Adonis Diaries

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: On how the leaks affected “Arab Spring” uprising

Julian Assange gave an extensive interview to Hans Ulrich Obrist, published in 4 parts in the French weekly Courrier International.  To the question on the contribution of WikiLeaks on Arab uprising, Assange had this to say:

“We tried in WikiLeaks to have an impact on the Arab societies. At least, we managed to pour oil on the fire.  Studying the interactions among the leaks and the uprising are still to be written.  The Lebanese daily Al Akhbar (The Stories) started publishing in December 2010 analyses of the US diplomatic telegrams that related to Tunisia and Saudi Arabia.

The domain name of Al Akhbar was attacked and redirected to a porno site in Saudi Arabia.  As Al Akhbar recovered from the attack, it had to face denials of services, and dealing with hackers erasing the contents of cables, articles, and pieces of analyses.  WikiLeakes supporters intervened and redirected to us the official Tunisian sites.

The New Yorker divulged a leak from the US ambassador to Tunisia, exposing the rampant corruption of President Ben Ali and his entourage. One leak announced the readiness of the US to supporting the Tunisian army against Ben Ali.  This piece of intelligence was a strong message and a signal to getting on the move.  When we witnessed the Tunisian uprising, we knew that Egypt of Mubarak is next in line.

Consequently, we worked hard to release leaks concerning Mubarak’s vast and deep network of collaborators and far-reaching corruption to even small municipalities and shop owners. In collaboration with the British The Daily Telegraph, we published 480 telegram leaks on Libya of Qadhafi.

These leaks tarnished and weakened the massive support that the US and western States lavished on Mubarak and Qadhafi.

For example, vice President Joseph Biden, refrained from repeating that “The regime of Mubarak is most probably democratic“.  Leaks exposed the close cooperation and technical support of the FBI with Egypt internal security services and procedures for torture activities, against human rights…

For example, another leaks divulged instructions to soccer clubs to not using Facebook and Twitter. The Egyptian revolutionary had a field day disseminating this leak of forbidding the usage of social platform.

From the 20 dailies we cooperated with, only The Daily Telegram thought it worthwhile analyzing leaks on Egypt and Libya and publishing any articles relative to these leaks they had.