All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Julian Assange.
He is the co-founder and public face of last week's most Googled term, WikiLeaks.
Welcome to the show, Julian.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thank you.
Well, I sure appreciate you joining us on the show today.
You're welcome.
All right.
So first of all, you're kind of a mysterious character in the media.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
So I'm an Australian.
I was born on a little island called Magnetic Island in the Pacific.
And I've been an activist for a long time, since I was a teenager in Australia.
But then in the 90s, I was involved in setting up one of the first ISPs in Australia, a free speech ISP, and writing a book and doing some other forms of journalism and developing cryptographic systems for human rights workers in Southern America, and then studied physics and mathematics.
And this is, WikiLeaks is an idea that I and some other people had to try and deal with some systemic problems we saw in the media and an understanding that all decisions that occur in a civilization are based upon what we know, regardless of your political orientation.
We can't have good decisions, good political decisions, good decisions about how civilization is run, unless we have the information that we need about how the world actually works to make those decisions.
We specialize on not just any sort of information, but the sort of information that is suppressed from the historical record and suppressed from the public debate.
And by suppressed, I don't mean that people aren't interested in it.
I mean that it's classified or there is an active attempt through the legal system or through violence to prevent journalists reporting it or prevent whistleblowers coming forward with that information.
Because we have seen through our earlier work, my earlier work, that suppressed information is suppressed for a reason.
Usually that reason is that the people who know it best, the organizations that really understand it and who are sitting on it and who are withholding it, believe that when it is released, there will be a reform effect.
There will be a pushback from other organizations and from civil society and from the broader population to do something in response to the release of that information.
That's why it is restrained in the first place.
So by selectively going after repressed information and getting it out to the public, we can very efficiently produce reform.
Now, I read a pretty negative piece about you in the Mother Jones, but there was something very interesting in there that I really liked that they quoted you as saying, and that was about the influence of Daniel Ellsberg and his leaking of the Pentagon Papers and how that helped shape your worldview toward this kind of activity.
Yes.
Well, I mean, that article is very odd.
However, yes, Daniel Ellsberg, who I have spoken to, is certainly an influence and maybe that's a sort of classic case of an example where by getting this suppressed information out to the public, people can look at things in a new way and certain possibilities come up in the air.
But also the courage is contagious.
Daniel Ellsberg is fond of this phrase, and I am as well.
In response to Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers, there are a number of other sources that came forward encouraged by this successful example, and that's something that we try and promote.
We're not about creating martyrs.
We're not about getting people to go on the run from the FBI like Ellsberg did, although some people are into that drama.
Rather, we're about enabling people to continue on in their jobs, continue on in their position, but still act according to their conscience.
Okay.
Now, let's get into obviously the big news, which is the collateral murder video, as it's titled.
This is from July 12th, 2007, right?
Yeah.
This concerns an event in New Baghdad, July 12th, 2007, during the middle of General Petraeus's surge of additional US forces into that area.
It takes place just after 10 a.m., at 10.18 a.m.
The backing story is that there was a small arms fire heard at 9.50 a.m. somewhere in the vicinity of New Baghdad by US forces.
There's no record of it actually hitting US forces, but it was heard.
It was the location of that small arms fire was not identified, and the person was not identified.
In response, Apache helicopters were asked to circle around the area, which they did so.
Twenty-eight minutes later, the lead Apache, which is called Crazy Horse, came across a square, which had a crowd in it of about 20 people loosely milling around, not in one cohesive group.
The Apache sees two Reuters journalists, they don't recognize them as such, carrying just their bags nonchalantly walking down the street where the local population are.
Some of the locals are leading them to photograph things that are interesting.
The Apache then mistakes these camera bags for weapons, and then it observes two other people in the crowd who appear that they may actually have weapons, but nonetheless, that's not unusual for Baghdad at this time, it's a very dangerous place, and they're not showing any sort of hostility.
It then asks for permission to engage on those individuals, and around nine have gotten together into a slightly tighter group, where they are looking at the photographs that are taken by Namir Nur-El-Din, a 22-year-old Reuters photographer.
It then attempts to kill all those people with 30-millimeter cannon fire from an altitude of around 1,000 meters.
It's clear that the people in the crowd at various times have seen these helicopters and they're not hiding from them.
Namir Nur-El-Din runs from the initial group of seven people, six people who were killed, and lands into a garbage dump and tries to take cover there, but he is nonetheless killed deliberately by more 30-millimeter cannon fire.
His assistant and driver, Naeem Chumrah, is left wounded, he's the only person left alive from this initial encounter, and he is crawling on the curb, barely able to get onto his hands and knees, there's no one else around, and the pilots are going, well, he's there, but we just need him to pick up a weapon, come on, buddy, pick up a weapon, all we need you to do is pick up a weapon, although there's no sign of any weapons around, because they understand that according to the rules of engagement, they can't shoot a wounded man who is not escaping or doesn't have a weapon, but they're certainly very eager to do so.
A van of Good Samaritans lives in the area and has two children in it, and then sees Saeed crawling on the curbside and stops, and the two other men, it's not clear where they come from, the houses, or whether they came from the van, then assist Saeed and try to carry him to the van.
In the meantime, the Apache asks for permission to kill all these people, including the wounded journalist, and under the basis that the dead have been collected and the wounded man is taken away, initially they say possibly that the van is stopping to collect weapons, but they do not maintain that in their request for permission to kill him.
And permission is given, and they shoot the van and kill Saeed.
He is of course dropped by the people trying to get him to the van.
He is individually targeted and killed, and the van is destroyed and disabled.
Two children, miraculously, the two children of the driver survive with wounds and are found by US troops and eventually taken to hospital.
And then about 20 minutes later, the Apache helicopter goes to another area about a half kilometer away, and it sees someone walking down the street who may have an AK-47.
It's not entirely clear, but they're carrying something.
And they disappear from the street, from the view of the Apache, and when the Apache comes back to the street, they're no longer there.
So they assume they have gone into a building, the roof of which is still under construction.
And they then ask for permission to launch a hellfire missile attack on this building.
However, this is a busy street and there's other buildings on the side, and the bottom floors of that building have been completed.
And we know, in fact, that three families were living in the bottom stories of that building.
They line up and get ready to fire their missile, and a pedestrian has been walking in the point of view of the gun camera across the scene.
They do not bother to pause for him, even though there's plenty of ample of opportunity to not fire or to come around again.
They launch a hellfire missile into the building.
The pedestrian is blown to smithereens.
And apparently seven people who were also in that building were also killed.
We sent people to Baghdad and obtained the death certificate of the wife of the owner who was killed that day in the building, and a number of other women were also killed.
Then civilians from the street gather around to look at, to see if there's any survivors, and pick their way through the outskirts of the debris.
And the Apache comes around, and this time the other Apache there's two fires, another missile, a thermobaric missile into the building, and we don't actually see that missile explosion.
However, we hear some talking about it.
And when the Apache comes around again, and we see the building again, there's more smoke and more debris, rescuers who are going to the aid of the wounded or killed in that building.
And the Apache fires in a third fire, and destroys the building.
And that is the end of the tape.
All right, now, I got a lot of questions for you here.
And let's see, I guess we got about First of all, I interviewed a young man named Josh Stieber on the show two days ago, and he was not involved in this particular thing, but he recognized the voices of the guys at the ground control giving the authority to fire as his friends from his same unit there.
And one thing he said, and I want to parse this carefully now, he was not confirming what we all know to be false, I think, so far, that there was a firefight in the immediate area, and reason to believe that these men were part of it.
But what he did say was that there was a team of American soldiers on the ground, involved in a ground mission nearby, and that that Apache was assigned to take out anything that could be a threat near them.
Now, those are pretty loose rules of engagement as they are, but it is taking something into account, perhaps, if that's correct, that is not immediately clear in the video, that there was actual mission to protect soldiers nearby, even if they had not been in a firefight any time recently.
Is that correct?
It's clear on the website, all that context is clear, and there's a number of articles immediately the day after.
There was a, and there's a map that shows precisely where US forces were, there was a Humvee approximately two blocks away from where this took place.
Now, we must remember, this is a suburb of New Baghdad.
This is where people live and go to work, and there may be US forces entering into this suburb, but nonetheless, it is a suburb where people live and work.
Sure.
And yes, as far as we understand, that Apache was called in by, in response to hearing small arms fire somewhere in the vicinity of that suburb, but 28 minutes beforehand.
And as you've said in other interviews that I've seen, there's no indication that that small arms fire had anything to do with these men that we see killed by the Apache in this video.
That's correct.
I wonder if...
And there's no statements made by the pilots to suggest that, or no statements made by the pilots to suggest that the ban of rescuers was previously known to be involved in any sort of insurgent activity.
And even in the military investigation that occurred, which was only just released to the public after our video, which has many errors in it, errors of fact, but it doesn't make the allegation, any specific allegations that these men were known or the rescuing ban was known.
Well, I wonder, since it was two Reuters reporters who were killed in this thing, along with I think 10 other people, has Reuters or anyone else been able to figure out exactly what assignment these reporters were on and who these men were that they were with?
I mean, for all I know, they were part of the Bader Brigade aligned with the government of Iraq at the time.
I'll give you my hypothesis on this.
The Reuters journalists initially that morning were on, according to Reuters, were on a weightlifting assignment.
And although the photographer is a respected war photographer, and he was then diverted to this area to photograph some of the damage that had occurred early that morning.
So the U.S. had been sort of doing a sweep over this broader area beginning at 6 a.m.
So there was a common look in what had happened.
And so that is the context of why they were there.
For the two men who may be armed, we have to be careful because we thought that originally there was three arms, and then we thought that that was clearly wasn't so.
And one of the men in that crowd who does have what appears to be an AK-47 has actually only one arm, so would be unable to fire it.
And at one stage, the weapon seems very sloppy.
So we're just a little bit hesitant on naming anything that we're not absolutely sure of.
But it wasn't unusual, in fact, for people to have arms during that period.
And every household is licensed to have an AK-47 for its own defense, in fact, during that time, and maybe still today.
So you can't just go shooting up a crowd just because one guy or two guys have a weapon.
But when we see them looking at the helicopter, occasionally, two helicopters with no apparent concern, and that makes me suspect that perhaps these armed guys, if indeed they were armed, thought that the US was friendly towards them, was well disposed towards them.
Remember, there are many sectarian militias engaged in guarding their local community from sectarian violence.
And sort of the thing that makes the most sense to their total lack of concern about the circling Apache is that they thought that they were on the side of the US favorite.
All right, now, it's been part of this discussion since this video came out, from those who basically, I guess, could be called apologists for what we see in the video, as well as people who are very much against it, such as the conscientious objector, Josh Steber, that I mentioned before, who agree on the premise that, hey, this is the rules of engagement.
This is how it is.
This is how the war was fought.
Those guys didn't, quote unquote, do anything wrong in that they were in the chain of command and doing what they were told, et cetera.
But I saw Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Schaefer, who's a former intelligence officer on MSNBC, and he's, I guess, an in-house expert analyst for NBC.
And he cited a few ways in which he thought these men were, in fact, violating the rules of engagement in what we see in that video, whether that amounts to court-martialable or prosecutable activity, I guess, is maybe beyond your expertise.
But do you, you know, have something to say one way or the other on that issue?
Well, we released the 2006, 2007, and 2008 rules of engagement and the rules of engagement flowchart, all classified, with the video itself, on the website, Confederal Murders, so that people can look and read precisely what the rules of engagement were before and after, and during, to understand whether these activities seem to be permitted by that.
The people I have spoken to who are more familiar with these rules say that there's a lot of flex in them, that really you can sort of push a truck through them if you want to.
And it's very hard to get a prosecution up, and there has only been 12 in both Iraq and Afghanistan theaters since 2001.
That in itself seems to be a problem.
However, while it's clear that this is another day at the office for these pilots, and many of the actions that they perform are covered by the rules of engagement, there's also some suspicious cases.
For instance, when they fire the Hellfire missile without doing what seems to be any collateral damage assessment beforehand on these pedestrians and the other people walking past.
They also exaggerate the situation for all three events to their commander.
They say to each other in the first attack, we see four people with weapons.
Rather, four times they say he's got a weapon to each other.
They don't say he has an AK-47, but presumably because that's not clear from the images that they're seeing.
Yet when they ask for permission to engage from their commander, they say we have five to six guys with AK-47s.
So they increase the number by one to two from what they actually saw, and they increase the clarity.
Rather than some kind of weapon, they say AK-47s precisely.
And in fact, as you pointed out earlier, Julian, it seems like at the part where the Good Samaritan pulls up in the minivan, they happen to have two children in it, to rescue the one guy that was still alive.
They said they're getting out of the van to rescue survivors, or to pick up survivors and weapons.
That's what they radio back to their commander.
They say that they're picking up weapons.
They are a bit more accurate.
They say possibly collecting the dead and picking up weapons.
And how can you argue possibly?
Although there are no weapons in that immediate area.
Then when they ask again for permission to engage, they say picking up the dead or wounded.
And then they say picking up the dead.
So they do drop the picking up weapons in their report back.
Is that after they get permission to fire on the van or before?
That's before.
Possibly in the first case, but they don't get permission to engage.
And when they report back without the use of the word possibly, they say picking up the dead.
However, in their last request, they do not say picking up a wounded man, which is what they can actually say.
They say picking up the dead.
So a slight distortion there.
And these are small distortions.
They do target a wounded man on the ground in that van attack, and not just being rescued.
I presume that what they're playing into, and they must understand what their commander will agree to and not agree to, but what they're playing into is insurgents getting away.
So even if someone is helping a wounded insurgent get away, therefore we know that our commander will give permission or that insurgent gives permission to kill them all.
That in itself is a bit off, but the actual circumstance was even worse, where this was a wounded man who was actually a Reuters journalist.
No one had arms, and the van was destroyed.
He was dropped on the ground, and then he was also killed with a 30mm cannon fire, even though he was already wounded and he was not in the van.
Alright, now before I let you go here real quick, I'd like to give you an opportunity, if you'd like to, to respond to some of your critics, perhaps specifically about titling the video Collateral Murder, and say, I don't know, highlighting, I'm trying to think of what Colbert said, highlighting the photographers, or this is something I read I think, but not the guy that seems to have an AK, that kind of thing.
I'll respond to two things.
First, a broader issue, what is the accountability framework that is occurring here?
There were clear lies made about what happened to the children, the military said it didn't know, what happened to the journalist, and the circumstances that this was an active firefight, it was not.
First of all, clear lies, concealing the video and the reports from the public until we leaked the video.
This is a very interesting framework.
Does the US military have any accountability?
Should it be accountable for these actions in policy, and should these soldiers be held accountable?
And what is the process by which they're held accountable?
For the specific allegations in relation to the video, we titled this Colateral Murder, a news story has to have a headline, and we did this because of the van incident, that this was clear murder, and if you read the front page of the website, that is the incident that we specifically named.
And it is also arguable that the missile attack on this pedestrian that was walking past was also murder.
Certainly in any regular criminal court of law, I believe at least in minority Australian jurisdictions, that would be a murder.
And we wanted to draw attention to the abuse of the phrase collateral damage, which was used to describe the situation previously.
For what there's been allegations of collective editing, this is simply a lie.
We released at the same time both versions of the video, the 38-minute version and one that was cut for time, an 18-minute version.
Even in the 18-minute version, we were very careful to do as little editing as possible.
In fact, the first 11 minutes is one uninterrupted continuous take, and that first 11 minutes covers all the violence and context of the first two events, the attack on the crowd and the van.
Totally unedited, 11-minute take.
The cut isn't until the aftermath, when the soldiers and the Humvees come?
Yeah, that's right.
And there's a lot of dead time between when the soldiers and the Humvees come.
There's nothing going on.
There's just a few removals of this dead time period to when the soldiers actually arrived, and that's it.
And one flashback to look more closely at the van to show that there were two children sitting in the front seat.
In the short version, you don't include, you don't skip ahead to the attack down the street later on.
You have to watch the full version to see that, so it seems like if you're biased, maybe it's in favor of the soldiers there.
That's right.
I mean, we don't have this missile attack in the short version, which we didn't have to do with some logistical reasons.
We're sending people to Baghdad to try and get more information about that event.
One of the most serious offenses, this missile attack is not even in the short version.
We don't have a bias like this, but the perceived bias should be that we deliberately did not include a significant death in the short version.
As for any statement about how we didn't point out that some of these people may have been armed, that is not true.
We say in the text introduction, there appears to be some people in that crowd who are armed, but nonetheless the behavior of everyone was relaxed.
The reason that we didn't draw arrows and circles on the two individuals who may have been armed is that you can see for yourself, and the gun side is pointed towards them at the moment that the pilot makes this comment, but also we're not 100% sure that those were armed.
They do appear to be armed, however we're not 100% sure, whereas for the cameraman, we are 100% sure.
Well it's still amazing to me that in a society which as you pointed out before is armed to the teeth, they have their own second amendment there, everybody has an AK-47, it's amazing that somebody having a rifle on the street means he's fair game, I didn't even realize that.
Well not only that he's fair game, but anyone who just happens to be standing around on that street is also fair game, just because one guy has a rifle.
It's amazing.
That's what Stieber said.
That is terrible.
Stieber said this is what occupation looks like, this is how it was every day over there.
Yeah, I think he said that 9 out of 10 incidents have ended in something like this.
Amazing.
And of course if you're a family living in that area, and we interviewed some of the victims, the children, and you can see their scars and we released their hospital reports as well.
If you were in Baghdad in 2007 during the sectarian violence and of course the external military issues and political issues, you would not be doing right by your family if you didn't have a gun.
And I think it might have been John who said that most families he visited, I can't remember if it was him or someone else, that most families, actually it was an American journalist who was there the day after, that most families he visited in Baghdad did in fact have an AK-47 in their household.
You needed this for the protection of your family and it's perfectly normal to have.
Alright, now I know you've got to go, I just want to end here by complimenting your entire effort at WikiLeaks and on behalf of everybody at AntiWar.com.
In fact, it's so important in an era when the media will not do their job and when we have the National Security Agency unbridled total information awareness about all of us that we have little brother like you keeping track of them and giving the only good kind of tattletale in the world, a government employee ratting on his boss, an opportunity to do so and get their information out to the public in ways that don't endanger themselves and so forth.
And so, round of applause, thank you very much and thank you very much for your time on the show today.
You're welcome.
Alright everybody, that is Julian Assange, he is co-founder and the public face of WikiLeaks.org.
