Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright you guys, introducing Suzy Dawson, a long time champion of WikiLeaks.
And she keeps a website, Suzy3d.com, that's S-U-Z-I and the digit 3-D dot com.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Suzy?
Thank you so much for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
And do I have it right, you're living in Russia now?
That's correct.
I've been here for three years.
And why is that?
Because unfortunately, much like America, if you meaningfully and effectively oppose the intelligence and security state, they like to make it impossible for you to reside peacefully where you live.
So unfortunately, in 2015, I joined a club of exiles and relocated to Berlin in Germany.
But unfortunately, the targeting that I had experienced back home in New Zealand simply followed me into Western Europe.
So eventually I discovered that moving into the Eastern Bloc, that targeting did stop and I was actually able to live in peace.
And what kind of harassment were you suffering in Germany?
Or I guess, for that matter, in New Zealand before you left there?
In New Zealand, it's emerged in December 2018 by a State Services Commission report that up to a dozen New Zealand government agencies were hiring private security contractors to go after activists and journalists and even regular citizens, particularly associated with a number of movements that I've been integral to.
I started off with getting break-ins in my house.
I was being stalked everywhere that I went.
I was being photographed everywhere that I went, being followed by vehicles and people on the street.
I was having my equipment stolen, sabotaged.
I was being harassed at events that I was covering as media.
I was being smeared.
I was having my personal details published online and that of my children.
And then eventually that escalated throughout the election season in 2014 and became physical attacks.
My car tyres being slashed.
A really scary incident where they actually tried to drive me off a road.
Another incident where my car actually was, they removed the oil cap on my car in a high-speed zone and my engine caught on fire.
And just really horrible death threats and constant threats to my life and to the safety of myself and my children.
That culminated in me leaving New Zealand.
And then what happened in Germany?
In Germany, I had 24-7 surveillance.
I had the blacked-out white policeman outside my house.
I had constant street harassment, constant photographers getting up in my face and photographing me and my children wherever we went.
I had incessant power drill sounds and construction sounds like literally 24 hours a day where I lived.
Then the building managers would tell me there's no construction, there's no power drills and yet here I am capturing audio of this power drilling sound constantly being played on the other side of my wall.
I had interference with my, I don't want to get into it specifically, but through my children and it was affecting my children.
And it was just the same kind of campaign of harassment just so that I could never live peacefully, never work peacefully, just constantly being interfered with and terrorized.
And this is, you chalked this up to your defense of WikiLeaks this whole time, is that right?
Or more?
Well, where it really kicked off was with the Occupy movement in New Zealand.
The evictions of Occupy coincided with the FBI's arrival in New Zealand to raid Kim.com.
Kim.com is a New Zealand resident who is currently facing extradition to the United States even though he's never been to the United States in his entire life.
They are trying to extradite him ostensibly for copyright violations, which are actually only civil violations in New Zealand.
But the prosecutor doing it is the prosecutor from the Eastern District Court of Virginia who's also going after Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
And my media team in New Zealand was the first to realize and to capture evidence of FBI activity on the ground at the Occupy evictions in the same week that they had famously raided Kim.com's mansion.
And so as I began to investigate FBI activity in New Zealand, that really exacerbated the targeting of me.
But certainly my support of WikiLeaks, I've been writing about Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, since 2011.
Then I was pretty key to a mass movement in New Zealand against the GCSB, which is the Government Communications Security Bureau, which is the New Zealand version of the NSA.
I was in the background organizing a mass movement against them in 2013, so they definitely took offense to that.
Throughout 2014, I was promoting Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Kim.com and Internet Party's events in New Zealand known as Moment of Truth, working on mass surveillance, revelations, Snowden documents, etc, etc.
And some major domestic political scandals in New Zealand involving the Prime Minister and the then Minister of Justice.
So yeah, basically targeted for my journalism and for my activism, even though both of them are supposed to be protected democratic rights in New Zealand, I discovered the hard way that they're not at all, and that you do get subjected to extrajudicial punishment if you try to undertake them in good faith for the benefit of the public.
Oh yeah, and don't forget Fool's Errand.
Time to end the war in Afghanistan, by me.
Well, so, in terms of silver linings, now that you're in Russia, are you friends with Ed Snowden?
I think Edward Snowden is a wonderful human being, and I think he's a wonderful person, and I think he's a wonderful person, and I think he's a wonderful person, and I think Edward Snowden is a wonderful human being, and I'll leave it at that.
Okay, fair enough.
Okay, so, let's talk about this Julian Assange character.
They got him all locked up in jail, and for some reason I had it in my head that he got 52 days, but it was 52 weeks, or 50 weeks I guess, almost a year in jail there.
But I guess originally there were some scare stories about his health, but it seems like his health is okay now, right?
We don't really know, because there's been a humongous lack of transparency on the part of the UK government, and we should be really, I think, pressuring them, because ultimately he's in their custody, and they are responsible for his physical safety and wellbeing.
And from where I'm sitting, there has been this wall of silence around his condition from official channels, and I would like to see some public pressure break that.
I'm really heartened by the prevalence of actions, decentralised actions that are taking place now all around the world in support of Julian.
I'm also particularly encouraged by the fact that we've seen the first instances of civil disobedience in support of Julian and freeing him.
In Melbourne, Australia, and in Washington, D.C., we've seen the first arrests of non-violent peaceful protesters protesting in support of Julian, and of press freedom and freedom of speech.
And that, to me, represents an acceleration in the campaign to free him worldwide, and I think it's getting in a really positive direction.
We're starting to see now some of the critical mass that would be needed to sustain a long-term campaign to free Julian.
Yeah, now, so can you talk about what's the state of the supposed investigation in Sweden right now?
Well, that's somewhat up in the air.
I think it's pretty clear to everybody at this point that Sweden is being used as some kind of secondary option for extradition if the UK to US route fails or falls flat on its face, which it may well do.
They just had a recent major setback, though, right?
I mean, the hawks in Sweden.
Well, I think the biggest setback has been the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture, Nils Melzer, formally finding that a triumvirate of states have conspired to torture Julian Assange throughout most of this decade.
And he released an absolutely damning report about the coordination, the collusion, really, of Sweden, the UK, and the US in the handling of Julian Assange's case.
And he made it very clear that Julian has been submitted to a sustained campaign of psychological torture throughout the time that he was in the embassy, and particularly that that was executed through mass media pressure, international mass media pressure, this relentless smear campaign that Julian has been subjected to.
And Nils Melzer, in his report, also really took the time to go right into the nitty-gritty of the original allegations in Sweden.
And he found that they had absolutely no merit.
They had originally been dropped within 24 hours by the first prosecutor who had agreed that no rape had occurred.
Nils Melzer references the fact that neither of the women actually wanted to prosecute Julian or to lay any charges at all.
He went into the fact that the condoms that were submitted as evidence didn't contain any of Julian's DNA or anybody else's DNA, for that matter.
It's just been a stitch-up from the outset.
And he made that very, very clear.
So I think that's been a huge recent development.
Now, I know that you've written, before I've seen on Twitter, where you mentioned, I guess, an article or two where you've mentioned that you've been a victim of violence personally, yourself.
Now, if there was a bias here, you, I guess, probably would tend to side with the victims if you had to.
Although, obviously, you're a champion of Assange and his work.
It seems pretty obvious that you'd turn right around and throw him under the bus if you felt like there was really something to the case of these, the cases, I guess, of these two women.
Could you get into the details a little bit of what supposedly happened there and why you're so satisfied that it's a trumped-up charge?
Well, I'm certainly not the first survivor of sexual violence to come forward in Julian's defence.
There was an op-ed early on in the Peaks by a group called Women Against Rape in London, in England.
And they pointed out very clearly that the police handling of this case is not typical of the response of police to any survivor of sexual violence who comes forward with any allegation.
That the way the case has been handled from the outset is, in fact, a complete and total anomaly.
And that is certainly the case from my own experience.
I can tell you absolutely that the way that the police handle allegations of rape or sexual violence against anyone who is not a politically expedient target such as Julian was for them at that time in Sweden, the handling is completely different.
What we saw with the Swedish case is that the police leaked the details of the allegations on the day they were made to the tabloid press in Sweden and then that was picked up and carried across the Western world.
Julian was branded internationally as a rapist before he had ever been interviewed or arrested or charged.
And that simply does not happen.
Then Julian was repeatedly trying to be interviewed and trying to speak to the police.
And there's this bizarre, actually, totally bizarre interview with the spokesperson for the Swedish prosecution authority on Al Jazeera just within a day of hitting the press about these allegations, the world press.
And the interviewer is asking the spokeswoman, you know, have you spoken to Julian Assange?
And the spokeswoman says, well, do you want to speak to Julian Assange?
And she says, well, no, no, we don't.
And he says, do you know where Julian Assange is?
And she says, no.
And he says, well, surely you want to speak to this person who's being accused.
Surely you want to have some discussion or conversation with him.
We see the same thing with Julian's lawyers actually got written permission for him to leave Sweden and to go to the UK and was granted that permission to leave.
And yet the common media narrative across the decade has been that he ran away from Sweden, that he was trying to avoid being questioned.
And the reality, the documented reality is that he was trying to participate in the process and he was actually being blocked from participating in the process by the very people who should have been on board with bringing him in and getting it resolved.
Right.
Well, you can say that again.
I mean, all this coverage, I don't know how many times I bet if someone went and did the research, they find thousands of examples of the media saying that Assange was hiding in that embassy from rape charges when, in fact, he had said, I'm happy to go to Sweden and answer your questions as long as you will put in writing that you promise not to extradite me to America where I believe they're planning on prosecuting me on espionage charges, which everybody said was a crazy, stupid, insane conspiracy theory that only kooks believe, only now he's been indicted on espionage charges in the United States.
Oh, look, absolutely.
Every single turn what he said would come to pass is exactly what has come to pass.
And you're entirely correct.
He tried to comply with the process in Sweden and was prevented from doing so by the very people who were supposedly investigating him.
He tried to comply in London and again was prevented.
We know that countless other people facing investigations in London from Sweden have, in fact, been interviewed and eventually Julian was interviewed by the Swedish investigators in the embassy, I believe, in 2016 and ultimately they did not pursue the case.
They did not pursue any charges.
So this has just been about smearing him from the outset and it sickens me as a survivor and it sickens many other survivors for these, for our, we feel like our pain and our experiences are being just for pure political gain are being exploited in this case and it's really unconscionable.
You know, I had not realized before I did know this, I had forgotten that the Swedish authorities had already come and investigated him, questioned him, I'm sorry, in the embassy, in the Ecuadorian embassy, in London there and they said they left satisfied and no charges at that point and that was three years ago.
Correct.
Wow.
And that was after many years of them claiming that they couldn't possibly do it.
Right.
But now they're precisely.
Wow, that is really something else.
It's a giant, it's a giant political farce and, and it's an insult, it's a profound insult to every survivor of sexual violence.
Well, I don't know how meaningful this is to people, you know, I take it for what it's worth and I think it is worth something that Daniel Ellsberg, who I know not very well, but I know him pretty well I guess, and he went and met with Assange in the embassy back years ago and questioned him all about what happened with these two women in Sweden and he came on my show right after that and explained not the details of Assange's side of the story but that Assange had told his side of the story to Ellsberg and as Ellsberg put it, he's been around the block a few times and he's no wilting lily and he knows how things go and he heard Julian Assange's explanation and he was satisfied that nothing amounted to anything like a rape or aggression against these women.
Is that your understanding of this too?
Yeah, sure, and actually Ellsberg was interviewed alongside Julian on Larry King Live in December of 2010, just a few months after the original allegations, and he told Larry King the same thing.
He said that the so-called plumbers were looking for information with which to blackmail him into silence and he found out that that kind of operation was going on now to try to neutralize the bearer of these messages, meaning Julian's messages about war crimes and this is yet another thing that many people, it's been totally buried, is the timeline of what was happening to Julian in the months prior to these allegations coming to light.
Julian was already the subject of a Pentagon manhunt three months prior to the allegations surfacing in Sweden.
He had published ...
Yeah, someone had leaked actually a CIA document about how we've got to go after and discredit WikiLeaks and someone had, some whistleblower had sent that document to WikiLeaks who published it.
Absolutely.
So, in March of 2010, five months before the allegations, the Collateral Murder Publishing team from WikiLeaks were complaining that they were being subjected to intense physical surveillance.
It was six weeks later that Manning was arrested and thrown into literally a dog kennel in Kuwait.
In June of 2010, the Pentagon announced officially that it was conducting an aggressive investigation, was their words, into WikiLeaks and that they had a prosecutor joining the Terrorism and National Security Unit of the Eastern District Court of Virginia to lead the WikiLeaks grand jury.
So, there was already these official investigations and a Pentagon manhunt for Julian.
In July of 2010, there was the Department of Homeland Security agent gate-crashing the HOPE conference in New York City trying to find Julian, who had been booked to do a keynote at that conference and instead Jacob Appelbaum, an activist and journalist, appeared and this is, I mean, they were going after Julian just front, back and sideways, months, months prior to him being smeared as a rapist.
And, I mean, that's really material.
I mean, the Australians had already confirmed that they were assisting a US counter-espionage investigation into WikiLeaks.
Then FBI Director Mueller was engaged in that WikiLeaks investigation.
You know, Michael Hayden, then ex-CIA and NSA Director, was penning op-eds in the Washington Post denouncing WikiLeaks.
And the Justice Department was openly discussing the fact that they were launching an investigation into WikiLeaks.
And this was all two months prior to the accusations against Julian.
And the idea that Julian, knowing that he is subject to a Pentagon manhunt, would decide to go on a sexual violence spree, is just ludicrous.
Completely ludicrous.
Is there a real reason to believe that he was set up in the first place with some kind of honey trap?
Or simply, when these two women went down to the police station to ask if they could get some kind of STD test mandated on him or something, that the cops just realized that here's something we can use to hit him in the head with?
Well, he arrived in Sweden on the 11th of August and it was the day that his credit cards, credit cards and debit cards were blocked and he was left without any access to funds whatsoever, which is what actually made him dependent upon the first accuser.
He was physically dependent on her.
They were having to pay for his train tickets and everything because he had no access to funds.
He was very much stranded in Sweden and forced to rely on the goodwill of strangers and that definitely that's true.
And although, you know, it's funny because I remember at the beginning they said, you know, one of these women had an ex-boyfriend who was CIA, which itself is on one hand suspicious, but also meaningless without, you know, further confirmation of connection of those dots.
And I guess it seemed plausible on its face for what it's worth that their story that, you know, their consent had gone as far as including protection, but not as far as not including protection.
And that one of them was nervous and was kind of encouraged by the other one that, well, let's go see if we can get the cops to ask him to take a STD test, something like that.
It didn't quite sound to me like a total setup there, but I can certainly see how the cops and the, you know, especially the higher, at the higher pay grades would say, wait, has he walked in with something about Assange?
We can make something out of that.
You know, they certainly have tried ever since.
Well, one of the women said definitively that she was not raped and she was the one that had encouraged the other woman to go in and to make a complaint.
The second woman said that she didn't want to charge Julian with anything.
She didn't want to allege anything against Julian.
She only wanted the STD test.
And she also said specifically that police had made up the charges.
That police wanted to get him and had made up the charges and she refused to sign the police statement.
There was even a quote of her, right?
That you're not going to railroad me.
In other words, use her to railroad him.
Yeah, they said, well, they said, she said that the police had railroaded her.
They had attempted to railroad her.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
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Now, let's talk about Chelsea Manning here for a minute before I forget, but I'm not wrong, right?
That Manning is still sitting in prison in contempt right now for refusing to rat on Assange again.
Yes.
Yeah, which is actually a stunning display of personal sacrifice and solidarity for Julian.
And, you know, personally, I've seen a lot, I've seen Julian raise up a lot of people.
Julian has really uplifted a lot of journalists and a lot of activists who've given them platforms, given them names, given them help, given them mentorship.
Hey, saved Ed Snowden's life that one time.
Yeah, absolutely.
Ed Snowden too.
But, I mean, I'm, I am an example of a journalist, an independent journalist who Julian raised up and gave a platform to, I mean, WikiLeaks shared my work every year from 2014 onwards.
They gave me amazing visibility in New Zealand at a time when I was in seriously dangerous circumstances performing my activism and journalism and, I was being blacked out nationally by the New Zealand media and WikiLeaks would come along and tweet out my work and just blow that containment strategy wide open and give me visibility that really protected me at a really precarious time.
And I'm not the only one.
Julian, Julian understands solidarity and Julian understands the power of his platform and he routinely used the power of that platform to provide shelter and cover for at-risk journalists and for at-risk activists.
And that's one of the things I respect the most about him.
And unfortunately, there has been a long line of people who he gave a leg up to who have burned him one way or another, either because they were opportunists like James Ball from The Guardian is a classic example but there are many others.
People who have tried to ride his coattails and capitalise on him and, you know, they're not going to be able to do it and they're not going to be able to capitalise on his name and ultimately have betrayed him and let him down.
And it is incredibly and I'm just so grateful for Chelsea Manning's solidarity towards Julian because she has had every pressure under the sun to get her to denounce Julian get her to denounce WikiLeaks to distance herself from them and she's been completely resistant to that.
And she has stood by Julian and WikiLeaks even at the cost of her own personal freedom and I respect that so much.
The integrity it takes to do that I just have all of the respect in the world for.
I just think she's such an incredibly strong character with so much integrity to do that for Julian and for WikiLeaks even when, you know, there's every incentive for her not to.
She is purely on principle making that point and taking that stand so much.
Yeah, seriously and you know I mean especially when he's already been indicted on that charge and they have no reason really to keep her there other than a pretext of contempt to just punish this person for a crime that hey she's already been sentenced and done her time for did seven years including the pre-trial.
Absolutely and imagine you know if she went the other way if she went to jail or blamed them or whatever else she would be celebrated around the world on every mass media platform she would be feted she would be you know there would be rewards if she was prepared to compromise her integrity and her ethics she would be richly and handsomely rewarded for it but instead she is you know suffering physically suffering psychologically and suffering financially to do the right thing.
Um and now and it's really worth mentioning too here about the actual indictment against Assange who started out this computer hacking charge and then elaborated with this superseding indictment for espionage and I mean I guess I didn't look that hard at the right wing hawks but so I don't know if no one stood up for this thing but I sure saw a lot of lawyers and critics and libertarians and leftist types saying that this is absolutely unprecedented and unheard of and and possibly unprosecutable just completely unrealistic to sort of conflate the leaky with the leaker with you know not even that crafty of language in the indictment I mean there's some parts of the indictment where it reads as though they're talking about manning but then they just put the word Assange in there to prove that they can bait and switch us into thinking of Assange as the leaker rather than the recipient of the leak which is just not true it's just crazy and if he had anything like a fair trial he ought to be able to beat this rap no problem yeah but I mean nobody gets a fair trial in the eastern district court of Virginia and that's what John Kariaku was doing at the court of Virginia yeah what would he know about it right exactly the one CIA agent prosecuted for torture but not for torturing anyone but for saying the name of somebody who tortures somebody absolutely and they put him through the ringer and destroyed his life just like they're doing to Kim.com right now I mean Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim Kim experts to talk more about this, but it's at least worth bringing up here that you could just take the parallel easy and say that an American journalist reporting about secrets that they found out about against the government of China, that they could be arrested, that they could be maybe deported from some third country, arrested and extradited from, I don't know, wherever, Singapore or Malaysia or wherever else they might go in the world doing journalism.
And the Chinese would say, hey, this guy's guilty of espionage for publishing our secrets based on the same standard.
And in fact, if they were smart and or cheeky about it, they would exactly cite the Americans and say, listen, even in the land of the First Amendment, they don't put up with this kind of thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
And as, as the rule of law degrades across the Western societies, it just further empowers, you know, those with even less legal protections to engage in even more abuses.
I completely agree with you and to justify it by the actions of what's being done in the West.
And actually, I wrote an interesting study about that from the perspective of legislation that has been passed, mass surveillance legislation that has been passed around the world in the wake of 9-11.
And particularly in New Zealand, we had the GCSB Act passed in 2013, which is what the movement that I referenced earlier that I've been involved in was directly opposing the passage of that bill.
That bill not only legalized mass surveillance of New Zealand citizens, but retroactively indemnified those, the agencies that had already been illegally performing that mass surveillance.
And in the direct wake of the passage of the GCSB bill, which unfortunately did pass by only one vote, we saw the Australian Data Retention Bill, we saw the UKIP Bill, we saw the USA Freedom Act, we saw the Canada CSEC changes, and it just rolled around the world.
And from there, we saw here in Russia, ultimately, the passage of almost identical legislation some years after the passage of it in the West.
So the more that these crimes are written into law, indemnified in law, the more that they snowball internationally, and then become a basis to justify the passage of similar legislation in other countries.
And it becomes like this global disease, it really does.
It's like a virus that spreads around the world, and all they need is to pass it in that first country, and then pass it in that second country, and ultimately it becomes an international standard, an international norm.
Right, and the biggest shame here is it is the land of the First Amendment that is helping to set all these precedents.
And so, not that this was ever really correct about American protection of human rights, but America has always talked such a big game about human rights.
And so we've seen already, when it comes to torture, disappearances, attacks, not necessarily full-scale civil wars or whatever, but attacks by the states against armed groups and this kind of thing, they all just invoke Uncle Sam and the war on terrorism, and they all just say, hey, yeah, this is exactly just like what you guys are doing.
We've seen that all over the world, including...
At Orwellian, and you know, we just live in that Orwellian world.
We've seen it this week with the Defend Media Freedom hashtag out of the UK, with Jeremy Hunt leading a press freedom event, what was it, 11 kilometers away from Belmarsh Prison, where Julian is rotting.
They are so blatant about the hypocrisy.
It's absolutely incredible.
Yeah, just like here we have, you know, free speech on campus, unless you have something critical to say about Israel, in which case you're a racist.
You hear all the right-wingers turn immediately into wilting little snowflakes who need their safe space to be protected from criticism of Israel, which is inherently racist.
Yeah, you know, I wonder how much of this is driven by the intelligence agencies as well, because I look at the general state, the decline, I would say, of activism in this decade, and it's just so abundantly obvious to me that it serves, the Divide and Conquer agenda serves the status quo, and that the status quo is held in place by the linchpin that are the intelligence agencies.
And I say that because in Occupy, you know, it was protesters versus the police.
It was protesters versus the state.
We would be lined up against riot cops.
And you see protests now, and it's no longer protesters versus the state.
It's no longer protesters versus the riot police.
It's protesters versus protesters.
It's citizens versus citizens.
We are no longer going after the power structure, we're going after each other.
And who does that serve?
That only serves the status quo.
And I mean, one of the most revealing, I've been studying the intelligence agencies for years, and their horrific crimes domestically and internationally.
And one of the really formative moments for me was when I was studying the fusion centers, which are these data-sharing conglomerate hubs, not only right across the U.S., but actually across the world.
And they originated in the war zones.
There was originally fusion centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it became fusion centers right across America and right across the Western world.
And they are taking data from the civic infrastructure and from civic sources and then tying it together with data from private agencies, you know, the credit card companies and everybody else, the telecoms and whatnot.
And they are making that data available at a federal level and also at the local level and also to what they call the critical infrastructure, which is the private companies, the banks and whoever who are involved in that.
And in one of the documents released in a FOIA from the fusion centers, it discussed how they were targeting both pro-life and pro-choice activists.
And that really was a huge moment for me, because it was the moment that I understood that they're not coming from a left perspective or a right perspective, and they're not targeting the left or targeting the right.
They're targeting the left and targeting the right.
And they're not trying to get them to be quiet.
They're trying to get them more amped up and to react against each other more in the COINTELPRO fashion.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because what they're really scared of isn't the left or the right.
What they're scared of is change.
All of this to them is a risk management strategy.
To them, left activists and right activists both represent a risk of change, of the status quo.
And that's why they infiltrate and use the COINTELPRO tactics on both the left and the right.
Absolutely.
I've just seen, you know, people talk all the time about the divisions in today's society.
And I think, where do those originate from?
They originate from the intelligence agencies, without a doubt.
And when you look at people like Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange, what are they really?
They're people who took on, who opposed, meaningfully and effectively opposed the intelligence services.
And wherever I see a whistleblower or a journalist or an activist who has gone at that core of the system at the intelligence agency, they are the ones who are killed, who are jailed, who are exiled every single time.
They are the ones who are suffering the most, and it's because they're the ones who dared to look behind the curtain, you know, the man behind the curtain, and it is the intelligence agency.
Like, we talk about the corruption in media, the corruption in government, the corruption in academia, the corruption in business and the banks, and behind all of that is the intelligence agencies.
Well, and it always goes both ways, you know, in fascism.
Big business is controlled by the state because they like it that way, and they control the state that controls big business and around it goes.
So it is certainly a two-way street there, or a five-way street.
But, you know, like, for example, one of my favorite examples from the WikiLeaks is some executive vice president at Citigroup tells Obama, here's your cabinet, and what you're going to do is you're going to keep Gates at defense, you're going to have Hillary at state, you're going to put, you know, the guys from Goldman Sachs are going to be at Treasury and the economic advisor spot, and whatever, and it goes down the list, and it's, I don't know, 95% or something, the exact cabinet that Obama then assembled, based on that.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's really something to behold.
I mean, anybody could have come up with that or guessed that, but to see it just like that in a plain old email, right?
Not even over Signal, he just sent a plain old email, by the way, tell the new president-elect that this is who his cabinet is going to be, says some schmuck at Citigroup that none of us had ever even heard of before, you know?
Absolutely, and I mean, yeah, this is the thing, presidents and heads of state are like at best general managers.
Yeah, for real.
Like, at best, that's what they are.
So by the way, now talk more about, tell us about some of the stuff that WikiLeaks has done.
You mentioned collateral murder there, I think we all know about the Hillary Clinton and Podesta emails from 2016 and all of that, wherever they came from.
But what were some of the stories that WikiLeaks was on that maybe people know the story, but they don't know that WikiLeaks is responsible for bringing us this information, or they don't know that this is the sacrifice that Manning, or what Manning made the sacrifice for was to bring this stuff out.
And it's not just the Manning leak, there's all kinds of stuff that WikiLeaks was doing, hangering governments all over this planet.
There is so much, I could literally spend hours talking about that WikiArea.
I think in terms of the ones people are least aware of, I would say the work that WikiLeaks did between 2007 and 2010, before they became super famous internationally, there's some really great examples there.
They were going after major Swiss banks.
They were going after tax havens.
They were exposing corrupt dealings and tax fraud into the billions of dollars of banking oligarchs in Europe.
That's a very early example.
They were also heavily involved in Kenya.
The first losses, the first murders of people who were associated with WikiLeaks were a pair of Kenyan lawyers who were investigating extrajudicial killings in Kenya, where Julian had been to Kenya and had worked directly with them, and then WikiLeaks had done releases about it.
And unfortunately, those two lawyers were actually assassinated in Kenya, which was a huge blow to WikiLeaks at the time.
That's a second example I can think of off the top of my head.
Then they were also instrumental in publishing the ClimateGate expose in 2009, a year before Collateral Murder, in which U.K. climate scientists had been internally bragging in emails about fudging climate data, which actually brings me to a great point, and I wrote about this recently in a piece called Freeing Julian Assange Part 2.
People often ascribe a political motive to WikiLeaks.
They often suggest that WikiLeaks is on one side or the other of a debate.
For example, in the U.K.
ClimateGate scandal, it was assumed that WikiLeaks must be climate change deniers, because otherwise why would they publish information about climate scientists?
But then you look at the very first week of Donald Trump's presidency after his inauguration, WikiLeaks was offering to publish suppressed climate science data that the Trump administration was trying to have erased from official government websites.
And that's on the other side of the climate change debate, and that's where you realize that WikiLeaks aren't climate change deniers and they aren't climate change opponents.
Actually, in both cases, what they were doing was trying to take true information that should be in the public record and to publish it regardless of the political consequences either way.
And I think that's just a really brilliant example.
People often talk about how WikiLeaks published information that was inconvenient to Bush and inconvenient to Obama, and were trying to solicit information, too, that was inconvenient to Trump.
And they connect that point in that way, but that climate change issue really demonstrated to me that they weren't taking a political position.
They were just wanting to preserve documents that they consider to be in the historical record regardless of which side of a debate those documents were on.
And another great example of that that I think people are completely unaware of, you hear all the time in mass media, well, WikiLeaks never published anything on Donald Trump.
Julian Assange never published anything on Donald Trump.
But if you go to WikiLeaks.org and you type in Donald Trump and press enter, there's over 10,000 records on Donald Trump.
I was reading in there about how Donald Trump's been leasing land to Muammar Gaddafi and all kinds of stuff, like unbelievable stuff about Trump's business dealings.
And it's just been sitting there openly in WikiLeaks.org this entire time that WikiLeaks has been smeared as being pro-Trump.
Well, that was actually funny when Gaddafi came to town and pitched a tent outside.
He did it at one of Donald Trump's properties there.
Exactly.
But Trump had leased him that land.
They were doing these business deals and whatnot, just as Trump had done around the world.
That's funny.
I didn't realize that.
The funny thing in the story was that he just allowed it pro bono as a gesture, but of course not.
No.
No, it was formally leased.
And I mean, another thing about the whole Clinton, the DNC leaks and the disaster emails is that people say it was to hurt Clinton and it was to help Trump.
But the entire opposition research of Clinton's campaign is in there, including all the spreadsheets and everything.
They went through the whole financials of all of Trump's super PAC information, which is published in the DNC leaks.
So while the media pitched this as being to help Trump, anybody who cared enough to actually read what WikiLeaks published would have had no shortage of leads to go after Trump with.
I mean, the same thing we hear, like WikiLeaks is in bed with Russia, WikiLeaks would never publish about Russia.
There's over 650,000 documents about Russia in WikiLeaks.
You can, you will never run out of material to write about Russia, damning material, if you actually utilize that database and do that research.
But nobody does it because they don't, it doesn't support their chief allegations.
It debunks them.
And it actually really upsets and disgusts me that, you know, hundreds of thousands of articles have been written worldwide about how WikiLeaks served Russia when all, any single one of those journalists would have had to do is go to WikiLeaks.org, type Russia and press enter.
That's it.
That's all they would have had.
That's how low the barrier is if you actually care about investigating Russia or if you actually care about investigating Donald Trump.
But they don't care.
They just want their mere narratives to be upheld, so they just pretend it doesn't exist.
Well, you know, it seems kind of incongruous, too, that in a way, I mean, even though these stories have so much value to you and me and news readers around the world, the stuff that, for example, that Manning leaked, this doesn't go for everything on WikiLeaks, of course, but the stuff that Manning leaked was all secret and confidential level stuff.
And the reason that it was on these very wide, widely accessed databases that, you know, had permissions granted to them to so many people across the government was because it wasn't top secret stuff.
It's the kind of stuff that, yeah, you can make a compelling news story out of it, but no, it does not compromise sources and methods.
It does not get CIA agents killed by the commies or whatever worst case scenario kind of secrets.
And of course, the prosecutors at Manning's trial and Secretary of Defense Gates, who kept his job thanks to some executive vice president of Citigroup, they had said that, oh, come on, all this stuff about blood on their hands and all the damage caused by Manning and Assange here with this leak is really greatly overblown, you know.
And it's interesting because, of course, the new indictment really hinges on the fact that some Afghans could have gotten hurt when they were essentially doxxed by Assange, although even that wasn't really his fault.
That was the Guardian's fault that they published the password to the documents where the names had not been redacted yet, the names of innocent people in there.
But no one could show that anybody ever got hurt from any of that stuff, that anybody ever got killed.
I mean, you know, all that happened was people learned the real news.
No one even got in trouble for the stuff in there, you know?
What would have gotten someone hurt was the OPM breach, the Office of Personnel Management breach, which had nothing to do with WikiLeaks or Manning, in which the personal, highly personal information of everybody who works for U.S. intelligence services worldwide was hacked and was exfiltrated from U.S. government service, you know, or the shadowbroker's breach of all the NSA tools, you know, the CIA tools, top-secret CIA hacking tools and whatnot.
I mean, time and time again, the U.S. government and the U.S. military and the U.S. empire has demonstrated that it is completely unable to secure even its most sensitive information.
It's just ridiculous.
All the more reason to clamp down on Manning and Assange and try to make examples out of them, I guess, but, you know, at the same time, though, and I can't even keep track of them all.
I mean, I think all this abuse has really motivated more whistleblowers.
I know there was one that apparently the guy, allegedly the guy that leaked all the assassination files to Jeremy Scahill has been arrested now.
There's quite a few that have come out.
I think probably most or at least many of them inspired by Manning and Assange and Snowden and Kiriakou and Drake and the others who come forward.
Benny, you know, the more that come forward, the more that come forward.
Yeah, absolutely.
People really need to have and to see those examples of those of us who are prepared to put the principles above any detrimental effects to, you know, to our persons.
And just don't lead to the intercept and you probably won't get caught.
Yeah, well, there's definitely something going wrong in that newsroom, I completely agree with you.
And I say that as someone who absolutely loves Glenn Greenwald and who thought that the founding of the Intercept was a fantastic development in independent media.
There's absolutely something going wrong in terms of source protection there.
And that is probably, you know, when I was thinking a lot today about like, what is the world lost with the silencing of Julian?
Like, we've lost his incredibly insightful geopolitical analysis.
We've lost his ability to protect at-risk journalists and whistleblowers.
I mean, there's many journalists whose lives he saved.
You know, from Azerbaijan, Julian literally saved his life.
And he's just one of many.
And I think that's something that, you know, I spoke earlier about how Julian really uplifted and raised up many at-risk journalists and whistleblowers, that that was a vital service that nobody else was providing, that really nobody else was providing.
And that's just such an unbelievable tragedy, because when they take Julian away from humanity, they're not just taking him, they're taking every person who he would have saved, whose situations he would have intervened in.
And I think that's one of the biggest challenges for us right now, is how do we live up to WikiLeaks' legacy of source protection?
How do we live up to their legacy of creating this underground railroad and being able to get the Edward Snowdens, you know, of this world out of this situation and to safety?
Right.
Yeah, and people might forget that.
It wasn't WikiLeaks that published all the Snowden stuff.
He didn't give this stuff to them.
But Assange went and sent Sarah Harrison, this great lawyer, to Hong Kong.
And she's the one who got him out of there and got him safely to, well, he was trying to go to Latin America when Obama took his passport and stranded him in Russia.
But anyway, the reason he's still alive and not in an American prison right now is because of Assange's intervention there.
It said publicly recently that he was absolutely stunned by the developments, because he was supposed to go to Ecuador.
And had he gone to Ecuador, we all know what his fate ultimately would have been with the betrayal of the Lenin-Moreno government.
And it's just a total fluke that Ed remains at liberty to this day.
Well, it's not a fluke.
Julian and WikiLeaks came.
It was a very strange, I don't know, strange, but you could kind of see the reasoning behind it.
I guess the decision that Obama made to strand him there, I mean, it was no coincidence that they stripped him of his passport while he was in Russia.
They could have waited for him to get to Ecuador where they could have grabbed him.
But I think, I don't know what.
They thought it would be too much trouble from a public relations point of view, so just leave him in Russia where he can be debriefed by the Russians.
I don't know what the thinking was, honestly.
They wanted to smear him as a Russian agent.
Yeah.
Look, it's what they do to the entire independent media sphere, you know.
It's no accident that they push all of the dissidents out of Western media and give them no voice and no platform.
So where do all of the dissidents end up?
They end up being interviewed on RT.
They end up having shows on Russian media platforms or, you know, Tel Aviv or wherever else in the world or Al Jazeera or wherever.
That's absolutely deliberate.
And why?
Because then what does the government say?
Oh, that's Russian propaganda.
Oh, that's, you know, whatever propaganda.
It's deliberate.
And that's really the same thing that they did with Ed.
They stranded him in Russia so that they could associate him with Russia.
And they, you know, strand independent media activists and whatnot on foreign government media platforms so that they can then associate them with those media platforms.
It's totally a deliberate strategy to discredit people.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right that it's totally transparent for those who are willing to see through it, but pretty effective for those who won't.
I mean, if you ask the Wall Street Journal, boy, it's no coincidence Snowden is in Russia, but they won't explain how he got stranded there.
They'll just pretend.
In fact, they ran, I think it was that guy Solomon at the Wall Street Journal had this whole thing about how the Snowden leak was a Russian and Chinese plot all along.
So I guess if you're a right wing hawk and you want to believe in that stuff, there's plenty of it for you there to fill that narrative out.
Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, the media just doesn't care.
The same thing as the Guardian claiming that Manafort had gone and visited Julian in the embassy when Manafort had never been anywhere near the embassy and certainly never visited Julian.
They don't care what the truth is.
They just come up with these lines.
Same thing about the smearing feces all over the wall.
Julian did not smear feces on the walls of the embassy, and they know that he did not, and they have provided no evidence that he did.
Yet every single article that's being written about him in UK press right now references these allegations that he smeared feces on the wall of the embassy.
They are shameless liars.
Shameless liars.
And it just goes to show too, like you're saying, how many people in media, alternative media too, left and right, are willing to believe in that stuff.
And boy, don't associate my name with the name of the guy who spread feces on the wall, so I don't know.
In fact, when they originally accused him of all of this rape stuff, I admit that I too kind of kept him at a little bit more arm's length there, because essentially his entire role had changed.
And it was the kind of thing that was making everybody who was near him seem, as they put it, radioactive or toxic.
The poison spreads.
And what the hell do I care, right?
I should have interviewed him another hundred times about that.
I have nothing to lose whatsoever.
But for some reason, I don't even know if I ever really thought it through very deeply or anything.
I just kind of quit interviewing the guy after that, you know?
I really regret, of course.
It's completely stupid.
Wow.
I mean, I think many people went through that same process.
And ultimately, that's why that was the smear that was chosen.
They targeted the smears at his natural areas of support.
So they find what would be the most abhorrent thing that they could accuse him of that would be the most offensive to his natural allies, and attempt to divorce him from that support base.
And so, you know, what are you going to do if you want to divorce him from a support base that is feminist or that is liberal or the tech activist?
What are you going to do?
Well, that's what you're going to accuse him of.
And unfortunately, it's effective and it works.
But kudos to you for ultimately seeing through it.
Yeah, well, and you know, I kind of did all along.
I never really believed in it.
It sure looked like a honey trap type of a situation to me.
But, you know, and I don't know, I guess your call dropped out for a second there.
Like, I was sort of complaining, like, I don't have a reputation to even be sacrificed.
Who cares?
I don't have a thing to lose for sticking my neck out for that guy.
If people wanted to say anything bad about me for associating with him or whatever, I don't care.
So, you know, it's like I don't even remember really thinking this through.
Oh, geez, I better not interview him anymore.
I just kind of never got back around to interviewing him after that sort of a thing.
It is kind of subtle.
You know what I mean?
Because, I mean, honestly, if you just asked me outright, I would have said, yeah, you're right, and had him on the next day.
You know what I mean?
Just kind of quit coming up after that in a way, you know?
Yeah, but it's that social pressure.
Yeah.
And that's what they try to generate is that social pressure, and they try to seed that self-censorship.
And it is really subtle, and it is really pervasive.
And unfortunately, I mean, look how many years it takes of fighting back against smears like that.
The smears are really effective.
We've got to give it to them.
They are effective.
But they're also being overplayed.
And when you look at them from the bigger picture and you look at them in aggregate, it starts to make a whole lot more sense.
I wrote about that in Freeing Julian Assange Part 1 on ContraSpin.co.nz.
I talked about the fact that actually four people in WikiLeaks, four core members of WikiLeaks, have been accused of battery of women.
And when you look at that one after the next after the next, it is just the carbon copy being just replayed over and over again.
And I really feel like these intelligence agencies have overcooked that goose now, and ultimately there's going to be some pretty strong blowback from it because they're just not going to get away with it.
So, I mean, we had obviously Julian's case, and then we had Jake Applebaum as well taken down by the same multiple accusers, very public smear campaign type of thing.
Then Trevor Fitzgibbon as well.
Actually, Trevor Fitzgibbon was a year before Jake Applebaum in terms of the timeline.
Same situation.
And, of course, you look at what these guys were doing immediately prior to them being smeared, and it's just so obvious that it's a targeted takedown by the state.
It's so obvious that it's an action in retribution for their work and for their work having such amazing veracity.
And it's just impossible to ignore, really, that these – we saw again with Kristen Hraftison.
Kristen Hraftison had been in the job of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief for less than a week when anonymous accusations of abuse of women were being made against him with no evidence whatsoever.
There wasn't even any named accusers.
There was nothing, just completely anonymous, spurious claims being made.
And I actually – I studied each of those cases, and I actually created this analysis table, and I looked at the activity that they were undertaking immediately prior to these accusations emerging.
In Julian's case, it was the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs.
In Jake Applebaum's case, he'd been working on the NSA drone kill list from the Snowden files right before he was smeared as a serial rapist.
Jacob was.
Trevor Fitzgibbon was working on the Snowden treaty with Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda to try and get states to step up and provide safe passage to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.
And in each of those three cases, there was multiple accusers.
There was spurious claims.
The claims were not even rape claims at all, but they're being dressed up as if they're rape claims, similar to this whole condom dispute in Julian's case.
But the same thing with Jake Applebaum and with Trevor Fitzgibbon.
Trevor Fitzgibbon was accused of inappropriate hugging, and Jake Applebaum was accused of making sexually explicit jokes in a bar or kissing someone.
I mean, just ridiculous.
In all three cases, there were retracted claims, where after the damage had been done, claims were retracted.
None of the three men had been criminally charged, none of them at all, no charges.
All three had been branded not just a rapist, but a serial rapist.
They used this term, serial rapist.
And all three of them suffered massively severe reputational damage and severe impact on their work.
Like, they were actually hampered in their ability to continue doing the incredibly important work that they had been engaged in prior to these smears being rolled out.
And I mean, ultimately, this is what has led to, last week, myself and 120 other survivors and 300 allies of survivors coming out against the attacks on the special rapporteur Nils Melter, who's being critiqued about his use of various words, idiosyncrasies in his wording, surrounding his reporting on the torture of Julian Assange.
And we wrote a public letter that we called Not In My Name, and said if you are going to attempt to, as these liberal women's groups have been attempting to get Meltzer fired from his role because of their allegations about his inappropriate wording or him being insensitive to rape survivors.
And so myself and this 120 other survivors came out and said, if you bring this man down, if you bring Meltzer down, it will not be in our name.
We are fed up with watching sexual violence being used as a cover for political attacks on Julian Assange's colleagues and his supporters.
We've had enough of it.
We've seen it year in and year out.
And you will not do it in our name.
That's cool.
And people can read...
We had to draw that line.
Yeah.
So I want to point out that piece.
It's Freeing Julian Assange Part 1.
That's at contraspin.co.nz.
And is there already a Part 2 or it's coming?
Yeah, Part 2 is out.
So Part 1 is about the series of people who were integral to the WikiLeaks operation who've been falsely accused of sexual abuse.
The Freeing Julian Assange Part 2 goes into the whole ClimateGate 2009 stuff that I was talking about earlier.
And it looks specifically at the origins of Russiagate, which I managed to track right back to 2009 because I discovered that these accusations of WikiLeaks working for Russia aren't just, like, 2006.
They aren't born in 2016.
They're actually born in 2009 during this frame-up of the WikiLeaks ClimateGate releases.
And then I looked into who was running the Russia desk for MI5 in 2009.
Do you know who?
Dearlove?
Christopher Steele.
Christopher Steele was running UK intelligence Russia desk in 2009 when WikiLeaks started being accused of being affiliated with Russia.
Falsely accused.
And by them?
By MI5 or by the British state?
Yes, so the UK tabloids and press were in unison running hit pieces on WikiLeaks claiming that they were working with Russian security services.
And that was under the purview of Christopher Steele.
And now, was that the thing where they were saying the big connection was supposed to be that guy Israel Shamir?
No, that was a bit later on than that.
No, so they were trying to say that WikiLeaks was discrediting UK climate scientists on behalf of Russia.
And they were basically manufacturing technical evidence.
They're saying that because the upload of the emails had been uploaded to a Russian server, therefore that proved it was Russia along behind it.
But actually, it hadn't originated in Russia at all.
It had been in Saudi Arabia and in Turkey before it had ever been uploaded to Russia.
So it was this totally nonsense claim, but it was being pushed uniformly across the UK press, tabloid press, and even internationally to try to discredit the WikiLeaks publication.
And what that was, is it was basically a blueprint.
This tactic that they used against WikiLeaks was a blueprint for 2016.
Well, they're doing it right now, too.
The latest piece was Isikoff saying that it was the Russians who originated the idea that maybe Seth Rich was the DNC leaker and therefore that was why he was murdered.
And then even the Washington Post, Philip Bump and the Washington Post came out immediately and said, I think the direct quote was, that's not true.
Just look at the calendar, pal.
And you can see that there are all kinds of essentially Trump supporter types immediately jumping to the conclusion that this guy must be the leaker from the day of or that night or the beginning of the next morning or something.
But as early as two or three days before Isikoff is even accusing the Russians of having put out this fake thing.
So again, this washed up hack, Isikoff, who wrote an entire book based on the Steele dossier being legit, who now admits that, oh, looks like none of that was true.
Sorry about selling all those books at the airport and making a million dollars.
But anyway, and now here's another one.
And these never end, and it's based only on claims of government officials.
He doesn't even say he's seen the document, for Christ's sake.
And then he doesn't even have his interns check the date on Twitter to make sure first.
Well, that's the world that we live in, is that if you do serious investigative journalism, you end up on the outside of the press, not inside of it.
And anybody who remains inside of it, anybody whose book is allowed to be sold at the airport and is allowed to get a million-dollar book deal is doing so because one way or another it's in service of the empire.
It's tragic, but it's true.
And it's so effective.
Again, I mean, I happened to log into Twitter just for a minute to see how the Rip Raimondo articles were doing there, and I saw where people were going, oh, my God, oh, my God.
You know, look, the Russians were behind it all along.
Because even after 101 of these claims about Russia in the last two, three years have fallen flat, they don't care.
The next one, Isikoff wouldn't lie to me again.
Isikoff wouldn't go off half-cocked again.
No way.
Not after how many times he's been burned.
And so they just keep believing it anyway.
It's that confirmation bias all the way down, you know?
Look, I think he's worked out who his audience is, and I think he's worked out what his profit model is, and I think he's buying to that.
All right, well, listen, I'll let you go.
As far as I know, it's really late at night where you are.
Oh, you're in Russia, not New Zealand, so it's not that late, but it's pretty late.
Thank you for coming on the show, Susie.
It's great to talk to you.
Thank you so much.
I've really enjoyed it.
Cool.
And listen, I really appreciate, and I'm speaking for a lot of other people too, we really appreciate the work that you put in on behalf of free speech and free journalism, and specifically the case of Assange and Manning and WikiLeaks like this.
It's really good stuff.
In Julian's case, I feel like I'm just giving back a tiny bit of what I've been given.
As WikiLeaks stood by me and supported me through thick and thin, and, you know, what Julian has done for journalism as a whole, but for sources and for other journalists, the acts of solidarity that he's engaged in and for which he's seldom credited, he will forever have my loyalty for that.
All right, right on.
Well, you have a great night, okay?
Thank you so much.
Night, night.
Really appreciate it.
Okay, guys, that is Susie Dawson.
You can find her here at ContraSpin.co.nz.
ContraSpin.co.nz, Freeing Julian Assange Part 1 and 2.
And then you can follow her on Twitter at Susie3D, and that's with a Z, S-U-Z-I, Susie3D.
And that's also her website is Susie3D.com.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
