“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the U.S.-led
campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with
cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray
stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered
Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally,
threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy
everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new
information from U.S. government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other
words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did
not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”
