Julian Assange interviewed by Laura Smith RT (2011) TV News Lies Necessary To Start Wars

the original RT upload of this interview has now been banned in the UK by YouTube

"The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"

Julian Assange speaking in 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"

Julian Assange: I grew up in Australia in the 1970s. My parents were in the theatre, so I lived everywhere—in over fifty different towns, attending thirty-seven different schools. Many of these towns were in rural environments, so I lived like Tom Sawyer—riding horses, exploring caves, fishing, diving, and riding my motorcycle.

The United States is trying to get up an extradition case for me to the United States. Just today we saw a new subpoena coming out of the secret grand jury that is operating in Alexandria, Virginia, and it’s trying to get up that espionage case against us. It is building that case, and whatever country I am in, once it decides to indict, they will try to extradite me from that country, and possibly not just me, possibly our other staff. The other problem with the Swedish extradition is that the process itself has been corrupted. It was corrupted from the very beginning. We’ve seen corruption in Swedish media, we’ve seen all sorts of strange actions in relation to how this case is progressed. RT: What message do you think you would send to the world, if the UK did turn around, almost unexpectedly at this point, it seems, and refuse to extradite you?JA.: It depends on to which country. Here is the sort of calculation that’s going on in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom wants to keep its good relationships with the United States. So, if the UK was to reject the US extradition order, that would pose terrible problems for it. Similarly, if it was to reject the Swedish extradition order, that would pose problems for it, because it would look like it was seeking to harbor me. And this is the sort of difficult situation that Afghanistan faced when it appeared as if it was harboring bin Laden, and as a result there was an aggressive response. Any country which appears to be harboring us, as the United States is trying to conduct its aggressive response, faces political pressures. If the United Kingdom does attempt to extradite me to the United States, then it faces a difficult position politically. The bulk of the people in the United Kingdom support us.RT: And finally, Julian, who do you consider to be your No. 1 enemy?JA: Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone – it’s not understanding what actually is going on in the world. It's only when you start to understand that you can make effective decisions and effective plans. Now, the question is, who is promoting ignorance? Well, those organizations that try to keep things secret, and those organizations which distort true information to make it false or misrepresentative. In this latter category, it is bad media.It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is… we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.One of the hopeful things that I’ve discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it. But what does that mean? Well, that means that basically populations don't like wars, and populations have to be fooled into wars. Populations don't willingly, with open eyes, go into a war. So if we have a good media environment, then we also have a peaceful environment