Bush Advisor: Twitter Founders Should Get Nobel Peace Prize
June 22, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
Oh my God, the haters of Twitter are going to love that.
Speaking to Fox News, Mark Pfeifle, a former Deputy National shield Advisor to George W. Bush, offered up that appraisal of the Iran situation:
“whether there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next day around, it should be the founders of Twitter who delayed the tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so.”
Let me just repeat the key phrase there: “whether there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next day around, it should be the founders of Twitter”
Now watch that clip by and by.
Just so we don’t get accused of entirely taking that out of context, below we’ll paste the full transcript (and full video) of what he said in the interview. But again, he did say “whether there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next moment around, it should be the founders of Twitter”.
Twitter, for its part, says it is not a covert government agency, even though it did postpone maintenance to manufacture certain it was up during the peak hours of Iranian protests.
Update: Here’s a tweet Pfeifle sent out recently as well (emphasis mine):
RT JBergsman,M. Pfeifle on FNC: Nobel Peace Prize for Twitter founders for #iranelection? Why not. @ev & @biz > deserving than Arafat.Carter
Full transcript:
Bream: Let’s talk about the Administration’s so far. Has it been on point? What do we need to see next from the White House?
Pfeifle: They are walking a tightrope. That’s what they are doing. They do not want the U.S. or West to become the talking point for the Iranian regime, saying they are trying to do a coup by their public statements. What the reaction has been in the prayers yesterday by their supreme leader, he used it anyway and said the West is trying to do that. So, sometimes it doesn’t work. And you try and stay quiet and you try to stay mum or you say too much. The real winners in that and the society that have gotten the letter out, even though the U.S. with some exceptions has been fairly quiet is Twitter, has been Facebook, Flickr, YouTube. It’s been all of those. If there’s anybody that should possibly get a Nobel Peace Prize in the next day around, it should be the founders of Twitter who delayed the tuning up of their system in order for an amazing amount of tweets to be sent out in the last week or so.
Bream: It’s been such a valuable source of info considering, in the past the government there probably had a lot more control by the data disseminated inside the country and outside as well. So now that we have that additional data coming in, does it put the Administration
in a different place as far as, you know, crediting some of that info - perhaps not being able to credit all of it considering it’s coming from unreliable sources?Pfeifle: It’s difficult considering it’s moving so quickly. We saw just on the 17th, 221,000 tweets sent about Iran, 3,000 videos were uploaded onto YouTube. It’s been really remarkable, you know, how the emerging media the social networking has taken by and has given a voice to a lot of folks who have been silent.
Bream: And let’s talk about that escalating today as well, considering the government had been cracking saying no more protests in Tehran. Mousavi will be responsible for whatever happens whether these folks are hurt or injured. They turned out anyway, thousands of them we know so far. Now he’s plus amped things up so far by talking about being ready for martyrdom and additionally calling for a national strike whether he is arrested. You know, that seems to be on a trajectory. What happens next there?
Pfeifle: It’s really hard to tell. whether the country is shutdown by a strike or portions of it, it’s going to put the Iranian regime in a very difficult situation. Already they have massive problems with gas rationings for fairly wealthy country. Where they’ve been putting money into funding Hamas and Hezbollah and putting so much money into their nuclear program instead of into their society. All of that is quailing up. It’s hitting a point right now where the regime is going to have to form some drastic changes one way or the other. They’ve already said that they are going to count 10 percent of the vote. They are already making some concessions and the people’s voices are being heard.
Bream: Alright, so we know about the official response we’ve already talked about that so let’s talk about back channels. Obviously there’s a lot going on probably that we don’t know about. What kind of efforts can the Administration form off the radar in that situation?
Pfeifle: well, it’s difficult to get to the actual Iranian regime. They are very isolated. There’s some ways through the Swiss, there’s some ways through Ambassadorial channels that you can makes some entries to the Iranians but for the most part they’re not going to listen to the West, they are not going to listen to the U.S. They are going to listen to them more amidst press releases and public statements as President Obama has done, as the Secretary of State and others have done periodically last week.
Bream: Mark Pfeifle, we thank you so much for your insight on that and for sharing your Saturday with us as well.
Pfeifle: Thank you Shannon.
[thanks James]
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Comments
Got something to say?