Amelia Hill is a Dirty Liar 1172

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The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.

This is easy to show. Read through Hill’s “report”. Then zip to 20 minutes and 55 seconds of the recording of Assange speaking at the event Hill misreports, and simply listen to the applause from the Oxford Union after Assange stops speaking.

Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.

Much of what Hill wrote is not journalism at all. What does this actually mean?

“His critics were reasoned, those who queued for over an hour in the snow to hear him speak were thoughtful. It was Julian Assange – the man at the centre of controversy – who refused to be gracious.”

Hill manages to quote five full sentences of the organiser of the anti-Assange demonstration (which I counted at 37 people) while giving us not one single sentence of Assange’s twenty minute address. Nor a single sentence of Tom Fingar, the senior US security official who was receiving the Sam Adams award. Even more remarkably, all three students Hill could find to interview were hostile to Assange. In a hall of 450 students who applauded Assange enthusiastically and many of whom crowded round to shake my hand after the event, Hill was apparently unable to find a single person who did not share the Rusbridger line on Julian Assange.

Hill is not a journalist – she is a pathetic grovelling lickspittle who should be deeply, deeply ashamed.

Here is the answer to the question about cyber-terrorism of which Amelia Hill writes:

“A question about cyber-terrorism was greeted with verbose warmth”

As you can see, Assange’s answer is serious, detailed, thoughtful and not patronising to the student. Hill’s characterisation – again without giving a word of Assange’s actual answer – is not one that could genuinely be maintained. Can anybody – and I mean this as a real question – can anybody look at that answer and believe that “Verbose warmth” is a fair and reasonable way to communicate what had been said to an audience who had not seen it? Or is it just an appalling piece of hostile propaganda by Hill?

The night before Assange’s contribution at the union, John Bolton had been there as guest speaker. John Bolton is a war criminal whose actions deliberately and directly contributed to the launching of an illegal war which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Yet there had not been one single Oxford student picketing the hosting of John Bolton, and Amelia Hill did not turn up to vilify him. My main contribution to the Sam Adams event was to point to this as an example of the way people are manipulated by the mainstream media into adopting seriously warped moral values.

Amelia Hill is one of the warpers, the distorters of reality. The Guardian calls her a “Special Investigative Correspondent.” She is actually a degraded purveyor of lies on behalf of the establishment. Sickening.

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1,172 thoughts on “Amelia Hill is a Dirty Liar”

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  • Clark

    Interesting section from Amelia Hill’s article:

    Rachel Savage, a 22-year-old PPE student then asked: “What would you say to the protesters outside who say your appearance tonight diminishes the seriousness of rape and sexual assault?”
    Assange half closed his eyes and sighed. “I heard there was a protest but we sent our cameras out there before joining you tonight and there were 28 supporters of me and of no one else.”
    Before the event, however, there had been at least 50 protesters and no supporters of Assange to be seen. After the ceremony, security staff confirmed they had not seen anyone defending the WikiLeaks founder all evening.

    There were about twenty eight supporters of Julian Assange at the London counter-protest (including Arbed and myself), and reportedly none at Oxford.

  • Clark

    Sorry, I should have expounded thus:

    …so when Assange said “but we sent our cameras out there before joining you tonight”, he presumably meant “outside this embassy”.

  • Clark

    Arbed, I’m concerned that those of us that supported Assange in London may have been manipulated. We were expecting a group of anti-Assange demonstrators to arrive outside the Ecuadorian embassy, but the group never arrived.

    Assange said “…and no one else”. In fact, there was one, with whom a group of us had quite a good debate. He, too, was apparently expecting a group from Oxford, and was trying to get word from them via some sort of mobile ‘phone.

  • craig Post author

    Clark

    Julian did say there was one anti-Assange demonstrator.

    I think this exchange was a genuine misunderstanding – the student who asked the question was referring to the small protest in Oxford, which Assange had no means of seeing. He was, as you say, referring to the expected but actually only one man protest at the Embassy. The misunderstanding was obvious to me at the moment it happened.

  • Clark

    Thanks Craig. What I want to know now is the origin of the story that an Oxford Union pro-extradition protest would arrive outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Presumably, the lone pro-extradition campaigner has some idea. He engaged in conversation along the lines of “where are they, when will they arrive”? I now wish that I could remember the details better.

    Craig, was the hall at Oxford full to capacity? Can we assume that all that oppose the extradition of Assange were in the hall? That would explain the apparent lack of a counter-protest at Oxford, especially considering the cold weather; if they could have got in, they probably would have.

  • John Goss

    The whole of MSM is owned and manipulated. Even as so many once great newspapers are on the brink of bankruptcy an unseen force bails these organs out just because of the importance of media control. No wonder the days of ‘publish and be damned’ with real stories are well and truly damned! Amelia Hill is not the problem. She is just a tool of the problem. She is called an ‘investigative journalist’ but she does not know what honest investigative journalism is and is clearly there to suck instead of blow the big trombone.

  • Jonangus Mackay

    @Craig:
    .
    “Hill moved propaganda to downright lies,” you say. “This is easy to show.”
    .
    Not on my computer it isn’t, or on my mobile device—or, it seems, on most other people’s. Moments after JA opens his mouth in your first YouTube insert, the sound goes dead. After numerous attempts to access a functioning version, I now concede defeat. Seems numerous frustrated folk have been complaining about this for days.
    .
    Given that:
    .
    1) This could be fixed in a matter of minutes.
    .
    2) Hack Hill’s report of the event is mysteriously fixed so it doesn’t take comments.
    .
    3) US war criminal Bolton (!) visited the scene the night before.
    .
    4) No signs whatever on the OxU website of your own no doubt discomfiting but fascinating contribution to the evening’s proceedings.
    .
    I conclude that had God not meant us to be suspicious, He wouldn’t have invented conspiracy theorists.

  • Arbed

    Clark, here’s your answer to the query of where the idea there would be a London protest came from: the protest organisers had two Facebook pages, one each for the Oxford and London protests.

    http://chirpstory.com/li/48502

    This twitter Chirpstory was put together for the record when the protest organisers later tried to deny there was ever meant to be a protest outside the Ecuadorian embassy (amongst other lies). I love it when peeps get caught out in their whoppers like that 😉

    And here is a rather good analysis of Amelia Hill’s porkies:

    Analysis: The Guardian’s obsession with sullying the reputation of Julian Assange

    http://wikileaksetc.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-guardians-obsession-with-sullying.html

    And – bonus treat – for real students of the genre, this is a wonderful, in-depth analysis of the Guardian’s poisonous campaign from right back in December 2010 (with some very intriguing timelines/dates…):

    Propaganda in Grey or Black: Vendetta against WikiLeaks, the ‘Liberal’ Press and Films that Threaten History

    http://marthamitchelleffect.org/#/cases-of-the-old-media-2/4572966061

    It seems from the author’s twitter feed that kind-hearted souls keep sending them new bits of research to add into the whole nasty tale, so the article is still a work-in-progess and may well have been added to since I last read it (yesterday).

    A long read, but worth it. When it’s all put together like this, even I’m shocked at the lengths to which the Guardian has gone to smear Assange and Wikileaks. And I’ve been following the whole story so long I didn’t think I could be shocked by it anymore…

  • Jonangus Mackay

    Thanks, Mary. Cleared cache, switched to a different browser. Still doesn’t work. People, as I say, have been complaining about this for days. The OxU careerists, tireless self-publicists & sycophants responsible choose not to find time to fix it.
    .
    Why no sign on their website of their footage of Craig’s contribution? Because they suppose no one in their right mind would be in the least bit interested? Note that they’ve been falling over themselves to insist that they didn’t actually organise the event, but were merely ‘hosting’ it. Remember Mr Murray’s last-minute disinvitation a while back from the New Statesman’s whistleblower-Assange-athon at Kensington Town Hall? That was mounted by over-weening careerist Jason Cowley, who did, however, manage to find space on his platform at the last minute for an F.O. mouthpiece. Is it any wonder CM seems convinced he’s repeated victim of behind the scenes censorship? I’m not suggesting conspiracy. Careerism unaided works wonders.

  • mike

    Glad to see you better, Craig.

    The mainstream love to attack Assange because, once the feeding frenzy over Wikileaks’ astonishing cache of documents had abated, the media, I think, realised that the narrative Wikileaks had revealed was of a very shadowy world, one whose workings belied the offically-sanctioned guff that those same media outlets routinely peddle as truth.
    Or, in short, Wikileaks were and are doing the job the media should be doing – holding power to account.

  • Mary

    Brilliant work Arbed.

    You say..A long read, but worth it. When it’s all put together like this, even I’m shocked at the lengths to which the Guardian has gone to smear Assange and Wikileaks..

    We can easily see why but from where do the orders for these character assassinations come? By a direct line from Washington or from Whitehall via Vauxhall?

    btw did you see my link the other day to the Maestro Rusbridger tinkling on his pricey Fazioli pianos(s) while this s**t goes on under his watch?

    http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/01/uzbek-cotton-slavery-campaign/comment-page-5/#comment-391119

  • Richard

    I think the sound problem is a simple mistake. Having worked with radio (and tie-clip) mics before (as the recordist), I think that shortly into his speech, Julian’s Mic fell off, and instead of picking up from his collar, it was picking up from a few feet lower. Annoying, but such things happen, and quite frequently.

  • thatcrab

    “Cleared cache, switched to a different browser. Still doesn’t work.”
    It suffers from the same audio problem. It must have been done to the original video track because all copys are affected. 20 seconds into it they altered the audio so that opposite sound is playing through each stereo channel. If it is combined to play as mono, the opposite sounds cancel out producing silence, it has to be listened to in stereo. The YT version might have had a subtle effect applied which leaves some sound. Depending on your sound device, shifting balance to one side might play it in mono (use the volume/mixer controls).

  • David

    I see they’re discussing this post over at Medialens

    “Craig Murray Pulls no Punches”

    http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1359567310.html

    and yes, someone did manage to get a link to this post in some other Guardian piece by this airhead.

    I see the disgraced Emma Brockes is back on the scene too. Normally if people are shit at their job, in this area, they’re sacked, so she must have been doing her job well, it’s just that The Guardian wants to pretend that that job is other than it is.

  • Fred

    “They would say that wouldn’t they?”

    It does happen to be true. Hard to believe I know, a politician telling the truth but it does happen sometimes.

  • Jonangus Mackay

    @Richard:
    .
    Twaddle. I too, for what it’s worth, have spent years in sound studios. Look at the screen. Assange’s mic is visibly & firmly in place on his right lapel throughout the silent segment. That’s not the origin of the problem; many, including our host, have been able to hear what he’s saying. The Oxford Union has acknowledged that there is a fault on their upload. The significant thing is that they’ve so far not bothered to fix it.

  • Arbed

    Mary said:

    “btw did you see my link the other day to the Maestro Rusbridger tinkling on his pricey Fazioli pianos(s) while this s**t goes on under his watch?”

    I did, Mary, and I concur with Jonangus’ assessment above: “It’s now appropriate for Rusbridger to drag his head away from his piano. And dangle it over that nearby canal in shame.”

  • Jonangus Mackay

    @David: On past showing, it would appear the division of labour is as follows: Ms Brockes does Chomsky, Ms Hill does Assange. The Guardian was compelled, months later, to issue an apology for its publication of Brockes’ efforts to warm the cockles of Uncle Sam’s rusty old iron heart. I fear it will be some time, if ever, before Hill’s (careerist) lies are similarly brought to proper public attention.

  • David

    Yes, Jonangus. The only positive thing is that not only are there so many more sources of information that expose the lies of these hacks but there are now many more ways of organising and actively displaying the poverty of their minds. Their propaganda is becoming less and less powerful and they seem unable to deal with that other than censorship, in terms of both comments in this case and as Julian was saying state attempts at censorship of the internet itself. That desperation of both is becoming more and more palpable, and the harder they try the more they expose the truth of what they’re up to. Ultimately the increasing desperation of their means undermine their ends.

    Anyway, here’s a real journalist from the old days explaining something of topical interest:

    “An anti-Semite today is a truth-telling person Jews who support the Zionist state of Israel RIGHT OR WRONG not only dislike but want to silence.”

    http://www.alanhart.net/anti-semitism-what-it-is-and-is-not/#more-2236

  • Brendan

    Craig Murray has been linked to on Wikileaks twitter feed. Expect trolling to commence. Hi Trolls! We love you!

    The worst I could say of the Assange interview is that he looked tired, a little ill actually, not surprising given he is stuck in an embassy. But otherwise he defended his work in his usual articulate manner, and was generally polite, answering questions put to him as best he could. The worst I could say of this article is that it was the writing of an angry, not especially talented 6th former.

    http://wikileaksetc.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/the-guardians-obsession-with-sullying.html

    This goes over similar ground. I’m afraid I no longer really understand The Guardian’s position. Assange did go on to call them ‘PPE students who somehow write for The Guardian’, which was a little waspish, and quite funny, but small beer really. I imagine certain fast-tracked journalists see their career being enhanced by these attacks on Assange. Firstly, I think they are wrong. Even if they are right, it’s still pathetic.

    One other point. I’m afraid that it seem to often be female journalists who out the boot in, not always of course, but often enough for me to raise an eyebrow. I’m not sure why this would be. Perhaps they see this line of journalism as a way to break the glass ceiling, but I’d think this was too simple. I suspect female journalists are the ones being asked to do the articles, interviews, because Assange is deemed to have a problem with women. I don’t know, but it’s odd.

    Personally, I believe that The Guardian has changed drastically – and changed really quite recently. Over the last few years. Maybe I’m mythologizing the previous incarnation of The Guardian, but I don’t recall it being quite this bad. And the recent Liberal Intervention Propaganda on Mali\Wherever has been Daily Mail standard horseshit, too.

  • Emmy

    Hi there! New here :-), Hi Clark we briefly met outside the Ecuadorian Embassy on the 23rd. There were two journalists present: Nicolas March from Cherwell (Oxford Student online paper) and Maxwell Ward student journalist from City University London Broadcasting (in house Radio/TV). There was someon called Fell, I asked him if he was a protester and he said no but he was lying as I saw his comments on the FB Protest page here http://www.facebook.com/events/534468209910745/ (Alex Felltir Sunderland) then he gave an interview to Maxwell Ward ::-). Here are a couple of videos, embarrassing in quality but priceless as a momento. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVYjG6RgQyE & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ9VtDtXgZs

    Amelia Hill in this article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/9296954/Phone-Hacking-Guardian-journalist-and-Met-Police-detective-will-not-face-charges.html appears to have worked closely to Nick Davis, and I think we know were he stands on the WikiLeaks story.

    Many thanks Craig for putting the message across so aptly, and I see you are seconded by Annie Machon in her article ‘Lies damned lies…’ on her blog.

  • nevermind

    Arbed your links have made my morsel sing, what a peach, thanks, the feed back on the blog was just so telling.

    Just to prose around, this blog is humming when bees are dying.

    Sorry this is OT, but it goes to the heart of the food chain.
    Tonight the FSA has lost all of its legitimacy, a mere shadow of its former self it had to admit that they lost control and were reliant on informants to get their information of breaches to their regulations with regards to the horse meat scandal and other haphazard regulations

    Why they don’t give a major grant to Hillside animal sanctuary and their excellent sleuthing with regards to animal cruelty and breaches of regulations as they exist, its their investigative teams that are getting the evidence of shady marketing practises.

    Consumers have been eating burgers with roughly 1/3rd. of horse meat, which could, or could not have been horse meat treated with phenylbutazone, a known drug to cause cancer in humans.

    For a year! This is not a time to throw money at the FSA, but to0 scrap it and use its ‘resources’ to shape a new DNA regime that guides our premature retailers.

    This said, I would like horse burgers, sized, priced advertised as such, but not sold under the pretence that its beef, its much better than that. ideally, I’d like the horse meat from wild and Gypsy horses,untreated with antibiotics and growth hormones, or phenylbutazone.

    To reject horse meat from the food chain is highly hypocritical when one considers high wagers on horses that come to grief at Becher’s Brook and are….. disposed off by the local knackers yard and then>>>>

    It is red meat, slightly sweet but without much fat, the wilder the tastier, its a non issue due to its connotations, but it has always been eaten by man, a nutritious resource and food.

    Why should horse meat not be consumed for the sake of pampered attitudes.
    Stil, the FSA has provided the mantle of control and H&S in the wake of the BSE scandal andit has failed the public perceptive opinions.

  • Clark

    Craig or Iain Orr, you’re the people to ask about extradition law.

    From the article linked by Arbed:
    http://marthamitchelleffect.org/cases-of-the-old-media-2/4572966061

    “…the European Court of Human Rights which has frozen “national security” extraditions from the UK to the US because the extreme isolation and long sentences defendants can expect amount to torture and inhuman treatment.”

    Do you know which ECHR decision this refers to, and how does it affect the argument that it would be more difficult for the US to extradite Assange from Sweden than from the UK?

    Does anyone have an authoritative source for this ECHR decision, please?

  • me in us

    Hi all, here’s a transcript of the two videos. I’m old school, it always flummoxes me when newsmaking video goes by without a transcript. Commenters on youtube were mostly all talking about the bad to nonexistent sound — try reading it with the closed captions on as you watch, they’re amazingly awful. Anyway, hope this is helpful; if not, I’m sure a mod can remove. With best wishes from the USA.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vQNWYnQjUE

    Julian Assange | Sam Adams Awards | Oxford Union
    January 23, 2013
    Transcript of Julian Assange’s address

    JULIAN ASSANGE: So I would just firstly like to say congratulations to Tom Fingar and the very important talk that he gave, of course well made and politic, though I think there are nuggets in there that are quite important to understand.

    I was involved in 2007 and 2008 at looking at what was happening to Iran. Now, from that process I am fully aware of some of the pressures that were on Tom. A lot of people did a lot of good work, perhaps the most important was Tom Fingar’s, in trying to correct the movement towards war with Iran based on lies. It is incredible to think back at those times that it was only in 2003 where the worst modern deception of the Western world occurred, where we went to war in Iraq based on lies in 2003 and over 100,000 people were killed and millions of Iraqi refugees displaced as a result. Just three years later, the drums for war with Iran were being whipped up not just in the United States but also in this country, and it’s thanks to journalists like Sy Hersh and professional truthful insiders like Tom and our sources and the sources for journalists that that war hasn’t happened yet.

    For example, at the beginning of 2008 we published Iraq’s classified rules of engagement for the U.S. Army. In those rules there was a section that was apparently designed, or at least permitted, for border skirmishes to start up, permitted U.S. troops to go into Iran under a variety of circumstances, and at the time there were disputes in the Gulf with ships approaching one another, a very heated moment, and the U.S. mainsteam media and the White House ramping up any little small incident. One of our sources provided us with those classified rules of engagement. We published them in a deal that we set up with the New York Times to get greater impact for it, and as a result the Iranian government held a press conference and said, “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare come over into our territory like that.” We then got hold of the next edition of these classified rules of engagement and that part had been removed from it. The procedures had been tightened up. And if you look back in the history of war, something between 20 and 50 percent of all wars have started as a result of these border skirmishes. That source has never been revealed. I assume that he or she is happy to have contributed to history and to human rights in that way and he goes about his business.

    As opposed to what is sometimes put about, WikiLeaks is not an organization that hates intelligence agencies. Far from it. At its very base, the idea of intelligence is an optimistic one. It’s that one can understand the world, one can apply intelligence to understand. The problem is the corruption of those agencies, and that corruption comes about because of secrecy. When Tom spoke about, in somewhat glowing terms, the improved process that he put down, and I believe him that that is a significant improvement from what was there before, it all rests upon one thing. It rests upon the abilities of people in those agencies to get out information to the public when those processes are not followed. We might have depoliticized analysts working in intelligence agencies who are to all intents and purposes mere robots, perfect machines with perfect accuracy. They are tasked, they engage in the task, they analyze, they pass up information higher up the food chain. And what if, in Tom’s case, for example, his National Intelligence Estimate, there was not a threat that it would be released, because our sources say that in fact the White House knew that if it did not release a version immediately, another version would be released, and the White House would have to get – would then come in second, and its opponents would have their spin on it, so the White House wanted to get their spin on it first. It’s only through this pressure of producing analytical product to the public that these sorts of agencies are kept honest and don’t become simply robots that are, in effect, perhaps this is drawing the bow too far, but some kind of Hitler’s willing executioners, mere people who act as robots who are told to carry out a task and do it. That is not enough. It is not enough to agree to carry out a task for superiors. That is the Nuremberg defense. We must all look to ourselves and understand whether what we are doing is right and just not just according to the views of our superiors but according to the long view of history, according to human rights and to our feelings of compassion, if we have any.

    Now the push to war with Iran is far from over. The push for war with Iran is far from over and the debate now is occurring in the public sphere as well as in various maneuvers by different intelligence agencies, the machinations that are happening in Syria and so on. Now I want to look at some of those. Our cables revealed, for example, that this country, the United Kingdom, engaged in a conspiracy to kill off Press TV, the Iranian state TV station, the Iranian equivalent to the BBC, from being able to broadcast into the United Kingdom. They cut off its satellite feed, which is one of the Sky satellites to this country, the death penalty, effectively, for a national broadcaster. What does that mean? Well, it means that the Iranian government can’t get out its view. Iran is surrounded by 45 military bases that are hostile to it on every side. There is no border that Iran does not have that is not already hostile or will probably shortly become so. That produces an atmosphere of intense fear. It produces an atmosphere where they think that there is a war. And as a result, we all know that Great Britain in World War I, in [7:58 ____ ] for example, and in World War II there were similar abuses. Iran’s fears means that the sort of human rights abuses that we claim about, the human rights abuses that are correctly looked into in Iran, have very little chance of resolution because the leadership of that country is so terrified about being invaded.

    Now, I want to draw this back to something that is personal to us and personal to WikiLeaks. The Internet has become the most important device for revealing the truth, at least since the beginning of the printing press. It has become the number one antidote to TV. Democracies are always lied into war. The Iraq war was a result of lies. The increased involvement in the United States in Vietnam was a result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, another lie. It’s not just lies by intelligence analysts, it’s lies by the big media machine. And what is in the big media machine? Well, it’s the various institutions that get too comfortable and too close to the table of power, the very table that they are meant to be reporting on and policing and getting into the historic record. When Tom spoke about process and removing political bias from analysts, there is also cultural bias. What is the cultural wind and is culturally accepted? That also flows into analysts. Now, producing cultural bias is something that we must watch more closely. It’s not just about what facts are reported on the BBC News. Those are important, but there are mechanisms of propaganda which go under the surface. They’re not direct factual claims, and those are things like Hollywood movies.

    Now I’ve seen this directly. When we looked at intelligence reports at low level coming out from Iraq in 2003 reporting what was happening there with the Badar Corps or [10:08 ____ ] or Iranian influence, the full package of culture bias that exists in the United States for people who are not properly educated in assessing what they are understanding came with them. Eventually those reports and analysts did learn more about what was happening and by the middle of 2003 were in fact sometimes passing out true reports of what was happening, that there is going to be a sectarian crisis in this country – that was known by Marines G-2 intelligence, for instance, halfway through 2003. Completely denied by the political leadership. So it’s not enough to produce accurate reporting, because if political leadership won’t let it out, what are you going to do? No, analysts must be responsible not to political leadership. Analysts must be responsible to the public and they must be responsible to the historical record.

    Now, we have something here which is a recent acquisition of WikiLeaks, although we have been following the matter for some time, and this is the script to a tens of millions of dollar budget Dreamworks movie. What is it about? It is about us, nominally. It is about WikiLeaks the organization. It is a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks the organization and the character of myself and our activities and so on. But it is not just an attack against us. It is an attack against Iran. It fans the flames to start a war with Iran, and it’s coming out in November. It’s being filmed now. Benedict Cumberbatch is playing me. This movie has British involvement and people in Britain should be concerned about it. How does it open? Well – and this has not been previously disclosed before – the opening scene is in a military complex in Tehran. The camera comes in, closes up on a file, and it is a design for a nuclear bomb marked with nuclear symbols. There’s notes and whispers all around and they are in Farsi, they’re in Persian. There’s an older scientist speaking. A high-speed camera will measure the explosive charge we have designed to trigger the chain reaction. It is then revealed by the camera four scientists in white coats walking in a windowless corridor. The youngest, “Simsana” – remember that name, “Simsana” — writes on the file: “The dimensions of the payload are consistent with a Shabab missile.” Okay. That’s the opening scene. Iran is working on an atomic weapon. The opening scene of a film about WikiLeaks. How does this have anything to do with us? Well, we’ll come to it.

    The next scene concerning Iran is in Cairo where that Iranian nuclear scientist is meeting a U.S. CIA agent, Kate. Closeup again on the handwritten diagram of a nuclear bomb, the same diagram as we saw in the opening. And “Siman” says, “I copied it from memory. They’re testing the explosive in the next six months.” Now, remember what Tom’s National Intelligence Estimate found. Iran did not have a nuclear program. All sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies feeding into that report said that was the case, with high confidence, and has been reconfirmed every year since that point. The senior diplomat who’s also at the table with the CIA agent says, “Shit! We thought they were at least three years away from a bomb. Another lie.” Tom’s report does not say that they’re three years away from a nuclear bomb. So it’s a lie upon a lie, a great big budget thing that’s going to be pushed out in November. The Iranian nuclear scientist then says, “If it works, they won’t hesitate to sell the technology, and even if one of these things” – sorry – “If it works, they won’t hesitate to sell the technology, and even if one of these things gets into the wrong hands, they’ll sell it anyway.”

    So that’s the reality of where we’re at. Not merely a war of intelligence agencies, but a war of corrupt media, corrupt culture. That war, we have got to understand, people who have appeared on this panel have been involved, sometimes with great sacrifice, at revealing the truth about important parts of the world, how the world is unfolding, how the world is shaping, the nature of institutions – they have revealed it, heroically in many cases, to the historical record, to our civilization as a whole, to you.

    You have to understand that where there’s great powers at work – I don’t mean shadow conspiracies, I mean enormous cultural powers, enormous industrial powers, the vast network of corporations that interact with government agencies around the world selling them products, shipping their logistics from one place to another. The National Security Agency, for example, now has approximately 70% of its expenditure pass through Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, etcetera. This produces a lobby that pushes in particular directions. How is it that such a lie got into a script about WikiLeaks? How is it that in the light of that National Intelligence Estimate that anyone could think that it was tolerable, acceptable, to foist that lie upon the public, that it would make it all the way through the Hollywood system, that distributors would pick it up? Because they perceive that that is where the power lies in the United States. They perceive that it’s perfectly okay to slander an entire nation, that it’s perfectly okay to beat the drums of war like that, because people in that system want the war. They want it.

    We have to understand that everything that we see, read and hear is produced for a purpose. It’s produced as a result of incentives. And other material is not produced. There are disincentives to not produce it. We walk almost sleepwalking, almost blind, every time we open a newspaper and read an article. That particular journalist wrote about that for a particular reason. They felt that their editor would accept that, that they wouldn’t have to argue with him. The editor felt that the proprietor would accept it. The journalist felt that the people that they deal with in their community would like it and in fact might even pat them on the head and take them to a fancier cocktail party or perhaps even give them a better position in Oxford. All these things influence how our society, our civilization, is documented.

    Now, working against that trend and against that current of corrupt powerful organizations producing a distorted perspective of the world has been the Internet. For the first time in history, that has allowed one person with some truth to speak to every single person who wants to hear that truth. It is the great antidote. There is a war on for control of the Internet. That war takes place on the one hand by producing incredible propaganda and hyping up threats about how the Internet is dangerous. On the other hand, it involves introducing mass surveillance systems to surveil all of the Internet. You know, different countries see the effects being brought by the Internet and the political liberations being brought by the Internet and powerful groups in those countries feel fearful and they feel destabilized, and as a result they want to find some way to control it and to know it. The knowing part of it comes from surveilling every transborder communication that occurs, between Great Britain and the United States, between almost every country in Latin America and the rest of the world because their communications have to pass through the United States to reach Europe, pass through the United States to reach Asia, and sometimes even pass through the United States when one Latin American country talks to another simply because the communications infrastructure has been passed that way. This is collectively the greatest transfer of wealth that has ever happened, the greatest theft of information that has ever happened from every single one of us who uses the Internet into the bowels of secret agencies.

    Now if those secret agencies were working on our behalf, perhaps we could accept it. If as soon as possible that material would enter into the historical record, would enter into the record of our civilization, where we could all individually make decisions using that information to produce a better, more harmonious world, then perhaps it would be tolerable. But it is not tolerable in its current form, and so it is up to decent people, good people, still working inside of government, inside of private contractors that are engaged in these sorts of behaviors, to get it out to the public, to get it into the historical record, either by doing it anonymously, which is of course what we favor, stay in there 30 years, work with us for 30 years getting out this sort of information, or by going public and standing up and fighting to describe the truth of what they’re seeing.

    Thank you.

    [applause]

    * * * * *

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJCL9S3Rlfk

    Cyber Terrorism | Julian Assange | Oxford Union
    January 23, 2013
    Transcript

    QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: I would like to ask you to comment briefly on how governments turn to this noun “cyberterrorism” and how they deal with these networks like Anonymous and its operations and what you think about it.

    JULIAN ASSANGE: As I said before, the Internet has become this generation’s, the Internet generation’s, primary tool of emancipation. Now, there’s a lot of effort been put into trying to stop the Internet working as the way it was meant to work, which is to be a universal communications medium with which we can all communicate with each other across the world to share our knowledge of the world and together deal with the most significant problems that we have at an individual level, at a group level, and at international level. The crackdown against the Internet, I think, is futile. I mean, we can see a lot of people whipping up further to try and get money for various so-called cyberterrorism outfits. We hear a lot about cyberterrorism. How many times have you heard about cyber peace building? We hear lots of talk about cyberwar and cyberdefense – I mean, this is a hype. It always comes from somewhere. It doesn’t just pop into a journalist’s brain. It comes as a result of organizations lobbying to influence the public opinion and influence the public record.

    What is fantastic and unavoidable is that the Internet generation is developing its own culture and its own consensus and its own political view, and it is so much better informed than anything that existed before, so much more nuanced, so much more sophisticated. Young people are vastly more worldly and sophisticated than even ten years ago as a result of the Internet. Their views about what is wrong and what is right are being internationalized as a result of education about how we are all living our lives. All those people, all those young people, these people in this audience at Oxford, are going to go into the CIA, they’re going to go into MI6, they’re going to go into GCHQ, they’re going to go into the National Security Agency, they’re going to go into Whitehall, they’re going to be inside all these organizations before they even know it. They’re going to be the technicians that control the great databases of the National Security Agency, the great databases of the CIA, and those people can act to reveal information to the rest of the world fairly easily, through us or through others. Sometimes there’s risk involved but they can be worked out and you can work through it. They can act to sabotage. This is a new pre-revolutionary moment just like when you had industrialization and as a result you developed skilled workers, and once skilled workers developed a political consciousness as to their own power and position in society, they could act to change their society. The Internet generation is in exactly that same position, perhaps in a much more advantaged – even more advantageous position, because the Internet is also involved not merely in the control structure of these great and powerful institutions, but it is involved intimately in spreading our culture, spreading our knowledge about the world. It is a replacement media and it is unignorable. These institutions will be reformed as a result of young people going into them. There is no other option. You cannot hire a technician who has not been educated by the Internet. You cannot hire any educated person now who has not been educated by the Internet, who has not been influenced by the Internet, who has not started to absorb the culture on the Internet, who doesn’t have friends that they’ve made and developed over the Internet.

    Also, Amelia Hill saw “no allies and tough queries,” Craig says go to applause — and I’d note that at 16:02 there’s a shot of what looks to me like overflow crowd of students watching from a staircase. That would be interest and enthusiasm.

    And the thing I haven’t seen anyone so far remark on is that at 11:53 Julian mentions that Benedict Cumberbatch will be playing him in the Dreamworks movie, and then in the audience shot at 13:12 — is that Benedict Cumberbatch himself sitting there? Looks like the guy on IMDB to me.

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