Interviews

This section contains posts featuring interviews that are of interest because of the interviewee or the issue being discussed. The views expressed in these interviews, as well as the credit and copyright, in each case belongs exclusively to the filmmaker(s) and/or producer(s).

Anatomy of the Deep State

March 5, 2014
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Many years ago Bill Moyers made a documentary on the Secret Government in the US, a scathing critique of the Executive Branch of that carries out secretive operations contrary to the wishes and values of the American people. In the video interview below, Moyers presents an updated version of this same phenomenon, called “the Deep State.” It’s a fascinating interview with government insider Mike Lofrgren, who has also written this related article for the Bill Moyers program. Here is the original Bill Moyers documentary on the Secret Government:

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Another hero

June 10, 2013
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A recently created Wikipedia entry on Edward Snowden read as follows: Edward Joseph Snowden (born 1984) is an American technical contractor, a former CIA employee, and a traitor. Snowden released classified material on ­top-secret United States National Security Agency (NSA) programs including the PRISM surveillance program to The Guardian and The Washington Post in June 2013. PRISM is a top-secret government surveillance program, in operation since 2007, that enables the NSA to access the servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook, to collect data on the emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, and connection logs of not only Americans but also billions of people around the world…

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Freedom and free software (interview with Eben Moglen)

January 23, 2013
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Eben Moglen, founder and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, is the ideal mix of a law professor mix and  a free-software technologist. In the following two-part interview with Slashdot – News for nerds he talks about free software, locked down information systems, and the importance of sharing. Here is a passage from the interview, which is well worth watching: “One of the things which everybody really now understands is that what makes the web a miracle also contains its dangerousness. The web was created for openness and power of construction. The browser made the web extremely easy to…

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Julian Assange interviews Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali

October 6, 2012
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The official description of 10th episode of The World Tomorrow reads as follows: A surprise Arab drive for freedom, the West’s structural crisis and new hope coming from Latin America. That’s the modern world in the eyes of Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali, two prominent thinkers and this week’s guests on Julian Assange’s show on RT.

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Interview with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy

September 26, 2012
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Originally aired on GamaTV, August 30, 2012, Uruguayan journalist Jorge Gestoso interviews Julian Assange from within the Ecuadorian Embassy. In this wide-ranging and fascinating interview Gestoso asks Assange if the Wikileaks’ cause is worth dying for. Assange answers yes. The interview can be seen here:

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Julian Assange interviews Nabeel Rajab & Alaa Abd El-Fattah (The World Tomorrow)

September 5, 2012
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In the fourth episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow Julian Assange speaks with two leading Arab revolutionaries in the middle of conflict, Alaa Abd El-Fattah from Egypt and Nabeel Rajab from Bahrain. Alaa Abd El-Fattah is a long time Egyptian blogger, programmer and political activist. His parents were human rights campaigners under Anwar Sadat; his sister Mona Seif became a Twitter star during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and is a founder of the No Military Trials for Civilians group formed under the post-Mubarak military junta. El-Fattah was imprisoned for 45 days in 2006 for protesting under the Mubarak regime, and…

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Julian Assange interviews Cypherpunks (The World Tomorrow)

July 28, 2012
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In the 8th and 9th episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow, Julian Assange is joined by cypherpunks from the US, Germany, and France to discuss the future of our increasingly digitalized world.  What is the ultimate purpose of Twitter, Facebook and other social media? What is the current state of online privacy and data protection? These are some the questions examined in this excellent two-part discussion with people who understand perhaps better than anyone else the challenges that cyberspace poses to human freedom. Part I: Part II:

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Freedom of thought and open-source software (lecture by Eben Moglen)

July 28, 2012
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Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, as well as founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center and long-term supporter of organizations like the Free Software Foundation, is a lecturer and free software/open-source advocate. Though the following lecture and interview only covers so much, they do serve as a good introduction to his extensive body of work. Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media and Why Free Media Require Free Technology This lecture was held during the Re:publica 2012 conference in Berlin. It describes in detail why the current societal model, in which proprietary…

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Julian Assange interviews Moazzam Begg and Asim Qureshi (The World Tomorrow)

June 25, 2012
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From the website of the The World Tomorrow: [The fifth episode] of The World Tomorrow takes us to the very heart of America’s War on Terror: Guantanamo Bay. Julian Assange sat down with a former Gitmo prisoner and a rights campaigner fighting for those still trapped behind the wire. Ten years ago the war on terror prompted the opening of the facility.  Now, more than three years after President Obama ordered its closure, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, like the war in Afghanistan, remains with us. Over a year ago, Wikileaks blew the lid on Gitmo by releasing a cache of…

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Julian Assange interviews Rafael Correa (The World Tomorrow)

June 3, 2012
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In the sixth episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador discusses the media, government corruption, and his country’s relationship with the United States. The interview opens with the circumstances surrounding the attempted coup in Ecuador in 2010, during which the president was taken hostage. Following the attempted coup, Correa embarked on a furious and controversial counter-offensive against Ecuador’s media. In this interview he explains the media’s role in the events of 2010 in terms of the vested interests of media corporations. He claims that corporate owners of the media “disguised as journalists, are trying to do politics,…

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How economic inequality harms societies (TED lecture by Richard Wilkinson)

May 17, 2012
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The following is a brilliant, evidence-based lecture on the devastating consequences of socio-economic inequality. The speaker is Richard Wilkinson, an epidemiologist and leading figure in the field of inequality research. The lecture presents a very compelling case for the idea that the level of socio-economic inequality in a society is the key criterion for determining the health of that society. One can also read a brief Truthout interview with Wilkinson on the consequences of inequality here. 

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Julian Assange and Slavoj Zizek interview David Horowitz (The World Tomorrow)

May 12, 2012
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Slavoj Zizek and David Horowitz are the guests for the second episode of Julian Assange’s interview show, “The World Tomorrow“. “Intellectual superstar” Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural commentator. David Horowitz is a hard-line American conservative and unrepentant Zionist. The tone of the conversation between Zizek, Horowitz and Assange alternates between combative and friendly. The topics covered include Palestinians and Nazis, Joseph Stalin, Barack Obama, the decline of Europe, and the tension between liberty and equality. Episode 2: 

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Julian Assange interviews Moncef Marzouki (The World Tomorrow)

May 12, 2012
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In Episode 3 of The World Tomorrow, Julian Assange interviews the president of the Republic of Tunisia, Moncef Marzouki. He 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. 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…

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Julian Assange interviews Hassan Nasrallah (The World Tomorrow)

April 22, 2012
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In the world premiere of Julian Assange’s ‘The World Tomorrow‘ on RT, he interviews Hezbollah leader Sayyid Nasrallah, his first appearance in  international media in over six years. For interviewing such a “radical” on an English-language Russian news network, Assange predicted that he would be denounced as a traitor. And sure enough Assange’s predictions are being proven true by the reactions of the international corporate media.  Episode 1:

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Mass surveillance in the USA (Democracy Now interviews)

April 21, 2012
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National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA’s massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after he became a whistleblower. Binney was a key source for investigative journalist James Bamford’s recent exposé in Wired Magazine about how the NSA is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the…

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Exposed: NSA Spy Center (interview with James Bamford)

March 26, 2012
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There is an interesting discussion on the March 21st edition of Democracy Now under the title “Exposed: Inside the NSA’s Largest and Most Expansive Secret Domestic Spy Center in Bluffdale, Utah.” The interview discusses a recent WIRED Magazine article by James Bamford entitled “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)“. This is the Democracy Now introduction to the discussion. A new exposé in Wired Magazine reveals details about how the National Security Agency is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program codenamed “Stellar…

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Just how stupid are Americans? (Interview with Rick Shenkman)

January 13, 2012
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It’s a provocative title for a post, but it really just refers to a book entitled “Just How Stupid Are We?” (where “we” clearly refers to Americans) by Rick Shenkman, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. A brief article by Shenkman on the same theme can be found here and the video clip below contains a relevant  interview with Shenkman. His account of the causes, consequences, and solutions to American ignorance  is highly interesting. Among the causal factors is the death of civics education in America and the introduction of the TV in 1965, which in turn has…

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