Wanted For Telling The Truth -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange breaks cover but will avoid America
US desperate to ask 22-year old founder of WikiLeaks what he knows of classified messages about Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Julian Assange spoke to the Guardian in Brussels after emerging from a month in hiding.
This is a great story, in case you've not been following along.
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The elusive founder of WikiLeaks, who is at the centre of a potential US national security sensation, has surfaced from almost a month in hiding to tell the Guardian he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert.
Julian Assange, a renowned Australian hacker who founded the electronic whistleblowers' platform WikiLeaks, vanished when a young US intelligence analyst in Baghdad was arrested.
The analyst, Bradley Manning, had bragged he had sent 260,000 incendiary US state department cables on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks.
The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington. The sensitivity of the information has generated media reports that Assange is the target of a US manhunt.
"[US] public statements have all been reasonable. But some statements made in private are a bit more questionable," Assange told the Guardian in Brussels. "Politically it would be a great error for them to act. I feel perfectly safe … but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the US during this period."
Assange appeared in public in Brussels for the first time in almost a month to speak at a seminar on freedom of information at the European parliament.
He said: "We need support and protection. We have that. More is always helpful. But we believe that the situation is stable and under control. There's no need to be worried. There's a need always to be on the alert."
Manning is being held incommunicado by the US military in Kuwait after "confessing" to a Californian hacker on a chatline, declaring he wanted "people to see the truth".
He said he had collected 260,000 top secret US cables in Baghdad and sent them to WikiLeaks, whose server operates out of Sweden. Adrian Lamo, the California hacker he spoke to, handed the transcripts of the exchanges to the FBI.
Manning was promptly arrested in Baghdad at the end of last month and transferred to a US military detention unit in Kuwait. He has been held for more than three weeks without charge.
Assange said WikiLeaks had hired three US criminal lawyers to defend Manning but that they had been granted no access to him. Manning has instead been assigned US military counsel.
While WikiLeaks declined to confirm receipt of the material from Manning, it has already released a film of a US Apache helicopter attack on civilians in Baghdad.
It has also posted a confidential state department cable on negotiations in Reykjavik over Iceland's financial collapse and is preparing to disclose much more material, including film of a US attack that left scores of civilians dead in Afghanistan.
The material is believed to derive from Manning, although WikiLeaks does not reveal its sources and its operations are designed to mask the source of the files it receives.
Prominent US whistleblowers and lawyers have advised Assange to stay out of the US and to be ultra-careful about his travel and public appearances. "Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of [Assange] for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified state department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security," US web paper the Daily Beast reported 10 days ago.
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Jun 22, 2010 at 8:11 PM
Reader Comments (20)
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/wikileaks-preparing-release-video-alleged-us-massacre-afghanistan/story?id=10954929&page=2
Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
State Department Anxious About Possible Leak of Cables to Wikileaks
On his last full day of freedom before Army CID investigators took him into custody, 22-year-old Bradley Manning pondered what would happen if his secret life as a self-described Wikileaks “hacktivist” were ever exposed.
“What would you do if your role [with] Wikileaks seemed in danger of being blown?” was the question posed by ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who’d been chatting with Manning online for about five days.
“Try and figure out how I could get my side of the story out, before everything was twisted around to make me look like Nidal Hassan,” wrote back Manning.
Manning has reportedly admitted that he downloaded 260,000 diplomatic cables and provided them to Wikileaks. In Internet chat logs first revealed by Wired magazine, Manning also took credit for leaking the 2007 video to the website.
“Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available,” Manning wrote of the diplomatic cables, according to Wired.
Wikileaks has not confirmed that Manning is a source of any information posted on the site. “We do not know if Mr. Manning is our source, but the U.S. military is claiming he is, so we will defend him,” Wikileaks said in another Twitter message.
Manning was turned in to the Pentagon by a former computer hacker based in California, Adrian Lamo, after Manning approached Lamo for counsel. Manning is believed to have contacted Lamo after reading a recent profile of him in Wired.
In the chat log revealed by Wired, Manning bragged to Lamo about having downloaded a huge library of State Department cables, as well as the 2007 video of the helicopter attack, and having provided the material to Wikileaks.
WikiLeaks: Where is Julian Assange? And how WikiLeaks protects itself
Classified cable from US Embassy Reykjavik on Icesave, 13 Jan 2010
the rest of us support WikiLEaks because we support truth...i'm guessing you have a different opinion...
As for your story above, no, they would never get my support.
You heard it from the source, Gobie cannot support the truth. Whistle blowers have been responsible for a lot, like exposing Madoff years before any one else could consider him a villain, for instance.
LOL. I can imagine two hefty male nurses dragging you away in your final years, all strapped-up into a straight-jacket and yelling out at the top of your lungs, "THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE!, I MUST see the BIRTH CERTIFICAAAAAAAAaaaaatttteeeeeeeee!!!"