It was not a surprise or a scoop to found the Wikileaks’ Julian Assange speaking on Al Jazeera Arabic after the publishing of Iraq logs , it was logic especially that the website chose Al Jazeera from all channels in the world to launch the logs to the Arab world.
Julian Assange was interviewed by Ahmed Mansour last night on Al Jazeera news channel for nearly an hour on air from London. Assange was invited to come to Doha for the interview from three weeks ago but he declined and preferred London for security reasons. Assange is aware for the extradition agreements and knows very well how Doha hosts the largest American military base in the region. Ahmed Mansour has good intentions but Assange I believe knows well how the Qatari regime can sell him in one second to the Americans. The man does not deny that he is living a security nightmare.
You can watch the interview below in Arabic after the break
Assange seemed to be sick and yet he came to the interview which I believe he liked more than his interviews in the CNN. This was not the best interview for Mansour nor for Assange. It was more like an introductory interview , Mansour introduces Julian Assange and the Wikileaks to the Arab viewers. Of course those who followed the episode like me knew that Mansour was calling the Arabs indirectly in the beginning and directly in the end to send files and documents to expose the Arab dictators asking questions on how people can send documents to Wikileaks ..etc . “I felt in Mansour’s voice and eyes , he was speaking about Egypt”. He even called the Arabs indirectly to donate to the Website.
Mansour asked Assange about the Arab journalists in Wikileaks and he told him that here are Arab journalists volunteered in Wikileaks as they needed experts in Arabic. Of course the trust issue is still an important barrier in Wikileaks whose founder knows that there are attempts to penetrate it.
They did not speak about the Iraq logs as they should ,there were many questions about the Iraq logs we wanted to ask. Still We know that there are thousands of documents still to be published. Assange hinted that the next patch will be documents about Afghanistan and Russia , I do not know if he meant the role of Russia in Afghanistan or Russia as a country itself . It was interesting that Assange revealed that the Russian intelligence offered him and Wikileaks an opportunity to collaborate but he refused.
thank you for posting this
ReplyDeleteThere is something strange going on when the leak of thousands of documents that describe routinized killing and torture creates a debate on whether publishing the leaked memos is the right decision or whether it endangers the lives of soldiers. The Pentagon says it is “extraordinarily disappointed” that WikiLeaks chose to release the videos. But WikiLeaks is not an American organization and has no legal reason to keep American secrets. The moral argument against WikiLeaks--that soldiers’ lives could be threatened-- is weak since the Pentagon has not suggested how information about brutality, under-reported civilian casualties and other outrages could otherwise be disclosed. The fact that--unlike after the Abu Ghraib scandal--the Pentagon is not carrying out any investigations does not inspire confidence, and neither does it calling the leaks, but not the actions documented in them, “shameful.”
ReplyDeleteA Norwegian historian, Roy Vega, has pointed on tracks to server addresses near Kremlin, Moscow, with regard to the supporting measures in Wikileaks system. The KGB oligarch Alexander Lebedev is named in blog articles. Vega claim there is a path of a old styled Soviet front structure in Wikileaks: 1. An "autonome" hacker and cracker system, 2. A distributing and 2.nd-server (mirrored) system, 3. A comprehensive propaganda network similar to Soviet fronts and its NGOs, along the lines of existing leftist contact points throughout Europe, Canada and Asia.
ReplyDeleteAsben