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