December 2010
98 posts
The Assange Interview
"PEOPLE AFFILIATED WITH OUR ORGANIZATION HAVE ALREADY BEEN ASSASSINATED. MY WORK IS SERIOUS. I DO NOT HAVE TO RUN OFF TO RANDOM STATES SIMPLY BECAUSE SOME PROSECUTOR IS ABUSING A PROCESS IN THOSE STATES."
Q: That rather belittles what this is all about. Very serious allegations have been made. It puzzles a lot of people that you're not saying: "Yes, I want to go to deal with these serious allegations, I will go anywhere they want me to go."
Julian Assange: I have already spoken to them.
Q: But they want to talk to you again. That's not uncommon in these cases.
JA: If they want to charge me, they can charge me. They have decided not to charge me.
Q: Yet.
JA: Or they can come to Sweden (or they can come here - JH corrects) or we can do a video link up, or they can accept a statement of mine. They have rejected all of that. And they have asked, as part of their application that, if I go to Sweden and am arrested, that I am to be held incommunicado. Entirely incommunicado. They have asked that my Swedish lawyer be gagged from talking about the evidence to the public.
Q: Everything you say may be true. I've no way of judging that. But, surely you can see how very, very damaging, at the very least, it is to somebody like you, somebody who has spent a large part of his life saying: "People are accountable. We must have systems that do transparency. We must have systems under which the public knows what's going on and people can be held to account." And here you are facing, possibly facing, very, very serious charges indeed, double rape even, is a possibility - and you are saying: "I will not go back to the country where those offences are alleged to have been carried out to face the music."
JA: No, I have never said that.
Q: In that case you can catch the next plane back to Sweden.
JA: No, I do things according to proper process. I stayed in Sweden for five weeks to enable that proper process to occur. Proper process did not occur. I left as part of, you know, just my normal course of activity - no complaints from the Swedish government. I have an organisation to run. I have my people to defend. There are other things at stake here… There are other things at stake here. I have a serious brewing extradition case in relation to the United States. I have a serious organisation to run. People affiliated with our organisation have already been assassinated. My work is serious. I do not have to run off to random states simply because some prosecutor is abusing a process in those states.
Q: No. It is happening because a couple of women have alleged that you seriously assaulted them, sexually assaulted them.
JA: No. One of the witnesses. One of the friends of one of those women, she says that one of the women states that she was bamboozled into this by police and others. These women may be victims in this process.
Q: Or they may not be. We can't try the case here, can we? We don't. I don't know enough. I do know what I've read in the newspapers. You know what has been printed in the newspapers. Serious allegations have been made against you.
JA: Most of what we know is, in fact, from the newspapers because somehow the Swedish prosecution has been, deliberately and illegally, selectively taking bits of its material and giving them to newspapers.
Matt Payton's Tumble-o-rama: Quotation Of The Day →
mattpayton:
“The dictionary definition of God is ‘a supernatural creator and overseer of the universe.’ Included in this definition are all deities, goddesses and supernatural beings. Since the beginning of recorded history, which is defined by the invention of writing by the Sumerians around 6,000 years…
(2010-12-20) The King
Once upon a now and then there is and was a mighty king whom we love to serve whether we know it or not and we ignore at our peril for he’s all that we’ve got His presence glows brighter by fireside and hearth Music, voices, laughter - he basks in their warmth He sails upon the winds borne by gleeful children’s screams and darts between dust particles connecting lovers’ dreams And he’d sing and...
A Sign of Empire Pathology: More US military... →
"The Wheel" (Wendell Berry)
At the first strokes of the fiddle bow
the dancers rise from their seats.
The dance begins to shape itself
in the crowd, as couples join,
and couples join couples, their movement
together lightening their feet.
They move in the ancient circle
of the dance. The dance and the song
call each other into being. Soon
they are one - rapt in a single
rapture, so that even the night
has its...
For The Future by Wendell Berry
Planting trees early in spring,
we make a place for birds to sing
in time to come. How do we know?
They are singing here now.
There is no other guarantee
that singing will ever be.
Indieguitartabs →
Questions Answered: Invented Languages
Schott’s Vocab
In January, co-vocabularists were invited to pose questions to two experts in the field of invented languages: Paul Frommer (the developer of Avatar’s novel tongue, Na’vi) and Arika Okrent (author of “In the Land of Invented Languages”).
10 Most Hopeful Stories of 2010 →
1. Climate Crisis Response Takes a New Direction. After the failure of Copenhagen, Bolivia hosted a gathering of indigenous people, climate activists, and grassroots leaders from the global South—those left out of the UN-sponsored talks. Their solution to the climate crisis is based on a new recognition of the rights of Mother Earth. Gone are notions of trading the right to pollute (which...
colesmokecrack:
kelvinween:
PRESS PLAY AND...
Social Science Data Archives →
Watchjonathan-cunningham:
cerebralthoughts:
The man that needs no introduction. Chomsky tells it like it is. He’s basically the human version of Yoda…
“No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every...”
– Theodore Roosevelt, explaining why we need the graduated income tax and the inheritance tax (via jonathan-cunningham)
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things...”
– H. L. Mencken (via jonathan-cunningham)
Tumble DC 25: Careers ruined in the name of the... →
jonathan-cunningham:
I wasn’t exactly well read when we invaded Iraq. I thought that Saddam Hussein had funded and armed Al Qaeda, and that he was stockpiling chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. There were people even then examining those claims with skepticism, and I’m only just now becoming aware of the…