Howard Chua-Eoan
Time Magazine
December 1, 2010
Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange said, “should resign.” Speaking over Skype from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, the WikiLeaks founder was replying to a question by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel over the diplomatic-cable dump that Assange’s organization loosed on the world this past weekend. Stengel had said the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like “the fall guy” in the ensuing controversy, and had asked whether her firing or resignation was an outcome that Assange wanted. “I don’t think it would make much of a difference either way,” Assange said. “But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that.”
Assange spoke about the latest tranche of documents from WikiLeaks in a 36-minute interview with TIME. He said there would be more: "We're doing about 80 a day, presently, and that will gradually step up as the other media partners step in." Indeed, every region of the world appears to be bracing for its turn in the WikiLeaks mill. Pakistani officials are almost certain that more revealing documents focusing on their country will come out soon. And the Russian media are anxious to see if future leaks will detail any behind-the-scenes dealings over the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war. (See a TIME profile of Julian Assange.)
Assange said that all the documents were redacted "carefully." "They are all reviewed, and they're all redacted either by us or by the newspapers concerned," he said. He added that WikiLeaks "formally asked the State Department for assistance with that. That request was formally rejected."
Asked what his "moral calculus" was to justify publishing the leaks and whether he considered what he was doing to be "civil disobedience," Assange said, "Not at all. This organization practices civil obedience, that is, we are an organization that tries to make the world more civil and act against abusive organizations that are pushing it in the opposite direction." As for whether WikiLeaks was breaking the law, he said, "We have now in our four-year history, and over 100 legal attacks of various kinds, been victorious in all of those matters." He added, "It's very important to remember the law is not what, not simply what, powerful people would want others to believe it is. The law is not what a general says it is. The law is not what Hillary Clinton says it is." (See a TIME video with Julian Assange on the top 10 leaks.)
And the source or sources of all the diplomatic cables? Stengel asked Assange if U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning, now detained in Quantico, Va., was the sole source of the megaleak. "We're a source-protection organization," Assange said, "so the last thing we would do is discuss possible sources. However, we do know that ... the FBI, State Department and U.S. Army CID [Criminal Investigation Command] has been going around Boston visiting a number of people there." He referred to "people who have been detained coming back into the United States" with connections to Manning. The U.S. soldier's "mother's home in Wales, in the U.K.," he said, was "visited, or raided, depending on how you want to describe it," by the FBI.
Stengel asked what was coming next from WikiLeaks. "We don't have targets," said Assange, "other than organizations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behavior ... That's created a general target." A story in Forbes magazine, which interviewed Assange before the latest leak, said that WikiLeaks has a large U.S. financial corporation in its sights. Assange confirmed that. "Yes, the banks are in there. Many different multinational organizations are in the upcoming weeks, but that is a continuation of what we have been doing for the past four years" since WikiLeaks was founded. He added that the volume of material has increased. "The upcoming bank material is 10,000 documents, as opposed to hundreds, which we have gotten in the other cases."
TIME and TIME.com will continue to report stories based on Stengel's Assange interview and on the continuing fallout from the release of the diplomatic cables.
