In this 40-minute web exclusive interview, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks discusses his more than 300 days in the Ecuadorean embassy, the U.S. Justice Department spying on journalists, the future of WikiLeaks and Visa’s financial blockade on WikiLeaks.
"Well, we are literally winning in the courts in Iceland. Of course, Iceland is an independent—is one of the most independent countries in Europe, that has been behind a lot of our values in the past. The European Parliament passed a resolution against the activities of the credit card companies in relation to us. In Australia, we have had three opinion polls. They show that I have between 26 and 28 percent of the voting intention, Australia-wide. We have 40 percent of the voting intention of people under the age of 30, 36 percent of the voting intention in the most popular state of New South Wales, where Sydney is located. The Kissinger Files, 1.7 million documents that we have just published.
And I detect a certain fear in the United States administration and a certain fear in the Pentagon in relation to making statements about us. The bad old neo-McCarthyist fervor that once existed in 2011 about this organization, where politicians felt that they could propose bills to Congress, where Lieberman and Peter T. King felt they could propose bills to Congress to declare my staff enemy combatants of the United States, who could be kidnapped or killed at will, those days are well and truly gone, where politicians like Biden thought that he could come out and declare that I was a high-tech terrorist, where other politicians and high-profile journalists thought they could come out and directly call for my assassination, as Bill O’Reilly did and other people in Fox and The Washington Times. They came out and nakedly called for my assassination, including an adviser even in Canada to Stephen Harper. Those days are gone. Now, this organization is furious, and we are after redress. And we are getting redress."
A full transcript of the interview is available here.
You can also watch Democracy Now!'s recent interview with Assange about the guilty plea of hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, the upcoming "show trial" for accused Army whistleblower Bradley Manning, and his little-known meeting with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
