Manama: Senior officials in several Arab countries have close links with the CIA and many people keep visiting US embassies in their countries to establish links with the US intelligence agency, Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website, said.
“These officials are spies for the US in their countries,” Assange told pan-Arab Al Jazeera channel in an interview on Wednesday evening.
The interviewer, Ahmad Mansour, said during the second part of the interview, that Assange had shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA, Qatari daily The Peninsula reported on Thursday.
However, neither Assange nor Mansour however divulged the names of these officials.
According to the WikiLeaks founder, US embassies around the world are very anxious about Israel, Iran, labour unions, arms dealings, mainly selling of American arms, and spying through high-tech devices.
Assange said he feared he could be killed, but added that there were 2,000 websites that were ready to publish the remaining files that are in possession of WikiLeaks after “he has been done away with."
“If I am killed or detained for a long time, there are 2,000 websites ready to publish the remaining files. We have protected these websites through very safe passwords,” Assange told the Doha-based network.
Currently, the whistle-blowing website is exposing files in a ‘responsible’ manner, he said.
"But if I am forced, we could go to the extreme and expose each and every file that we have access to," he said. "We must protect our sources at whatever cost. This is our sincere concern."
"WikiLeaks is receiving sensitive files from Afghanistan, Kenya, Russia and China, among other countries. For nine years the US and Nato forces have failed to silence people in Afghanistan because the people there are loyal and truthful. The US marines fighting in Afghanistan are not happy being there and don’t really know why they are there and fighting for what," said Assange.
The US is trying to use latest technology to disrupt his website but in vain. “Washington is also projecting me as a terrorist and wants to convince the world that I am another Osama bin Laden,” he said.
Assange said that he would be put on a trial for his various exposes from January 11 in a special court that deals with terror-related cases.
“If the UK, where I am based right now, decides to hand me over to Sweden for alleged cases of sexual abuse, Stockholm will hand me over to the US,” he said.
The Australian national said he feared that the US might slap laws declaring him as a spy who had been acting against Washington. The Pentagon has set up a ‘war room’ manned by 120 officials and their job is just to disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks, he said.
“We have more files dealing with defense issues of Central Europe, but I or my staff didn’t have the time to go through all of them. What is being published by the five media partners of WikiLeaks are only those details which they think are interesting for their readers," he said, quoted by the Qatari daily.
