Julian Assange - WikiLeaks (18 page)

What kind of world do we live in where children become victims just like that? What was the war in Iraq all about anyway? Does anyone actually remember? I think this is as absurd as it gets in this kind of situation.

There are days when I know why I live in a neutral country.

I'm seriously wondering about this. Was it possible for them to detect a threat in this group of men? Sure, the big camera could look like a weapon, but the group doesn't look threatening. Am I being naive? Tell me what you think.

The dialogues are even more powerful than the images. We understand what these soldiers were trained to do. They don't hesitate; they cut straight to the chase. It probably seems like a routine exercise to them.

At no time does the group of men in the street seem to be afraid of this helicopter whirring above. They don't hide or run for cover behind walls. They appear quite calm, suspecting nothing. The helicopter is either very far up in the sky or they're so used to this display that they no longer pay any attention to it.

For these men the fight is not whether to shoot or not, but rather consists in showing that they are good little soldiers by hitting their ‘target' with a minimum of bullets or as quickly as possible, I don't know. And then there's the humiliating, hurtful vocabulary. I understand that you have to be straight to the point when doing your job, but this sounds like they don't even think that they're dealing with equals or even humans anymore.

One of the “bastards” isn't dead, as he tries to get up. It's one of the members of the Reuters team. We see the gunsight of the cannon hover over the injured body, and he doesn't seem to be carrying a weapon or scrambling to find one. Then we hear:

“Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”

I've come to the conclusion that there's something weird about entrusting the military to keep the peace. These guys are trained to shoot and they want to shoot. That's all they want to do. And what happens after the blunder?

This blunder cost the lives of some 15 people, all civilians, including two members of the Reuters agency, a photographer and his driver. I read that it's highly likely that nobody would have been interested in the affair if Reuters hadn't tried everything it could to find out what really happened.

WikiLeaks put the famous video online. Reuters had been requesting it from incompetent authorities for years. Thanks to a leak. Thumbs up to the person who had the courage to leak these images! How can anyone cover up images like these and sleep well at night? I think the people who have to cover this up must have a tough time. And the soldiers? The entire hierarchy is involved.

In fact, were they told that they had only killed civilians? Were they tried, judged, sentenced, put into a psycho ward, or do they truly believe in their ‘wonderful' almighty army and were just following orders?

Four million people have already seen this film. We have to keep spreading it. I know a lot of people who haven't seen it or don't talk about it. Here is the link to the main video:
www.collateralmurder.com

WikiLeaks, Assange, continue to show us the true face of humans and of our governments. I'm following you…

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A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

–
Oscar Wilde

Iceland could very well become Julian Assange's new adoptive country. In fact, the country's history and Julian's history have been inexorably linked since the summer of 2009.

Iceland has been inhabited since the ninth century, and less than a century later in the year AD 930, Icelanders claimed their state was a free one, constituting the oldest parliament in the world. This republic lasted until the thirteenth century when Iceland was annexed to Norway, then Denmark, to which the island remained linked until 1944 when Iceland became an independent republic. Its economy is based on a mixed system featuring many corporations and a strong public sector. According to the human development index of 2006, Iceland was the second most developed country in the world after Norway.

But in 2008, Iceland was hit by a major crisis, with the banks on the brink of bankruptcy. In October of that year, Iceland's Financial Supervisory Authority took control of Kaupthing, the country's largest bank after having nationalized the two other Icelandic banks, Glitnir and Landsbankinn. Iceland was then potentially bankrupt with a fifteen per cent inflation rate and a currency that lost sixty per cent of its value in one year. The crisis wasn't really visible, but when Icelanders heard about the situation of their banks, they were flabbergasted.

At end of July 2009 the Kaupthing bank was not declared bankrupt, although it was given a moratorium on payments from the District Court of Reykjavik. The State injected thousands of millions of euro into the bank.

For one year, the financial crisis only got worse, and a legal investigation was launched to find out whether the bank directors responsible for the disaster broke the law to get rich.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, investigative journalist on Iceland's RUV public television, had received an anonymous message that damning documents on bankrupt Icelandic bankers had popped up on the Internet. The short message was followed by a link:
www.wikileaks.org
, a site he'd never heard about before.

He clicked on the link and couldn't believe what he saw. Stunned, he discovered the book of accounts of the Kaupthing bank as well as e-mails and minutes of secret meetings. Right before his eyes an internal document of the bank appeared, describing dubious loan contracts without coverage for astronomical amounts of money, which had been approved for the bank's main shareholders and officers just a few days before the nationalization.

Kristinn had evidence in front of him that the biggest borrowers were the bank owners themselves who had vouched for their own loans.

The journalist thought he was seeing things. After verifying the authenticity of the documents, he prepared a series of reports on the affair. At the same time, the Kaupthing bank sent an injunction to WikiLeaks, demanding that the documents be removed. This was their short response to the injunction:

No. We will not assist the remains of Kaupthing, or its clients, to hide its dirty laundry from the global
community. Attempts by Kaupthing or its agents to discover the source of the document in question may be a criminal violation of both Belgium source protections laws and the Swedish constitution. Who is your US counsel?

On August 2 2009, just before the news started, the RUV received an injunction from the District Court of Reykjavik forbidding the broadcast of one of the reports for violating banking secrecy. Journalists elaborated on television what had just happened and showed viewers the URL of the WikiLeaks website.

The bankruptcy of banks was a very sensitive subject and Kristinn knew that the effect would be instantaneous. The entire population rushed to go online to download the documents. Four days later, the Citizens' Movement had won over the power of the mighty banks and the court lifted the injunction. As of that moment WikiLeaks was elevated to the status of national hero.

Following this affair, Kristinn looked into the site whose goal was to act as global haven for whistleblowers on the Internet, where people could denounce illegal acts committed by their bosses, superiors or politicians. If they possessed the documents proving their accusations but wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, they could send documents very easily by way of a secure page on the website. All it took was a click.

The document then went on a long journey. “First it was encrypted and extracted from its software format to be stored on a server at the Internet access provider PRQ in Sweden in order to benefit from Swedish law on freedom of the press where journalists couldn't be forced to reveal their sources, and if they
decided to do so, the revealed source could take them to court. Next, a copy of the documents was sent to a server in Belgium, where the law on the protection of sources also applied to technicians who handled documents. Finally, they were uploaded onto a server located in a third country that WikiLeaks kept secret, where it was then decrypted and published. WikiLeaks had implemented an international network of anonymous relay servers whose only function was to hide their tracks.”
²¹

Kristinn then learned that the site already had a troubled past in its two years of existence. Thousands of documents had already been published denouncing corruption or misconduct: Swiss banks in the Cayman Islands, compromising files from the Church of Scientology or American documents classified as defense secrets on the fate of prisoners at Guantanamo.

Kristinn realized that this website was a wealth of information for an investigative journalist like himself. He then took a closer look at the people who started the organization and met with Julian. He started collaborating with WikiLeaks and it had been an unwavering collaboration up until today, as he was considered the spokesperson of the organization when Julian was unavailable.

Kristinn is a pleasant and easy-going person, we know, we talked to him on the phone. Although he didn't have much to say about Julian's personality, he was open with a good sense of humor. Ever since the storm that hit Julian, Kristinn had remained focused on the organization, explaining that they'd like to emphasize the leaks rather than WikiLeaks and continue to focus on the organization and less on its founder. He preferred to believe that the impact of Julian's arrest wouldn't have the impact many people thought it would have. “This isn't a one-man organization,” he said, “we're continuing the work.”

Kristinn is a committed journalist. While he worked with the entire WikiLeaks team on
Collateral Murder
, he asked the television station to send him to Iraq to check the facts and authenticate the damage described in the film. RUV accepted and hurried him off to Baghdad. Nonetheless, the station refused to broadcast the provocative film. Three months later, Kristinn was dismissed and left the RUV. The reason invoked was personal incompatibility with his superiors about the news segment. Nothing seemed to prove this and the question remained unanswered.

Back to 2009. The love story between WikiLeaks and Iceland had just begun when Kristinn prepared his stories on Kaupthing for the RUV.

In December, Smári McCarthy, who was in charge of the university association Icelandic Digital Freedom Society, invited the two figureheads of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, under the name Schmitt, for a conference in Reykjavik: Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference.

Smári was a young activist and committed anarchist. In 2008, he founded the association with a group of people linked to the Internet. A first, a very voluntary and provocative conference took place the same year on freedom within the scope of the Internet. The following year, when Julian and Daniel were guests, they brought the list of the laws that protect WikiLeaks in different countries. But Julian brought more than that: “an ambitious project that would make Iceland an inviolable sanctuary for the digital documents threatened with censorship or destruction in other countries. To get that far, one had to start by profoundly changing national legislation regarding the freedom of expression.”
²²
Julian's proposals rang true with Smári McCarthy, as well as with Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir was a parliamentarian with character. She was an Internet pioneer and a talented blogger, an artist yet more of a poet. Some of her poems are on her blog where she can be seen as a modern-day viking warrior. She was also a rebel. Since 2009 she has led a party called ‘The Movement,' which has three deputies in the Icelandic Parliament. She was attracted to the project Julian proposed as much as to the man with the magnetic charm. They started working right away with the volunteers. They addressed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a law that intended to make Iceland a haven for modern media.

“Their first task consisted of taking stock of the best laws on the freedom of expression around the world. They retained Swedish and Belgian laws on the protection of sources, an Estonian law on the transparence of administration, a New York state law that prohibits attacking media in a country not concerned by a matter in court, a California law protecting the media against unjustified lawsuits, as well as a French law on the regulations of press offenses after a period of ninety days.”
²³

Besides legislative and technical work, the goal of the IMMI was almost a philosophical one. They wanted to define the freedom of information and expression today, taking into account the set of new information and communication tools available.