the law that the, I did it for a good reason defense is not even allowed in court at all. There's no public defense. You're right for

espionage charges. If you had the classified information, even in discussing classified information, something that I read in the post today that's considered classified information and I tell it to you in the course of this interview you and I could be charged with the Espionage Act. Yep. Well, and that's the thing is

it's written that broadly, but they've never used it that broadly. So this is the real test of whether they're going to get away with it or not. That's right. Now, it's very important and interesting here that in your documentary you interview the brother of the Reuters reporter blown away by the Apache

helicopter there in Sauter City in 2007. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Oh, man. Yeah, Nebill, Noraldine, and he was actually an archaeology professor before the war, but as a lot of professionals at that time,

they got jobs working as fixers or translators. He gets a job with Reuters. He gets his little brother, Namir, hired as well. Their father had been a cameraman for their Rocky News Channel. So they kind of had it in their blood. So both brothers were working at Reuters. And one day, the Namir gets sent out to see what's happening with some U.S. troops that are going through the neighborhood of New Baghdad. And while he's standing on a corner with a group of other Iraqi men and his driver named Sa'aich Ma, an Apache helicopter

opened fire on them, killing all of them. A veiled. in pulls up to help him. This is a father with two kids in the van taking him to school. He sees them on the ground crawling. He's trying to help him get him into the van. The pilots fire on the van, which is a pretty clear war crime that someone offering medical assistance on the battlefield can't be fired upon, but he does anyway. When U.S. troops get there and tell the pilots, hey, there were two kids in the van, the pilots laugh and say, that's why you don't bring your kids to war zone. That's all on video. That's all backed. It's indisputable. What happens next is the military realizes they've killed the Reuters journalist because he had his cameras with them and his press

ID when they find the bodies. So they reach out to Reuters almost right away and they tell Reuters that, I'm sorry, two guys got killed. They were caught in the crossfire, I think, was the first story. And then it was they were with guys who were engaging U.S. troops, insurgents. Reuters said, well, let's see the whole video. They only showed them a small part of the video in that meeting. Reuters said, can we see the whole video? The military said, no, we've investigated it, and it's all okay. Reuters filed a freedom of information request for the whole video.

The Pentagon denied it. So for Namir's family and the Bill's family, the story was that he was caught in the crossfire or he was with insurgents. And that was the truth they were going to have to live with. three years later that happened in 2007 three years later wiki leaks releases it this is kind of their biggest release to the world that were all demanding disclosures they happen in 2010 and they had the whole video they released the entire video and you can clearly see that the military have been lying for those years to reuters and to the family members of the victims and it's one of the reasons

we highlight that story is without the wikileaks disclosure we would never know the truth about that But we would never know the truth about a lot of things about treatment in Gitmo, about about Abu Ghraib, about the civilian death count that the U.S. knew about was off by tens of thousands in Iraq, about the U.S. authorities knew that Iraqi authorities were torture, raping, and killing Iraqis, and the U.S. authorities were turning a blind eye to it. Like, these are all things we would never know unless WikiLeaks released them. But like you said, there is no public benefit argument. you the government could be flat out murdering people and if you released it as classified information you could be tried on the spiel not jacking and there's no defense to it and that's basically

what's happening here but we we did go spend time with no bill and he just said like it he hears those words of the pilots man they're laughing the whole time that they're doing it and they ring in his head and he never met julian asange or stella julian's why but he was interested in it and we end up coming down to london and meeting stella why we were there and so we got to to film that as kind of a special moment but in his mind he connects his little brother namir's desire to get the truth out about what was actually happening in iraq as a photojournalist for reuters to assange getting the truth out as well that seeing them kind of on the same mission and both being persecuted really by the same government yeah hey y'all horton here for tennessee hot sauce

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Casali is C-A-S-A-L-Rickas-Cosally.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. Searchlight Pictures Presents, The Roses, only in theaters August 29th, from the director of meet the parents and the writer of poor things comes the roses starring academy award winner olivia coleman academy award nominee benedic cumberbatch andy sandberg kate mckenon and alison janny 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 and by the way a small part of that story too is that david finkel from the washington post clearly seen the video or at least it had it described to him in great detail and yet had

withheld much of the story too. And I think that was part of Manning's motive in leaking that video. And I'm sorry because it's so many years ago now, but I actually read the book, Finkel's book, Good Soldiers, where he talks about this and I confronted him about that. And I couldn't get him to budge and, you know, admit how much it was that he knew about that. he claimed to just be protecting his source i guess but he was embedded with them at the time um with the not with the air unit that did it but with the ground unit that showed up on the scene um had the soldiers ether mccord and josh steber yeah steber um but i'm curious what would think will say how do he defend that he just wouldn't answer basically he said well you already

got what i wrote and i'm sticking with that and you know that kind of an answer if i remember remember it right yeah manning talks about that some in her a book as well read me dot text no i should read that i'm so far behind on my assange books i got to read and i didn't even know manning had a book i've never done a story where like everyone in it has a book um it was it was kind of incredible i read more books on this story but yeah hers came out while we were doing the reporting okay um right now So I think is the trial of Julian Assange by Nils Melzer, who is the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. And when he was first asked to look into it in his official position, he declined it and wasn't interested. And I forget what point he became interested in it, but he had this really negative opinion of Assange.

And he just wasn't going to go down that road. But the more he looked into it, the more he could see the government overreach. So eventually he and a team of doctors went in and examined Assange in Belmarsh. And he came out, and his official opinion is that Assange has been the victim of state sponsors torture. And it's not like that's just a rando opinion. As the UN's best repertoire on torture, he knows all the legal requirements for that. And it's really a detailed look into this entire case, particularly the Swedish charges. You know, one of the interesting things got, think about this.

Think about how much you know about Assange. You probably didn't know that much about him before the collateral murder announcement. That's when the whole world kind of knows. Maybe you did, but most people didn't know that much about him until July 2010 when he makes the announcement at the National Press Club and shows collateral murder and the whole manning disclosures.

Only less than three weeks later, I think, is when the accusations come out in Sweden. And basically, he goes into some form of house. arrest or another from that point on. So almost everything that the world knows about Assange happened when he was in some form of being detained. Wow, I hadn't realized that. He was like years later or something.

But no, it was like almost immediately on the back of it. Like two or three weeks of freedom he had between collateral murder and when the Swedish accusations come out, his partners are the New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Paez, and LeMond. These are not alternative media sources. These are the biggest newspapers in five different countries. And so he's brought in by mainstream media and they published the information that he got. And then they basically threw him under the bus and let all this happen.

And now that they see these charges could come back and affect them, they've all joined together in a letter to the DOJ saying, you've got to drop the espionage charges because this could affect all. national security reporting. Which, by the way, on the contrary, they've known that all along, and they hate him so much and are so jealous of him that they're willing to sacrifice their own freedom of speech and all of ours for it. But then what happened was the lawyer from back in the days of the Pentagon Papers came and started beating them all over the head with it, starting with the New York Times, and basically insisted that they do this. And that's in Andrew Coburn's recent piece in Harper's. Otherwise, if it was just up to Charlie Savage, they'd let him hang.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. One last thing. Can you please elaborate? Because this is such an important part of the story. And you got a great interview with Zach Dorfman from Yahoo News here. And, you know, he's done a lot of quality stuff on the outbreak of the war in Ukraine as well. Can you talk a little bit about what he, and I guess that was the same, he was on the team with Isikoff and all them when they reported, or was it Isikov at all that reported this story? Mike Izikov and Sean Naylor were on that same story. Okay, so go ahead and give us the dirt on this, because this is almost unbelievable, but not. My favorite line from Dorfman is, so he's talking about in 2017, Nassan just still at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and it's leaked to him the CIA hacking tools known as Vault 7, and WikiLeaks publishes them. And Vault 7 was how the CIA could spy on people using their smartphones or smart TVs, like get into any documentation. device basically to spy on people. And Pompeo was furious because the CIA had been kind of watching all these other leaks and now this would never happen to them. And when it happened to them, it was a massive embarrassment. And so my favorite line from Dorfman and our piece,

and you can find our piece on YouTube, the imprisonment of Julian Assange, as Dorfman says, that's when things got Shakespearean. And the way he basically explains it. And for them to publish this, Yahoo News, they really had to source this story. And then, just because what I'm going to tell you sounds so outrageous, you have to wonder if it's true. Pompeo later basically confirms it, because on a Megyn Kelly interview, Pompeo said parts of it are true, and the officers they spoke to should be charged with giving state secrets. Well, you can only charge someone if they gave actual real estate secrets. You can't do it if they gave fake information. there's no charges for that. So he basically validates this and verifies it. But as the story goes

from Dwarfman is Pompeo was so pissed, he wanted options. And he said, don't worry about the lawyers. Give me the art of the possible. What can we do to Assange to get him? So there were discussions all the way from kidnapping them up to assassinating them. The discussions in terms of assassinating them were like from the lawyers at least, you definitely cannot do that. But you could re-indict him if you had charges against him. So that was one of the reasons the charges fell at the Bolt 7 release, as they needed some charges so they could get him. But they were worried about him trying to get out of the embassy

and get to some other friendly country. Because can I just give you a side note, something we didn't cover? Ecuador had granted him asylum, political asylum, because they believed he was being politically prosecuted and given him citizenship. The U.S. went down and got involved in the Ecuadorian elections, got someone else elected, told that president,

the new president that the U.S. would love to work with Ecuador economically. They sent a congressional delegation, and Mike Pence went down and said, we can really do great things for Ecuador, but we got to take care of this Assange thing first. And so as Ecuador is basically starting to put the pressure on Assange, they were worried Assange might find a way to get somewhere else to safety. So they had plans. If he does, how do we stop the car? If it gets on a plane, do we shoot the tires out of the plane?

do we do the shooting or do the brits do the shooting who's got the legal authority like they really discussed this all the way through and it's just it it is um yeah it it's insanity when you read it and i would encourage it anyone go go look up the story it's a long story yahoo news investigates but it is um it's it's just jaw dropping what powers our government has if you expose their secrets If you believe in transparency in government and you're willing to actually fight so that your government's transparent to you, oh, be prepared. All right. Now, refresh my memory about who was it that wrote the story about the plea deal that they almost had, where Assange was going to, in fact, sit on Vault 7 and not leak it if they would let him go.

And the CIA wanted to do it. And the DOJ, I guess, was working on it until his own lawyer, if I remember right, told Senator Warner and Senator Warner told James Comey that FBI director and he ruined the deal. Did I remember that story right? And is that in your, that's not in your documentary, but you know what I'm talking about? I haven't come across that, but that's really interesting. Oh, you don't know that one? Let me see if I can find it here.

Yeah, Comey. And see, this raised questions about his lawyers. Like, what the hell kind of a mistake was that? Let me see if I can find it. You know, what lawyer? Was it Barry Pollock or Jen Rubenstein or? I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

I'd be curious about that story. I'll tell you what, while I Google that, could you talk specifically about the idea of poisoning him, kidnapping him and poisoning him and all of this? Who brought that up and how confirmed is that? What all is the sourcing on all that? I know that Assange and Stella had mentioned this, that they were worried about him being poisoned in the embassy. The presumption is that that was part of the discussion within the CIA. what Mike Pompeo would call the art of the possible. They could have done it because they had the security team at the embassy.

No one is saying that they did do that, but it got to that level of concern with Julian and with his family. Yeah. If I remember it right, I thought that Andrew Coburn had written in his Harper's piece that someone inside the plot had gone to Congress about it. I said, man, there's something going on. on here you guys need to know about

I don't remember that on the Coburn piece and I read that I actually had the magazine Lane around how about the description of harpers yeah man I'm not over my skills on a couple of points here first of all on the last point it was John Solomon how Comey intervened to kill WikiLeaks immunity deal and that's at the hill

from June 2018 18 yeah totally missed that and so that does exist that wasn't a figment of my imagination now on this other one.

Let me see. I bet I can just control F for Congress because there can't be too much of that in here. Let me see. Yeah, a lot of hard copy is a little harder to scam. Okay, so the operations under discussion were so extreme as well as potentially illegal that some officials grew concerned

and briefed certain Congress members on Pompeo's dangerous schemes. Yet again, the establishment press evinced scant interest. and then he says Michael Iskoff told me he got no calls from other journalists interested in probing further. Yeah, that's insane. Like this thing plays out like a spy movie, what we're talking about. And for some reason, like the media let it just drop. Like the legs on that story should have been significant.

Yeah. And they weren't. Wouldn't you love to see Democrats discuss the content of the leak, like that the D&C was actively working to make sure that Bernie couldn't get nomination. I mean, the fact that Walsham and Schultz had to step down because of what was in the documents rather than the messenger of it.

Well, and in fact, the one that I... Corruption exposed. I mean, the best one really is the Pied Piper strategy in the Podesta emails. We need to ask all our friends in the liberal media to boost up Trump as much as we can because he'll be easier to beat in the general, which is

the conventional wisdom, right? Nobody wants the winger. It's the moderate centrist that wins in the fall. And in fact, they continue to use this strategy. They even donate in the last midterm congressional elections. The Democrats are donating to MAGA wing nuts. And I guess I read that in many cases it worked. And the Democrat won in the general.

And it's the same strategy they were using there. But they, you know, cheaters never win. Or I guess sometimes they do. But in this case, it brings up the idea, though, of shooting the messenger if you don't like the message. And if you look back, where we're talking a minute, about what happened in Iraq. An Apache helicopter shot a bunch of unarmed people.

Now, some were arms. Some had AK-47, which you're allowed to have there. And then there's some debate about whether there was a rocket launcher or not. Depends on who you believe on that. But we also know most of people were unarmed and they were doing nothing now that we can see the whole video, but standing on a corner. So on that day, no one has been held to account, not the people who pulled the trigger, not the people who approved the shooting, not the people who approved the shooting, not people who. who investigated and cleared it, not the people who lied to Reuters about it and then covered it up by denying the FOIA request. None of those people have faced any sort of justice or

account. The only people to face justice for that day, more than 20 people killed, are the two people that let us know what happened, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, the only two people to face justice for that day. And you know, I'm sorry I have to. It's just, it has to be brought up that they were fighting the Shiites who they fought the whole war for but they decided on this anti-Iran propaganda campaign in 2007 to take the fight to mktata al-Sauder who was fully one-third of the united Iraqi alliance that the whole war was fought to put in power and they did this for no reason whatsoever yeah so my background actually is I was a marine officer and I was at Central Command under General Tommy Franks during the invasion, and I was one of the people

they put on air to help sell the war. Is that right? That's where I first met Al Jazeera, and that's when I, this documentary came out about the way Al Jazeera covered the invasion called Control Room, and I'm in that. And I resigned my commission so I could talk about the way the war was sold and our misunderstanding of Al Jazeera, the kind of disingenuous way the war was sold, how I was used. In fact, for the 20th anniversary, they just did a, AJ Plus did a video that's been playing this week. What's it called? Like, I sold a war and I regret it or something like that.

It's on YouTube. Oh, is that right? Great. I definitely have some insight into that. Yeah, some regret. Lots. Did you write a book about that? Yeah, I wrote a book called Mission Al Jazeera years ago. Because I helped start Al Jazeera English after all of that. Isn't that something? You know, it kind of rings a bell. I think I heard the story of the former spokesman who went to Al Jazeera or something, but I didn't put two and two together there. That's me. Yeah.

Very interesting. Okay. Well, listen, and I'm sorry. Would you say the name of the new one was? I was a what? Oh, hold on a second. I'll Google it real quick. Sure.

Where's YouTube? AJ Plus did it. I sold the Iraq War and regret it by AJ Plus. Great. man i'm going to watch that and maybe i'll talk to you again in a week yeah you can watch that and call me back for sure yeah man okay listen thank you so much for your time on the show and for your attention to this issue i mean people uh i think somebody says it in your documentary or maybe i heard this last night you know there's a symbol there's a

movement there's a website there's all these things we're talking about a real human man locked in a cage. And as his dad, you know, stipulated last night, because I wanted to make sure of this. He's still locked up 23 hours a day. You know, super max conditions here on this just complete, unbelievably, you know, on the fourth month, going into the fourth month of 2023 here that this is still going on. This is so damned unfair and just absolutely must be addressed. And I don't know what role public pressure can play on the margin, but it's got to be something and we got to do whatever we can can i tell you scott one of the reasons i'm so adamant about people referring to asanj as a hacker is that's one of the reasons that you used to keep him in solitary so long because we have to be scared of what he could do if he could get to a

computer but anyone who calls him a hacker challenge him name one thing julian assange hacked to do it you have to go back to when he was like 17 years old in australia and it was like the local phone system there he didn't hack any of the stuff he's publishing stuff include fault seven, the CIA analyst who leaked that is now in prison for leaking it to him. This was stuff that's leaked to him and that he published as a publisher. You can't tell me one thing that he hacked, but by calling me a hacker, and I've interviewed other hackers to get special treatment because the criminal justice system is scared of what they can do.

So they get especially harsh treatment within prisons if they're a hacker. You can't let them use the phone because they might be able to do something. They just watched too many movies, right? where a guy with a hoodie at a computer terminal can control the stoplights and can turn off the power and can do whatever he wants, right? Like that Bruce Willis movie. There was a – and I did an interview guy named Kevin Mittnick is his name, and he was one of the original hackers ever arrested. He used to, like, do the phone hacking where you, like, dialed in tones, and it could do something, right? And in court, they cited the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick and starting a nuclear war from a home computer.

as why he couldn't be given phone privileges and had to be kept in solitary while awaiting trial because of a movie. Well, you see, the internet is a series of tubes, and Matthew Broderick can start a nuclear war from his house. Yeah. And the Chinese are in my Wi-Fi. I learned that this week, too. Yeah. Oh, I know from those things. And, you know, the other crazy thing here, you mentioned it, but you just touched on it.

There's so much more to be said about it is the assassination plan is wild enough, but the character assassination that's gone on for years. is edited and embedded by the media has been it's the most thorough character assassination I've ever seen of an individual what they've done

with Assange. One of the most important things I would say about this entire case is if you can't report about government malfeasance because it might anger them, even the worst of government malfeasance were crimes

because you have to worry about that government coming after you, right? Then what's the point of journalism? If journalism can't report about government malfeasance, what's support of journalism, and I would challenge you here, show me a robust democracy that doesn't have robust journalism. So if you're really going to, like, neuter journalism, then what you're really doing is neutering democracy at the end of the day. And that's why I think this case should matter to everyone. Check it out.

Everybody said Al Jazeera, the imprisonment of Julian Assange by Josh rushing. Thanks a lot. Yeah, yeah, thank you, Scott. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-P-F-K 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.