(London, U.K.) A renowned investigative journalist has spoke of how he found Julian Assange “paranoid and crazy” when they first met – only for his methods to become standard journalistic practice a number of years later.
John Goetz, an investigations editor with the German public broadcaster NDR, was among a handful of prominent journalists to be invited to the Guardian’s offices in London in the summer of 2010 — WikiLeaks had just received upwards of 100,000 sensitive documents that were leaked from the U.S. military.
The classified cache of documents later came to be known as the Afghan War Logs — revealing torture, assassinations and CIA kidnappings. Goetz rubbished the American government’s assertion that Assange “recklessly endangered lives” at the second week of the WikiLeaks publisher’s U.S. extradition proceedings on Wednesday (September 17).
The Berlin-based reporter, who had then been a senior investigative journalist for Der Spiegel, spoke of those seminal 2010 meetings and how even veteran journalists from The New York Times, The Guardian and his publication found Assange to be ultra-obsessed with security.
“I remember being frustrated by the constant emails and reminders that we needed to be secure and that we needed to use encryption on everything,” Goetz said.
“It was the first time I had touched a crypto-phone. The amount of precautions were enormous.
“I thought it was all paranoid and crazy, but it became standard journalistic practice.”
Goetz, who had had a background on reporting on Afghanistan and the U.S. military, gave an inside look of how WikiLeaks transformed investigative journalism.
He detailed how the technology Assange and his whistle-blower organisation had built helped him substantiate allegations of serious wrongdoing that was previously considered unfathomable — namely in the case of Khaled el-Masri.
El-Masri, a dual German-Lebanese citizen, had approached Goetz with his story five years before Goetz had ever come into contact with WikiLeaks.
Goetz said: “It was interesting because at that point in time, very few people believed what he was alleging. He said he had been kidnapped, drugged, dumped in Afghanistan and ended up in some forest in Albania.
“He said it was Americans and that he was taken to an American military base after we was kidnapped in Macedonia. All the allegations have since been proven in the European High Court.”
Goetz said he had managed to find the 13 CIA agents who kidnapped, beat and sodomised El Masri — using flight logs and hotel records to track the men to North Carolina — and the investigation became the cover story for Der Spiegel.
As a result of Goetz’s reporting, German prosecutors in Munich decided to order the arrest of the 13 CIA agents — the arrest warrant was never issued in the U.S. however.
“The arrest warrant was never issued to the U.S. even though everyone knew where the perpetrators of the crime lived,” Goetz said.
“I never really understood that and that was something I reported on.”
It was only when he worked on the U.S. State Department cables with WikiLeaks that he, and the rest of the world, were able to piece together what really took place.
“When I first saw the cables, it was fascinating because it was the first thing I typed in.
“It was fascinating to see the pressure applied on Germany from the U.S. not to arrest.
“I don’t recall exactly what it said but it was something like there would be serious repercussions for German-U.S. relations if they went ahead.”
Goetz’s testimony echoed similar sentiments produced by Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, at the hearings last week.
Timm said that the technology developed by Assange and WikiLeaks had enabled the Freedom of the Press Foundation to develop a similar tool for journalists and media organisations that allowed whistleblowers and sources to leak documents anonymously.
The tool, entitled SecureDrop, is now used by almost every media organisation around the world including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and Al Jazeera.