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There is a great deal of important information here so I'm sending it off as is.
John Pilger and Jeremy Scahill are very admirable journalists and Assange is rising in everyone's opinion, except for those who don't deserve to have one (and, contrary to the cliche, there are many such).
Next will be a great coverage of another prisoner in a far different setting.
Denial in London; Still No Charges Filed in Sweden
Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...
AMY GOODMAN: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still in jail in London. On Tuesday, a British court granted Assange bail but then forced him to remain in prison after Swedish authorities decided to challenge the decision. Assange has been detained since last week, when he was arrested in London on an international warrant to face sex crimes allegations in Sweden. His arrest came amidst an international uproar over WikiLeaks’ most recent publication of a massive trove of secret U.S. diplomatic cables.
In a dramatic day in court Tuesday, Assange’s supporters broke out in cheers when the London judge granted Assange bail. But when the counsel for the prosecution indicated it would appeal, the judge told Assange he would remain in jail until a hearing at a higher court within 48 hours. If he wins that appeal, Assange will still have to raise 200,000 pounds sterling—more than $300,000—in bail money. He would also be subject to a curfew, be forced to wear an electronic tag, and report to a nearby police station every evening until his next court appearance on January 11th.
Before Tuesday’s hearing, Assange remained defiant, telling his mother, Christine, from his cell he was committed to publishing more secret U.S. cables. In a written statement of his comments supplied to Australia’s Network Seven by his mother, Assange said, quote, "My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have expressed. This circumstance shall not shake them."
Several of Julian Assange’s high-profile supporters have been attending the court proceedings in London and have offered to contribute funds for his bail. They include political commentator and writer Tariq Ali, campaigner Bianca Jagger, filmmaker Ken Loach and veteran Australian journalist John Pilger, who is joining us now from London. John Pilger is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker who has written close to a dozen books and made over 50 documentaries. His latest film premiered last night on television and in theaters throughout Britain. It’s called The War You [Don’t] See and includes interviews with Julian Assange.
John Pilger, we welcome you to Democracy Now!, as well as Julian Assange’s attorney, Mark Stephens. John, why don’t you start off by telling us what the scene—
MARK STEPHENS: Hi, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN:—was like outside the courtroom and the significance of what is happening right now.
JOHN PILGER: Well, the scene outside the courtroom represented how people feel about this. People are overwhelmingly angry and overwhelmingly supportive of Julian Assange and of WikiLeaks. They have no difficulty seeing the injustice, the injustice that has been perpetrated in this rather absurd case in Sweden, but also the importance of Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization in allowing us to get a glimpse of how the world is really run, how and why politicians lie to us. I think it’s—in all my career as a journalist, I’ve never known anything like it. I think we’re seeing a great awakening, and WikiLeaks has been the catalyst for that. And that was very much demonstrated outside the court yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Stephens, maybe for people around the world who are watching and listening to this right now, you can explain what exactly happened in the courtroom, the fact that Julian Assange has been held for more than a week in prison and has not been charged with a crime. Explain how we have come to this point.
MARK STEPHENS: Well, it’s a slightly bizarre situation. He’s wanted for questioning in Sweden. He’s already had one interview with the Swedish prosecutor. He’s wanted for another interview. The Swedish prosecutor has refused to tell him what she wants to interview him about or to give him the nature of the allegations. So, really, what we’re talking about now is an extradition warrant, which they’ve now issued. And so, the question on the extradition warrant is, should he serve his time in prison while the decision about extradition is being made, or should—as the Swedes would have it, should he be sitting in jail, Scrooge-like, over Christmas? Now, the problem we’ve got is that the Swedes seem dead set to try and keep him in jail.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Interpol red—what red flag is, what exactly the Swedes are saying he has done and they want him for, and what it means for him to be extradited to Sweden, if that’s what’s going to happen.
MARK STEPHENS: OK. An Interpol red notice is a notice sent out, usually secretly, but very bizarrely in this case it’s been made public, which allows the authorities of each state to notify Sweden every time he crosses a port or enters or leaves a country. The matter that he’s wanted for is a sexual misdemeanor, a series of offenses in Sweden. He isn’t charged with that. And the Swedish lawyers tell me that even if he were convicted, he wouldn’t go to jail. So we’re in this rather bonkers position where the Swedish lawyers tell us he wouldn’t go to jail, yet on an extradition warrant, he’s being held in custody. And as you said at the top, Amy, they are some onerous conditions. He’s effectively under house arrest—or, as we said in court yesterday, mansion arrest—because he will be put up in a 600-acre estate, a 10-bedroom mansion near London.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what is happening, that you understand is happening, here in the United States in Virginia? So he is being wanted for questioning about sex crimes in Sweden, but then the United States, the Attorney General Eric Holder, has said something else.
MARK STEPHENS: Excuse me, yes. A bit of a cough.
The position is that—the word swirling around the elites in Stockholm is that the Americans are effectively using this as a holding charge. A holding charge, as you’ll know, is a charge that people have no intention of prosecuting, because it’s meritless, or that it’s such a minor offense that actually the big sucker punch is coming, and we haven’t yet seen that. And the word in Stockholm is that there is a secret grand jury empaneled in Alexandria just near the Pentagon and that they are considering how they might get Julian Assange on criminal charges in the United States. Now, the United States authorities have flatly denied that. Now, if that’s true, then it would be difficult to see how he could be extradited. And, of course, as a lawyer, I can’t see that he’s committed any offense. And indeed a congressional report that came out on the 6th of December said very much the same thing. But I’m sure you’ll appreciate, as will viewers, that he has made some big and powerful enemies.
AMY GOODMAN: A friend of Julian Assange has told Sky News he believes that if he is extradited to Sweden, that he could be sent to the United States. Why would it be easier for him to be sent to the United States from Sweden than from Britain, Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: That’s a very good question, Amy. And the answer really is that we do have extradition arrangements between the U.K. and the U.S., but the British judges have a long history of looking at them pretty carefully. You’ll be familiar with the case of Gary McKinnon, the young child that hacked into the Pentagon computers, comprehensively embarrassed them, and he’s wanted on an extradition warrant to the United States. That’s been being fought for about three or four years now. And so, the possibility is that the British courts would look at this and scrutinize it in a thorough and independent way. That’s what British judges are; they’re not politically influenced. Whereas I think that it’s felt that the Swedes have perhaps a little more of a soft touch and perhaps, more fairly, are less experienced, the judiciary in Sweden, in dealing with these extradition warrants, and perhaps would—it would go more on the nod from Sweden.
AMY GOODMAN: How much money exactly does Julian Assange have to raise for bail?
MARK STEPHENS: He’s got to raise 200,000 pounds in cash. That’s about $300,000. And, of course, the problem with that is that we finished court after banking hours closed yesterday, so—and getting that kind of money out of a bank, you’ll realize that most banks don’t carry that kind of money. It’s very modest amounts that they carry these days, because we spend most of our money electronically. And, of course, he’s being electronically hobbled by Visa and MasterCard, who have stopped the accounts being—paying money to WikiLeaks. And so, actually gathering that money has meant that he’s had to call on—and we’ve had, on his behalf—to call upon the very generous friends that he has, very high-profile individuals. But even they can’t make money move after banking hours. And, of course, that’s why he was sent back to Wandsworth Prison, the very prison that indeed Oscar Wilde, the Anglo-Irish writer, was held in when he was up for crimes of a very different nature.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s been held in solitary in prison, Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: Yes, very unusually. Men who are accused of rape are usually released on bail, and they are given bail on condition they don’t contact the alleged victim. So, to find someone in prison is unusual enough. To find conditions as sort of onerous as these put on your bail is incredibly unusual. And to then find that you’re put in prison is even more unusual still. Yet further in the unusual stakes is the fact the he’s on a 23-and-a-half-hour lockdown, although he’s a model prisoner, deprived of access to television, to current affairs information, news, newspapers, magazines and such like. So, he really is on almost a punishment regime.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting. There’s a letter from Women Against Rape, a British organization, in The Guardian newspaper in London. It’s written by Katrin Axelsson in support of Julian Assange. And it says, "Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. [...] Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst." This is a feminist organization in London. Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: I think that most of us are extremely troubled about this. And I think the reason that we’re troubled is that false allegations of sex crimes are incredibly rare. When they come along, they stink. This one utterly reeks. And, of course, the problem for that, more widely, is that it discourages genuine complaints about rape and sexual misbehaviors. And, of course, it demeans the complaints that are made by women who have genuinely been abused. And so, any of those kind of false allegations really do devalue this. And I’m not surprised that people like Naomi Wolf and—in the Huffington Post and also that letter in The Guardian are really concerned about this, because it is an unusual zeal, as she says. I would say it’s a vindictive campaign, and one has to understand why that vindictive campaign is going on.
AMY GOODMAN: What did the Swedish authorities ask him about in the first questioning of him? And how is it that he hasn’t been released on bail?
MARK STEPHENS: Well, he was granted bail yesterday by the judge, albeit on conditions, and we’re now waiting for the further appeal. The Swedes really clearly didn’t want to abide by the umpire’s decision. And, of course, we’re having every time to have people who have been incredibly generous with their time, people like John Pilger who have come along, other high-profile figures like Bianca Jagger and Jemima Khan, film director Ken Loach, Hanif Kureishi, the author. All sorts of people have come forward, stepped forward. Some of these people don’t even know him and have said, "I believe that there is something really wrong here." And they’ve come to right an injustice. They see an injustice taking place before their eyes, and they are stepping up to the plate to do something about it. And I have to say, I am in awe of those people who have behaved so honorably and so decently.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Mark Stephens, for being with us, attorney for Julian Assange. John Pilger, I’d like to ask you to stay with us. We’re going to play a clip from the film that premiered last night throughout Britain called The War You Don’t See, which has a section on Julian Assange, a man you have come to know, who you call a friend.
In a dramatic day in court Tuesday, Assange’s supporters broke out in cheers when the London judge granted Assange bail. But when the counsel for the prosecution indicated it would appeal, the judge told Assange he would remain in jail until a hearing at a higher court within 48 hours. If he wins that appeal, Assange will still have to raise 200,000 pounds sterling—more than $300,000—in bail money. He would also be subject to a curfew, be forced to wear an electronic tag, and report to a nearby police station every evening until his next court appearance on January 11th.
Before Tuesday’s hearing, Assange remained defiant, telling his mother, Christine, from his cell he was committed to publishing more secret U.S. cables. In a written statement of his comments supplied to Australia’s Network Seven by his mother, Assange said, quote, "My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have expressed. This circumstance shall not shake them."
Several of Julian Assange’s high-profile supporters have been attending the court proceedings in London and have offered to contribute funds for his bail. They include political commentator and writer Tariq Ali, campaigner Bianca Jagger, filmmaker Ken Loach and veteran Australian journalist John Pilger, who is joining us now from London. John Pilger is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker who has written close to a dozen books and made over 50 documentaries. His latest film premiered last night on television and in theaters throughout Britain. It’s called The War You [Don’t] See and includes interviews with Julian Assange.
John Pilger, we welcome you to Democracy Now!, as well as Julian Assange’s attorney, Mark Stephens. John, why don’t you start off by telling us what the scene—
MARK STEPHENS: Hi, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN:—was like outside the courtroom and the significance of what is happening right now.
JOHN PILGER: Well, the scene outside the courtroom represented how people feel about this. People are overwhelmingly angry and overwhelmingly supportive of Julian Assange and of WikiLeaks. They have no difficulty seeing the injustice, the injustice that has been perpetrated in this rather absurd case in Sweden, but also the importance of Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization in allowing us to get a glimpse of how the world is really run, how and why politicians lie to us. I think it’s—in all my career as a journalist, I’ve never known anything like it. I think we’re seeing a great awakening, and WikiLeaks has been the catalyst for that. And that was very much demonstrated outside the court yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Stephens, maybe for people around the world who are watching and listening to this right now, you can explain what exactly happened in the courtroom, the fact that Julian Assange has been held for more than a week in prison and has not been charged with a crime. Explain how we have come to this point.
MARK STEPHENS: Well, it’s a slightly bizarre situation. He’s wanted for questioning in Sweden. He’s already had one interview with the Swedish prosecutor. He’s wanted for another interview. The Swedish prosecutor has refused to tell him what she wants to interview him about or to give him the nature of the allegations. So, really, what we’re talking about now is an extradition warrant, which they’ve now issued. And so, the question on the extradition warrant is, should he serve his time in prison while the decision about extradition is being made, or should—as the Swedes would have it, should he be sitting in jail, Scrooge-like, over Christmas? Now, the problem we’ve got is that the Swedes seem dead set to try and keep him in jail.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Interpol red—what red flag is, what exactly the Swedes are saying he has done and they want him for, and what it means for him to be extradited to Sweden, if that’s what’s going to happen.
MARK STEPHENS: OK. An Interpol red notice is a notice sent out, usually secretly, but very bizarrely in this case it’s been made public, which allows the authorities of each state to notify Sweden every time he crosses a port or enters or leaves a country. The matter that he’s wanted for is a sexual misdemeanor, a series of offenses in Sweden. He isn’t charged with that. And the Swedish lawyers tell me that even if he were convicted, he wouldn’t go to jail. So we’re in this rather bonkers position where the Swedish lawyers tell us he wouldn’t go to jail, yet on an extradition warrant, he’s being held in custody. And as you said at the top, Amy, they are some onerous conditions. He’s effectively under house arrest—or, as we said in court yesterday, mansion arrest—because he will be put up in a 600-acre estate, a 10-bedroom mansion near London.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what is happening, that you understand is happening, here in the United States in Virginia? So he is being wanted for questioning about sex crimes in Sweden, but then the United States, the Attorney General Eric Holder, has said something else.
MARK STEPHENS: Excuse me, yes. A bit of a cough.
The position is that—the word swirling around the elites in Stockholm is that the Americans are effectively using this as a holding charge. A holding charge, as you’ll know, is a charge that people have no intention of prosecuting, because it’s meritless, or that it’s such a minor offense that actually the big sucker punch is coming, and we haven’t yet seen that. And the word in Stockholm is that there is a secret grand jury empaneled in Alexandria just near the Pentagon and that they are considering how they might get Julian Assange on criminal charges in the United States. Now, the United States authorities have flatly denied that. Now, if that’s true, then it would be difficult to see how he could be extradited. And, of course, as a lawyer, I can’t see that he’s committed any offense. And indeed a congressional report that came out on the 6th of December said very much the same thing. But I’m sure you’ll appreciate, as will viewers, that he has made some big and powerful enemies.
AMY GOODMAN: A friend of Julian Assange has told Sky News he believes that if he is extradited to Sweden, that he could be sent to the United States. Why would it be easier for him to be sent to the United States from Sweden than from Britain, Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: That’s a very good question, Amy. And the answer really is that we do have extradition arrangements between the U.K. and the U.S., but the British judges have a long history of looking at them pretty carefully. You’ll be familiar with the case of Gary McKinnon, the young child that hacked into the Pentagon computers, comprehensively embarrassed them, and he’s wanted on an extradition warrant to the United States. That’s been being fought for about three or four years now. And so, the possibility is that the British courts would look at this and scrutinize it in a thorough and independent way. That’s what British judges are; they’re not politically influenced. Whereas I think that it’s felt that the Swedes have perhaps a little more of a soft touch and perhaps, more fairly, are less experienced, the judiciary in Sweden, in dealing with these extradition warrants, and perhaps would—it would go more on the nod from Sweden.
AMY GOODMAN: How much money exactly does Julian Assange have to raise for bail?
MARK STEPHENS: He’s got to raise 200,000 pounds in cash. That’s about $300,000. And, of course, the problem with that is that we finished court after banking hours closed yesterday, so—and getting that kind of money out of a bank, you’ll realize that most banks don’t carry that kind of money. It’s very modest amounts that they carry these days, because we spend most of our money electronically. And, of course, he’s being electronically hobbled by Visa and MasterCard, who have stopped the accounts being—paying money to WikiLeaks. And so, actually gathering that money has meant that he’s had to call on—and we’ve had, on his behalf—to call upon the very generous friends that he has, very high-profile individuals. But even they can’t make money move after banking hours. And, of course, that’s why he was sent back to Wandsworth Prison, the very prison that indeed Oscar Wilde, the Anglo-Irish writer, was held in when he was up for crimes of a very different nature.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s been held in solitary in prison, Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: Yes, very unusually. Men who are accused of rape are usually released on bail, and they are given bail on condition they don’t contact the alleged victim. So, to find someone in prison is unusual enough. To find conditions as sort of onerous as these put on your bail is incredibly unusual. And to then find that you’re put in prison is even more unusual still. Yet further in the unusual stakes is the fact the he’s on a 23-and-a-half-hour lockdown, although he’s a model prisoner, deprived of access to television, to current affairs information, news, newspapers, magazines and such like. So, he really is on almost a punishment regime.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting. There’s a letter from Women Against Rape, a British organization, in The Guardian newspaper in London. It’s written by Katrin Axelsson in support of Julian Assange. And it says, "Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. [...] Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst." This is a feminist organization in London. Mark Stephens?
MARK STEPHENS: I think that most of us are extremely troubled about this. And I think the reason that we’re troubled is that false allegations of sex crimes are incredibly rare. When they come along, they stink. This one utterly reeks. And, of course, the problem for that, more widely, is that it discourages genuine complaints about rape and sexual misbehaviors. And, of course, it demeans the complaints that are made by women who have genuinely been abused. And so, any of those kind of false allegations really do devalue this. And I’m not surprised that people like Naomi Wolf and—in the Huffington Post and also that letter in The Guardian are really concerned about this, because it is an unusual zeal, as she says. I would say it’s a vindictive campaign, and one has to understand why that vindictive campaign is going on.
AMY GOODMAN: What did the Swedish authorities ask him about in the first questioning of him? And how is it that he hasn’t been released on bail?
MARK STEPHENS: Well, he was granted bail yesterday by the judge, albeit on conditions, and we’re now waiting for the further appeal. The Swedes really clearly didn’t want to abide by the umpire’s decision. And, of course, we’re having every time to have people who have been incredibly generous with their time, people like John Pilger who have come along, other high-profile figures like Bianca Jagger and Jemima Khan, film director Ken Loach, Hanif Kureishi, the author. All sorts of people have come forward, stepped forward. Some of these people don’t even know him and have said, "I believe that there is something really wrong here." And they’ve come to right an injustice. They see an injustice taking place before their eyes, and they are stepping up to the plate to do something about it. And I have to say, I am in awe of those people who have behaved so honorably and so decently.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you, Mark Stephens, for being with us, attorney for Julian Assange. John Pilger, I’d like to ask you to stay with us. We’re going to play a clip from the film that premiered last night throughout Britain called The War You Don’t See, which has a section on Julian Assange, a man you have come to know, who you call a friend.
democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
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Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...
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AMY GOODMAN: We’re continuing with John Pilger, the famed Australian filmmaker who has lived in Britain for decades. John, your film, The War You Don’t See, premiered last night on ITV in Britain and in theaters throughout Britain. The film features your interview with Julian Assange. This is an excerpt.
JOHN PILGER: Well, what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is doing is what journalists should have been doing. I mean, I think you mention the reaction to him. Some of the hostility, especially in the United States, from some of those very highly paid journalists at the top has been quite instructive, because I think that they are shamed by WikiLeaks. They are shamed by the founder of WikiLeaks, who is prepared to say that the public has a right to know the secrets of governments that impinge on our democratic rights. WikiLeaks is doing something very Jeffersonian. It was Jefferson who said that information is the currency of democracy. And here you have a lot of these famous journalists in America are rather looking down their noses, at best, and saying some quite defamatory things about Assange and WikiLeaks, when in fact they should have been exploiting their First Amendment privilege and letting people know just how government has lied to us, lied to us in the run-up to the Iraq war and lied to us in so many other circumstances. And I think that’s really been the value of all this. People have been given a glimpse of how big power operates. And they’re—it’s coming from a facilitator, it’s coming from these very brave whistleblowers. And in my film, Julian Assange goes out of his way to celebrate the people within the system who he describes as the equivalent of conscientious objectors during the First World War, these extraordinarily courageous people who were prepared to speak out against that slaughter. All the Bradley Mannings and others are absolutely heroic figures. There’s no question about that.
In my film, I also went to Washington, and I interviewed the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Bryan Whitman, the man who’s been in charge of media operations, as they call it, through a number of administrations. And I asked him to give a guarantee that Julian Assange would not be hunted down, as the media was describing it. And he said he wasn’t in a position to give that guarantee. So, I think we’re in a situation here, Amy, where people have to speak out. This is a very fundamental issue, and the people we need to speak out most of all are those with the privilege of the media, with the privilege of journalism, because this is about free information. This is about letting us know truths that we have to know about if we are to live in any form of democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: The nationwide warning that has gone out has been remarkable, John. Democracy Now! obtained the text of a memo that was sent to employees at USAID, thousands of employees, about reading the recently leaked WikiLeaks documents. The memo reads in part, quote, "Any classified information that may have been unlawfully disclosed and released on the Wikileaks web site was not 'declassified' by an appropriate authority and therefore requires continued classification and protection as such from government personnel... Accessing the Wikileaks web site from any computer may be viewed as a violation of the SF-312 agreement... Any discussions concerning the legitimacy of any documents or whether or not they are classified must be conducted within controlled access areas (overseas) or within restricted areas (USAID/Washington)... The documents should not be viewed, downloaded, or stored on your USAID unclassified network computer or home computer; they should not be printed or retransmitted in any fashion."
It’s gone out to agencies all over the government. State Department employees have been warned, again, not only on their computers where they’re blocked at work, but at home. People who have written cables are not allowed to put in their names to see if those cables come up. Graduate schools, like SIPA at Columbia University, an email was sent out from the administration saying the State Department had contacted them and that if they care about their futures in government, they should not post anything to Facebook or talk about these documents.
And then you have Allen West, one of the new Republican Congress members-elect, who called for targeted news outlets that publish the cables. In a radio interview, Congressmember West—well, Congressmember-elect West, called for censoring any news outlets that run stories based on the cables’ release. This is what he said.
JOHN PILGER: Look, Amy, I thought you were reading out there several passages from 1984. I don’t think Orwell could have put it even better than that. Surely, we mustn’t think these things. I’m thinking it at the moment. So if I was over there, I must be guilty of something, and therefore I should be illegally taken out.
Look, there’s always been—as you know better than I, there’s always been a tension among the elites in the United States between those who pay some sort of homage, lip service, to all those Georgian gentleman who passed down those tablets of good intentions all that long time ago and a bunch of lunatics. But they’re powerful lunatics. They’re—perhaps "lunatics" is not quite right. They’re simply totalitarian people. And up they come in anything like this. I see—I read this morning that the U.S. Air Force has banned anybody connecting with it from reading The Guardian. So, everyone is banned from doing things and banned from thinking and so on.
They won’t get away with it. That’s the good news. They are hyperventilating, and they’re hysterical, and so be it, but they won’t get away with it. There are now two genuine powers in the world. We know about U.S. power. But that great sleeper, world public opinion, world decency, if you like, if I’m not being too romantic about it, is waking up. And the scenes outside the court yesterday went well beyond, I think, just the WikiLeaks issue. It is something else. WikiLeaks has triggered something. And I don’t think it will be the proverbial genie being stuffed back in the bottle, either. So, you know, world opinion is—when it stirs, when it moves, when it starts to come together collectively to do things that are important to us all, it’s a very formidable opponent to those totalitarian people who you’ve just quoted. So I’m rather more optimistic.
The immediate thing is to free Julian Assange. And I’m hoping that will happen tomorrow at the High Court. I should just add, you know, Mark Stephens was very eloquently describing the case. But, you know, the absurdity of this case is that a senior prosecutor in Sweden threw this thing out. And I’ve seen her papers. And she was left—she leaves us in no doubt there was absolutely no evidence to support any of these misdemeanors or crimes, or whatever they’re meant to be, at all. It was only the intervention of this right-wing politician in Sweden that reactivated this whole charade. So, in a way, it is perhaps symbolic of the kind of charades, rather lethal charades, that we’ve seen on a much wider scale in relation to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and other issues that have involved the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world. So, what we’re seeing is a rebellion. Where it will go, I’m not quite sure. But it’s certainly started, I can tell you.
AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, I’d like to ask you to stay with us as we talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we talk about the power of the U.S. government. This week we reported on the sudden death of Richard Holbrooke, who has played such a key role through four Democratic administrations, from Vietnam to Yugoslavia, from Timor to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. And we’d like to talk about his legacy and about U.S. foreign policy. You have done a number of documentaries related to the areas where he worked, and we’re also going to be joined by Jeremy Scahill.
I also want to say, when you talk about a wave of reaction against what has happened to Julian Assange, I mentioned Columbia’s graduate school called SIPA that warned students not to post things to Facebook or deal with these issues raised by WikiLeaks, but there has been a reversal. Clearly, the administration at Columbia has been seriously embarrassed, and the dean there has now issued a new statement saying that he encourages the discussion of issues, wherever those issues may take one. John Pilger, stay with us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
JOHN PILGER: In the information that you have revealed on WikiLeaks about these so-called endless wars, what has come out of them?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Looking at the enormous quantity and diversity of these military or intelligence apparatus insider documents, what I see is a vast, sprawling estate, what we would traditionally call the military-intelligence complex or military-industrial complex, and that this sprawling industrial estate is growing, becoming more and more secretive, becoming more and more uncontrolled. This is not a sophisticated conspiracy controlled at the top. This is a vast movement of self-interest by thousands and thousands of players, all working together and against each other.AMY GOODMAN: That is an excerpt of the new film that premiered last night in Britain, The War You Don’t See. John Pilger, you know Julian Assange. Talk more about what he’s saying and about the media’s coverage of what WikiLeaks has done, from the release of the Iraq war logs to those in Afghanistan to now this largest trove of U.S. diplomatic cables ever released in history, John.
JOHN PILGER: Well, what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is doing is what journalists should have been doing. I mean, I think you mention the reaction to him. Some of the hostility, especially in the United States, from some of those very highly paid journalists at the top has been quite instructive, because I think that they are shamed by WikiLeaks. They are shamed by the founder of WikiLeaks, who is prepared to say that the public has a right to know the secrets of governments that impinge on our democratic rights. WikiLeaks is doing something very Jeffersonian. It was Jefferson who said that information is the currency of democracy. And here you have a lot of these famous journalists in America are rather looking down their noses, at best, and saying some quite defamatory things about Assange and WikiLeaks, when in fact they should have been exploiting their First Amendment privilege and letting people know just how government has lied to us, lied to us in the run-up to the Iraq war and lied to us in so many other circumstances. And I think that’s really been the value of all this. People have been given a glimpse of how big power operates. And they’re—it’s coming from a facilitator, it’s coming from these very brave whistleblowers. And in my film, Julian Assange goes out of his way to celebrate the people within the system who he describes as the equivalent of conscientious objectors during the First World War, these extraordinarily courageous people who were prepared to speak out against that slaughter. All the Bradley Mannings and others are absolutely heroic figures. There’s no question about that.
In my film, I also went to Washington, and I interviewed the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Bryan Whitman, the man who’s been in charge of media operations, as they call it, through a number of administrations. And I asked him to give a guarantee that Julian Assange would not be hunted down, as the media was describing it. And he said he wasn’t in a position to give that guarantee. So, I think we’re in a situation here, Amy, where people have to speak out. This is a very fundamental issue, and the people we need to speak out most of all are those with the privilege of the media, with the privilege of journalism, because this is about free information. This is about letting us know truths that we have to know about if we are to live in any form of democracy.
AMY GOODMAN: The nationwide warning that has gone out has been remarkable, John. Democracy Now! obtained the text of a memo that was sent to employees at USAID, thousands of employees, about reading the recently leaked WikiLeaks documents. The memo reads in part, quote, "Any classified information that may have been unlawfully disclosed and released on the Wikileaks web site was not 'declassified' by an appropriate authority and therefore requires continued classification and protection as such from government personnel... Accessing the Wikileaks web site from any computer may be viewed as a violation of the SF-312 agreement... Any discussions concerning the legitimacy of any documents or whether or not they are classified must be conducted within controlled access areas (overseas) or within restricted areas (USAID/Washington)... The documents should not be viewed, downloaded, or stored on your USAID unclassified network computer or home computer; they should not be printed or retransmitted in any fashion."
It’s gone out to agencies all over the government. State Department employees have been warned, again, not only on their computers where they’re blocked at work, but at home. People who have written cables are not allowed to put in their names to see if those cables come up. Graduate schools, like SIPA at Columbia University, an email was sent out from the administration saying the State Department had contacted them and that if they care about their futures in government, they should not post anything to Facebook or talk about these documents.
And then you have Allen West, one of the new Republican Congress members-elect, who called for targeted news outlets that publish the cables. In a radio interview, Congressmember West—well, Congressmember-elect West, called for censoring any news outlets that run stories based on the cables’ release. This is what he said.
ALLEN WEST: Here is an individual that is not an American citizen, first and foremost, for whatever reason, you know, gotten his hands on classified American material and has put it out there in the public domain. And I think that we also should be censoring the American news agencies which enabled him to be able to do this and then also supported him and applauded him for the efforts. So, that’s kind of aiding and abetting of a serious crime.AMY GOODMAN: And speaking of crimes, another Congress member, longtime Congressmember Peter King from here in New York, has called for the classifying of WikiLeaks as a foreign terrorist organization. I did my column this week talking about "'Assangination': From Character Assassination to the Real Thing" and the calls of Democratic consultants like Bob Beckel on Fox Business News for Julian Assange to be killed. He said he doesn’t agree with the death penalty, so he should be "illegally" killed, maybe taken out by U.S. special forces. John Pilger?
JOHN PILGER: Look, Amy, I thought you were reading out there several passages from 1984. I don’t think Orwell could have put it even better than that. Surely, we mustn’t think these things. I’m thinking it at the moment. So if I was over there, I must be guilty of something, and therefore I should be illegally taken out.
Look, there’s always been—as you know better than I, there’s always been a tension among the elites in the United States between those who pay some sort of homage, lip service, to all those Georgian gentleman who passed down those tablets of good intentions all that long time ago and a bunch of lunatics. But they’re powerful lunatics. They’re—perhaps "lunatics" is not quite right. They’re simply totalitarian people. And up they come in anything like this. I see—I read this morning that the U.S. Air Force has banned anybody connecting with it from reading The Guardian. So, everyone is banned from doing things and banned from thinking and so on.
They won’t get away with it. That’s the good news. They are hyperventilating, and they’re hysterical, and so be it, but they won’t get away with it. There are now two genuine powers in the world. We know about U.S. power. But that great sleeper, world public opinion, world decency, if you like, if I’m not being too romantic about it, is waking up. And the scenes outside the court yesterday went well beyond, I think, just the WikiLeaks issue. It is something else. WikiLeaks has triggered something. And I don’t think it will be the proverbial genie being stuffed back in the bottle, either. So, you know, world opinion is—when it stirs, when it moves, when it starts to come together collectively to do things that are important to us all, it’s a very formidable opponent to those totalitarian people who you’ve just quoted. So I’m rather more optimistic.
The immediate thing is to free Julian Assange. And I’m hoping that will happen tomorrow at the High Court. I should just add, you know, Mark Stephens was very eloquently describing the case. But, you know, the absurdity of this case is that a senior prosecutor in Sweden threw this thing out. And I’ve seen her papers. And she was left—she leaves us in no doubt there was absolutely no evidence to support any of these misdemeanors or crimes, or whatever they’re meant to be, at all. It was only the intervention of this right-wing politician in Sweden that reactivated this whole charade. So, in a way, it is perhaps symbolic of the kind of charades, rather lethal charades, that we’ve seen on a much wider scale in relation to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and other issues that have involved the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world. So, what we’re seeing is a rebellion. Where it will go, I’m not quite sure. But it’s certainly started, I can tell you.
AMY GOODMAN: John Pilger, I’d like to ask you to stay with us as we talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we talk about the power of the U.S. government. This week we reported on the sudden death of Richard Holbrooke, who has played such a key role through four Democratic administrations, from Vietnam to Yugoslavia, from Timor to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. And we’d like to talk about his legacy and about U.S. foreign policy. You have done a number of documentaries related to the areas where he worked, and we’re also going to be joined by Jeremy Scahill.
I also want to say, when you talk about a wave of reaction against what has happened to Julian Assange, I mentioned Columbia’s graduate school called SIPA that warned students not to post things to Facebook or deal with these issues raised by WikiLeaks, but there has been a reversal. Clearly, the administration at Columbia has been seriously embarrassed, and the dean there has now issued a new statement saying that he encourages the discussion of issues, wherever those issues may take one. John Pilger, stay with us. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn to the life of the veteran U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who died Monday night at the age of 69 after suffering from a torn aorta. At the time of his death, Holbrooke was serving as President Obama’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He had served under every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy.
He recently described the war in Afghanistan as one of the hardest diplomatic assignments he has faced.
Jeremy, as we’re coming out of this clip of Richard Holbrooke supporting the Bush administration’s war on Iraq.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, first of all, I mean, Richard Holbrooke, probably more than any U.S. diplomat since Henry Kissinger—and he cut his teeth, of course, during the Vietnam War working under Henry Kissinger—Richard Holbrooke has represented the utter militarization of what is called U.S. diplomacy. He was also at the center of the nexus of U.S. militarists, of aggressive, hawkish, quote-unquote, "diplomats," and the elite, white-shoe media culture. And that’s why you see people like Joe Klein and others falling over themselves to engage in revisionist history about Richard Holbrooke. They only tell one part of the story. And often, in the case of Iraq or Yugoslavia, they’re telling a very one-sided version of history that makes Richard Holbrooke look like something that he wasn’t, and that was a peacemaker. He was a war maker and was someone who extended the tentacles of U.S. foreign policy.
Under the Clinton administration, Holbrooke was sort of the hammer when it came to diplomacy, as he’s been, in a way, under President Obama, though we’ll get to that later with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Let’s remember, when we’re talking about Iraq, Richard Holbrooke wasn’t just speaking as some pundit when he was supporting the Bush administration’s lie-laden case for war in Iraq. He also promoted the idea that Saddam posed a threat with weapons of mass destruction, Richard Holbrooke. But during the Clinton administration, there were the most ruthless economic sanctions in history imposed by the Democrats on the government—or rather, the people—of Iraq, that just targeted the civilian population, denied food and medicine, turned the hospitals of Iraq—and John Pilger knows about this better than anyone, because he did the definitive film on it—turned the hospitals of Iraq into death rows for infants. So, you know, Richard Holbrooke was part of an administration that also bombed Baghdad on multiple occasions in the north and the south of the country, as well, under the guise of the no-fly zones.
AMY GOODMAN: This was during Clinton’s years.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And this was during the Clinton administration. So then, when you fast-forward to the Bush fraudulent case for war, having someone like Richard Holbrooke support it is the embodiment of the continuity of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq. Clinton started the war on Iraq in full after George H.W. Bush invaded and attacked Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and it’s been consistent U.S. policy. And Richard Holbrooke has been a staple of that policy—was a staple of that policy.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back in time. I’ve been to East Timor a number of times during the Indonesian occupation, one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. John Pilger also did a remarkable documentary about it called Death of a Nation. East Timor is a place that was occupied by the fourth-largest military in the world, Indonesia. And it started under Ford and Kissinger and went on to Carter, and Holbrooke was in that administration. A third of the population was killed. In 1997, investigative journalist Allan Nairn went to Brown University, where Richard Holbrooke was speaking, and he questioned him about East Timor.
JOHN PILGER: Well, look, Richard Holbrooke is the embodiment of rapacious U.S. policy. And I think there’s something interesting here in the—all the commemoration of his career that has gone on, interesting in regard to the WikiLeaks issue, because here we have—and it’s not only in the United States, it’s here, as well: "This great peacemaker, this great statesman, has passed on." Well, that’s just not true. And if we’d had a kind of WikiLeaks glimpse of the truth of Holbrooke’s career, we might not be getting all these effusions at the moment.
Just going back a little bit earlier in my experience, Amy, then I would bring it up to East Timor, but my first knowledge of Richard Holbrooke’s involvement was when the foreign minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Co Thach, in 1978 told me in confidence—Thach is now dead, so I’m sure I can speak about this—he told me that Holbrooke, in 1978, had given him assurances that the administration, of which he was a leading member, of course, at the time, the Carter administration, would, if not normalize with Vietnam, then it would lift the siege. And it was an economic siege, an embargo. A Trading with the Enemy Act was the being imposed on the Vietnamese. There was terrible hardship and starvation in Vietnam, all of it a policy of revenge for expelling the Americans, three years later. Holbrooke had said to Thach, who was—they met together in New York in 1978, and Holbrooke had told him to wait for a call. And Thach said, "I waited in the Holiday Inn on, I think, West 42nd Street for four days, waiting for a call from Holbrooke, which he had promised to let me have and to describe the new policy towards Vietnam. And it never came. He refused to answer my messages." And the imposition of extreme austerity as a policy of revenge continued. That always seemed to me to sum up the kind of duplicitous nature of Holbrooke’s role.
Certainly, as you rightly described—and it’s very interesting listening to Allan Nairn’s excellent questioning of Holbrooke there. I mean, I was told by the senior CIA official in the embassy in Jakarta at the time—Philip Liechty appears in my film—of the kind of support that the regime in Jakarta was getting of aircraft, logistics, Broncos, logistics, armaments, all kinds of support, that were going directly—directly into East Timor, in spite of public declarations by the likes of Holbrooke that this was not happening.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to fast-forward—
JOHN PILGER: So, as Liechty made clear—
AMY GOODMAN: John, because we just have two minutes and we have so many areas to cover, I wanted to fast-forward to Yugoslavia—
JOHN PILGER: OK.
AMY GOODMAN:—where, Jeremy, you lived and covered for years. Talk about your experience.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, Richard Holbrooke was a central player in the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Everyone knows. The whole world knows. Slobodan Miloševic was a mass murderer and a thug. Radovan Karadžic, Ratko Mladic, all of these Bosnian Serb leaders, they were thugs. What never gets talked about is that what Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. officials were doing was supporting Croatian ethnic cleansers that were trained by U.S. private military company MPRI to engage in the single-greatest ethnic cleansing of the war against the Serbs in Krajina.
Then you fast-forward to later in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke was a key player in essentially providing a false pretext for war over Kosovo against Slobodan Miloševic, known as the Rambouillet Accord. The U.S. essentially said to Slobodan Miloševic, "If you don’t sign an agreement that would allow us to occupy your country, allow you to take control of your media outlets, allow our forces to be immunized from prosecution in your country, we are going to bomb you." Richard Holbrooke delivered that ultimatum to Slobodan Miloševic following the Rambouillet discussion. Miloševic, like any leader in the world, rejected an occupation agreement, and so the United States bombed. Holbrooke, when you and I questioned him later at the Overseas Press Club in April of 1999, denied that he had ever said that that was [not] an occupation agreement, when in fact he had said it on Charlie Rose’s show.
At that same event where you and I confronted Richard Holbrooke, the Overseas Press Club Award, he celebrated the bombing of Radio Television Serbia, after Eason Jordan, the president of CNN International, told him it had been bombed. And he said that it was a positive development. On a night when they were honoring foreign correspondents, Richard Holbrooke was praising the outright murder of media workers—16 media workers, including make-up artists and engineers—none of Miloševic’s propagandists killed. RTS was not taken off the air. It was a war crime according to Amnesty International, and praised by Richard Holbrooke. To me, that’s the embodiment of what his career has meant in terms of its projection of U.S. power around the world. There are good victims and bad victims; the media workers of Radio Television Serbia, they deserved to die that day, but the journalists of the United States or China or North Korea who get imprisoned in foreign countries, those are worthy victims. The same can be said about the way the U.S. prosecuted its war in Yugoslavia and in Iraq, Turkey with the Kurds, Richard Holbrooke at the center of it for his whole career.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, a very critical analysis, Jeremy Scahill, John Pilger. I want to thank you both.
He recently described the war in Afghanistan as one of the hardest diplomatic assignments he has faced.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: There’s no Ho Chi Minh. There’s no Slobodan Miloševic . There’s no Palestinian Authority. There is a widely dispersed group of people that we roughly call the enemy.AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley described Holbooke as a peacemaker and highlighted his role in brokering the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia.
P.J. CROWLEY: It is, of course, a very sad day here at the State Department. We have lost one of our own and a legendary figure in Richard Holbrooke, who could fill a room, including this one, as he did many times and took great pleasure in engaging the press in advancing whatever it was he was working on, whether it was peace in the Balkans, you know, peace in Congo as U.N. ambassador, or most recently, peace in South Asia in the context of Afghanistan and Pakistan.AMY GOODMAN: While tributes have been pouring in for Richard Holbrooke, little attention has been paid to his role in implementing and backing U.S. policies that killed thousands of civilians. As Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter administration, Holbrooke oversaw weapons shipments to the Indonesian military as it killed a third of East Timor’s population. In 1980, he played a key role in the Carter administration’s support for a South Korean military crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising in the city of Kwangju that killed hundreds of people. Details of Holbrooke’s role in East Timor and Korea have been entirely ignored by the corporate media since his death—hardly covered before, as well. Richard Holbrooke was also a prominent Democratic backer of the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq in 2003.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I think Saddam has to be dealt with, and I would support an international coalition of the willing to deal with it. The fact is that we all can agree that Saddam is a truly terrible chief of state and is in the process of trying to create—and we don’t know how well he’s done, because the inspectors have been gone for over three years—trying to create weapons of mass destruction.AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the legacy of Richard Holbrooke, we’re joined by Jeremy Scahill, and again, staying with us, John Pilger is with us in London. Jeremy Scahill, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute, author of the Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. In 1999 he reported daily from Yugoslavia during and after the 78-day NATO bombing. John Pilger is a longtime journalist and filmmaker who has reported extensively on the U.S.-backed Indonesian attack on East Timor, reported extensively on Iraq and Vietnam and Cambodia and many other places.
Jeremy, as we’re coming out of this clip of Richard Holbrooke supporting the Bush administration’s war on Iraq.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, first of all, I mean, Richard Holbrooke, probably more than any U.S. diplomat since Henry Kissinger—and he cut his teeth, of course, during the Vietnam War working under Henry Kissinger—Richard Holbrooke has represented the utter militarization of what is called U.S. diplomacy. He was also at the center of the nexus of U.S. militarists, of aggressive, hawkish, quote-unquote, "diplomats," and the elite, white-shoe media culture. And that’s why you see people like Joe Klein and others falling over themselves to engage in revisionist history about Richard Holbrooke. They only tell one part of the story. And often, in the case of Iraq or Yugoslavia, they’re telling a very one-sided version of history that makes Richard Holbrooke look like something that he wasn’t, and that was a peacemaker. He was a war maker and was someone who extended the tentacles of U.S. foreign policy.
Under the Clinton administration, Holbrooke was sort of the hammer when it came to diplomacy, as he’s been, in a way, under President Obama, though we’ll get to that later with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Let’s remember, when we’re talking about Iraq, Richard Holbrooke wasn’t just speaking as some pundit when he was supporting the Bush administration’s lie-laden case for war in Iraq. He also promoted the idea that Saddam posed a threat with weapons of mass destruction, Richard Holbrooke. But during the Clinton administration, there were the most ruthless economic sanctions in history imposed by the Democrats on the government—or rather, the people—of Iraq, that just targeted the civilian population, denied food and medicine, turned the hospitals of Iraq—and John Pilger knows about this better than anyone, because he did the definitive film on it—turned the hospitals of Iraq into death rows for infants. So, you know, Richard Holbrooke was part of an administration that also bombed Baghdad on multiple occasions in the north and the south of the country, as well, under the guise of the no-fly zones.
AMY GOODMAN: This was during Clinton’s years.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And this was during the Clinton administration. So then, when you fast-forward to the Bush fraudulent case for war, having someone like Richard Holbrooke support it is the embodiment of the continuity of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq. Clinton started the war on Iraq in full after George H.W. Bush invaded and attacked Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and it’s been consistent U.S. policy. And Richard Holbrooke has been a staple of that policy—was a staple of that policy.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back in time. I’ve been to East Timor a number of times during the Indonesian occupation, one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. John Pilger also did a remarkable documentary about it called Death of a Nation. East Timor is a place that was occupied by the fourth-largest military in the world, Indonesia. And it started under Ford and Kissinger and went on to Carter, and Holbrooke was in that administration. A third of the population was killed. In 1997, investigative journalist Allan Nairn went to Brown University, where Richard Holbrooke was speaking, and he questioned him about East Timor.
ALLAN NAIRN: You were the Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter administration at the height of the genocide in Timor, the years of '76, ’77, ’78, ’79, when the killing rose to a peak. And you were the Carter administration's point man on Timor policy. You handled the testimony before Congress and so on. And it was under your watch that the U.S. sent in the OV-10 Bronco planes, the low-flying planes, which were used to bomb and strafe the Timorese out of the hills. Testimony from Catholic Church sources, reports from Amnesty International and others indicated that hundreds of thousands of East Timorese were killed during this period. And during this period, not only was the U.S. sending in these weapons which were used to kill the Timorese, but it was also blocking the U.N. Security Council from taking enforcement action on the two resolutions which called on Indonesia to withdraw its troops without delay. We know this because Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., wrote about it in his memoirs. That was the policy that started under Ford and Kissinger, OK, and you continued that policy.
So, I have two questions. The first is, would you be willing to facilitate the full declassification of documents regarding what the Carter administration, your administration, did in East Timor by granting a waiver under the Privacy Act? And secondly, would you favor the convening, for the case of East Timor, an international war crimes tribunal along the lines of what has been done in Bosnia and Rwanda, along the lines of what President Bush called for in the case of Saddam Hussein in Iraq? And would you be willing to abide by its verdict in regard to your own conduct?
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: You know, first of all, we’re not going to have time to deconstruct your question and take it on point by point here. We’ve got other questions, and we need to get to them. But let me say very clearly, first of all, I don’t accept every statement you have just made as fact. Far from it. Moynihan, for example, was not the ambassador during the Carter administration; he was the ambassador during the previous administration.
ALLAN NAIRN: He started it under Ford, and you continued that policy.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Let’s not—I don’t think we’re going to have time to deconstruct this here. I do not accept most of your statements. However, in regard to the last questions, of course I favor declassification. I have no—I have nothing to hide about my own role. If I made a mistake or two along the way, I’ll confront it when that goes—when that comes up. No one is error-free here. But just for the purpose of everyone else in the room, this is not an accurate description of the administration’s policy or my own role in it. As I said in my opening remarks, Indonesia was an important country and remains an important country. And the solution to the problem, as I said to an earlier question, does not, in my view, involve a complete arms cut off. You’re welcome to disagree. But I am interested in consequences of policy. I’m interested in solving the problem. And not—
ALLAN NAIRN: The consequences in this case were genocide: a third of the Timorese population killed.
RICHARD HOLBROOKE: If you want to accuse me of genocide, you’re welcome to do so. And if—as far as extending the war crimes tribunal to Timor, or for that matter, Cambodia, where it’s incomprehensibly not of a mandate, I’m all for it. In fact, I have recently written a letter to the Holocaust Commission at the museum recommending that they take this issue on, precisely because it’s incomprehensible to me why various people who are equally as murderous as Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic have never been investigated. But I tell you here, for the benefit of everyone else, that the Timor issue is not as simple as described just now. It just isn’t. This is not what happened, and I don’t think anyone who knows Jimmy Carter or what he stands for would agree that this was a deliberate policy of giving low-flying airplanes or helicopters to the Indonesians so that they could go out and kill people in the hills.AMY GOODMAN: That was [Richard] Holbrooke responding to journalist Allan Nairn. John Pilger, I want to play a clip from your 1994 film Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy. This is a clip of José Ramos-Horta, then foreign minister in exile of East Timor, who is now the president of East Timor. He describes a bombing with a U.S.-supplied OV-10 Bronco plane in 1977, when Richard Holbrooke was Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter administration.
JOSÉ RAMOS-HORTA: As the months went by, the war went on. One of my sisters, Maria Ortencia, by then 17 years old in 1977, was killed during an air raid carried out by the Indonesian air force using a Bronco aircraft. Two American-supplied Bronco aircraft nose-dived to a village somewhere in the remote countryside and opened fire on the village. At that particular moment, there were no guerrilla troops there, only civilian population. My sister was there. She was running the local school. She and 20 kids, at least, were killed.AMY GOODMAN: That was José Ramos-Horta, who became a close friend, by the way, of Richard Holbrooke. John Pilger, your response?
JOHN PILGER: Well, look, Richard Holbrooke is the embodiment of rapacious U.S. policy. And I think there’s something interesting here in the—all the commemoration of his career that has gone on, interesting in regard to the WikiLeaks issue, because here we have—and it’s not only in the United States, it’s here, as well: "This great peacemaker, this great statesman, has passed on." Well, that’s just not true. And if we’d had a kind of WikiLeaks glimpse of the truth of Holbrooke’s career, we might not be getting all these effusions at the moment.
Just going back a little bit earlier in my experience, Amy, then I would bring it up to East Timor, but my first knowledge of Richard Holbrooke’s involvement was when the foreign minister of Vietnam, Nguyen Co Thach, in 1978 told me in confidence—Thach is now dead, so I’m sure I can speak about this—he told me that Holbrooke, in 1978, had given him assurances that the administration, of which he was a leading member, of course, at the time, the Carter administration, would, if not normalize with Vietnam, then it would lift the siege. And it was an economic siege, an embargo. A Trading with the Enemy Act was the being imposed on the Vietnamese. There was terrible hardship and starvation in Vietnam, all of it a policy of revenge for expelling the Americans, three years later. Holbrooke had said to Thach, who was—they met together in New York in 1978, and Holbrooke had told him to wait for a call. And Thach said, "I waited in the Holiday Inn on, I think, West 42nd Street for four days, waiting for a call from Holbrooke, which he had promised to let me have and to describe the new policy towards Vietnam. And it never came. He refused to answer my messages." And the imposition of extreme austerity as a policy of revenge continued. That always seemed to me to sum up the kind of duplicitous nature of Holbrooke’s role.
Certainly, as you rightly described—and it’s very interesting listening to Allan Nairn’s excellent questioning of Holbrooke there. I mean, I was told by the senior CIA official in the embassy in Jakarta at the time—Philip Liechty appears in my film—of the kind of support that the regime in Jakarta was getting of aircraft, logistics, Broncos, logistics, armaments, all kinds of support, that were going directly—directly into East Timor, in spite of public declarations by the likes of Holbrooke that this was not happening.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to fast-forward—
JOHN PILGER: So, as Liechty made clear—
AMY GOODMAN: John, because we just have two minutes and we have so many areas to cover, I wanted to fast-forward to Yugoslavia—
JOHN PILGER: OK.
AMY GOODMAN:—where, Jeremy, you lived and covered for years. Talk about your experience.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, Richard Holbrooke was a central player in the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Everyone knows. The whole world knows. Slobodan Miloševic was a mass murderer and a thug. Radovan Karadžic, Ratko Mladic, all of these Bosnian Serb leaders, they were thugs. What never gets talked about is that what Richard Holbrooke and other U.S. officials were doing was supporting Croatian ethnic cleansers that were trained by U.S. private military company MPRI to engage in the single-greatest ethnic cleansing of the war against the Serbs in Krajina.
Then you fast-forward to later in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke was a key player in essentially providing a false pretext for war over Kosovo against Slobodan Miloševic, known as the Rambouillet Accord. The U.S. essentially said to Slobodan Miloševic, "If you don’t sign an agreement that would allow us to occupy your country, allow you to take control of your media outlets, allow our forces to be immunized from prosecution in your country, we are going to bomb you." Richard Holbrooke delivered that ultimatum to Slobodan Miloševic following the Rambouillet discussion. Miloševic, like any leader in the world, rejected an occupation agreement, and so the United States bombed. Holbrooke, when you and I questioned him later at the Overseas Press Club in April of 1999, denied that he had ever said that that was [not] an occupation agreement, when in fact he had said it on Charlie Rose’s show.
At that same event where you and I confronted Richard Holbrooke, the Overseas Press Club Award, he celebrated the bombing of Radio Television Serbia, after Eason Jordan, the president of CNN International, told him it had been bombed. And he said that it was a positive development. On a night when they were honoring foreign correspondents, Richard Holbrooke was praising the outright murder of media workers—16 media workers, including make-up artists and engineers—none of Miloševic’s propagandists killed. RTS was not taken off the air. It was a war crime according to Amnesty International, and praised by Richard Holbrooke. To me, that’s the embodiment of what his career has meant in terms of its projection of U.S. power around the world. There are good victims and bad victims; the media workers of Radio Television Serbia, they deserved to die that day, but the journalists of the United States or China or North Korea who get imprisoned in foreign countries, those are worthy victims. The same can be said about the way the U.S. prosecuted its war in Yugoslavia and in Iraq, Turkey with the Kurds, Richard Holbrooke at the center of it for his whole career.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, a very critical analysis, Jeremy Scahill, John Pilger. I want to thank you both.
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