Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, oversees a populist intelligence network. Digitally altered photograph by Phillip Toledano.
The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B-Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.
by Raffi Khatchadourian
June 7, 2010
Read the full article here: The New Yorker
Related information:
– Pentagon Hunts WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange
– Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has passport confiscated in Australia
– WikiLeaks Plans to Post Video Showing US Massacre of Afghani Civilians
In case you want to know what the US government response was to this video:
Here is what Defense Secretary Robert Gates had to say:
– Gates: WikiLeaks Video ‘Painful To See’ But Won’t Have ‘Lasting’ Impact (Huffington Post):
“And, you know, we’ve investigated it very thoroughly. And it’s unfortunate,” he added. “It’s clearly not helpful. But by the same token, I think it should not have any lasting consequences.”
– The War on WikiLeaks … and Why It Matters
– US Must Stop Spying on WikiLeaks
– Pentagon Targets WikiLeaks Whistleblowers
– Pentagon Adds WikiLeaks to The List of Enemies Threatening National Security
– US Army considered attack on Wikileaks