For Pacifica Radio, July 4th, 2021.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, the subject today is the heroic Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who is, as of right now, sitting in solitary confinement in the Belmarsh prison in England, where he's being held, even though the judge has already decided that she won't extradite him to America because our prisons are so barbaric here that they can't possibly extradite him.
But he's still sitting in solitary confinement anyway, until the appeal is heard and or dismissed.
And his only crime, of course, is leaking the truth.
The rest of it is a bunch of made up nonsense.
And our guest today can prove it.
It's Bjartmar Aleksandarsson, writing for Stundinn in Iceland.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
And thank you for letting me pronounce your first name like a Texan.
Not a problem.
Yeah, I have two others.
So it's OK.
OK, great.
Well, listen, this is such an important story.
The superseding indictment, the updated indictment against Julian Assange used against him in court in the hearings last fall included accusations from a guy whose last name is Thordarson or something very close to that.
Could you say it for us one time?
Yeah, Thordarson.
And so this was a guy who essentially became an informant for the FBI and made all these accusations against Assange.
And those accusations made it into this superseding indictment.
And as you report in the article, were cited by the British judge whose name happens to be Barrister in her judgment, where she decided not to extradite Assange over prison conditions in the United States and his mental condition as possibly suicidal.
But she upheld all of the facts.
In her opinion, she assented to all of the facts in the superseding indictment, which the appeal, the U.S. government and therefore British government's appeal is based on.
Correct?
Yes, that's true.
The updated version is based on the testimony of of Mr. Thordarson.
And and in my conversations with him, you can see there is a quite much difference of what he's telling me and what it says in the indictment.
Now, was he outright confessing to you that, yes, I lied, I was making up a bunch of stuff because it was for my own good?
Or how did that come about?
Well, no, this actually started.
I actually had four interviews with him regarding two stories.
The first story we began and ran at Stinton in March, April was that he actually was conning money out of companies, just basically embezzlement.
And he was doing this in a grand scale.
And he was stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from companies and then selling it back on the market.
I mean, he he he stole almost 1500 kilograms of fresh frozen chicken from one company through through this embezzlement scheme.
And I actually got him to confess that.
He also floated a signature of his former lawyer and was putting more money, basically saying that a company owned more money than it did.
It had no money.
And he was he signed the paperwork with this lawyer saying that this lawyer signed the story and was trying to use these companies to embezzle money from other companies.
So it all started there.
And since I had him, I just wanted to know because he's kind of a famous international guy regarding WikiLeaks.
So I started asking, well, I mean, he's a con artist.
He's a, you know, complete liar regarding so many issues.
And just talking for nine hours, you can see how much he can lie in only a few minutes.
But then I start wondering regarding this FBI case against Julian Assange and if that was just based on lies.
So I just started to ask him about each of the indictment cases.
And soon I found out that this did not make sense, that the indictment was telling one thing and he was telling me another thing.
And that's how we printed the story of regarding these indictment issues, that it's just not connecting his testimony and then what he told me.
And now he has been.
Is this correct?
He has been convicted of child molestation and has been officially diagnosed by, I guess, a psychiatrist as being a sociopath.
Is that correct?
Yes.
He's been diagnosed to be border sociopath.
He could face because here in Iceland we have a legal system that if you cannot know what you're doing is wrong, you cannot be sentenced for a crime.
A professional psychologist said that he was a borderline sociopath.
And yes, he has been a judge, got a sentence for abusing nine boys underage.
There were other fives who pressed charges, but those charges didn't go through the system.
And one of those boys committed suicide after it didn't went through.
Incredible.
And this is the FBI's man and the Department of Justice's man that they used to build the case against Julian Assange.
Incredible.
Yeah, that's correct.
And after he got the immunity agreement signed in 2019, when the FBI came back here to wake up this corpse of a case, he actually started his crime spree again.
And today he's actually hiding from the criminal underworld here in Iceland because he actually owes a lot of money that he got a Rolex watch for almost twenty five thousand dollars he didn't pay.
So he's not only hiding from the authorities here, which are investigating him for several fraud cases and many more crimes that he has done in several past years.
And I believe that you write in this piece, sir, that you have seen the deal that he signed with the FBI, where the FBI promised that they would not forward on any information that they had about his crimes on to Icelandic authorities.
Is that correct?
Yes, that's true.
We have the agreement with the FBI and Mr. Thorisen.
And the FBI says that it says in the agreement that they will not share any information with any other agencies.
That includes the Icelandic police.
So the main article basically here in Iceland, we have an Icelandic version of it, which is much longer, much detailed than the English one.
And we we print out communications from never seen chat logs that actually Mr. Thorisen gave to me.
So we can see how he is contacting the hackers, for example, Kyla and Sabu, which were a member of Lulsæk hacker group, and actually asked them to attack Icelandic government institutes and also infrastructure companies here in Iceland, for example, the biggest electric company here.
So you can see through the chat logs, you can see through this all that we're talking about 12,000 documents.
And I mean, this took three months of my life to work on this.
So it's it's it's been good, it's over.
But it's it's been a lot of work, investigative work that has gone into this.
And you can see how the because in the indictment, they're trying to connect Assange with the crime spree or the hacker spree that Siki went on and all these chat logs.
We have no evidence that indicates that any other member of Wikileaks were taking part of this, that the Wikileaks, any other member of Wikileaks were asking him to do this.
It seems that he just went broke and he wanted to do this on him on his own.
And when we talked to him regarding these chat logs in the interviews, he admitted that nobody asked him to do this.
Nobody Assange never asked him to to hack any of these institutions or try to get in them or create these DTOS attacks.
But when you read the indictment, it seems like Julian was the mastermind of all of this.
And then did he forget that he had made those claims previously or maybe those claims were just embellished by the DOJ?
Yeah, that's the thing.
We don't know because, you know, this is what he told me, what he told the FBI.
So we don't know if the FBI got the same information I have and just, you know, did what they did with the indictment or if if Siki told another story.
We don't know that.
So the FBI or DOJ has not commented on this story and not yet, but hopefully we will get some answers from them regarding this.
But it seems that even when they were taking up the case in the courts in the UK, they even went even further in connecting Julian Assange with the hacking.
But there's no evidence that we have did in our three month investigation of nine hours interview with Siki that Mr. Thorson, sorry, that shows that there was any connection.
And even when he he said in the indictment that they were stealing documents from from WikiLeaks personnel, I mean, Mr. Thorson told me that Julian Assange personally told him to do that.
And in every case that he did something, either he was not told to do it or he tells me that Julian walked up to him personally to do this.
And the problem here is that he has a nickname and that's Siki that Siki, the hacker, Mr.
Thorson has this nickname.
And the problem is that through the chat logs, the evidence that we have is that he had no computer skills at all.
And even there is a case where when he has actually contacted the FBI and in 2011, he's trying to get their help to get a video downloaded from his mobile phone.
So his computer skills are just X exaggerated.
He doesn't have it to do these hacking.
So why would Julian Assange ask somebody with no experience of hacking to actually try to do these things?
Mm hmm.
It just it doesn't make sense.
All right.
So a couple of things here.
First of all, if he did tell the FBI what they say he said in the indictment, you're just saying that the chat logs and his statements to you simply do not substantiate that.
So either he lied to them or he's lying to you or they lied to the court because the stories don't add up.
Exactly.
So, I mean, either way, if because the indictment is set, it's based on a testimony from NATO country one, which is Iceland, and from a teenager, which is Mr.
Thoris.
Now, if that testimony is based, then of course, he then he must have been lying then from what he's telling me.
Yeah.
But I know that logs do substantiate what he told you.
Just not the.
Of course, that's the thing.
And there are evidence that shows, for example, regarding the phone calls from the Icelandic members of Parliament that in the indictment, it says that Julian Assange were asking him to hacking it.
But he tells me that a third individual actually gave him these phone recordings on memory stick.
Then I asked him, did you listen to them or did you check them out?
And he said, no, I did.
I never checked the files or anything.
So I asked, do you know if these were even audio files?
And he could not confirm that either.
And he just said that he just gave them to Julian Assange.
Nothing in this story actually adds up regarding what is said in the chat logs and what he's telling me to the indictment.
And that's just too many holes.
That's the problem here.
And you don't go.
I don't know.
You know, I know something about the justice system in the United States, of course.
But in the Icelandic justice system, just it doesn't work that way.
You cannot go with a case like this through the Icelandic justice system because it wouldn't work.
The judge would just throw it out.
All right.
Now.
So it's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton here talking with Bjarne Marr, Alex Anderson.
That's how I pronounce it.
He's writing for Stundin.
That's Stundin.is.
And this incredible piece is called Key Witness in Assange Case Admits to Lies in Indictment.
And you mentioned there, sir, that the media has not reacted very much to this.
And I can verify that regardless.
This article is available to Assange's lawyers.
And they're going to have to bring this journalism to court next time, as soon as the next hearing and show the judge that, look, here's all this contrary information about what they told you and about what you're on the record believing to be true.
And so, well, I think in England, at least, there's a much better chance that the law could actually be invoked to free this man.
But they don't have much more than this.
Right.
And this is the reason for the superseding indictment.
As you say in here, that they had what was called the New York Times problem.
How do we punish this guy who's a publisher?
He's not a leaker.
He's a leaky who receives the leak and publishes it just like the New York Times does on a daily basis.
And so they included all of this stuff that this witness made up in order to claim conspiracy.
And they also included a thing about, oh, helping Manning hack a password or failing to would also amount to conspiracy.
But this was a big part of trying to come up with conspiracy charges so that they could frame Assange as anything but a 21st century style reporter.
Right.
And that's yeah, that's the main thing here is this superseding indictment is basically trying to tell him that, you know, change him from a journalist to a hacker.
That's basically if you change him to a hacker, he isn't a journalist.
He's stealing information and so on.
And that's why you've got the New York Times problem there.
And I mean, you have incident, for example, with the Pentagon papers that this is just the first first amendment case.
So it will be really difficult for the U.S. government just to charge him on the Espionage Act of the 19 from 1917.
So they added this in to try to make their case stronger.
Now, I found out also the indictment regarding that he was actually trying to pressure Chelsea Manning to get more information.
And he used the he used certain word trace that was asking him basically, are you sure you cannot get anything more?
I mean, I do this every day.
I mean, I get confidential information from the you know, from people inside the Icelandic government, confidential information that by law I shouldn't have.
I mean, this is just investigative journalism.
And to to ask for information that about that something is wrong in the system.
And it's our job as journalists to ask questions and then also try to get information from inside the system to get some answers for these questions.
And that goes really far in the American tradition anyway.
That would go if we're talking about a reporter from The Wall Street Journal.
They could absolutely badger their source to death and and try to help them hack something or give them an idea of maybe you could steal a key from the janitor or anything to get them to.
Right.
They're the one taking the risk getting the document.
But as far as tradecraft of how to get the document and get it to the reporter, the reporter could be a full fledged co-conspirator in planning that.
And that would still have been protected up to now.
Yeah, I mean, I have never heard of an investigative journalist even trying to ask, as you say, to try to get a key or something like that to a lot safe or something.
But it's mostly just are you sure you don't have any more information?
And no, but I mean, I mean, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I wasn't very clear, but I just meant the reporter could suggest to their source.
Maybe you could steal a key from the janitor not to give to the reporter, but to get more documents or to do right to hack a code like they accused Assange of trying to help Manning hack into another computer to get more secrets, which wasn't even right.
It was just to cover his tracks.
But anyway, her tracks now.
Yeah.
And even he actually what I my chat logs that I have is actually showing that Julian Assange is actually helping Chelsea Manning to get music from a server, not confidential information.
Chelsea Manning asked for help to get music from a military server, not international secrets.
So it's that it's just not even the same.
So it's but in this case, we're talking about a problematic situation where you can obviously see that the U.S. government want to basically harm Julian Assange regarding that they want to keep him in prison as long as his life, as much as they can.
I mean, there is not a really strong case against this guy.
And just if you would take this to the Icelandic court system, it will never work.
It would be thrown out of court every single time.
All right.
Now, you talked about how they claim that he had ordered this hack of this Icelandic bank and how that wasn't really right.
Somebody had given this stuff to this guy.
I mean, no evidence that Assange had anything to do with that.
But this is complete bullshit with the banking documents.
They was hacking something.
My co-workers and even a dear friend of mine had this before even Mr. Thorisson had it.
And the thing what problem was we're talking about, there was a file that was encrypted and people had been trying to decrypt it for months before even Mr. Thorisson got the copy of the file.
Then he contacted another person to try to encrypt it.
And he told me that this guy was trying to use some MIT supercomputers to decrypt this file and it didn't work.
So it just it doesn't make sense because, you know, when I asked my friend about this, he said, no, I had I had this file as a journalist.
This file was going everywhere and everybody was trying to decrypt it because this was about the Icelandic financial collapse in 2008 and could shed some light on how the banking industry basically destroyed this country because of the bankruptcy and how they were dealing.
There's a different story there, but that's complete bull.
There was no hacking of banking documents, none whatsoever.
So for me to see that a well-educated, well-trained FBI agents or the DOJ in the Justice Department were trying to say that it was connected to hacking.
You would just need to ask an Icelandic reporter.
He could tell you the truth about this.
Everybody knew about this.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, can you tell us briefly here about this game, the way the FBI set this up in the using their informant Sabu to do a DDoS attack and then pretend to help the Icelandic government?
I guess.
Am I right that then apparently they also had their through their same influence?
They had Thordarson, then through Sabu had him walk in and turn himself into the FBI and offered to become an informant.
Was that it?
No, no, no.
Sabu actually was arrested by the FBI on, I think, the 6th of June of 2011.
And that's no, sorry, sorry.
I got that date wrong.
I don't know the date exactly.
But Sabu actually was arrested by the FBI for for computer hacking.
And he became an FBI informant at that time after his arrest.
After the arrest, Sabu was still a big part of a hacker group called LulzSec.
And Siggi was, oh sorry, Mr. Thordarson was actually in contact with this group, including Sabu and Kyla.
And he asked this group to create DDoS attacks on government institutes here in Iceland.
And while he was asking them, Sabu was an FBI informant.
So the FBI knew about these computer attacks on Iceland.
After these attacks, the FBI came to the Icelandic authorities and said, hey, listen, we might have a possible threat of a huge cyber attack against Iceland.
And we want to help you guys.
Of course, we are a small nation, 340,000 people, not so much, I would say, experience in dealing with these sort of crimes.
So we accepted the FBI's help to come in with several agents to try to prevent this cyber attack.
But the problem here is that there was no cyber attack.
FBI knew this because they had Sabu as an informant.
And when the attacks were happening in Iceland, then Sabu was an FBI informant.
So they used this to get, gain access through, of the Icelandic legal system to gain access to the Icelandic authorities and the Icelandic police to investigate Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
It had nothing to do with the cyber attack.
And this is actually when our former Ministry of Interior, Mr. Ómar Dríónasson, stepped in and he saw that this was not right.
So he kicked the FBI out of the country because he knew they were not investigating this cyber attack.
They were only investigating Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
And that's basically a breach of law here in Iceland.
So he threw them out.
But even after he threw them out, he, the FBI still spent five days here in Iceland interrogating Mr. Dríónasson.
So they even broke the Icelandic law by when we kicked them out five days.
But now, so you're right in there that the Wikileaks guys were onto this rat for stealing from them.
And so then he just walked into the FBI and said, well, I'll inform on them.
But that seems like a nice coincidence.
And so I thought maybe the implication there was that Sabu had told him, you know, what you should do is turn yourself into the FBI when he was already working for the FBI.
And that that was part of this cobweb they were spinning for Assange.
No, no.
No.
Here's the funny part.
Basically, Sabu as an FBI, after Mr. Thurston became FBI informant on the 23rd of August of 2011, when he walked inside the American embassy in Iceland, he did not know at the time that Sabu was an FBI informant and Sabu did not know that Sikki was an FBI informant.
I mean, you even have chat logs between Sabu and Sikki where they're trying to entrap one another for the FBI.
So it's it's kind of a strange game that they were playing that both being FBI informants and they were trying to catch one another for the FBI.
So was there anything, you know, odd to you about the timing of his decision to just walk right into the embassy and turn himself in?
I know you say that they were onto him for theft, but yeah, I mean, he had burned every bridge behind him.
He had done this sexual abuse against young boys before the 23rd of August.
He had stolen money from companies before the 23rd of August.
And the thing is that he saw that the walls were coming in.
And so he thought of an escape.
And he actually told me that he was really scared at the time when he contacted the FBI.
He started lying to me that the reason why he went to the American embassy in Iceland and the FBI was because he thought that Lulzak and the other hackers and WikiLeaks went too far regarding the Syria files.
And he got scared that, you know, some dictator in Syria now was on this and he just was really scared about this.
Then he changed actually his story later in the interview when I pushed him.
And then it was basically that, of course, I was saving my own ass.
And I just, you know, of course, I was scared.
And of course, I saved my own ass.
But he didn't go any further in regarding what it was that he was saving his ass.
He didn't want to talk about that.
So from the FBI's point of view, though, they had set up this DDoS attack with Sabu and had then created this liaison relationship with the Icelandic police.
And then, lo and behold, what a great coincidence and stroke of luck for them that here comes this child rapist who needs immunity.
And so they give him this deal as long as he'll make up these lies about Julian Assange.
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
He was trying to get immunity in 2013.
But the thing is that there was no immunity agreement signed in 2000, sorry, 2011.
There was no agreement signed.
But the FBI promised him that they would not share this information with the Icelandic police.
It was not signed until 2019 when they wanted this, his testimony to be taken up in court.
Because we have to remember in the first indictment, there's nothing about Mr. Thorson, nothing.
So they didn't need his testimony.
But when they saw they had the New York Times problem, they needed his testimony.
So they woke up the case again, took him in again for questioning to basically approve everything he said back in 2011.
So it's of course, the FBI were protecting their source.
And they didn't give the Icelandic police no information about the crimes actually he did in Iceland regarding computer hacking or whatever, all the information the FBI had about him.
But the Icelandic police actually grabbed him regarding the fraud cases in 2011 and also the sexual abuse cases.
So it's a complicated case for a long time period.
And to see how the case indictments are against him and what Siki is telling me, it doesn't add up.
You just it has none.
There's only minuses here.
There's no plus.
Yeah.
Well, if there's a rule of law in England left at all, this journalism of yours will result in Julian Assange finally being freed from the dungeon where they have him locked in solitary confinement there at the Belmarsh prison at the behest of the United States government for the crime of publishing documents leaked to him by government employees in the exact tradition of all American journalism from the founding all the way through.
So there you have it.
Happy Independence Day, everybody.
And that's Bjart Marr-Alexanderson writing for Stundin.
That's S-T-U-N-D-I-N dot I-S.
And the article is called Key Witness in Assange Case Admits to Lies in Indictment.
Thank you so much for this great journalism and for your time on the show, sir.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
And that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Antiwar dot com, and I'm the author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
Find my full interview archive, more than 5,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at Scott Horton dot org and at YouTube dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
