US Edition 
Julian Assange interviews Hizbollah chief in debut of new chat show
Julian Assange interviewed Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday in the first episode of the WikiLeaks founder’s provocative new show on RT, the Russian-government’s English-language propaganda channel.
Nasrallah, whom the United States and the UK consider a terrorist, spoke to Mr Assange via a video link from a secret location in Lebanon in his first appearance on a foreign TV station in three years.
Mr Assange, 40, who is on bail in the UK while he fights extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations, had promised a “notorious” first guest on his twelve-episode show, The World Tomorrow.
The freedom of information campaigner faced heavy criticism when he announced in January that he would be hosting a talk show on RT.
The channel is state-funded and produces a relentless stream of anti-American bulletins, which complement crushingly pro-Kremlin Russian-language broadcast media.
Mr Assange brushed off the disapproval, saying he maintains full editorial control and will talk to “iconoclasts, visionaries and power insiders” of all kinds for the show.
However, Nasrallah, 51, seemed a better fit for RT than the Russian opposition leaders whom the WikiLeaks campaigner claims to have invited on air for later programmes.
Mr Assange adopted a deferential air with the Hizbollah chief, whose group aims to “obliterate” Israel, asking him a series of softball questions. The Lebanese reiterated well-worn Hizbollah positions, but also revealed that his organisation had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Syria’s opposition to negotiate with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
The host and interviewee shared a joke about how Lebanese militiamen use village dialect as code when using walkie-talkies rather than sophisticated encryption. “That’s not going to do you any good in WikiLeaks, by the way,” Nasrallah quipped.
Mr Assange nodded sympathetically when the Hizbollah leader condemned a US ban on the organisation’s Al Manar TV channel, which has been accused of spreading anti-Semitism.
Speaking before the broadcast, the WikiLeaks founder had predicted that he would be pilloried for his new programme, saying that critics would comment: “There’s Julian Assange, enemy combatant, traitor, getting into bed with the Kremlin and interviewing terrible radicals from around the world.”
He said, however, that he would push ahead in order to highlight people and issues not covered in mainstream western media.