Dennis Bernstein (DB): Let me get your overview here of Julian Assange and what is happening to him. How do you see this?

John Pilger (JP): Well, it’s a very complicated and very suspicious case, of course. Today [Thursday] we saw a pinch of justice, that’s all. But his bail is weighted down with conditions. He’s virtually under a kind of house arrest. Now if he wasn’t Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, none of this would have happened. I doubt whether there would be any prosecution, we’d be having this conversation.

And we learned today [Thursday] that the Swedes had not initiated this appeal against bail that was heard today in the London court. It was the British. Why were they doing it? Were they doing it on behalf of the U.S.? I don’t know the answer to those questions. But suspicions really do mount in this case.

Because the unspoken in the court … was the possible prospect of Julian Assange being extradited to the U.S. to be prosecuted under a law, which at this point doesn’t exist, which the Attorney General in the U.S. is at the moment is trying to invent. ‘Cause there isn’t such a law against whistle-blowers, certainly not against those who facilitate whistle-blowing as WikiLeaks does. But that is speculation.

But then there’s the Swedish case which is very strange indeed. I’m not saying that it is being run by the CIA or anything like that but it’s got very strange and dark elements and very contradictory elements to it. So more of this is going to emerge when the expedition issues are heard. I think the next hearing is in January but it will probably run through for a couple of months.

DB: In the United States, everybody has everything on the table now, not for Iran, but for Julian Assange. Arrest him, prosecute him, lock him down, assassinate him. Could you talk about this?

JP: Well, I mean, you know there’s always been this tension in the U.S. hasn’t there? Between all that rosy history of Georgian gentlemen handing down tablets of good intentions and the other side, a bunch of lunatics. I’m not saying these people writing those columns are lunatics but they’re on the fringe of that fringe. So they’ve always been there, and so we expect to hear from them at times like this.

But I think what’s more worrying is that the, as I mentioned, the Attorney General in the Obama administration is making all these boorish noises about he’s going to prosecute him. For what? For what? This is supposed to be the land of the First Amendment. And I dug out a statement by Obama just before he came to power about how he wanted it to be the most informed period in modern U.S. history and all that nonsense. I think that’s the worry.

The truth is the Obama administration is worse than the Bush administration certainly in this area. You know Bush didn’t actually prosecute a single whistle-blower. He made a lot of noises. Obama is breaking all records in Justice Department prosecuting whistle-blowers. So there is clearly a motivation there to try and get Assange.

DB: I suspect that the idea, in part, is to keep the focus on Assange and off the information — some of which helps to fill in some pretty big holes. Speaking about some of the documents, it was rather interesting and significant that we saw the administration and the Congress in the U.S. playing a key role in trying to prevent the former Vice President of the U.S., Cheney, et al, from being indicted by a Spanish court, indeed trying to suppress the court from indicting members of the Bush administration for torture and related adventures. That kind of material is interesting and it seems to put the fire under Obama and official Washington to go after WikiLeaks.

JP: Yeah, because it might lead to them. They know that they’ve all got secrets, and they want to keep their secrets from us, and they are all implicated, to some degree. And they are worried. A lot of these people are worried about what’s going to come out, all over the world. ............ M O R E:  http://pulsemedia.org/2010/12/18/curiosities-abound-in-assange-case/#more-29563

A version of this article first appeared on Consortium News:  http://www.consortiumnews.com/index.html

– Dennis Bernstein produced this interview for “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica network, which was broadcast across the US on Thursday, Dec. 16, from the KPFA studio in Berkeley, California. You can access the audio archive of that entire show on their Web site,  http://www.flashpoints.net/
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John Pilger: Swedes are smearing him and encouraging the US ........... M O R E:  http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-pilger-swedes-are-smearing-him-and-encouraging-the-us-2164320.html

Picture: ..... International (political animations by Peter Nicholson): John Pilger Uncle Sam 2003 .........  http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/cartoon_1330.html