Please Redistribute!!
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I knew it.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Date: Thu Mar 7 11:48:57 2013 EST
Subject: Oy vey / Jemima
To: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Look at this! A letter sent on Friday from WikiLeaks 'ambassador' Joseph
Farrell to Jemima Khan in response to her strange attack on Assange in the New
Statesman. Khan's article followed criticism made by WikiLeaks about
the title of a forth coming $2.5m Universal documentary, "We Steal
Secrets: The story of WikiLeaks", in which Khan was given an "Executive
Producer" credit.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Dear Jemima,
As you can imagine, when I read your article in the New Statesman I was
very surprised. I was also shocked, but most of all, I was disappointed.
When you told me in September 2011 that Alex Gibney, who had been
commissioned by Universal to do a WikiLeaks documentary, had approached
you to offer you an Executive Producer position on his film I attempted
to ask you subtly why you thought he was offering you the position. My
exact words were: "Being called an Executive Producer on one of Alex
Gibney's films is full of kudos and will certainly be very helpful in
any further documentary projects. I am an inherent cynic (likely
augmented by this work) but, if he is not asking for any production
money, then it is purely a matter of branding and using your name as an
endorsement." Before approaching you, Gibney had already been trying
desperately to get an interview with Julian for more than half a year,
since February 2011, and had thus far been unsuccessful. I feared he
might have been using you, not because he valued your opinions on the
film, or because he was likely to ever ask you to produce anything else
with him in the future, but because he needed access to Julian. In
fact, just two months before the film premiered at Sundance you said to
me that you were "getting my agent to insist I see the finished Gibney
doc". That, in itself, struck me as an executive producer with very
limited executive power.
Without access and without original interview footage, Gibney needed a
tool to legitimise his film and add credibility to it. And, in the
absence of the exclusive interview with Julian, what better way than to
have the journalist celebrity who is publicly known to be a friend of
Julian named in the credits? I am certain you were aware of that risk,
because when you told me you were accepting the Executive Producer role
you said: "I will still try to persuade Julian (via you) to cooperate
(as I have done in the past) not because I'm now officially involved in
the film – it's not contingent upon any access to Julian – but because
I genuinely think he needs friends not enemies now".
From the moment Gibney approached us we did extensive research into
him. We looked deep and took advice from people who knew him and some
who had worked with him. Every colleague, ally, friend and even the
documentarians we spoke to advised us against an interview with Gibney.
Yet we were open to talks, we were ready for dialogue, and we engaged
with him and with Alexis Bloom, his producer. None of our meetings
allayed our fears that their piece was not going to be the true story.
They did not appear genuine to us and they seemed to have many
prejudices about Julian and the organisation. Their angle favoured
sensationalism from the beginning, an angle I would have thought you
would oppose had you had any influence on the picture.
Julian has had significant relationships with hundreds of people. Your
list of so-called alienated and disaffected allies is not long: your
article mentions nine people, one of whom Julian has never actually
even met.
You list Mark Stephens, an internationally little-known media lawyer
who had a contractual dispute with Julian and who charged Julian more
than half a million pounds for a magistrate's court case defence. Yet
you overlook Gareth Peirce, "the doyenne of British defence lawyers";
Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional
Rights and other lawyers at the CCR; Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish
judge; Jennifer Robinson, who left Mark Stephens' firm over the issue;
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC; Geoffrey Robertson QC, the acclaimed human
rights lawyer whose table you sit at regularly; John Jones; Julian
Burnside SC and Julian's other lawyers in Australia; his lawyers in
Ecuador; the Icelandic lawyers; the Danish lawyers; the Washington
lawyers; or any of the rest of an international team of dozens of
lawyers who represent or advise Julian and WikiLeaks.
You list Jamie Byng, who published an unprepared, unapproved,
unfinished manuscript that had not been fact-checked without Julian's
knowledge, but you do not mention Colin Robinson or John Oakes of OR
Books, with whom Julian has published a successful and acclaimed book
without any problems or disagreements. Neither do you mention the more
than fifteen other publishers who are releasing his Cypherpunks book in
various languages, or indeed the publishers of Underground with whom he
has maintained a good relationship for more than fifteen years.
You list Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who sabotaged WikiLeaks' anonymous
online submission system, first stole and then deleted more than 3,000
submissions evidencing, inter alia, war crimes, corruption and bank
fraud. He also started a rival organisation, OpenLeaks, a still-born
branding exercise with zero publications. His entire livelihood is
earned by constantly backstabbing the man who fired him.
You list a person, who you incorrectly describe as "the technical whizz
behind much of the WikiLeaks platform", who was in actual fact a
technician contracted to upgrade our submission platform according to
Julian's architectural design specifications. He was first referred to
in Domscheit-Berg's book as "the architect", a propaganda term invented
by Domscheit-Berg for his book well after he was suspended from
WikiLeaks. The term is clearly designed as an attempt to steal Julian's
creative authority. But you are correct that this is the way that he is
portrayed in Daniel Domscheit-Berg's book, which contains numerous
falsehoods. I am, as I have always been, at your disposal to clarify
those stories that are promoted in an attempt to harm WikiLeaks and
Julian and to give you the true facts. Had I known you had an interest
in the architectural make-up of the submissions platform and its coding
genesis, I could have explained this to you further in person.
You list the Guardian and the New York Times, the two organisations who
broke their agreements with us. One of the contractual clauses that the
Guardian broke was to disclose a password that unlocked a list to all
the diplomatic cables, which it published in its book in an act of
gross negligence. Both the Guardian and the New York Times have written
factually incorrect books about us to whitewash their deceitful
actions, which they continue to profit from and promote. You don't,
however, mention the 110 media partners with whom we have ongoing
working relationships, some of whom have also written books about
WikiLeaks but who donate all the profits to us, as a gesture and in
solidarity to help us circumvent a banking blockade that has eroded the
majority of our resources.
Why don't you list the hundreds of activists, researchers and
publishers who play a day-to-day role in WikiLeaks' operations – the
technicians who maintain servers; the developers, mathematicians and
cryptographers who build new search interfaces and oversee the internal
security protocol; those who curate data for us; the investigators who
corroborate submitted material; or the managers and administrators who
plan and bring projects to fruition?
Why don't you list the allies and friends across the world who enjoy a
close personal relationship with Julian and who are part of the same
support community that you once were – the more than 150 people you
spent time with at Julian's private 40th birthday party, to which
Julian was generous enough to invite even Alex Gibney?
Is it because they do not seek acclaim in the press and because they do
not say negative things about Julian, and hence have zero currency in
the news?
As to falling out with Alex Gibney, Julian never fell out with him –
Gibney was never a friend in the first place so there was never any
relationship to fall apart. Alex Gibney was just another one in a long
list of people trying to cash in on Julian and WikiLeaks. You may
remember me saying how utterly offensive I find it that there are all
these people out there who are benefiting financially from Julian,
while the organisation suffers a banking blockade and lawyers have
eaten away all of his personal funds.
You asked me for a response to David Allen Green's article on 20th
August 2012 and I told you that it was being produced. I told you that
your request for this response did not go directly to Julian as you
thought it had, but instead that it came to me. My email to you after
we met said: "I will get you a response to the DAG article and, as I
said, blame me, not him, for the lack of response." What you asked for
was not as simple as you thought, which was that Julian could probably
rattle off the legal sections and sub-sections by heart – the response
was far more complicated than that.
I have attached it. It is 55,972 words long, which is roughly 70 per
cent of the length of a doctoral thesis. Julian's legal defence
committee prioritised this and asked a person to look into the
arguments in depth, in order to produce a compelling response due to
the harm caused by David Allen Green's misinformation. It was
peer-reviewed and revised and took six months to produce for you – a
time resource that does not come cheap to a defence committee that has
to deal with simultaneous challenges, David Allen Green being just one.
Something of this length and detail ought to have taken three years to
produce.
I did not merely tell you that Julian was "very busy". You know that.
What I did say was that he was very busy and that we were a very small
core team. Your email asking for a response to the David Allen Green
piece was written the day after Julian made his first speech in public
since he had entered the embassy, four days after he formally obtained
asylum and only five days after the embassy was surrounded by more than
50 Metropolitan police who were preparing to force their way into the
diplomatic mission to get him. On top of this, we were still publishing
the Syria Files and we had just begun a new release, the Detainee
Policies. I told you that since the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay
prison facility none of the world's media and none of the world's NGOs
had released a single Guantanamo Bay Manual, and we had just released
our third. During all of this, we were also dealing with the vitriol
coming from the UK establishment media while Julian was having his
asylum claim evidence reviewed. He was (and still is) in fear of being
extradited onwards to the United States, he had not been outside in
more than two months, and he was overseeing the publication of hundreds
of thousands of documents.
Over a lunch you questioned this fear of extradition to the US, and
when I asked you what you would do in his position you refused to
answer the question. I asked you more than six times what you would do
in his shoes. Having offered to cooperate with the Swedish
investigation non-stop for the past two years and been refused with no
proper explanation, and believing that you would end up in an American
prison for decades, in solitary confinement and under SAMs, what would
you do? You never gave me a concrete answer. Instead, you skirted the
question with another question and discounted the numerous legal
opinions out there, favouring instead an article by David Allen Green.
I reiterated that Julian had never said that it would be likely in
practice that he would face the death penalty, although the Espionage
Act permits this. But more to the point, and one that everyone always
ignores, there was (and still is) the fear of being extradited to face
life imprisonment and almost certainly torture or other inhumane and
degrading treatment for his publishing activities.
I told you that the Swedish authorities could, if they wanted to,
charge Julian in absentia. Even if they were to do that, they should,
according to their own procedures, conduct an interview with him before
requesting his extradition. I repeated that he remains available even
in the embassy for questioning by the Swedish authorities should they
wish to employ the standard procedures they use regularly in other
cases.
I explained to you how the argument that "he is no more vulnerable to
extradition to the US from Sweden than he is from the UK" is a red
herring. I explained why the US had not already requested his
extradition from the UK, because this would create a case of competing
extradition requests that the Home Secretary would have to judicially
review and prioritise one over the other, thereby creating political
embarrassment for a major ally whichever way the decision went. I cited
the US Ambassador's own admission that the US would wait to see what
happened with the Swedish case before they made a move. I was careful
to explain this with Jennifer Robinson present to add a legal
perspective if needed. However, in spite of this explanation, you
allowed this claim not only to go into your article but also to remain
in Gibney's film – expressed in remarks made by Baroness Helena Kennedy
QC that have been misleadingly edited to remove their proper context.
She has since said that she "did not expect that he [Gibney] would
fillet my interview" and also says "I regret thinking I could present a
sensible perspective".
Irrespective of my explanations and those of two lawyers whose counsel
you seek yourself, you could have spoken to Julian in person. He did
call you – more than once. You could have called back. You could have
come to visit him to check on his well-being, as many others have done.
On that note, you were never invited just for a "photo opportunity".
You were invited to the embassy by us in September but you heard that
there was a paparazzi waiting outside the embassy. This is no great
surprise following the biggest diplomatic incident in recent years.
However, you knew about it beforehand and avoided it. Then I relayed a
request from Vivienne Westwood's team, asking you if you would model
her "I am Julian Assange" t-shirt at her fashion show. The request came
after you had already said you were unavailable even to attend her
show. This was her idea and her request. She was trying to do something
to help us and thought you would want to do the same. You were also
invited to visit Julian shortly after he entered the embassy on 22nd
June; for tea and cake on his birthday on 3rd July; for a sureties'
get-together in late July; for afternoon tea on 11th September and
again on the 9th October; and for a breakfast meeting on the 21st
December. All of which you declined. These are all times when you could
have asked Julian in person about your issues. As you will recall from
your discussion the last time you saw him, in December 2011, he enjoys
debate and disagreement. How do you know that Julian had not seen the
Gibney film by the time it premiered? We do not steal secrets but
people leak things to us. Irrespective of the "ironic" meaning behind
the title of the film you claim it has, it will not be understood by
the general public with that meaning. What they will see is a
straightforward conjunction of a quote, a proper noun and the word
"story", and they will read it as such. It is tantamount to someone
doing a documentary about you and calling it "I am a War Apologist: The
Jemima Khan Story" because they had interviewed someone completely
unrelated to you and quoted them saying "I am a war apologist".
It is one thing to publicly disagree with someone, or even to distance
oneself in public from a former ally, but it is quite another to use
one's own publication to the further harm of a political refugee
suffering the persecution of a superpower. I imagine you must have
vetted the magazine cover, which claims that Julian is 'alone'. Julian
is not alone. That New Statesman front page was used to harm the entire
WikiLeaks project out of disaffection. It was also an attempt to cast a
shadow on all his allies. And yet you were the one who said: "he needs
friends not enemies…". Julian has both friends and enemies. He does not
need or seek friends who only agree with him (in fact, I have not met
one non-argumentative friend of his) but he certainly does not need
friends who are in fact enemies.
From the point of view of defending a film in which you feature as
"Executive Producer", your actions are straightforward: your name is on
the credits of a dated WikiLeaks documentary with a prejudicial title
which features all the hostile people who haven't had anything to do
with WikiLeaks in years. You chose a production credit over principle
and in doing so attacked a vulnerable political activist and fellow
journalist, something which I know to be beneath you.
In disappointment,
Joseph Farrell
(David Allen Green response is now on
http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html )
