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Private Notes
This is the first English-language interview with Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah for over a decade. As turmoil spreads through the Middle East, Julian Assange interrogates Hassan Nasrallah on the hard issues, including Hezbollah’s stance on the conflict in Syria. Other topics covered include the relationship between Hezbollah’s media machine and military strategy, and the role of in politics and in everyday life. Assange engages with the frank views of a human Nasrallah, ordinarily portrayed either as demon or hero by the Western, Arab and global media.
“Intellectual superstar” Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural commentator. David Horowitz is a renowned stalwart of hardline conservative American political thought and an unrepentant Zionist. The tone of the conversation between Žižek, Horowitz and Assange alternates between combative, personal and good-humoured. The topics covered jump backwards and forwards at a wildfire pace, to include Palestinians and Nazis, Joseph Stalin and Barack Obama, the decline of Europe and the tension between liberty and equality, among many others.
President of the Republic of Tunisia, Moncef Marzouki is a trained physician, and was a long time opponent of the dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. During the early 1990s, his vocal opposition to Ben Ali led to his imprisonment at the hands of the regime. He founded the National Committee for the Defense of Prisoners of Conscience, and was President of the Arab Commission for Human Rights. Persecuted and harrassed, Marzouki left Tunisia for exile in France. With other Tunisian exiles he founded and chaired his political party, the Congress for the Republic. He has written extensively on dictatorships, bringing a medical eye to bear on the ailments of his society. Since 2001 he has argued that Ben Ali would not fall because of armed uprising, or because of foreign pressure, but because of a people’s movement, employing the methods of civil resistance. In January 2011, Tunisia proved him right. After Ben Ali’s departure, he returned from exile to announce his candidacy, and was elected interim president by the new Constituent Assembly of Tunisia in October 2011. Assange notes, “Moncef Marzouki, human rights activist, must now lead the state that imprisoned him. Can he transform the state? Or will the realities of power transform Marzouki?”
Nabeel Rajab, who was arrested on Saturday 5th of May, is a lifelong Bahraini activist and critic of the Al Khalifa regime. A member of a formerly staunch pro-regime family, Rajab has agitated for reform in Bahrain since his return from university in 1988. Along with the Bahraini-Danish human rights defender Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, he helped establish the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights in 2002. After years of working on hot issues in Bahrain, such as discrimination among sects and migrant labor rights, he became a face for the Bahrain uprising of February 14 2011, after a courageous sit-in at Pearl Roundabout. Since then, he has been a public face for the revolution, waging a social media war on Twitter with PR companies working for the regime. After al-Khawaja was imprisoned, he led protests for his release. He has endured beatings, arrests and legal harrassment for engaging in pro-democracy demonstrations. On Saturday 5th of May, he was arrested at Manama airport , and charged the next day with encouraging and engaging in “illegal protests.” Nabeel Rajab remains in detention at the time of broadcast. Alaa Abd El-Fattah is a longtime Egyptian political activist, programmer and blogger. He was imprisoned for 45 days in 2006 for protesting under the Mubarak regime, and again imprisoned for 68 days for protesting under the post-revolutionary military government, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). He also played a role in the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Initially abroad, El-Fattah helped route around Mubarak’s internet blockade. At the height of the protests he returned to Egypt and participated in the defense of Tahrir Square against security forces. It was after Mubarak stepped down, engaging in protests against the SCAF, that he was again arrested and imprisoned in October 2011. El-Fattah’s parents were human rights campaigners under Anwar Sadat; his sister Mona Seif became a Twitter star during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and is a fou
Moazzam Begg is the Director of Cageprisoners and ex-Guantanamo detainee. He is a British citizen who was kidnapped by US security forces in Pakistan in February 2002 on the pretext that he was an “enemy combatant.” He was rendered from Pakistan to Afghanistan, where he was subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment during interrogation. He was later flown – again, without legal process – to the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, and kept there without charge or access to justice until January 2005. He was released by order of President George W. Bush after discussions with the UK government. Since his release, Begg has campaigned with Cageprisoners for the rights of victims of the same detention policies, and worked to promote awareness of the fact that the US government was involved in the kidnap, torture, illegal trafficking and due-process-free imprisonment of innocents around the world. Asim Qureshi is the Executive Director of Cageprisoners, a former corporate lawyer. He joined Cageprisoners because he was drawn to the plight of Muslims around the world under Bush-era detention policies. Working for years as a researcher and writer within the NGO, he investigated abrogations of the rule of law – primarily against Muslims – around the world, in Pakistan, Bosnia, Kenya, Sudan, Sweden, the US and the UK. Qureshi is a frequent consultant for other NGOs, and a regular columnist, producing articles on unlawful detention, rendition and torture. Writing on the religious and cultural sensitivities of Muslims in the context of the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ he hopes to promote understanding between Muslim communities and the wider West.
Even at the lowest ebb of his popularity, according to a U.S. Embassy cable from Quito, Rafael Correa held “the… record for popularity among all presidents in Ecuador since 1979.” Correa is a transformative president for Ecuador. Since taking office in 2007, he has taken unprecedented moves to revolutionize the small Latin American country. In 2008, he declared Ecuador’s national debt illegitimate. His defiant stance eventually led to a favourable renegotiation of Ecuador’s repayment terms. While a new constitution brought in under his administration guarantees environmental rights, Correa has also opened up Ecuador to Chinese mining. His stance towards the United States has been controversial: he closed a U.S. military base in Manta, and expelled the U.S. ambassador after WikiLeaks State Department cables revealed the embassy exercising influence over members of the Ecuadorian police force. Surviving an attempted police coup in 2010, Correa was criticized by private media in Ecuador, and retaliated with a series of controversial libel actions in Ecuadorian courts – a move for which he has been slammed by press freedom groups internationally. A charismatic left-wing populist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois, Correa proves a pivotal figure in recent Ecuadorian history, and a keen spokesperson for the Latin America of the 21st century.
Alexa O’Brien is a New York activist and citizen journalist. In 2011 O’Brien started the #USDayofRage campaign, calling for reform of the US electoral system. The campaign eventually fed into the #OWS movement. As a direct result of her #USDayofRage campaign, O’Brien has been subject to harrassment by US authorities, and is a plaintiff in the Stop The NDAA lawsuit, recently securing a temporary injunction against the indefinite detention provision in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. O’Brien is providing unparalleled, in-depth coverage of the Bradley Manning hearings on her website, alexaobrien.com. David Graeber is an American anthropologist based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Graeber is the author of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, a historical monograph on the use and role of debt in historical movements and revolutions. A veteran of anti-globalization protests since the turn of the century, Graeber was an original participant in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and is credited as its intellectual spokesperson. Since then, he has become one of the foremost spokespeople for the movement, and its most prominent theorist. Naomi Colvin is the driving force behind UK Friends of Bradley Manning, an advocacy group that has been winning significant publicity for the plight of alleged U.S. whistleblower Bradley Manning in the United Kingdom. Colvin has since become a key activist and regular spokesperson for the Occupy London group, articulating the general goals and principles to the wider public in television and radio interviews. She has published in the Guardian on both Occupy and on the Manning affair. Aaron Peters is a doctoral candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. Peters writes on social movements in the context of the internet, and has been one of the most insightful commentators on the major mass movements in recent years. A student activist, Peters is both a keen analyst of and a participa
Jacob Applebaum is a staff research scientist at the University of Washington, and a developer and advocate for the Tor Project, which is an online anonymity system for everyday people to fight against surveillance and against internet censorship. Jacob believes that everybody has the right to read, without restriction, and the right to speak freely, with no exception. In 2010, when Julian Assange couldn’t deliver a talk in New York, Jacob gave the talk instead. Since then, he has been harrassed by the U.S. government: interrogated at airports, subjected to invasive pat-downs while being threatened with prison rape by law enforcement officials, had his equipment confiscated and his online services subject to secret subpoena. Jacob is uncowed by these measures, and remains an outspoken advocate of freedom of expression, and a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks. Andy Mueller-Maguhn is a long time member of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany, and a former spokesman. He is a specialist on surveillance, working in a journalistic capacity on the surveillance industry with his project wiki, buggedplanet.info. Andy works in cryptographic communications, and runs a company called Cryptophone, which markets secure voice communication devices to commercial clients. Jeremie Zimmermann is the co-founder and spokesperson for the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, the most prominent European organization defending anonymity rights online and promoting awareness of regulatory attacks on online freedoms. Jeremie works to build tools for the public to use to take part in public debate and to try to change things. He is mostly involved with the copyright wars, the debate around net neutrality and other regulatory issues that are crucial for the future of a free internet. Shortly after sitting for his interview on The World Tomorrow he was stopped by two FBI officers while leaving the United States, and was interrogated about Assange and WikiLeaks.
A new and significant force is taking form in Pakistani politics, coalescing around the person of former cricket champion Imran Khan, and his party, Tehreek-e-Insaf. Once dismissed in US cables as a “one-man party,” Khan’s persistent critique of the status quo began last year to resonate with the population. Since late 2011, he has been drawing tens of thousands into the streets to rally against corruption and national subservience to U.S. interests. He promises to dislodge from power Pakistan’s cartel of dynastic political parties, and to restore to independence a judiciary weakened by successive constitutional crises. Now regularly topping popularity polls, Imran Khan’s party has become a serious contender in forthcoming national elections – which may be called during the next year.
Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist, and lifelong radical intellectual. As the progenitor of the theory of “generative grammar,” he played a central role in pushing forward a cognitive revolution in philosophy, linguistics, computer science, mathematics and psychology. As a public intellectual, Chomsky has, since the 1960s, been one of the most prolific and consistent critics of United States foreign policy. He opposed the Vietnam war, and along with Howard Zinn was part of the Boston circle targeted by investigations after the release of the Pentagon papers. Since then, Chomsky has produced a formidable body of work, earning him a reputation as the foremost dissident voice in the American intellectual establishment. Tariq Ali is a British Pakistani military historian and public intellectual. During the 1960s, Ali earned a reputation as the original ‘street fighting man,’ acting as a political campaigner and activist while leading efforts against the Vietnam War in Britain. Over the years he has maintained a steady output as an anti-war commentator and staunch leftist. A spirited debater, Ali remains a strong critic of Western imperialism and neoliberal reform, bringing to bear a sweeping account of historical developments over the last century. In recent work he has brought into focus the continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations, claiming that the Global War On Terror remains a pretext for escalating lawlessness in the international conduct of the United States and its allies.
Dato’ Seri Anwar bin Ibrahim is the charismatic face of the Malaysian opposition. Formerly a high-ranking and popular member of the government of Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad in the 1990s, Anwar fell out of favour, and in the late 90s was expelled from political life on corruption and sodomy charges that turned out to be politically motivated. By the time he was acquitted, he had already served six years in prison. On his return to politics in 2008, amid a surge of support for his anti-corruption platform, he was hit with fresh sodomy charges. He claimed they were, again, engineered by his political opponents. Anwar fought a four year court battle against the accusations, and in January of this year he was cleared of all charges. Malaysian politics is currently heating up in advance of the impending election. In May 2012 – after this interview was filmed – Anwar was accused of inciting demonstrators to breach an anti-protest law, because of his appearance at a pro-democracy rally in April. If convicted, he will be disqualified from politics for the near future, ruining his election chances.
