Follow on TwitterVideo Clips Of U.S. Politicians & Political Analysts Declaring WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange A ‘Terrorist’
For those who continue to belittle Julian Assange’s fears for his safety, and who insist that Ecuador’s granting him political asylum was merely a ploy to evade questioning on sexual accusations in Sweden, WikiLeaks has just compiled video clips of U.S. officials, world Leaders, and famous TV political pundits proclaiming Julian Assange to be a ‘terrorist’, with many explicitly calling for his assassination:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-DIZvcK6Rc[/youtube]
Just a few transcript highlights of an alarming number of implicit and explicit threats made against Assange and WikiLeaks:
1. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Meet The Press:
David Gregory: Should the United States do something to stop Mr. Assange?
Biden: We’re looking at that right now. The Justice Department is taking a look … I would argue that he is closer to being a high tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.
2. Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove:
The head of WikiLeaks is not a particularly credible source in my mind. He is a … to my mind he is a criminal and he ought to be hunted down, and grabbed, and put on trial for what he has done here.
3. Former Speaker, House of Representatives, (2012 GOP Candidate for President of the US) Newt Gingrich:
Information warfare is warfare and Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information ‘terrorism which leads to people getting killed is ‘terrorism’, and Julian Assange is engaged in ‘terrorism’. He should be treated as an enemy combatant. WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.
4. U.S. Senator (from Kentucky) Mitch McConnel:
I think the man is a high-tech terrorist, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem we need to change the law.
5. Bob Beckel, Political Commentator and Analyst:
The way to deal with this is pretty simple. We’ve got special-ops forces. I mean a dead man cannot leak stuff. This guy is a traitor and treasonous, and he has broken every law in the United States. The guy ought to be — and I’m not for the death penalty, so if I’m not for the death penalty … illegally shoot the son-of-a-bitch!
6. Bo Dietl, Chairman NY Security Guard Advisory Council:
Obama, if you’re listening today? You should take this guy out — have the CIA take him out.
7. President Obama: “He broke the law.”
[…]
VP and Assist. General Counsel Of NY Times: How Can Corporations Blacklist WikiLeaks, But Not The NY Times?
At the ‘Media Law in the Digital Age‘ conference at Kennesaw State University last weekend, the Vice President and General Counsel of the New York Times, David McGraw, addressed the disturbing trend in which private for-profit corporations have been doing governments’ bidding by shutting down publishers like WikiLeaks:
Lucy Dalglish, Exec. Dir. RCFP: Even organizations like WikiLeaks need money to survive, and one of the reactions wasn’t so much the governments trying to shut them down, but the vehicles by which they got their funding have tried to shut them down: Paypal, Amazon, Visa, all of these folks, have basically said “We don’t want to have anything to do with you.”
And my understanding is that WikiLeaks has been suffering because of that. Do you have any thoughts about basically good old fashioned Capitalism having a role in whether or not the public gets access to this information?
McGraw: … It is a hard question, but a very very troubling development that people who are private actors on the financial side are going to be making these decisions. Whether its Mastercard and Visa cutting off donations; whether it’s Amazon shutting people out of the cloud — preventing access to books they disapprove of — if they were to go down that route.
Unfortunately, at this point, it is legal for them to do that, it appears — absent some restraint on trade concerns which haven’t surfaced — for them to make that decision. I think it puts a great deal of power in the hands of people who — while they probably have cash registers for brains, as Russell Baker once said — that making that call is, putting that power in their hands, is troubling.
It’s odd of course, and WikiLeaks was quick to point this out, that while Amazon is throwing them off of their server storage and asking them to find a home elsewhere, that they continue to offer the New York Times through Kindle. How do they justify the difference between those two things when both were publishing these documents? I don’t know what the answer is, but I do think it raises a scary proposition when private companies not in the publishing industry, not part of the marketplace of ideas, are controlling that marketplace.
WATCH:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HwYaK-8mS0[/youtube]
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