The following is the second part of my interview with filmmaker Michael Moore.
We spoke on December 14, the day after he'd pledged $20,000 of Julian Assange's $316,000 bail, prior to his appearances on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddox Show. In this segment, we talked about the upcoming WikiLeaks documents from Bank of America, the massive fines against BofA for fraud and conspiracy, and how accused Private Bradley Manning slid down the pivotal crack between the Espionage Act and international law.
LW Let's talk about the material itself. What has WikiLeaks given us? The political equivalent of Gawker or People Magazine? Or is it another Pentagon Papers? Or is it another version of the Valerie Plame affair with some musical chairs going on — with Julian Assange and Private Manning swapping places with the Washington Post journalists and the White House leakers?
MM It's all of that and more. And it began when WikiLeaks released a classified military video that showed US soldiers stationed in Iraq firing upon a group of civilians, killing them as well as two reporters.
Then they released field reports about devastating incidents in Iraq. The reports also revealed that our US soldiers felt very bad about the innocent lives lost at the hands of the army. Then came information about Afghanistan. Afghanistan documents revealed new things but also confirmed things that many people felt. The connection between Karzai's brother and the heroin trade, for example. There's this corruption in the Afghan government and our guys in the field are scratching their heads wondering what the heck we were doing there.
The wholesale characterization of the cables as gossip is not accurate. I think it does, however, pertain to some of the cables.
But from the recent drop of the 250,000 cables, we've only seen a few. When the word got out last week that WikiLeaks obtained corporate documents from whistleblowers at Bank of America it threw this whole thing into another arena.
Bank of America has already been caught in a conspiracy. (Additionally, days after our interview, Arizona and Nevada sued Bank of America.)
On December 7th the IRS fined them around $130 million. Then back in September of 2009, the SEC fined them $33 million. Then earlier this year the SEC fined them $150 million…they've been caught doing so many heinous things.
When I was doing the research for my last film I found out that they train their collection agencies to beat up homeowners who are behind in their mortgage payments. Bank of America had a special section for training people on how to collect from the relatives of a dead owner's house. They were trained to call the next of kin and try to convince them they were legally responsible for the debts left behind of the deceased. First of all, this is fraud. If your parents die, you are not responsible for their debts. But all they had to do to turn a profit was convince 4 or 5% of the people they called.
