Title: Vigil 17 — confirm not panel
Show: #Unity4J
Date: 2019-02-18
URL: https://youtu.be/R2FzEJrsqRQ
Duration: 42:00

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[00:05] I thought that I would get a fair trial and that's why I went as long as I did without taking a plea because I really believed that once I got in front of a jury they were going to see how ridiculous this was and I was going to be acquitted but what ended up happening and forgive me if I've told these stories before but I think they're important uh what the government did with me and what they will almost certainly do with Julian is to invoke something called sipa the classified information protection act that changes

[00:36] everything related to this trial so what happens is that all of the attorneys on both sides will have to be granted temporary security clearances and literally everything every scrap of information that comes up in the case is considered to be classified a classified document uh Julian would not even be allowed to meet with his attorneys in their offices all meetings would have to be either in the Justice Department

[01:08] secure conference room which is where I had to meet my attorneys every time or uh they would build a temporary secure area called a skiff inside the courthouse and they would bring Julian out of the holding cell provided that he's not granted bail and he would meet his attorneys in the courthouse it's very very difficult and it's especially difficult because you're not allowed to take notes on any of these documents

[01:39] they're classified and so you can't you can't jot something down your lawyers can't jot something down to jog their memories nothing you walk in they check you you don't have anything that you're carrying in with you and then when you come out they check you again and make sure you don't have anything you're coming out with that was one problem another problem is that there's something called a section six conversation I had never heard of this

[02:09] ever in my life until it was invoked in my case I had asked for 70 documents to be Declassified so that I could defend myself and that's what I needed I needed 70 documents with these 70 documents I was confident that I would be acquitted and so we made 70 SE motions for judge brinka to um review each one and we would hope declassify them so we blocked off two days for

[02:41] these hearings and we went into the courtroom and the judge said um I'm gonna make this easy for everybody and I'm going to deny all 70 of these motions and my lawyers jumped up objection your honor said my lead attorney said it'll be impossible for us to defend him if we don't have access to any of these documents these documents prove that this was a vindictive and selective prosecution which was one of our

[03:12] contentions the prosecutor jumped up and said your honor section six conversation I had never heard of that as soon as those words came out of his mouth my lawyers objected again and their objection was overruled and I said to one of the lawyers what's happening he said just a minute this is really important and then he said your honor at least let Council into the chambers you can leave the defendant out let us come into Chambers and she said motion denied so what it meant was that

[03:44] the prosecutors all six of them got to go into the judge's Chambers God knows what they told her in there because my lawyers weren't allowed in and then they came out and she said I am denying all 70 of these ions and then that was it she hit her gavel and it was the end of it we start walking out of the courtroom and I said to my lead attorney what just happened in there and he said uh we just lost the case that's what happened I said so now what do we do he said now we

[04:16] talk about a plea I told him I didn't do anything wrong I'm not taking a plea and he turned and he said you know what your problem is you think this is about Justice and it's not about Justice it's about mitigating damage and I took a plea a week later that's what I fear is going to happen to Julian it's not about Justice it's about mitigating damage because once they decide they're gonna get you they're gonna get you unless

[04:46] you're fortunate enough to be held up in an embassy someplace you know as bad as things are in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London they're not as bad as they are in adx Mar or adx Florence you know so I I fear not that Julian is going to be found guilty I think in a fair trial he would clearly be found not guilty he's a journalist but it won't be a fair trial

[05:16] the fix is in especially in this District the eastern district of Virginia I'll add one more thing I hired OJ simpsons's jury consultant he happened to be the uncle of my best friend's wife and so he did it pro bono he flew up to Washington from Dallas we got him a security clearance and he went through thousands and thousands of pages of classified documents finally when he finished we met all the attorneys I had

[05:48] 11 attorneys plus this guy we met to discuss strategy and he said listen take the deal if we were in any other District in America I would tell you let's go for it we're going to win this thing but the eastern district of Virginia you don't have a prayer your jury is going to be made up of people who are from or who have relatives with the CIA the FBI the defense department

[06:19] Homeland Security or intelligence Community contractors you don't stand a chance and so that's finally what made me take the deal again that's EX ly what I fear is going to happen with Julian you didn't you didn't stand a chance also because they wouldn't let your lawyers into the court into the judge's Chambers to look no and they could have told her anything uh in in that meeting they could have said that yeah that I had you know child pornography on my computer or I beat my

[06:50] wife or I I have a Russian passport and I'm G to flee the country God knows what they said to her back there but she came out and she said nothing doing no defense I want to ask you a bring but before that I just want to tell our audience that when you talked about mitigating damage in your case was the revelation of the truth that the United States was participating the CIA in in particular in torture correct so that got out and they wanted mitigate that damage in Julian's case they'd want to

[07:21] somehow mitigate the damage that they suffered from their own actions that were revealed in uh absolutely vetted and correct and true documents that were were leaked two week leaks and then published these are their crimes that Julian exposed right yeah exactly they're going to flip it around like they did with you was their crime of torture which is against us and international law that you exposed and then rather than the country rallying around to prosecute the officials in favor of that we've got one of them and responsible for it we've got one of them running the CIA right now Gina hospital

[07:53] and you were prosecuted just like Chelsea Manning who revealed video evidence of war crimes pretty much fasy evidence of a war crime he's the one who went to jail and was in solitary and pretty much suffered torture himself I wanted to ask you about before Brink him one one question about uh the skiff that you uh I was talking to Tom Drake he told me that they built indeed built one of those skips at the Baltimore courtroom Federal courthous in Baltimore where he was tried or was about to be tried is your a

[08:24] feeling if it was inside the courtroom or the justice department and you probably have no proof of this that your attorney client privilege would be violated that they'd somehow be listening in oh absolutely absolutely I I assumed from the very first day that uh that they were tracking everything we were we were discussing they were looking at exactly what cables we were we were uh reading or what we were printing uh or or even that they were going through our files when uh when we finally left for the day I just assumed

[08:56] that they had access to everything another not very discouraging fact now brinka would most likely in your opinion be the judge if there were a trial of Julian San correct yes it would be brinka over the course of many years she has reserved all national security cases for herself one thing about brinka really really loves to see her name in print it's not just National Security cases see in in most federal district courts uh you're assigned a case just based on whoever's uh turn it

[09:28] is right they're just assigned one after the other after the other in the eastern district of Virginia the judges pick and choose what cases they want to hear and then the cases that really nobody wants and they're usually minor cases are generally given to the um the more Junior federal judges I forget the name um but brinka takes all the all the National Security cases she had mine she had Jeffree Sterling's she had Zacharias mousawi she has Ed Snowden and now we know thanks to this mistake that justice

[09:59] department made that they have that she has Julian as well well she also has another high-profile case or had one that was high-profile until very recently a woman bought a a painting at a yard sale for $5 and it looked very much like a Monae like an original Monae and as it turned out it was an original Monae and it had been stolen from the the Walker Art Museum in Baltimore in the 1950s and it was in somebody's house for a half a century they died

[10:30] and uh it ended up in this yard sale and it sold for five bucks well the museum wanted their painting back and this woman said no I bought this painting for five bucks and it's going in my living room and the museum sued her judge brinka assigned the case to herself because there was so much media interest in this long lost Masterpiece from Monae that she knew she'd be in the post every day and she was she was in the post every day that this trial went on and then the museum got there painting back

[11:00] but that's what she does you know she she very discreetly Mak sure that she stays in the news and what better case to keep her in the news every single day than Julian Assange yeah I want to add one more thing about brinka um she has this she has this kind of uh kind of a tick uh it's something that she repeats over and over and over again with every defendant uh when she hands down sentence and it

[11:31] doesn't matter if it's a day or if it's a hundred years she says that it's fair and appropriate and if you sit in her courtroom you'll hear her repeat it in every single case fair and appropriate well on the day of my sentencing I was the last person to be sentenced so I sat there for hours waiting to be sentenced everybody in front of me had a federal drug case uh one of them was this major trafficker from Thailand and most of them were just guys who were smoking

[12:02] weed at the eima or whatever um and then there were a couple who were undocumented now if you got caught smoking weed at the eima she gave you a year and a day if you were an undocumented immigrant you were going to get three to five years followed by deportation well she would hand out these what I consider to be Draconian drug sentences and children are crying and clinging at their fathers and the wives

[12:33] are crying and she's splitting up these families right there in front of you and as they're wailing in court she just leans forward and she says that sentence is fair and appropriate well there's there's nothing fair or appropriate about destroying families deliberately destroying families uh because a guy was smoking a joint you're gonna you're G to make it so he doesn't see his children for the next 20 years you're going to deport him to a country that he doesn't even know anymore but that's what brinka does

[13:04] she's uh she's a hanging judge what was her fair and appropriate sentence in York John well that's a good question uh in in my case she deemed 10 years to be fair and appropriate but my attorneys had negotiated something called an 11 c1c plea which meant that it was written in stone and it had been agreed to with the prosecutors and that was for for two and a half years 30 months so in the sentence or in the

[13:36] sentencing phase in the hearing she said that she had been a judge since 1986 she had been a prosecutor before that and she had never had an 11 c1c plea and she looked at me and she said into the microphone I don't like it I don't like it one bit and if I could I would sentence you to 10 years in prison but she couldn't so she accepted the two and a half and I counted my blessings did you just serve the entire

[14:07] two and a half yeah I I got I got no halfway house time off at all not one hour of halfway house time I did the whole stretch and it was because I um I wrote a Blog from prison called letters from Loretto it became my second book and uh I continued to exposed waste Fraud and Abuse at the prison and in the Bureau of Prisons it enraged them they tried repeatedly to throw me into solitary I told them go

[14:40] ahead I said I've been nose toose with Al-Qaeda with Hezbollah with the Iranians and I'm supposed to be afraid of your solitary in Loretto Pennsylvania please I said give me a little bit of credit and they would back off they always backed off and then one time um one of the guards mentioned to a friend friend of mine that the reason that they kept threatening me and then not doing anything was that I had access to the media and they were afraid that if they sent me to solitary that CNN would be waiting for them in the parking lot and

[15:11] they just wouldn't be able to answer so it saved that's interesting that leads you to that leads you to the next question I want to ask you how did uh your revelation of torture when the Tria went on obviously that had to be front and center so uh whether you were convicted or not the public got to hear I would think if the Press covered the trial fairly that America was torturing now uh since you serve time we don't hear about that

[15:42] that's not in the public conscious that just F fades in to the normal life that we live just the way surveillance and all of snowden's Revelations were maybe a shock when they came out for a while but now it's just part of the fabric of our lives in the US that we're being surveilled uh illegally uh what lasting effect uh if any did your revelation of America torturing have and how much do you blame the media if there hasn't been any oh I I do blame the media the mainstream media anyway

[16:13] uh you know my Revelations LED and and these are not my words these are John McCain's words my Revelations led to the McCain Feinstein Amendment uh which says that it bans torture it doesn't actually ban torture what it does is it it makes um it makes all national security interrogations uh fall under the uh Army Field Manual okay and the Army Field Manual is very clear about what you're allowed to do in an interrogation and what you're not allowed to do but that's

[16:43] an executive document and so if you want to bring back a torture program and do it legally all you have to do is change the Army Field Manual and any president can do that with a stroke of a pen you don't need any congressional action so I think that my don't say that John Trump may be listen yeah yeah he may not know he could do that you're right right so you know at least we we haven't had a torture program since I went public that that made it

[17:15] worthwhile but you're right Joe the the public doesn't really care when Gina haspel was named CIA director uh The Washington Post called me and they asked me if I would write an oped uh in opposition to the nomination did it gladly and they gave me 1,200 words on the front page of the Sunday opinion section major Soap Box uh it led to a half a dozen death threats uh it was a

[17:45] big mess but I got my side of the story out and then even Rand Paul called me and asked me to go up to his office the next day which I did to strategize on how to defeat this nomination uh the democ rats went soft at the end the likes of of Mark Warner and Joe Mansion they went soft and Gina haspel became CIA director uh but the story just went away it just went away quietly and now what pains me the most is if you look at

[18:16] public opinion polls a clear majority of Americans uh support a torture program after all these years after all these Revelations after exposure of of these monstrous things that being done to human beings a majority of Americans supports a torture program that's the most disappointing thing to me and I and I do blame the mainstream media for that because they could have jumped on this issue and they did not Le U one thing you said was that

[18:46] this uh law that came out of your case banned Against torture it's was already banned yeah by the convention Against torture that's right you notal treaty signed by Senate uh ratified by the Senate which automatically becomes US law so what did they ban they ban something they it's like Banning murder again I don't get Yes again forgive me if I sound like a broken record but uh not only are we signatories to the to the United Nations convention Against torture we were actually the the drafters the authors of that convention

[19:18] besides that we have a federal law in this country called the federal anti-torture Act of 1946 and it specifically B and those things that we were doing to prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu gra in 1946 we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS We that was a death penalty charge to waterboard somebody in January 1968 The Washington

[19:49] Post ran a front page photograph of an American Soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner the day that that picture ran Robert mcamera who was Secretary of Defense at the time ordered an investigation that Soldier was arrested he was charged with torture convicted and sentenced to 20 years at lenworth well the law never changed over all those years never so I always contended that it made no sense for something to be a crime in

[20:20] 1946 and a crime in 1968 and then perfectly legal in 2002 and made no sense it was it was a bastardization without any changes any legislation overturning it of course correct you said there is there's no torture program now well do you need a program to torture people no is there freelance torturing freelance torturing going on yeah there's a lot of freelance torturing I mean we we have no idea

[20:50] really what our soldiers are doing on any given day in Afghanistan or in Syria or in Yemen or Somalia or any of the other 100 plus countries where they happen to be we have no idea you know we we get information out in drips and drabs like this uh soldier in Afghanistan who was questioning an Al-Qaeda suspect or Taliban suspect really is what he was and then as he was taking him back out of the base to take him back to his village saw a one of the sources who was from the same Village

[21:20] and rather than expose The Source our soldier took his guy out and shot him in the head and buried him in a shallow grave and is shocked he's shocked he's been charged with murder well that kind of thing happens all the time we just never hear about it so I I would call that in part a torture program John what do you think is worse from from the government's point of VI us government's point of view your revelation of torture or the revelations of WikiLeaks and how

[21:50] would Assange be treated by that judge and depending on your answer I I don't think that either one of them were bad I I think Julian's Revelations were more embarrassing and that's really the question here we know now with with hindsight that literally nothing that Julian revealed led to any kind of a long-term problem for the United States it didn't expose sources and methods it didn't

[22:21] expose excuse me it didn't expose uh the names of confidential informants it it it didn't jeopardize relationships it exposed crimes uh and there's actually a law in this country saying that it's illegal to classify a program that is a crime you can't legally classify something just to keep yourself from being embarrassed by it and Julian embarrassed them so I think that his case is more important

[22:52] for the government than mine was I would also say that I agree with uh Garland in that they don't want Julian to mount a defense they're going to want him to uh to take a plea and to keep his mouth shut because God knows the damage that Julian could cause them in court you know my my attorneys early on in my case raised uh something called the issue of gry male not black male but it's kind of gray and what that meant is or was in my

[23:26] case look I was at the C for 15 years half of that was in counterterrorism operations which is the ugliest bloodiest part of CIA operations horrible things happen in counterterrorism you see horrible things war crimes crimes against humanity human rights violations and you keep your mouth shut because it's wartime things like that happen you convince yourself to keep your mouth shut well it's the same thing with Julian God knows what

[23:56] Julian knows from all the different documents that he's seen the the government can't be confident that Wikileaks has released literally everything and they're G to be afraid that Julian's gonna get up on the stand to defend himself and he's going to reveal more classified information now that's going to force the government to the negotiating table because the last thing they want is Julian on the stand testifying on his own behalf probably won't happen you said

[24:27] that after uh there's no official torture program in part because of your Revelations but so in other words there are no black sites perhaps although it could still be going on yeah yeah right I think that's you had some impact yes you had some impact though in the end you served two and a half years in prison unjustly but you did in the end do something that may have been worth it for you uh because there's at least been uh an ending of official Geor go Kan

[25:00] told the New York Times in um 2015 that it was only because of my Revelations that that the McCain Feinstein Amendment uh passed and indeed it took eight years after my Revelations for McCain Feinstein to pass but he said that that had I not said anything um the American people would not have known that we were torturing prisoners so that that made it all worthwhile you know John McCain was wrong on 99% of his policies but on torture he was he was completely right

[25:32] well for obvious reasons because he if he hadn't experienced it himself maybe he wouldn't have been that's right now uh Trump on the campaign Trail and in debates in the primaries Anyway said that he wanted to bring back worse than water watering he said water boarding hell of a lot worse hell of a lot worse now the guy's a big BS artist we know that he's always exaggerating everything everything's great everything's big everything's going to be worse uh but still you say that he has not brought

[26:03] back an official torture program even with M hpel at the helm in Langley this is quite extraordinary we don't really know do we we don't know um she was questioned at length on this issue in her nomination hearing her confirmation hearing before the Senate uh intelligence committee uh publicly and I I would assume privately as well and um she actually made a reference to my Revelations saying that

[26:33] in the end she realized and the organization realized that the program was probably not legal that's as that's as good of an admission as we're going to get from bloody G hasel but um yeah but she she told lawmakers uh in including Republicans that there would be no torture program on her watch that that was a A Dark Day for the agenc see that the program was conceived and implemented in the in the ugly days post

[27:04] 911 and that it wasn't coming back now we're gonna have to take her word for it I suppose and rely on the media to uh to make sure that she is telling the truth and continues to tell the truth but officially as it stands now there are no black sites uh anywhere but you know what Joe that's not to say you don't really need a black site in order to torture somebody what you do is a an extraordinary rendition now a rendition is if I if I'm

[27:35] in Pakistan and you're an Egyptian and I catch you in Pakistan I send you back to Egypt because you're Egyptian that's that's an extraordinary Rend I mean that's a rendition an extraordinary rendition is if I'm in Pakistan you're an Egyptian I catch you and I send you to Israel for interrogation or Syria or Li and I say to those intelligence guys don't torture him right and you wink don't torture him but uh whatever he

[28:07] says send us a memo and let us know give us the transcript that's an extraordinary rendition those are illegal but the CIA has never come out to say we don't do extraordinary Renditions they've never said that they don't do them uh while your Revelations had had some effect positive as McCain has said and others as you've laid out here what about the revelations of Julian Assange the of the we of WikiLeaks of the war crimes committed

[28:38] has that had would that have had any impact on the US no longer committing war crimes I don't see it myself what do you think no I don't think so either I as terrible as that sounds I mean what Julian exposed being a being a video in my opinion was so much more impactful than what I exposed uh because you could see it and then you could keep going back to it on on YouTube that you're watching a war

[29:11] crime unfold before your eyes that should have led to statutory changes it should have have led to to uh Military Officers going to prison it should have led to people being reduced in rank it should have led to policy changes and none of those things happened none of them the government through the media was able to turn the debate to make the debate about Wikileaks and not about the war crimes that Wikileaks uh uh

[29:44] exposed and one could argue that war crimes are worse than torture even of a higher order and it's had no impact and another thing that we should have seen was editorials in the New York Times on the Washington Post insisting that those people responsible the pilots their superiors whoever was responsible be prosecuted and charged at the US never do this again and instead they've turned around and also made it about now Assange personally to smear him when they once profited from his work

[30:15] including in those days because it made the Bush Administration look bad this is my view uh now that he's made the Democrats Hillary in particular look bad he's he's got to be attacked and SM weed and lost in all this or the war crimes that were revealed it is just accepted now there's been no change or any impact at least in your case there's been at least an official disbanding of an official program of torture whether it carries on or not in in the revelations of weeks and there was so many films and

[30:47] documents but the premier one is this video you're talking about I would think you'd have to say that shows in Action a primas evidence of War crime there's been no impact at all and the media has turned against this guy yes which is just unbelievable to me shocking shocking and disappointing I agree I have a question on that for for John and that is um what do you you're mentioning the the way in which you know torture and and that was exposed in previous decades was prosecuted what do you think

[31:19] has has changed the culture around that to the point where now there is no prosecution about it and and in fact you're you were the one that was prosecuted for revealing it is there any specific reason that you can think of or multiple yeah oh yeah it it was 911 911 was so traumatic inside the CIA it was such a colossal intelligence failure every CIA officer in that building felt at the time that he had the blood of 2,000 Americans on his hands um you know

[31:52] you're paid to do one thing and that's protect the country and you fail utterly and completely and then at the same time just after 911 Osama Bin Laden released a statement saying that that Al-Qaeda was planning an attack that would dwarf 911 and we had to believe him so um so people went completely overboard in just ignoring the law the rule of law human rights civil liberties they just did

[32:23] away with them I naively believed at the time that it was a pendulum and the Pendulum would swing back in the proper direction back toward a respect for human rights and civil liberties and that just never happened what happened instead was organiza organizations like the CIA the NSA the FBI at all um saw this new found Authority and said oh this is better than we've ever had it we're never giving this up and so they began doing or CIA and NSA began doing

[32:55] what Jay Edgar Hoover had perfected in the 30s 40s and 50s and that is going to Congress every year and scaring the out of members of Congress about threats against the country and then demanding ridiculous increases in budgets and then getting it I remember going up to kofer Black one day kofer became Ambassador kofer black but he was the director of the cia's counterterrorism center and this was about uh three four months after 911 and I I caught him in

[33:27] the hall and I said kofer I just need one minute I have an idea for an operation that I want to do and he put up his hands and he said whatever it is just do it I have so much money I can't possibly spend it all and so I did it there was no oversight there was no board that I had to argue before there was no chain of command that I needed to get permissions from I just did it I booked myself a business class ticket and I went and did it just like that and the CIA likes it

[34:01] when nobody's looking over their shoulders that's incredible what it was he did not want to know what it was you told him what you were gonna do no no no he didn't even know what he didn't care but it was you know was it to capture Arabs go go do it another thing too uh do you remember the movie The Kingdom with Jamie Fox and a couple of other big stars well there's a scene there are two scenes in that that movie one is where an FBI agent is going to go to Saudi

[34:32] Arabia to investigate a terrorist attack that killed his best friend and as he's leaving um the best friend's Widow Whispers into his ear kill them all and at the end of the film where he's found the Mastermind of the attack he shoots this guy and the guy's granddaughter kneels down and she's crying oh ABA you're shot you're dying

[35:02] and he tells her my daughter grow up and kill them all and when I was leaving for Pakistan to head counter terrorism uh operations there as I was leaving the guys in my Branch were shaking my hand you know godspeed good luck be careful and my boss leaned forward and he said kill them all and I remember thinking my God is this what we've come to and it it it was that's what we had come

[35:33] to wow that's uh quite interesting I hope that doesn't classified stuff you're telling us here John it's all in book number one it's not classified they told you to that they told you to kill them all is not a classified uh order you you're allowed to go and do whatever you want um Tom Dr Drake told me a story you reminded me of Tom Drake of course being The Whistleblower from the NSA who first revealed the wireless

[36:05] wire tapping in the Baltimore Sun they almost put him in jail but he stuck to his guns and the government knew they didn't have a case and they dropped it in the end he told told me that right after a couple of days after 911 that his Superior that he was working with she was number three in the agen in the agency in the NSA went around talked to the Troops you know the low level grunts working the surveillance and to try to keep the spirits up after 911 and uh they were

[36:35] quite upset as Drake was that they'd failed the country they took their job seriously about providing Security National Security to the American people and they were upset that they'd failed that they had not discovered this 911 plot before it happened and she apparently said according to Tom uh would this was the best thing that ever ever could happen to the agency you know how much money we're going to get oh yeah absolutely and they were shock absolutely that story tells you a little bit about uh in these agencies FBI NSA

[37:08] probably at CIA there are lower level people who who actually believe what they're supposed to be doing and want to do the job to protect the US and inevitably a lot higher level folks don't see it that way and have been known to quash investigations if they're getting too close to tful interest or whatever and just like Sabel Edmond's story if you know is that she her investigation that she had started uh was stopped by the FBI and I talked to I worked on that talked to an FBI agent at

[37:40] his home outside Denver and he more or less confirmed that that was true that they were shocked that they were told to stand out so was that the same with the CIA as well were they idealistic agents or is it more corrupt in the FBI than the NSA I found the corruption like Tom like Tom Drake did I found the corruption to come from the the management levels at the CIA and not not the lower management I mean I was I was a branch chief uh what three times it wasn't at my level but it was above that at the um at the

[38:12] level of division Chief or office director or the deputy directors uh of the CIA it was all politics for them they weighed everything W uh against how it would play at the White House and how would it play on Capitol Hill and then at the deputy director level up at the top they've kind of sort of worried about whether or not it was legal or if we could argue successfully that it was legal even if it was clearly illegal you know there are so many ways to twist

[38:44] words and phrases and and say that up is down and night is day and if they think that they can pull that off they go for it but yeah I I my experience at the agency was very very similar to Tom's experience at NSA yeah well that's what I expected so to sum up what we were saying uh while you're whistleblowing did lead to some concrete um changes uh you don't think that Wikileaks or do you think Wikileaks Revelations of war crimes and other um

[39:17] malians by the US government will lead to any kind of changes it will just be accepted and continue as normal yeah I think that's the unfortunate case and I think it's because Julian has been portrayed in the mainstream media even by the recipients of his Revelations um as as a criminal it's crazy the way it happened it's crazy he's a Russian mole he was a a a republican um asset that was used to

[39:51] uh deny Hillary Clinton the presidency you hear all kinds of stupid crazy scenarios but uh yeah the mainstream media I think has forsaken him and because of that we won't see uh substantive changes no and and they want to make sure that nobody else ever tries that again they're also as Elizabeth has been saying they've been using him to promote and further this Russia gate story absolutely yeah and I think that it's

[40:23] interesting it's not just the media it's also entities that um describe themselves as U media like unbiased Arbiters of of bias like media bias fact check these organizations will label Wikileaks as known associates of of the Kremlin and Putin they'll label them as providing inaccurate or mixed accuracy in their information but then they'll at the same time label the Atlantic Council totally unbiased and totally reliable so I think that there is definitely e an

[40:53] effort to smear Julian Assange not just in the media but in across all sorts of different organizations so that the public doesn't trust what Wikileaks published for sure well that's the essence of it then right to question theity of the of any new Revelations that come out definely that's that's uh disturbing that executive order by the way that John referred to is 13526 and it was signed by Barack Obama which says that the government no nobody in Government Can classify a document if

[41:25] it covers up a crime that's being committed or even embarrassment So based on that order jul son should be able to walk out of the embassy tomorrow because all he's done is reveal crimes and embarrassment and um that's not a crime then under Obama's executive order because uh it wasn't shouldn't have been classified to begin with so if it wasn't classified he's not revealed classified information [Music]
