The five-year-old interview was released on Wednesday.
Lady Gaga’s interview with Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, about the situation of whistle whistleblower, Chelsea Manning has been released by the website Wednesday.
The release of the tape, comes on the same day that Manning is set to be released from prison after being found guilty of leaking classified US army documents to Wikileaks. Manning’s 35-year sentence for the offence was commuted by President Barack Obama.
The taped interview between the two took place at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London back in 2012 and was originally set to be sent into the public domain prior to Manning’s trial.
Manning chose to live as a woman before the trial started and was previously known as Private First Class Bradley Manning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWqcEMjafzQ
Lady Gaga asks: “Do you feel badly that [Manning] is in this situation?”
Assange replies: “I feel that we have a duty to fight, to draw attention to his plight. If he has truly done what he has alleged to have then he is a hero, there is no doubt that he is a hero.”
She also asks Assange: “Is he a gay soldier?” Do you think that his treatment has anything to do with that?”
“They’ve tried to use that against him,” Assange replies, saying “they’re using that to diminish him as a human being.”
This is not the first time that Lady Gaga has been at the forefront in this story. Manning has admitted to being a fan of hers and actually downloaded the military files onto a CD labeled with the artist’s name.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’, erase the music, then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing.
Manning would even lip-sync to the popstar’s hit ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American History.
Manning was convicted of espionage and aiding the enemy after leaking classified data to the WikiLeaks website that’s become famous for publishing secret information from anonymous sources.
She gave more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to the anti-secrecy group.
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