La primera idea que tuve al decidir el formato informativo fue crear un suplemento semanal a modo de "El País Semanal". El tema que trataré será Wikileaks pero principalmente me gustaría centrarlo en la figura de Julian Assange, incorporando grandes fotografías suyas (centrar el layout en las fotografías) y una entrevista personal del periodista.
Ressource Article taken from Vanity Fair Magazine:
Julian Assange: Roommate from Hell
In late 2007, a German I.T. worker named Daniel Domscheit-Berg heard about an anarchist hacking group called WikiLeaks. He got involved with the fledgling organization, eventually rising up to become its spokesman—and founder Julian Assange’s right-hand man. In an excerpt from his new book, Domscheit-Berg describes Assange’s bouts of paranoia, his penchant for elaborate disguises, and his epic battles with a cat named Mr. Schmitt.
The first time that something Julian said really left a bitter taste in my mouth was in early 2009, when we were considering taking part in the World Social Forum in Brazil. A friend had mentioned to me that he would like to come with us. I told Julian about it. Personally, I was against the idea. This friend had nothing to do with the project, and we weren’t going there on vacation, but rather to make contacts and to work.
Julian, on the other hand, thought it was an excellent idea and said, “Let him come along.” Julian would have liked for someone to shoulder his luggage. That was the first time I asked myself who was playing his porter right now.
I couldn’t think of anyone. Besides me.
I realized only later that Julian must have frequently interpreted my behavior as kowtowing. I just wanted to be friendly and considerate. I think that he must have regarded me as weaker than I actually was. Perhaps it’s because I am an optimistic person who spends less time criticizing and more time getting things done.
And our friendship began to fall apart the moment that Julian no longer felt that I was kowtowing to him. When I began to bring up concrete problems, simply because problems existed and not because I saw our relationship differently, he started to describe me as someone who needed to be “contained.”
In early 2010 his tone toward me changed radically. “If you fuck up, I’ll hunt you down and kill you,” he once told me. No one had ever said anything like that to me. No matter how frightened he was that something would go wrong, a threat like that was utterly inexcusable. I just asked whether he still had all his marbles, laughed, and left it at that. What are you supposed to say to such a statement?
I can’t think of any serious mistakes for which I alone was responsible. Once I didn’t make a backup of the central server, and when it broke, Julian said, “WikiLeaks has only survived because I didn’t trust you.” Julian had a backup that we could use to reboot everything easily. Probably, he hadn’t made the copy only out of fastidiousness but just because he distrusted people, including me. It was the server on which our e-mails were stored.
The absurd thing was that he was the one who was continually losing or forgetting things. And that was precisely what he was accusing me of. If Julian messed something up, on the other hand, something else was usually the reason. He always had an elaborate explanation, sometimes one that cast him as the hero.
When, in June 2009, he was due to be presented with Amnesty International’s Media Award, he arrived in London three hours late. The leak for which the prize was awarded was about extrajudicial killings by the Kenyan police. An investigation concluded that 500 people were murdered. Two human rights lawyers from a Kenyan legal aid foundation had uncovered this and written a report on it. Julian missed the award ceremony. A lot of people whom he couldn’t have otherwise reached back then would have heard him in the auditorium. We expected this award to open a lot of doors for us, and it would take the wind out of the sails of some of our critics. Something Amnesty regarded as worthy of an award couldn’t be that unethical. Two months before the award ceremony, Oscar Kamau Kingara, the director of the Kenyan foundation, and his director, John Paul Oula, were gunned down in their car in Nairobi. The two of them were on their way to a Kenyan human rights commission, with which they had written their report. We had only put the report on our website, making it accessible to a wider audience. We owed it to Kingara and Oula to accept the award on their behalf. It was the least we could do.
Julian wrote a solemn press release in which he once again stressed their civic courage. Julian’s excuse for showing up late at the award ceremony was long-winded. It could have taken up several pages of a spy thriller. The only detail I can remember is that two police officers had allegedly followed him. On another occasion, he explained that he had missed a connecting flight because he was busy solving an extremely difficult math problem. Although I spent a lot of time with him, I could never tell when he was trying to pull the wool over my eyes and when he was telling the truth.
I know at least three different versions of his past and the origins of his surname. There were stories of him having at least ten ancestors from various corners of the globe, from the South Sea pirates to Irishmen. For a while, he even had business cards printed up with “Julian D’Assange” on them. He created a real sense of mystery about himself and constantly cloaked his past in new details. He was glad every time a journalist jotted them down. My first thought when I heard he was writing an autobiography was that they should put it in the fiction section! Julian reinvented himself every day, like a hard drive that one kept on reformatting. Reset, reboot. Maybe he didn’t know himself—who he was and where he came from. Maybe he had learned early on that he always had to cut himself free from women and friends, and this was easier if he could revise his personality andpress the Reset button.
Julian was engaged in a constant battle for dominance—even with my cat, Mr. Schmitt. Mr. Schmitt is a lovable, lazy creature, a bit shy, with gray-and-white fur and an extremely laid-back way of walking. Unfortunately he also has a neurosis stemming from the time when Julian lived with me in Wiesbaden. Julian was always attacking the poor animal. He would spread his fingers into a fork shape and pounce on the cat’s neck. It was a game to see who was quicker. Either Julian would succeed in getting his fingers around the cat and pinning it to the floor, or the cat would drive Julian off with a swipe of its claws. It must have been a nightmare for the poor thing. No sooner would Mr. Schmitt lie down to relax than the crazy Australian would be upon him. Julian preferred to attack at times when Mr. Schmitt was tired.
“It’s about training vigilance,” Julian explained.
Mr. Schmitt was a male cat, and male cats were supposed to be dominant.
“A man must never forget he has to be the master of the situation,” Julian proclaimed.
I wasn’t aware that anyone in my apartment or the courtyard had questioned Mr. Schmitt’s masculinity. What’s more, he was neutered.
Julian often behaved as though he had been raised by wolves rather than by other human beings. Whenever I cooked, the food would not, for instance, end up being shared equally between us. What mattered was who was quicker off the mark. If there were four slices of SPAM, he would eat three and leave one for me if I was too slow. I wondered if I was being small-minded when things my mother used to say would pop into my mind occasionally. Things like “You could at least ask.”
We both liked raw meat—steak tartare with onions. The fact that I took longer to eat my share was because I ate it with whole-grain bread and butter, while Julian preferred to eat his food without any accompaniments. He would eat meat or cheese or chocolate or bread. If he thought that citrus fruit would do him good, he would suck one lemon after another. And sometimes food would occur to him in the middle of the night after he hadn’t consumed a single bite all day.
It was not that he had never learned any manners. Julian could be very polite when he wanted to. For example, he frequently accompanied my visitors—even when he didn’t know them—out the door, into the lobby, and onto the street.
Julian was very paranoid. He was convinced that someone was watching my house, so he decided we should avoid ever being seen leaving or returning to the apartment together. I used to wonder what difference that made. If someone had gone to the trouble of shadowing my apartment, he would have known we lived together.
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