vrijdag 30 december 2016

Jimmy Carter: America Must Recognize Palestine

By JIMMY CARTERNOV. 28, 2016

ATLANTA — We do not yet know the policy of the next administration toward Israel and Palestine, but we do know the policy of this administration. It has been President Obama’s aim to support a negotiated end to the conflict based on two states, living side by side in peace.

That prospect is now in grave doubt. I am convinced that the United States can still shape the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before a change in presidents, but time is very short. The simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.

Back in 1978, during my administration, Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, and Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, signed the Camp David Accords. That agreement was based on the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which was passed in the aftermath of the 1967 war. The key words of that resolution were “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East in which every state in the area can live in security,” and the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

From left, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Jimmy Carter of the United States in 1978 during the White House announcement of a Middle East peace agreement reached at Camp David. CreditAssociated Press

The agreement was ratified overwhelmingly by the Parliaments of Egypt and Israel. And those two foundational concepts have been the basis for the policy of the United States government and the international community ever since.

This was why, in 2009, at the beginning of his first administration, Mr. Obama reaffirmed the crucial elements of the Camp David agreement and Resolution 242 by calling for a complete freeze on the building of settlements, constructed illegally by Israel on Palestinian territory. Later, in 2011, the president made clear that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines,” and added, “negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.”

Today, however, 38 years after Camp David, the commitment to peace is in danger of abrogation. Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands. Over 4.5 million Palestinians live in these occupied territories, but are not citizens of Israel. Most live largely under Israeli military rule, and do not vote in Israel’s national elections.

Meanwhile, about 600,000 Israeli settlers in Palestine enjoy the benefits of Israeli citizenship and laws. This process is hastening a one-state reality that could destroy Israeli democracy and will result in intensifying international condemnation of Israel.

The Carter Center has continued to support a two-state solution by hosting discussions this month with Israeli and Palestinian representatives, searching for an avenue toward peace. Based on the positive feedback from those talks, I am certain that United States recognition of a Palestinian state would make it easier for other countries that have not recognized Palestine to do so, and would clear the way for a Security Council resolution on the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Security Council should pass a resolution laying out the parameters for resolving the conflict. It should reaffirm the illegality of all Israeli settlements beyond the 1967 borders, while leaving open the possibility that the parties could negotiate modifications. Security guarantees for both Israel and Palestine are imperative, and the resolution must acknowledge the right of both the states of Israel and Palestine to live in peace and security. Further measures should include the demilitarization of the Palestinian state, and a possible peacekeeping force under the auspices of the United Nations.

A strong Security Council resolution would underscore that the Geneva Conventions and other human rights protections apply to all parties at all times. It would also support any agreement reached by the parties regarding Palestinian refugees.

This is the best — now, perhaps, the only — means of countering the one-state reality that Israel is imposing on itself and the Palestinian people. Recognition of Palestine and a new Security Council resolution are not radical new measures, but a natural outgrowth of America’s support for a two-state solution.The combined weight of United States recognition, United Nations membership and a Security Council resolution solidly grounded in international law would lay the foundation for future diplomacy. These steps would bolster moderate Palestinian leadership, while sending a clear assurance to the Israeli public of the worldwide recognition of Israel and its security.

The primary foreign policy goal of my life has been to help bring peace to Israel and its neighbors. That September in 1978, I was proud to say to a joint session of Congress, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” As Mr. Begin and Mr. Sadat sat in the balcony above us, the members of Congress stood and applauded the two heroic peacemakers.

I fear for the spirit of Camp David. We must not squander this chance.

FROM THE ORIGINAL SOURCE "The Assange Interview with Republica.it

Julian Assange: "Donald? It's a change anyway"

The interview. The Wikileaks cofounder: "Our source Chelsea Manning tortured in Usa"

di STEFANIA MAURIZI

LONDON - When they appeared on the scene for the first time in 2006, few noticed them. And when four years later they hit worldwide media headlines with their publication of over 700,000 secret US government documents, many assumed that Julian Assange and his organisation, WikiLeaks, would be annihilated very shortly.

Since 2010 Assange has lived first under house arrest and then confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been granted asylum by Ecuador. The country's officials judged his concerns of being extradited to Sweden and then to the US to be put on trial for the WikiLeaks' revelations well-grounded.

Repubblica met Julian Assange in the embassy, nicely decorated for the Christmas season. These last ten years have been intense ones for his organisation, but the last two months have been truly hectic: WikiLeaks' publication of Hillary Clinton's and US Democrats' emails hit headlines around the world. The US government hit back, accusing WikiLeaks of having received these materials from Russian cybercriminals with the political agenda of influencing the US elections, a claim some experts question. In the midst of these publications, Ecuador even cut off Julian Assange's internet connection. Finally, in November, Swedish prosecutors travelled to London to question the WikiLeaks' founder after six years of judicial paralysis. In a matter of a few weeks, they will be deciding whether to charge or absolve him once and for all. Next February, Ecuador will be holding political elections. If Julian Assange loses asylum, will he be extradited to Sweden and then to the US?

How did it all start? Back in 2006, why did you think a new media organisation was necessary?
"I had watched the Iraq War closely, and in the aftermath of the Iraq War a number of individuals from the security services, including the Australian [ones], came out saying how they had attempted to reveal information before the war began and had been thwarted. People who wanted to be whistleblowers before the Iraq war had not found a channel to get the information out. I felt that this was a general problem and set about to construct the system which could solve this problem in general".

In a famous interview, you declared that at the beginning you thought that your biggest role would be in China and in some of the former Soviet states and North Africa. Quite the opposite, most of WikiLeaks' biggest revelations concern the US military-industrial complex, its wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq and its serious human rights violations in the war on terror. These abuses have had a heavy impact in an open and democratic society like the United States and produced 'dissidents' like Chelsea Manning willing to expose them. Why aren't human rights abuses producing the same effects in regimes like China or Russia, and what can be done to democratise information in those countries?

"In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like "Novaya Gazeta", in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn't a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player. WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organisation with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and president Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources, though not always. For example, we have published more than 2 million documents from Syria, including Bashar al-Assad personally. Sometimes we make a publication about a country and they will see WikiLeaks as a player within that country, like with Timor East and Kenya. The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away".

What can be done there?
"We have published some things in Chinese. It is necessary to be seen as a local player and to adapt the language to the local culture".

There is strict control of the web in China...
"China banned us in 2007, we have worked around that censorship at various times, publishers there were too scared to publish [our documents]. The feeling is mixed within China: they of course like to see the Western critique that a number of our publications enable. China is not a militaristic society, they don't see they have a comparative advantage in making warfare, so they presumably like general critiques of war, but it is a society that is authority-structured, which is terrified of dissidents, whereas if you compare it to Russia, it too is an increasingly authoritarian society, but one that has a cultural tradition of lionising dissidents".

Why aren't the US and UK intelligence agencies leaking to WikiLeaks about their enemies, like Russia or China? They could do it using NGOs or even activists as a cover and they could expose WikiLeaks, if your organisation didn't publish their documents...
"We publish full information, pristine archives, verifiable. That often makes it inconvenient for propaganda purposes, because for many organisations you see the good and the bad, and that makes the facts revealed harder to spin. If we go back to the Iraq War in 2003, let's imagine US intelligence tried to leak us some of their internal reports on Iraq. Now we know from US intelligence reports that subsequently came out that there was internal doubt and scepticism about the claim that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even though there was intense pressure on the intelligence services at the political level to create reports that supported the rush towards the war, internally their analysts were hedging. The White House, Downing Street, the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN stripped off those doubts. If WikiLeaks had published those reports, these doubts would have been expressed and the war possibly adverted".

WikiLeaks published documents on Hillary Clinton and the US Democrats. How do you reply to those who accuse you of having helped to elect Mr. Trump?
"What is the allegation here exactly? We published what the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, and Hillary Clinton herself were saying about their own campaign, which the American people read and were very interested to read, and assessed the elements and characters, and then they made a decision. That decision was based on Hillary Clinton's own words, her campaign manager's own words. That's democracy".

Do you agree with those who say that it was a hit job, because you hit Hillary Clinton when she was most vulnerable, during the final weeks of her campaign?
"No, we have been publishing about Hillary Clinton for many years, because of her position as Secretary of State. We have been publishing her cables since 2010 and her emails also. We are domain experts on Clinton and her post 2008 role in government. This is why it is natural for sources who have information on Hillary Clinton to come to us. They know we will understand its significance".

So Clinton is gone, has WikiLeaks won?
"We were pleased to see how much of the American public interacted with the material we published. That interaction was on both sides of politics, including those to the left of Hillary Clinton those who supported Bernie Sanders, who were able to see the structure of power within the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and how the Clintons had placed Debbie Wasserman Schultz to head up the DNC and as a result the DNC had tilted the scales of the process against Bernie Sanders".

What about Donald Trump? What is going to happen?
"If the question is how I personally feel about the situation, I am mixed: Hillary Clinton and the network around her imprisoned one of our alleged sources for 35 years, Chelsea Manning, tortured her according to the United Nations, in order to implicate me personally. According to our publications Hillary Clinton was the chief proponent and the architect of the war against Libya. It is clear that she pursued this war as a staging effort for her Presidential bid. It wasn't even a war for an ideological purpose. This war ended up producing the refugee crisis in Europe, changing the political colour of Europe, killing more than 40,000 people within a year in Libya, while the arms from Libya went to Mali and other places, boosting or causing civil wars, including the Syrian catastrophe. If someone and their network behave like that, then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means".

What do you think he means?
"Hillary Clinton's election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better".

In these ten years of WikiLeaks, you and your organisation have experienced all sorts of attacks. What have you learned from this warfare?
"Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire "international community". We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants".

You have spent six years under arrest and confinement, the UN established that you are arbitrarily detained, the UK appealed against the UN decision and lost, so this decision is now final. What is going to happen now?
"That's all politics, that's something that people cannot properly understand, unless they been through the legal system themselves in high-profile cases. This decision by the UN in my case is really an historical decision. What is someone to do when they are in a multi-jurisdictional conflict, that is politicised and involves big powers? There is too much pressure for domestic courts to resist, so you need an international court with representation from different countries which are not allied to each other to be able to come to a fair decision. That is what happened in my situation. Sweden and the United Kingdom have refused to implement this decision so far, of course it costs both Sweden and the UK on a diplomatic level and the question is how long they are willing to pay that cost".

After six years, the Swedish prosecutors questioned you in London, as you had requested from the beginning. What happens if you get charged, extradited to Sweden and then to the United States? Will WikiLeaks survive?
"Yes, we have contingency plans that you have seen in action when my Internet was cut off and while I was in prison before. An organisation like WikiLeaks cannot be structured such that a single person can be a point of failure in the organisation, it makes him or her a target".

Is the internet still cut off?
"The internet has been returned".

You've declared on more than one occasion that what you really miss after 6 years of arrest and confinement is your family. Your children gave you a present to make you to feel less alone: a kitten. Have you ever reconsidered your choices?
"Yes, of course. Fortunately I'm too busy to think about these things all the time. I know that my family and my children are proud of me, that they benefit in some ways from having a father who knows some parts of the world and has become very good in a fight, but in other ways they suffer".

One of the first times we met I noticed a book on your table: "The Prince" by Machiavelli. What have you learned about power in 10 years of WikiLeaks?
"My conclusion is that most power structures are deeply incompetent, staffed by people who don't really believe in their institutions and that most power is the projection of the perception of power. And the more secretively it works, the more incompetent it is, because secrecy breeds incompetence, while openness breeds competence, because one can see and can compare actions and see which one is more competent. To keep up these appearances, institutional heads or political heads such as presidents spend most of the time trying to walk in front of the train and pretending that it is following them, but the direction is set by the tracks and by the engine of the train. Understanding that means that small and committed organisations can out-manoeuvre these institutional dinosaurs, like the State Department, the NSA or the CIA".

http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2016/12/23/news/assange_wikileaks-154754000/

dinsdag 27 december 2016

Israel threatens to give Trump 'evidence' that Obama orchestrated UN resolution

Netanyahu allies claim ‘iron-clad information’ from Arab sources reveals Obama administration drafted document to end settlements, which US abstained from

samantha power israel un resolution

Samanta Power, the US ambassador to the UN, raises her hand to indicate US abstention from voting on the security council resolution to condemn Israeli settlements. Photograph: Albin/Pacific/Barcroft Images

Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem

Israel has escalated its already furious war with the outgoing US administration, claiming that it has “rather hard” evidence that Barack Obama was behind a critical UN security council resolution criticising Israeli settlement building, and threatening to hand over the material to Donald Trump.

The latest comments come a day after the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, was summoned by Netanyahu to explain why the US did not veto the vote and instead abstained.

The claims have emerged in interviews given by close Netanyahu allies to US media outlets on Monday after the Obama administration denied in categorical terms the claims originally made by Netanyahu himself.

However, speaking to Fox News on Sunday, David Keyes – a Netanyahu spokesman – said Arab sources, among others, had informed Jerusalem ofObama’s alleged involvement in advancing the resolution.

“We have rather iron-clad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” Keyes said.

Doubling down on the claim a few hours later the controversial Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, went even further suggesting it had gathered evidence that it would present to the incoming Trump administration.

“We will present this evidence to the new administration through the appropriate channels. If they want to share it with the American people, they are welcome to do it,” Dermer told CNN.

According to Dermer, not only did the US not stand by Israel’s side during the vote, it “was behind this ganging up on Israel at the UN”.

Dermer is a controversial figure in Washington, blamed by the Obama administration for organising the invitation for Netanyahu to address the US Congress in the midst of Israel’s campaign against the Iran nuclear deal.

His comments on CNN seem to represent an even more egregious breach of protocol, not least over the vague sourcing of the evidence alluded to by Keyes and Dermer.

Indeed, Israel was accused by unnamed US officials in a Newsweek article two years ago of “very sobering … alarming … even terrifying” levels of espionage targeting the US refuted as a “ malicious fabrication aimed at harming relations” by then foreign minister Avigor Lieberman.

Last year, however, US officials again accused Israel of spying, this time on the Iran nuclear talks, with one telling the Wall Street Journal: “It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy.”

Dermer’s threat on CNN to hand information to Trump would seem to replicate some of those concerns.

Israel’s threat to present “evidence” on a sitting president, and one of Israel’s closest ally, to an incoming presidential team – and to do it so publicly – appears almost unprecedented.

The moves appear part of a high risk – and even more highly partisan strategy – on Netanyahu’s part, tying the future of Israel to a highly unpredictable Republican president-elect with no experience of public office and who comes from the very fringes even of the party he stood as candidate for.

The US has already denied the claim made by Israel in the strongest terms.

“We did not draft this resolution; we did not introduce this resolution. We made this decision when it came up for a vote,” said Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said in a statement on Friday.

But because of its opposition to settlement activity and concern for what it could mean for the region, the US “could not in good conscience veto”, he added.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/26/israel-un-resolution-settlements-obama-trump

------------------------------

My Comments :

1. The Mercer clan et al. ( Robert en Rebekah Mercer, Carl Icahn, Sheldon Adelson, Yared Kushner etc.), all militant, Orthodox, fundamentalist ultra-zionist Jews - and their extreme-right Christian-zionist allies, like Gafney and Bolton - have been buying the election for Trump and the GOP.

2. Now the pro-Israel/lobby from the Jabotinsky-wing is demanding in return for this coup d'état against the USA, the absolute power over the personal nomination of the staff and the Administration, including a Likud (and even more to the extreme right) policy.

3. That policy will have to culminate in the complete annexation of the West-Bank, The Gaza-strip and East-Jerusalem, in a later stade, eventually (wishfully) to be expanded with the "historical" territory, reaching from the banks of the Euphrates untill the brook of tyhe river Nile, and in the North, pieces of Lebanon and Syria, thus completing the ancient Eretz-Israel.

4. Not only will the de jure occupation of the West-Bank and East-Jerusalem and the de facto occupation of the concentration-camp called Gaza-Strip, be the ultimate goal of the eternal annexation of the aforementioned territory, but the entire indigenous people living in the territories and in "Israel-Proper" (which of course, in fact, is no more than an ordinary Western Colony), will to be renamed as "Illegal Trespassers", and subsequently be "Transferred" to "Arab territory".

5. After all, from the Zionist ideological view-point, Eretz-Israel is "The Promised Land", exclusively to only contain "The Chosen People", that - according to the Zionist Christians, is destined to return to Zion / Jerusalem, in order to fulfill the divine task, of preparing the way for the return of `The Messiah`, in order to redeem Humanity.....

6. So in this respect, not only will `the Gentiles` be sacrificed for the `higher aim` of the Zionists Jabotinsky style, but - in the words of the nominated USA ambassador David Friedman - also the Jews, who are still persisting to favor a two state solution and negotiations with the Arab League about the Peace initiative, will be considered non-Jews, and will be dealt likewise.

7. Former Mossad director Halevy appears to have been right, that there might be a real danger of a civil war in Israel, but appears to be wrong, about the scenario, that this war will be between the Ultra-Orthodox (the Haridi) and the rest of the Jewish (and Palestinian) population.

8. After all, if the Jabotinsky section of the Israeli society - by way of controlling the future USA Foreign Policy as I have indicated before - will become the dominating factor in Israel, as well in the USA (including within the rather politically and religiously divers Jewish Community in the USA and elsewhere in the world), a civil war will be between much wider sections of the Israeli Society, and will start much earlier as well.

9. Make no mistake about the position of Trump in that context, because he will be brutely set aside (impeached), if and when he will formulate even the slightest protest or reservation, for the man is only an instrumental vehicle in the imperial hands of the ultra-Zionists.

10. He might for instance become a problem, if the so-called Alt-Right - which has been cleverly manipulated by the Mercer Acquisitions, Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica into voting for the belligerent White-Supremacist Trump - will raise their objections against the nomination of so many Jew-Supremacists in the incoming Trump Administration and even might try to rise to the occasion, and ignite a race war in the USA.

11. Thereby the extreme racist and fascist right will target not only the traditional non-WASP minorities, but will also target the moderate Jews and by so doing, will serve as a threat against all dissent Jews in the USA, as will happen - and has been happening for some time already - to the dissent Jews in the Israeli Society at large, in order to have them forcibly united towards the Likud doctrine of conquering Eretz-Israel....

12. As a direct consequence the world in the near future most certainly, will NOT be a better place to live, but a place of (even more) war about the Western Jewish-Christian domination of the ME, as has been initiated many times in the last few decades, according to the Yinon-Plan, the Clean Break (with the long abided for Labor policy of (in name at least) systematically engaging in Peace treaties with all the surrounding countries) strategy and the Zionist-neocon enterprises of the PNAC and the Redrawing of the Map of the Middle East by way of the systematic break up of all the countries in the region through proxy wars by organizing invasions (Afghanistan and Iraq) and initiating `civil wars` with the help of `Islamist extremists` etc..

13. The redrawing of the Map of the Middle East, and fracturing all the countries in the region, along ethnic lines, so Israel, in the end, can become the leading power in the Region and act along the road of Jew-Supremacism.

14, Watch in particular for the first foreign policies of the new USA Likud shadow cabinet, regarding Iran, which might easily lead up to a dangerous new impulse of the already existing wars in the ME, with the potential of a war, that might extend the region...

N.B. If Netanyahu is threatening to publish evidence of Obama pre-meditation in `setting up the UN` against `Israel`, he seems to be all too willing to clearly demonstrate, that `Israel` has been penetrating the White House even more intense than already may be assumed..

zondag 25 december 2016

Julian Assange: "Donald? It's a change anyway

The interview. The Wikileaks cofounder: "Our source Chelsea Manning tortured in Usa"

di STEFANIA MAURIZI

LONDON - When they appeared on the scene for the first time in 2006, few noticed them. And when four years later they hit worldwide media headlines with their publication of over 700,000 secret US government documents, many assumed that Julian Assange and his organisation, WikiLeaks, would be annihilated very shortly.

Since 2010 Assange has lived first under house arrest and then confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been granted asylum by Ecuador. The country's officials judged his concerns of being extradited to Sweden and then to the US to be put on trial for the WikiLeaks' revelations well-grounded.

Repubblica met Julian Assange in the embassy, nicely decorated for the Christmas season. These last ten years have been intense ones for his organisation, but the last two months have been truly hectic: WikiLeaks' publication of Hillary Clinton's and US Democrats' emails hit headlines around the world. The US government hit back, accusing WikiLeaks of having received these materials from Russian cybercriminals with the political agenda of influencing the US elections, a claim some experts question. In the midst of these publications, Ecuador even cut off Julian Assange's internet connection. Finally, in November, Swedish prosecutors travelled to London to question the WikiLeaks' founder after six years of judicial paralysis. In a matter of a few weeks, they will be deciding whether to charge or absolve him once and for all. Next February, Ecuador will be holding political elections. If Julian Assange loses asylum, will he be extradited to Sweden and then to the US?

How did it all start? Back in 2006, why did you think a new media organisation was necessary?
"I had watched the Iraq War closely, and in the aftermath of the Iraq War a number of individuals from the security services, including the Australian [ones], came out saying how they had attempted to reveal information before the war began and had been thwarted. People who wanted to be whistleblowers before the Iraq war had not found a channel to get the information out. I felt that this was a general problem and set about to construct the system which could solve this problem in general".

In a famous interview, you declared that at the beginning you thought that your biggest role would be in China and in some of the former Soviet states and North Africa. Quite the opposite, most of WikiLeaks' biggest revelations concern the US military-industrial complex, its wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq and its serious human rights violations in the war on terror. These abuses have had a heavy impact in an open and democratic society like the United States and produced 'dissidents' like Chelsea Manning willing to expose them. Why aren't human rights abuses producing the same effects in regimes like China or Russia, and what can be done to democratise information in those countries?

"In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like "Novaya Gazeta", in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn't a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player. WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organisation with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and president Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources, though not always. For example, we have published more than 2 million documents from Syria, including Bashar al-Assad personally. Sometimes we make a publication about a country and they will see WikiLeaks as a player within that country, like with Timor East and Kenya. The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away".

What can be done there?
"We have published some things in Chinese. It is necessary to be seen as a local player and to adapt the language to the local culture".

There is strict control of the web in China...
"China banned us in 2007, we have worked around that censorship at various times, publishers there were too scared to publish [our documents]. The feeling is mixed within China: they of course like to see the Western critique that a number of our publications enable. China is not a militaristic society, they don't see they have a comparative advantage in making warfare, so they presumably like general critiques of war, but it is a society that is authority-structured, which is terrified of dissidents, whereas if you compare it to Russia, it too is an increasingly authoritarian society, but one that has a cultural tradition of lionising dissidents".

Why aren't the US and UK intelligence agencies leaking to WikiLeaks about their enemies, like Russia or China? They could do it using NGOs or even activists as a cover and they could expose WikiLeaks, if your organisation didn't publish their documents...
"We publish full information, pristine archives, verifiable. That often makes it inconvenient for propaganda purposes, because for many organisations you see the good and the bad, and that makes the facts revealed harder to spin. If we go back to the Iraq War in 2003, let's imagine US intelligence tried to leak us some of their internal reports on Iraq. Now we know from US intelligence reports that subsequently came out that there was internal doubt and scepticism about the claim that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even though there was intense pressure on the intelligence services at the political level to create reports that supported the rush towards the war, internally their analysts were hedging. The White House, Downing Street, the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN stripped off those doubts. If WikiLeaks had published those reports, these doubts would have been expressed and the war possibly adverted".

WikiLeaks published documents on Hillary Clinton and the US Democrats. How do you reply to those who accuse you of having helped to elect Mr. Trump?
"What is the allegation here exactly? We published what the Democratic National Committee, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, and Hillary Clinton herself were saying about their own campaign, which the American people read and were very interested to read, and assessed the elements and characters, and then they made a decision. That decision was based on Hillary Clinton's own words, her campaign manager's own words. That's democracy".

Do you agree with those who say that it was a hit job, because you hit Hillary Clinton when she was most vulnerable, during the final weeks of her campaign?
"No, we have been publishing about Hillary Clinton for many years, because of her position as Secretary of State. We have been publishing her cables since 2010 and her emails also. We are domain experts on Clinton and her post 2008 role in government. This is why it is natural for sources who have information on Hillary Clinton to come to us. They know we will understand its significance".

So Clinton is gone, has WikiLeaks won?
"We were pleased to see how much of the American public interacted with the material we published. That interaction was on both sides of politics, including those to the left of Hillary Clinton those who supported Bernie Sanders, who were able to see the structure of power within the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and how the Clintons had placed Debbie Wasserman Schultz to head up the DNC and as a result the DNC had tilted the scales of the process against Bernie Sanders".

What about Donald Trump? What is going to happen?
"If the question is how I personally feel about the situation, I am mixed: Hillary Clinton and the network around her imprisoned one of our alleged sources for 35 years, Chelsea Manning, tortured her according to the United Nations, in order to implicate me personally. According to our publications Hillary Clinton was the chief proponent and the architect of the war against Libya. It is clear that she pursued this war as a staging effort for her Presidential bid. It wasn't even a war for an ideological purpose. This war ended up producing the refugee crisis in Europe, changing the political colour of Europe, killing more than 40,000 people within a year in Libya, while the arms from Libya went to Mali and other places, boosting or causing civil wars, including the Syrian catastrophe. If someone and their network behave like that, then there are consequences. Internal and external opponents are generated. Now there is a separate question on what Donald Trump means".

What do you think he means?
"Hillary Clinton's election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States. Donald Trump is not a DC insider, he is part of the wealthy ruling elite of the United States, and he is gathering around him a spectrum of other rich people and several idiosyncratic personalities. They do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilising the pre-existing central power network within DC. It is a new patronage structure which will evolve rapidly, but at the moment its looseness means there are opportunities for change in the United States: change for the worse and change for the better".

In these ten years of WikiLeaks, you and your organisation have experienced all sorts of attacks. What have you learned from this warfare?
"Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire "international community". We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants".

You have spent six years under arrest and confinement, the UN established that you are arbitrarily detained, the UK appealed against the UN decision and lost, so this decision is now final. What is going to happen now?
"That's all politics, that's something that people cannot properly understand, unless they been through the legal system themselves in high-profile cases. This decision by the UN in my case is really an historical decision. What is someone to do when they are in a multi-jurisdictional conflict, that is politicised and involves big powers? There is too much pressure for domestic courts to resist, so you need an international court with representation from different countries which are not allied to each other to be able to come to a fair decision. That is what happened in my situation. Sweden and the United Kingdom have refused to implement this decision so far, of course it costs both Sweden and the UK on a diplomatic level and the question is how long they are willing to pay that cost".

After six years, the Swedish prosecutors questioned you in London, as you had requested from the beginning. What happens if you get charged, extradited to Sweden and then to the United States? Will WikiLeaks survive?
"Yes, we have contingency plans that you have seen in action when my Internet was cut off and while I was in prison before. An organisation like WikiLeaks cannot be structured such that a single person can be a point of failure in the organisation, it makes him or her a target".

Is the internet still cut off?
"The internet has been returned".

You've declared on more than one occasion that what you really miss after 6 years of arrest and confinement is your family. Your children gave you a present to make you to feel less alone: a kitten. Have you ever reconsidered your choices?
"Yes, of course. Fortunately I'm too busy to think about these things all the time. I know that my family and my children are proud of me, that they benefit in some ways from having a father who knows some parts of the world and has become very good in a fight, but in other ways they suffer".

One of the first times we met I noticed a book on your table: "The Prince" by Machiavelli. What have you learned about power in 10 years of WikiLeaks?
"My conclusion is that most power structures are deeply incompetent, staffed by people who don't really believe in their institutions and that most power is the projection of the perception of power. And the more secretively it works, the more incompetent it is, because secrecy breeds incompetence, while openness breeds competence, because one can see and can compare actions and see which one is more competent. To keep up these appearances, institutional heads or political heads such as presidents spend most of the time trying to walk in front of the train and pretending that it is following them, but the direction is set by the tracks and by the engine of the train. Understanding that means that small and committed organisations can outmanoeuvre these institutional dinosaurs, like the State Department, the NSA or the CIA".

http://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2016/12/23/news/assange_wikileaks-154754000/