Assange’s latest showed the duplicitous nature of American foreign affairs, not that that really surprised anyone whose read Confessions of an Economic Hitman or other unsanitized history. Now this. About time someone exposed the banks.
In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.
(For the full transcript of Forbes’ interview with Assange click here.)
When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”
Of course WL is going after US and US based mutinational organizations.
Who the f*ck cares what some self-anointed chief of some tribe in some god-forsaken, bug infested Hell-hole in the Amazon get up to?
Also the US is the most open to criticism (its not entirely its fault sometimes,) and has FOIA laws so that the populace has something to build on. (See question above.)
The fact that are politicians have no respect for us is OUR fault. (Vote to try four years without a government by write in ballot next election and see what that does? THROW ALL OF THE BUMS OUT! It’ll teach ‘em a lesson.)
Political leaders of other “soit-disant” civilized nations are scared of their populace.
We’re just a bunch of sheeple so you know we’re just going to get spit on, sheared, prodded, exposed, left out naked in the cold and eventually they’re going to toss our corpses under a bus.
They Italians showed their displeasure at Mussolini by hanging his shot-up body upside down in a stockyard.
The French sentenced Pétain to death in 1944.
There is a long history of peasant uprisings in Europe.
We’re in a similar situation to Burma(aka Myanmar) with a leadership which doesn’t even present to lead; they just sentence us to what ever crimes they make up.
The procedures, Hell the very definition of democracy about probable cause and protection against unreasonable search and seizure are being violated every day by the TSA and some imbeciles out there are supposedly “all for it” (just like the alleged “party atmosphere” in Theresienstadt, a Jewish Ghetto established by the SS in World War II.)
Your only crime is that you’re too poor to fly in a private plane.
F*ck that!
I see Time “Person of the Year” honors for him in the near future..
#56 You are comparing apples to oranges, at least if you don’t frame the issue in a narrow way.
I think the leakers in both Plame case and the Wikileaks case, Libby\Cheney and the army private, should be prosecuted. They made a voluntary oath and broke it.
Throwing those reporters in jail on contempt charges is a black mark on the US courts. Freedom of the Press would seem to include not locking up journalists for doing their jobs.
In this case, you can’t screw Assange because he runs something that isn’t exactly a newspaper. He has been doing this for a long time, and nobody complained when he published the secret stuff of dirty money banks and violent little authoritarian states.
Wikileaks publishes stuff about public figures and governments. It is all delayed, usually by months and sometimes by years.