.
WikiLeaks'
Assange signals release of documents before U.S. election
By Andrea Shalal,Reuters
By Andrea Shalal
BERLIN
(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday the organization
would publish around one million documents related to the U.S. election
and three governments, but denied the release was aimed at damaging Hillary
Clinton.
He said the documents would be released before the end of
the year, starting with an initial batch in the coming week.
He criticized Clinton, the Democratic presidential
candidate, for demonizing the group's work after a spate of releases related to
the Democratic National Committee before the Democratic convention this summer.
Assange said her campaign had falsely suggested that
accessing WikiLeaks data would make users vulnerable to malicious software.
But he denied the release of documents related to the U.S. election was specifically geared to damage Clinton, saying he had
been misquoted.
Assange also signaled changes in the way WikiLeaks is
organized and funded, saying the group would soon open itself to membership. He
said the group was looking to expand its work beyond the 100 media outlets it
works with.
Assange, 45, spoke via a video link at an event marking
the 10th anniversary of the group's founding. He remains in the Eucador Embassy
in London where he sought refuge in 2012 to
avoid possible extradition to Sweden,
where he is wanted for questioning over allegations that he committed rape in
2010.
Assange denies the allegations and says he fears extradition
to the United States,
where a criminal investigation into the activities of WikiLeaks is underway.
He told a packed news conference at a Berlin theater the group's work would
continue, even if he had to resign in the future, and he appealed to supporters
to fund the group's work, and said several new books were forthcoming.
Assange said Britain's vote to leave the
European Union could complicate his case by limiting his ability to appeal to
the European Court of Justice.
Asked how he felt after four years in the embassy, he
said "pale" and joked he would be a good candidate for medical study
since he was otherwise healthy but had not seen the sun in over four years.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by
Madeline Chambers and Janet Lawrence)
World
WikiLeaks
vows to release 'significant' material on US election
AFP
Berlin (AFP) -
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pledged Tuesday to publish
"significant" new material on the US election before the November 8
vote, speaking on the 10th anniversary of the online leaking platform.
Assange said there were "enormous expectations in
the United States"
about the material and that "some of that expectation will be partly
answered", with "a lot of fascinating angles" in the documents.
"Do they show interesting features of US power
factions? Yes they do," he said, addressing an anniversary event in Berlin via videolink.
On why WikiLeaks was holding back for now, he added that
"if we're going to make a major publication in relation to the United
States at a particular hour, we don't do it at 3:00 am," referring to the
time in the eastern United States.
He also said that "we hope to be publishing every
week for the next 10 weeks," promising documents on the subjects of war,
arms, oil, Google and mass surveillance.
Assange -- speaking from the Ecuadorean embassy in
London, where he has been holed up for over four years to avoid being
extradited to Sweden to face rape allegations -- hailed WikiLeaks for releasing
10 million documents over the past decade, exposing state and corporate
secrets.
He pledged that WikiLeaks would seek to expand its
activities with extra staff and new media partnerships, with plans to hire 100
more journalists over the next three years.
"We're going to need... an army to defend us from
the pressure that is already starting to arrive," said Assange, wearing a
black T-shirt with the word "truth" on it.
On the eve of the US Democratic Party convention in July,
WikiLeaks published some 20,000 internal emails pointing at an apparent bias of
its leaders for Clinton
during the primary campaign.
Assange charged that WikiLeaks was now the target of a
witch hunt orchestrated in particular by Clinton,
likening it to the repression of American communists in the 1950s driven by
then senator Joseph McCarthy.
Assange said WikiLeaks would scale up to "amplify
our publications and to defend us against what is really a quite remarkable
McCarthyist push in the United States at the moment, principally by Hillary
Clinton and her allies because she happens to be the person being exposed at
the moment".
Asked whether he felt affinity with Clinton's Republican rival Donald Trump, he
said: "I feel personal affinity with all human beings. Through
understanding someone, you can feel sorry for them.
"I certainly feel sorry for Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump. These are two people who are tormented by their
ambitions."
World
Julian
Assange moves speech to Berlin
due to 'specific information'
steven_musil,CNET
WikiLeaks
founder Julian
Assange has moved
a much-anticipated press conference on Tuesday from London
to Berlin,
citing unspecified "specific information."
Assange,
who has been living in asylum in Ecuador's
embassy in London
for four years, had been scheduled to deliver a speech from his balcony during
which it was expected he would release information that could be damaging to US
presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton. Assange had said in August he planned to release
"significant" information about the Democratic nominee before the November 8 election.
The
change in venue, which WikiLeaks announced in a tweet Monday,
came just hours after the document-leaking site tweeted a report that quoted Clinton as appearing to
suggest use of a drone strike against Assange. According to True Pundit, Clinton asked during a
2010 State Department meeting about WikiLeaks and Assange, "Can't we just
drone this guy?"
The quote,
allegedly made while Clinton
was serving as Secretary of State, was included in a massive trove of
classified State Department documents that Wikileaks began releasing later that
month.
Representatives
for WikiLeaks and Clinton's campaign didn't immediately respond to requests for
comment.
The
WikiLeaks founder sought asylum from Ecuador in 2012 after Swedish investigators issued a
European arrest warrant for Assange that required British police to detain and
extradite him. He is trying to avoid extradition to Sweden
out of fear he would then be extradited to the US to face questioning over
classified material published on WikiLeaks.
