The women’s Web site attacked the musician after he revealed that he cheated on ex-wife Kim Gordon
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Thurston Moore calls Jezebel “gender fascism,” Jezebel responds with Oprah GIFs
Showing posts with label Responds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Responds. Show all posts
Friday, March 7, 2014
Thurston Moore calls Jezebel “gender fascism,” Jezebel responds with Oprah GIFs
Thurston Moore calls Jezebel “gender fascism,” Jezebel responds with Oprah GIFs
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Ukraine responds to mass protests by passing tough anti-protests laws
Ukraine’s pro-government lawmakers on Thursday pushed through parliament tough legislation in an apparent bid to suppress protests against President Viktor Yanukovych.
The opposition, which has been spearheading nearly two months of rallies against Yanukovych over his decision to ditch a key pact with the European Union, branded the vote “a power grab.”
According to the new legislation backed by 235 out of 450 lawmakers, a blockade of public buildings would be punishable by up to five years in prison.
The legislation also simplified a procedure to prosecute lawmakers.
According to the new law, protesters wearing masks or helmets will face a fine or an administrative arrest.
Dissemination of slander on the Internet was also banned and would be punishable by a fine or corrective labor of up to one year.
The sweeping legislation caused an outcry among opposition leaders who fear that the government would use the new legislation to prosecute them and break up the protest movement.
More from GlobalPost: Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church stares down government, and wins
“The regime of Viktor Yanukovych and the Regions Party have completely destroyed state power in Ukraine,” said Arseniy Yatsenyuk, leader of Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party.
“This is nothing else but an overthrow of the constitutional system and a power grab in Ukraine.”
Last month, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in the capital Kyiv and western Ukraine after Yanukovych decided to scrap key political and trade agreements with the EU.
The protests have since dwindled but the opposition maintains a protest camp on Kyiv’s central Independence Square known locally as the Maidan.
Opposition lawmakers sought to disrupt the vote but pro-Yanukovych parliament members voted by a show of hands, provoking concern from foreign officials.
“I am concerned about the way some laws were voted in parliament today. Norms should be adopted through proper procedures,” said the EU’s ambassador to Ukraine, Jan Tombinski.
“Otherwise the credibility of democratic institutions and of the legal system is at stake.”
“I am concerned about the way some laws were voted on in parliament today,” US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt added on Twitter.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140116/ukraine-responds-mass-protests-passing-tough-anti-protests-laws
Ukraine responds to mass protests by passing tough anti-protests laws
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Drake responds to Kendrick Lamar"s controversial "Control" verse
Rapper says ‘Kendrick’s not murdering me, at all’
Photo:
Drake has become the latest rapper to respond to Kendrick Lamar‘s ‘Control’ lyrics in which he called out a number of his rapping peers.
Lamar’s controversial lyrics caused a bit of a stir within the rap community as he claimed to be one of the best MCs of all time whilst saying he was trying to ‘murder’ the likes of Drake, A$ AP Rocky, Wale, Big Sean and Pusha T.
However, Drake failed to see what the fuss was all about and he doesn’t believe Lamar was ‘murdering’ him at all.
Drake told Billboard: “I didn’t really have anything to say about it. It just sounded like an ambitious thought to me.
“That’s all it was. I know good and well that Kendrick’s not murdering me, at all, in any platform. So when that day presents itself, I guess we can revisit the topic.”
Listen to Big Sean ft. Kendrick Lamar – ‘Control’ below:
Earlier this week (29 August) Lamar revealed that he may have to ‘dumb down’ his lyrics if people are going to take tracks similar to ‘Control’ the wrong way, whilst comparing himself to the likes of Biggie and 2Pac.
He said: “The irony of that line is that the people who actually understood it and got it were the actual kings of New York, you know, me sitting down with them this past week, and them understanding, it’s not actually about being the king of whatever coast, it’s about leaving a mark as great as Biggie, as great as Pac.”
Below – Lydon vs Bono, Louis vs Cheryl: the best feuds in music
Drake responds to Kendrick Lamar"s controversial "Control" verse
Monday, August 12, 2013
Saturday, July 27, 2013
(UPDATED: RNC Responds to PJ Media) EXCLUSIVE: RNC Operatives Join Holder’s Campaign Against Texas, Several Other States
PJ TatlerUPDATE:
RNC Communications Director Sean Spicer is denying the claims made within this article, both via phone and by submitting comments below as “SeanS”.
Additionally, Tom Hofeller, mentioned in this article, claims via email that this article is “unequivocally false.”
PJ Media not only has 100% confidence in the accuracy of the article’s contents, we offered Spicer, via email, three additional questions for the RNC to answer regarding their denial:
1. Does RNC oppose a renewed Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, or is the story accurate that RNC consultants are working on a fix?
2. Does RNC oppose an amended Section 4?
3. Was RNC’s staff involved in the 2006 reauthorization of Section 5 — advocating amendment and higher burdens on states?
We stated that we would wait for their responses and would publish them in this article.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that the Justice Department will seek to recapture Texas and return it to federal oversight for approval of all election law changes such as photo voter identification. Holder’s move comes after the Supreme Court in June freed Texas and other states from the requirement that all state election laws be approved in Washington, D.C. Holder’s move prompted outrage from Texas Senators Ted Cruz, John Cornyn and Governor Rick Perry.
The three should also be angry with the Republican National Committee. PJ Tatler has learned that staff at the RNC have been spending RNC donations plotting to do exactly what Eric Holder is seeking to do – return Texas and other states to federal oversight.
According to RNC sources frustrated with the race-based effort, paid RNC consultant Tom Hofeller (thofeller@rnchq.org) is spending RNC donations to develop race-based criteria to grab Texas and other states and place them back into federal receivership. The sources tell Tatler that nearly all of the members of the actual committee have been kept in the dark about this effort, and no mention is ever made in RNC fundraising efforts — for good reason, because GOP donors would be furious.
Hofeller, a long-time RNC consultant on redistricting, has devised ways to force several states back into federal receivership by amending the Voting Rights Act to grab states and force them to obtain Washington, D.C. approval. He is hopeful that Congressional Republicans will use his RNC-generated ideas to accomplish this goal.
So far, the Republicans in Congress have shown more sense than the Republicans paid by the RNC, and are cool to the idea of returning states to federal receivership.
According to congressional sources, Hofeller has also been misrepresenting the importance of the law struck down by the Supreme Court. Hofeller has told Hill sources the federal election oversight law is essential to elect Republicans, something most Republicans on the Hill no longer believe is true. Hofeller has spread this message while being paid by the RNC.
RNC fundraising is down this year. If the rank and file learn that donations are being used to place states back under Eric Holder’s boot, to attack voter ID, and pay race-obsessed consultants like Hofeller, expect RNC fundraising to suffer further. Why should donors pay the RNC to help Eric Holder attack Texas?
The bigger question: why is the RNC paying anyone like Tom Hofeller one red cent to do something that the overwhelming majority of Republicans oppose?
(UPDATED: RNC Responds to PJ Media) EXCLUSIVE: RNC Operatives Join Holder’s Campaign Against Texas, Several Other States
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Julian Assange on Meeting with Google, Responds to Anti-WikiLeaks Attacks from New Film to Finances
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We are speaking today with Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, granted political asylum by Ecuador last year, sought refuge almost a year ago at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, because the British government promises to arrest him if he steps foot outside. Julian Assange is also author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. I wanted to ask you quickly, Julian, about the Icelandic Supreme Court decision around Visa and the—and the whole issue of how the money supply to WikiLeaks has been cut off online, if you can explain this latest development.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Amy, first let me contextualize it. There’s attacks on all fronts against WikiLeaks—criminal, reputational, financial, in many different countries. There’s also counterattacks that we have been making. And in relation to this Visa blockade, back in—back in late 2010, U.S. right-wing politicians, like Senator Lieberman, contacted a number of different financial institutions in the United States and encouraged them to cut off WikiLeaks as a recipient of Visa donations, our donations but by Visa. Now, as a result, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Moneybookers, Western Union, Diners Club, Discover, JCB and the Bank of America and Swiss Post Finance—that’s 10 different financial organizations—as a result of that pressure, engaged in extrajudicial financial blockade against us and our donors, much the same as they do to Cuba, but without any legislative backing, without any administrative backing. Even the U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner investigated whether we should be formally added to a U.S. blacklist, and found that there was no legal basis to do so.
In response, WikiLeaks, for the past year and a half or so, has been engaged in litigating some of these giant financial services companies that are influenced by Washington power brokers. And we won in the lower courts in Iceland, and we have won in the Supreme Court in Iceland just a few weeks ago. Now, that victory in the Supreme Court stated that Visa must open up the gateway and its subcontractor Valitor in Iceland must open up the gateway. Visa has relented and has opened up the gateway. However, it has also activated what it says is another clause in the contract to shut it back down again on midnight June 30. So, between now and midnight June 30, people can donate directly to WikiLeaks; otherwise, they have to—come midnight June 30, they will have to engage in indirect mechanisms. But they are there. For example, Daniel Ellsberg, John Cusack, John Perry Barlow and some others set up the Free Press Foundation in the United States precisely to deal with some of these economic blockades. But if you go to WikiLeaks.org/donate, you will see that there’s different ways that we have constructed to work around this economic blockade. Unfortunately, they’re all a little bit indirect, so it’s a little bit of an extra burden for donors and a reputational burden, because you don’t see that you are donating directly to WikiLeaks; you see that you’re donating to the Free Press Foundation or the Wau Holland Foundation in Germany or a number of others. But donations now to WikiLeaks via the Free Press Foundation in the United States are tax-deductible. We’ve also had a major victory in Europe in relation to the German tax authorities, which also were politically pressured, and that has come out and been admitted, to remove our tax deductibility in Europe. That’s now back. We’ve won against that. So, the position of my asylum here is such that we’ve been able to concentrate more of our resources on counterattack and have been successfully engaged in that battle.
AMY GOODMAN: We wanted to turn—switch gears right now. The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has come out with a new book called The New Digital Age. And we wanted to ask you about a meeting you had. On June 23rd, 2011, Julian Assange, you had a secret five-hour meeting with the Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At the time, you were under house arrest in rural England. Also in attendance Jared Cohen, former adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Scott Malcomson, director of speech writing for Ambassador Susan Rice at the State Department and current communications director of the International Crisis Group; and Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting to discuss their ideas for this book that has just come out, The New Digital World. We want to go to a part of your conversation with Schmidt and Malcomson. This is a recording you made of that meeting, first time being played in a national broadcast, where you talk about the PATRIOT Act.
JULIAN ASSANGE: We wouldn’t mind a leak from Google, which would be, I think, probably all the PATRIOT Act requests.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Yeah, which would be illegal.
JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s no jurisdiction, da-da-da-da-da.
ERIC SCHMIDT: We are a U.S.—
JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s higher laws. There’s higher laws, First Amendment, you know.
ERIC SCHMIDT: No, no. I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time on this question, because I am—I am in great trouble because I have given a series of criticisms about PATRIOT I and PATRIOT II, because—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: —which I think are—because they’re nontransparent, you know, because the judge’s orders are hidden, and so forth and so on. And the answer—the answer is that the laws are quite clear about Google in the U.S., that we couldn’t do it. It would be illegal.
JULIAN ASSANGE: We’re fighting this case now with Twitter, that we’ve done three court hearings now, trying to get the names of the other companies that fulfilled the subpoenas to the grand jury in the U.S. Twitter resisted, and so that’s how some of us became aware. They argued that we should be told that there was a subpoena. I wasn’t told, but—
ERIC SCHMIDT: And this is—and this is concerning you, concerning WikiLeaks?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, me personally, yeah. But three other people were told, but we know it is at least four other companies.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I can certainly pass on your request to our general counsel.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Tell them to argue that we should be told.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So, your specific request is that Google argue legally—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: —that WikiLeaks, as an organization, should be informed—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Or any of the individuals.
ERIC SCHMIDT: —or the individuals, if they are named in a FISA.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: OK.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I will pass that along.
AMY GOODMAN: That is a part of this five-hour conversation that you had with the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Malcomson, director of speech writing for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. Can you talk about the circumstances of this meeting, how you made this recording, and then talk about the substance of what we just heard?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s quite interesting to speculate as to the surface excuse for the meeting being about a book versus was there another side to it, as well. If we look at the way that Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have been going to North Korea and meeting with some other thieves, and how that information very rapidly goes back to the State Department—we know that the results of that meeting with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen went very, very quickly back to the top levels of the State Department—that they’re, in some ways, becoming informal, deniable foreign ministers for a section of U.S. power. That’s a very interesting thing to see Google resting so heavily on the U.S. State Department.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to an excerpt from the book by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen called The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. In it, the authors suggest WikiLeaks has endangered lives. They write, quote, “Neither WikiLeaks nor groups like Anonymous are terrorist organizations, although some might claim that hackers who engage in activities like stealing and publishing personal and classified information online might as well be. The information released on WikiLeaks put lives at risk and inflicted serious diplomatic damage,” end-quote. The authors don’t cite evidence for their claim, but they do put an asterisk next to the statement saying, quote, “At a minimum, platforms like WikiLeaks and hacker collectives that traffic in stolen classified material from governments enable or encourage espionage.” Julian Assange, your comments on that quote taken from Eric Schmidt’s book?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s absurd. States that engage in espionage want to keep the information that they gain to themselves in order to get competitive knowledge advantage over other states, and also simply to protect their sourcing operations. There’s a reason why that claim, like all such claims, remains uncited: because it is false. Not even the Pentagon, in fact, no government organization, claims that the activities of WikiLeaks have led even to the loss of life for a single person anywhere in the world. And if we want to speculate about speculative risks, as opposed to talk about the hundreds of thousands of cases of—hundreds and thousands of deaths that WikiLeaks documented, the U.S. military being involved in one way or the other, then we can go to a statement made by NATO in Kabul, reported by CNN, that NATO could not see a single case of an Afghan needing protection or needing to be moved as a result of our publication of the Afghan War Diaries, and that it was the Afghan War Diaries that led to all these rhetorical flourishes by the Pentagon and by the establishment media in the United Kingdom, led by Murdoch, and in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me end with your response to Alex Gibney’s recently released documentary. We interviewed him at Sundance, the documentary called We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. This is Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, or NSA.
MICHAEL HAYDEN: Everyone has secrets. Some of the activities that nation states conduct in order to keep their people safe and free need to be secret in order to be successful. If they are broadly known, you cannot accomplish your work. Now look, I’m going to be very candid, alright? We steal secrets. We steal other nations’ secrets. One cannot do that above board and be very successful for a very long period of time.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, or NSA, his statement, “We steal secrets,” the one that Alex Gibney used for the title of his documentary. Your response, Julian Assange? And have you gotten to see this documentary?
JULIAN ASSANGE: [inaudible] at best. The claim in the title is simply false. It has spread everywhere, of course, because it’s in all the promotional literature. I assume very few people will go actually to see that film. That the promotion has been done by Universal. That’s a $ 2.5 million hit job on my reputation, the reputation of the organization. What’s the equivalent title? I Make Fictitious, Fraudulent Films: The Story of Alex Gibney. In response, we have published the full transcript, ahead of public—ahead of the film’s release, with line-by-line detail showing exactly how Alex Gibney edited statements, stitched them together, etc., and didn’t engage in—didn’t engage, it seems, in any fact checking of the statements that the people he was interviewing. You know, for an example, I make some statement that begins with, “Well, what they say is,” and then I quote it. Alex Gibney cuts off the “What they say,” so in order to put someone else’s words into my mouth. And that’s present throughout the film. This is not a serious work.
AMY GOODMAN: We have just 10 seconds in this part of the interview, Julian.
JULIAN ASSANGE: This is not a serious work, and this is not a serious—not a serious filmmaker.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, we’d like to ask you to just stay with us for a post-show discussion. We have many more questions to ask you. Julian Assange, speaking to us from the Ecuadorean embassy, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, granted asylum by Ecuador. That’s why he’s in their embassy right now.
Democracy Now!
Julian Assange on Meeting with Google, Responds to Anti-WikiLeaks Attacks from New Film to Finances
Julian Assange on Meeting with Google, Responds to Anti-WikiLeaks Attacks from New Film to Finances
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We are speaking today with Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, granted political asylum by Ecuador last year, sought refuge almost a year ago at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, because the British government promises to arrest him if he steps foot outside. Julian Assange is also author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. I wanted to ask you quickly, Julian, about the Icelandic Supreme Court decision around Visa and the—and the whole issue of how the money supply to WikiLeaks has been cut off online, if you can explain this latest development.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, Amy, first let me contextualize it. There’s attacks on all fronts against WikiLeaks—criminal, reputational, financial, in many different countries. There’s also counterattacks that we have been making. And in relation to this Visa blockade, back in—back in late 2010, U.S. right-wing politicians, like Senator Lieberman, contacted a number of different financial institutions in the United States and encouraged them to cut off WikiLeaks as a recipient of Visa donations, our donations but by Visa. Now, as a result, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Moneybookers, Western Union, Diners Club, Discover, JCB and the Bank of America and Swiss Post Finance—that’s 10 different financial organizations—as a result of that pressure, engaged in extrajudicial financial blockade against us and our donors, much the same as they do to Cuba, but without any legislative backing, without any administrative backing. Even the U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner investigated whether we should be formally added to a U.S. blacklist, and found that there was no legal basis to do so.
In response, WikiLeaks, for the past year and a half or so, has been engaged in litigating some of these giant financial services companies that are influenced by Washington power brokers. And we won in the lower courts in Iceland, and we have won in the Supreme Court in Iceland just a few weeks ago. Now, that victory in the Supreme Court stated that Visa must open up the gateway and its subcontractor Valitor in Iceland must open up the gateway. Visa has relented and has opened up the gateway. However, it has also activated what it says is another clause in the contract to shut it back down again on midnight June 30. So, between now and midnight June 30, people can donate directly to WikiLeaks; otherwise, they have to—come midnight June 30, they will have to engage in indirect mechanisms. But they are there. For example, Daniel Ellsberg, John Cusack, John Perry Barlow and some others set up the Free Press Foundation in the United States precisely to deal with some of these economic blockades. But if you go to WikiLeaks.org/donate, you will see that there’s different ways that we have constructed to work around this economic blockade. Unfortunately, they’re all a little bit indirect, so it’s a little bit of an extra burden for donors and a reputational burden, because you don’t see that you are donating directly to WikiLeaks; you see that you’re donating to the Free Press Foundation or the Wau Holland Foundation in Germany or a number of others. But donations now to WikiLeaks via the Free Press Foundation in the United States are tax-deductible. We’ve also had a major victory in Europe in relation to the German tax authorities, which also were politically pressured, and that has come out and been admitted, to remove our tax deductibility in Europe. That’s now back. We’ve won against that. So, the position of my asylum here is such that we’ve been able to concentrate more of our resources on counterattack and have been successfully engaged in that battle.
AMY GOODMAN: We wanted to turn—switch gears right now. The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has come out with a new book called The New Digital Age. And we wanted to ask you about a meeting you had. On June 23rd, 2011, Julian Assange, you had a secret five-hour meeting with the Google CEO Eric Schmidt. At the time, you were under house arrest in rural England. Also in attendance Jared Cohen, former adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Scott Malcomson, director of speech writing for Ambassador Susan Rice at the State Department and current communications director of the International Crisis Group; and Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting to discuss their ideas for this book that has just come out, The New Digital World. We want to go to a part of your conversation with Schmidt and Malcomson. This is a recording you made of that meeting, first time being played in a national broadcast, where you talk about the PATRIOT Act.
JULIAN ASSANGE: We wouldn’t mind a leak from Google, which would be, I think, probably all the PATRIOT Act requests.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Yeah, which would be illegal.
JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s no jurisdiction, da-da-da-da-da.
ERIC SCHMIDT: We are a U.S.—
JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s higher laws. There’s higher laws, First Amendment, you know.
ERIC SCHMIDT: No, no. I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time on this question, because I am—I am in great trouble because I have given a series of criticisms about PATRIOT I and PATRIOT II, because—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: —which I think are—because they’re nontransparent, you know, because the judge’s orders are hidden, and so forth and so on. And the answer—the answer is that the laws are quite clear about Google in the U.S., that we couldn’t do it. It would be illegal.
JULIAN ASSANGE: We’re fighting this case now with Twitter, that we’ve done three court hearings now, trying to get the names of the other companies that fulfilled the subpoenas to the grand jury in the U.S. Twitter resisted, and so that’s how some of us became aware. They argued that we should be told that there was a subpoena. I wasn’t told, but—
ERIC SCHMIDT: And this is—and this is concerning you, concerning WikiLeaks?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, me personally, yeah. But three other people were told, but we know it is at least four other companies.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I can certainly pass on your request to our general counsel.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Tell them to argue that we should be told.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So, your specific request is that Google argue legally—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: —that WikiLeaks, as an organization, should be informed—
JULIAN ASSANGE: Or any of the individuals.
ERIC SCHMIDT: —or the individuals, if they are named in a FISA.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: OK.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I will pass that along.
AMY GOODMAN: That is a part of this five-hour conversation that you had with the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, and Scott Malcomson, director of speech writing for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. Can you talk about the circumstances of this meeting, how you made this recording, and then talk about the substance of what we just heard?
JULIAN ASSANGE: It’s quite interesting to speculate as to the surface excuse for the meeting being about a book versus was there another side to it, as well. If we look at the way that Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have been going to North Korea and meeting with some other thieves, and how that information very rapidly goes back to the State Department—we know that the results of that meeting with Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen went very, very quickly back to the top levels of the State Department—that they’re, in some ways, becoming informal, deniable foreign ministers for a section of U.S. power. That’s a very interesting thing to see Google resting so heavily on the U.S. State Department.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to an excerpt from the book by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen called The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. In it, the authors suggest WikiLeaks has endangered lives. They write, quote, “Neither WikiLeaks nor groups like Anonymous are terrorist organizations, although some might claim that hackers who engage in activities like stealing and publishing personal and classified information online might as well be. The information released on WikiLeaks put lives at risk and inflicted serious diplomatic damage,” end-quote. The authors don’t cite evidence for their claim, but they do put an asterisk next to the statement saying, quote, “At a minimum, platforms like WikiLeaks and hacker collectives that traffic in stolen classified material from governments enable or encourage espionage.” Julian Assange, your comments on that quote taken from Eric Schmidt’s book?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s absurd. States that engage in espionage want to keep the information that they gain to themselves in order to get competitive knowledge advantage over other states, and also simply to protect their sourcing operations. There’s a reason why that claim, like all such claims, remains uncited: because it is false. Not even the Pentagon, in fact, no government organization, claims that the activities of WikiLeaks have led even to the loss of life for a single person anywhere in the world. And if we want to speculate about speculative risks, as opposed to talk about the hundreds of thousands of cases of—hundreds and thousands of deaths that WikiLeaks documented, the U.S. military being involved in one way or the other, then we can go to a statement made by NATO in Kabul, reported by CNN, that NATO could not see a single case of an Afghan needing protection or needing to be moved as a result of our publication of the Afghan War Diaries, and that it was the Afghan War Diaries that led to all these rhetorical flourishes by the Pentagon and by the establishment media in the United Kingdom, led by Murdoch, and in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me end with your response to Alex Gibney’s recently released documentary. We interviewed him at Sundance, the documentary called We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. This is Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, or NSA.
MICHAEL HAYDEN: Everyone has secrets. Some of the activities that nation states conduct in order to keep their people safe and free need to be secret in order to be successful. If they are broadly known, you cannot accomplish your work. Now look, I’m going to be very candid, alright? We steal secrets. We steal other nations’ secrets. One cannot do that above board and be very successful for a very long period of time.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, or NSA, his statement, “We steal secrets,” the one that Alex Gibney used for the title of his documentary. Your response, Julian Assange? And have you gotten to see this documentary?
JULIAN ASSANGE: [inaudible] at best. The claim in the title is simply false. It has spread everywhere, of course, because it’s in all the promotional literature. I assume very few people will go actually to see that film. That the promotion has been done by Universal. That’s a $ 2.5 million hit job on my reputation, the reputation of the organization. What’s the equivalent title? I Make Fictitious, Fraudulent Films: The Story of Alex Gibney. In response, we have published the full transcript, ahead of public—ahead of the film’s release, with line-by-line detail showing exactly how Alex Gibney edited statements, stitched them together, etc., and didn’t engage in—didn’t engage, it seems, in any fact checking of the statements that the people he was interviewing. You know, for an example, I make some statement that begins with, “Well, what they say is,” and then I quote it. Alex Gibney cuts off the “What they say,” so in order to put someone else’s words into my mouth. And that’s present throughout the film. This is not a serious work.
AMY GOODMAN: We have just 10 seconds in this part of the interview, Julian.
JULIAN ASSANGE: This is not a serious work, and this is not a serious—not a serious filmmaker.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, we’d like to ask you to just stay with us for a post-show discussion. We have many more questions to ask you. Julian Assange, speaking to us from the Ecuadorean embassy, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, granted asylum by Ecuador. That’s why he’s in their embassy right now.
Democracy Now!
Julian Assange on Meeting with Google, Responds to Anti-WikiLeaks Attacks from New Film to Finances
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