Assange: Hillary "Should Resign"
Time reports:
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 Assange's organization began loosing on the world over the weekend. Stengel said that the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like "the fall guy" in the ensuing controversy and was her firing or resignation an outcome that Assange would want? "I don't think it would make much of a difference either way," he 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 (the full audio will be available soon on TIME.com). 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 appeared to be bracing for its turn in the WikiLeaks mill. Pakistani officials are almost certain more revealing documents will come out focusing on their country soon. Russian media is anxious to see if future leaks will detail behind-the-scenes dealing over the August 2008 Russia-Georgia war.
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 "we have formally asked the State Department for assistance with that. That request was formally rejected."
Asked what his "moral calculus" is 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 one hundred legal attacks of various kinds and have 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."
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