John Shipman, whose son is Julian Assange, is facing 175 years in U.S. prisons. He s currently detained at a British maximum security prison awaiting extradition to the United States. John has done an extraordinary documentary called Ithaca, a reference to Ulysses' trip, which took him 20 years after the Battle of Troy to get to his home in Ithaka. And it s been an incredible story of a father who is fighting all the great forces of institutional and military forces and judicial forces of the planet to free his son, along with Stella Morris, who is Julian s wife and is now married to Julian's fianc . John and Stella are married in the jail, but it s a beautiful story of our times because it s really a story about the suppression of free expression in our times. Here is a journalist who has been imprisoned because he had political views, and he had a hostility towards secrecy. And he exposed things that the United State government did not want him to expose. And that had been very, very valuable for the rest of us to understand the power of government and the abuse and misuse of those powers. Julian's story is a powerful reminder that every American should be grateful to Julian for exposing what the government does not want us to know about the dark side of history and the dark history that it s trying to keep us awake at night. Julian s story is an incredible tribute to the sacrifices he made to expose the dark legacy of the past and the efforts he s made to make a difference in the present and the future. He s a hero, and a hero who has done more than enough to help us understand the truth about what s really going on in the world. Thank you Julian for being a hero and to do the right thing, and for fighting for what s possible, not less than enough, and fighting for the truth, and to speak out against the truth. - The truth, not only in the good, and not just in the words we need to get a chance to get the chance to know the truth in order to speak the truth out loud, and we should all be grateful for the words they get to see the truth they see in the pictures they see on the pictures we see on social media, and they get it on the internet, and the fact that they get them on the big ones. The truth is much better than the ones we get them in the real world, and it s not enough, so we can all get their chance to see it.
00:00:01.000I'm very privileged today to have a wonderful guest, John Shipman, whose son is Julian Assange, who's now facing 175 years in U.S. prisons.
00:00:14.000He's currently detained at a British maximum security prison awaiting extradition to the United States.
00:00:24.000And John has done this extraordinary documentary called Ithaca, a reference, I suppose, to Ulysses' trip, which took him 20 years after the Battle of Troy to get to his home in Ithaca.
00:00:42.000The documentary is this really beautiful story.
00:00:48.000Of a father who is fighting all the great forces of institutional and military forces and judicial forces of the planet to free his son, along with Stella Morris, who is Julian's...
00:01:16.000And it's a story of our times because it's really a story about the United States and the world, the suppression of free expression.
00:01:24.000Here is a journalist who has been imprisoned because he had political views and he had a hostility towards secrecy.
00:01:34.000And he exposed things that the United States government did not want him to expose.
00:01:39.000And that had been very, very valuable for the rest of us to be able to understand the power of government And the abuse and misuse of those powers, things that every American should know about, and that, in my view, we should be grateful to Julian Assange for exposing.
00:01:57.000But the sacrifice, the personal sacrifice he made by doing so has been extreme.
00:02:02.000And let me start out by this, just asking about his health.
00:02:07.000Well, you know, after sort of 13 years confined to a room and now four years confined to a jail cell, it's not the best.
00:02:19.000But, you know, and also it's very hard to keep healthy in jail.
00:02:27.000Consequently, his Not really what you'd call well.
00:02:33.000And also, there's the constant stress of court case after court case, raising money to pay the lawyers, and being at the beck and call of jailers.
00:03:08.000Prior to being put in maximum security prison in the UK, he was in the Ecuadorian embassy where he was granted asylum in Sweden fleeing from a charge of inappropriate sexual conduct that Julian said at the time had been drummed up In order to facilitate his extradition to the United States by the Swedish government,
00:03:37.000the Swedish government in 2019 dropped those charges, acknowledging that they were essentially baseless and that it does appear that they were politically motivated as another way to get his indictment.
00:03:52.000But ultimately, his welcome at the Ecuadorian embassy Ran out and the British government, they withdrew the asylum.
00:04:00.000The British police went into the embassy and forcibly removed him.
00:04:04.000Yes, just a couple of extra things there.
00:04:16.000If they'd have laid charges, it would have to have evidence, which they didn't have any.
00:04:22.000And the second thing is that there is a procedure for becoming an asylee and a procedure for removing the privilege of asylum.
00:04:34.000In the case of Julian, removal of asylum was arbitrary.
00:04:39.000And the scandal was that Ecuador allowed police to enter their territory, their embassy, and forcibly remove Julian.
00:04:51.000So, you see, contraventions of due process, irregularities of administration, the Crown prosecuting service, the Swedish prosecuting authority.
00:05:02.000And contravention, a scandalous contravention of the great gift of 1973 of the United Nations General Assembly, the conventions of asylum.
00:05:16.000And there's been abuse of power from the beginning of this.
00:05:19.000He's actually charged by the United States government with violating the Espionage Act of 1917.
00:05:26.000Which has always been a controversial statute in our country because it was passed under the Woodrow Wilson's administration to prevent opponents of World War I from speaking their mind.
00:05:44.000It forbade any lack of loyalty to the United States.
00:05:47.000These kind of vague terms that could be applied against anybody.
00:05:50.000It was, in fact, applied against A political journalist just doing political work.
00:05:57.000I mean, it was applied against Eugene Debs, the labor leader who was anti-war, and he was put in jail for 10 years for just speaking out against the war.
00:06:07.000It was applied by J. Edgar Hoover, by the FBI, by the Justice Department to silence black people.
00:06:15.000It was during World War I and at other times in our history.
00:06:19.000And it was also applied against Daniel Ellsberg when he released the Pentagon Papers, which of course is absolutely critical now.
00:06:29.000I don't think anybody would argue that it's very important that we had access to the Pentagon Papers because they've given us insight.
00:06:38.000I want to ask you to start at the beginning and tell us about Julian's journey because he started out in the early 90s as a hacker.
00:06:50.000And from the beginning, he was a thorn in the side.
00:06:59.000But he was a thorn in the side of totalitarian authorities.
00:07:04.000Well, just for the 1991 war, he had access to certain servers belonging to the Pentagon and been shocked at the targeting procedures that generals discussed amongst themselves.
00:07:24.000From then, that radicalised his approach to information.
00:07:28.000But Julian remains, of course, socially conservative, well-mannered and civic forms of address and structures.
00:07:41.000So he started a thing called WikiLeaks in 2006, based upon the idea that now computers had become common, people would be able to log on and review information and form their own analysis of what was put before them.
00:08:03.000That was a wiki, of course, of the people and leaks.
00:08:07.000I was unclear about why you said he got upset originally because he found something that made him angry.
00:08:17.000It started out in 1991 that Julian found in his hacking days access to certain computers and the targeting procedures of generals and they're discussing amongst themselves those targeting procedures.
00:08:35.000What you're talking about is how they're targeting certain civilians or enemies of our country for drone strikes, etc.?
00:08:48.000So that targeting procedure, if I remember correctly, there was a bunker in Baghdad, a shelter bunker, where 350 people Iraqi women and children were seeking protection from the bombing and it was destroyed and all those lives destroyed along with it.
00:09:14.000This caused Julian to move to a deeper understanding of the necessity of free information.
00:09:23.000So basing his instincts on Upon the First Amendment, and also very deep in with the Californian movement of the cypherpunks, started a WikiLeaks.
00:09:39.000Leaks, of course, obvious, meaning revelations.
00:09:43.000As computers had become ubiquitous by 2006, the idea was to give all people the availability to form their own analysis in groups, amongst friends, families and institutions, based upon documentation that was available on the internet instantly.
00:10:08.000So the great leaks that Julian received from Manning, the first leak, notable leak, was Fagura, trafficking and dumping e-waste off the coast of Africa, which destroyed the lives of coastal villages being poisoned by the land.
00:10:29.000The pollution from E-West, I think, 120 villages died in that case.
00:11:14.000And just to remind people of what came out at that time, of these incredible scandals that Julian, that we never know about, If WikiLeaks and Julian had not exposed them to the public, among those were the extrajudicial killings by Kenyan police of political opponents,
00:11:36.000drone strikes that were US-sponsored in Yemen that were killing civilians, the actions of China to suppress dissent in Tibet.
00:11:47.000And one of the most momentous ones at that time was the collateral killing.
00:11:53.000So the killings by U.S. contractors in Iraq, Blackwater, and these other private contractors of 18 civilians from a helicopter.
00:12:08.000So they were essentially joy shooting.
00:12:10.000U.S. contractors were joy shooting civilians in an intersection in Baghdad, as I recall.
00:12:18.000And the military had possession of that tape, but they were keeping it secret.
00:12:23.000And they were obviously keeping it secret, not for a national security reason, but because it was embarrassing to policymakers.
00:12:32.000And, you know, there was a period where it was being played constantly.
00:12:36.000And it woke Americans up to a new side of our war in Iraq.
00:12:41.000Yes, that collateral murder video, as its name, extends over about 17 minutes.
00:12:48.000The file is still available for everybody to view on WikiLeaks.
00:12:52.000I'll also add, I don't want to keep some balance here, there was also 80,000 pages of files that On Russia, and equally, I think, 222,000 files on China.
00:14:25.000Jail was commuted after seven years by Obama for releasing that file.
00:14:32.000And Julian, well, is still, you know, now it's 13 years, so he's more or less spent 13 years in jail so far.
00:14:42.000The Department of Justice is now pursuing him for another 170 years, should he live so long.
00:14:50.000One of the distinctions that people should understand is that Chelsea Manning was a military intelligence analyst, was part of the United States military, but Julian Assange is a journalist.
00:15:04.000And, you know, to publish journalists or publishing to punish journalists and jail them, It is, you know, extremely antithetical to U.S. values, to our constitution, to our tradition of free expression, and to the critical importance that the free flow of information is the foundation of democracy.
00:15:30.000The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is a guiding star.
00:15:36.000Most other populations in the West envy it and wish that their governments would adopt it because it allows for an increase in the average overall intelligence of the populace, which, if you're a government...
00:15:54.000It's a strategic asset, if you're part of the populace, is an asset for you to contribute to government.
00:16:02.000So there's no proper excuse for the truncation or oppression or chilling of that right.
00:16:11.000There's no proper reason for it except to protect the crimes that some people in government commit.
00:16:21.000Another of the things that we didn't talk about, one of the really important assets to me that Julian uncovered and that we would otherwise not known about was in 1999 that the NSA had patented this voice translation one of the really important assets to me that Julian uncovered and that we would otherwise not known about was in 1999 that the NSA had patented this voice translation system that could,
00:16:49.000And they're keeping all of our emails, but we think that when we talk to somebody on the phone, that's not being stored anywhere.
00:16:57.000But in 1999, the NSA patented a system that would allow them to transcribe and store and archive every telephone conversation in the world, both sides of the conversation.
00:17:11.000You know, that's a frightening, frightening piece of technology for those of us who care about civil rights and constitutional rights and without Julian Nobody would have known about that.
00:17:22.000Yes, that is actually, my laugh is ironic, because it's actually illegal.
00:17:29.000You know, the NSA is not allowed to do that however they do, and they continue to do so.
00:17:39.000Proper administration of the Constitution needs, I think, to be, you know, from the outside, from an Australian's point of view, that this advantage that the United States has in its Constitution to be ruined is With government, well, certain sections of government ruined with the complicity of certain sections of the government is a worry for people within the United States.
00:18:10.000When we started this conversation, we have to give permission for the Zoom to record.
00:18:20.000However, if we miss the recording, we can ring up the NSA. LAUGHTER That would be convenient to have actually worked that way, because we have screwed up our recording a couple of times.
00:18:35.000So just to clarify what you've said, Julian is...
00:18:38.000People are angry at Julian, and he's being punished on the Espionage Act for exposing illegal acts by the United States government and by other governments, by the Kenyan government, the Chinese and the Russian government.
00:18:55.000Because he exposed illegal acts by the United States government, and he's not only being judicially persecuted, the CIA actually, we now know, debated killing him with the Trump administration.
00:19:09.000Yes, that was my, how do we say, an enthusiasm of Mike Pompeo's in the Trump administration to launch the CIA against Julian and record all of his meetings and conversations.
00:19:26.000Consequently, tainting anything the Department of Justice would embark upon with illegality.
00:19:36.000I'm not sure in the United States, Well, I think.
00:20:04.000But it's interesting that that is the role because he would have been violating Australian law and UK law by not reporting a crime that he knew occurred.
00:20:13.000The CIA, as I said, not only debated killing him but kidnapping him.
00:20:17.000From, I think, the Ecuadorian Embassy, and then executing them.
00:20:25.000Again, the mess under Mike Pompeo's rule, administration, is as follows.
00:20:34.000The Department of Justice National Security Section...
00:20:38.000In a meeting, as reported by those reporters from Yahoo, Dorfman and Isakov, discussed with the CIA, now what are you going to do with him when you snatch him and kidnap him?
00:20:56.000You would have somebody that we haven't got a crime to charge with.
00:21:02.000The CIA was convinced that they ought to settle down a bit, and as a consequence of that, the Department of Justice, under Prosecutor Kronberg, cooked up the espionage charges.
00:21:18.000How can Americans who still believe in free expression support Julian and his case?
00:21:25.000Well, the simplest thing that we've found effective and easy and democratic participation, which is great, is simply to ring the congressman and say, you know, this looks like It's going to go pear-shaped and it is embarrassing to our constitution to pursue a publisher.
00:21:51.000We'll note that the five partners that I mentioned, the New York Times, etc., the publisher of the New York Times and the publishers of those other four newspapers I wrote to Merrick Garland asking that the charges be dropped.
00:22:10.000I emphasised the point, the publishers, because the realisation that this persecution or prosecution can be turned against publishers and chill their capacities, their stature and their prestige to be able to have some power to confront government.
00:22:34.000So in other words, you have the New York Times and The Guardian and a number of other prominent newspapers around the world who, thank God, are now asking the Biden administration and the Justice Department to drop these charges because they recognize, and they were not on the bandwagon before this, but I think more and more they've recognized that Julian is being persecuted because he was the publisher of a news organization.
00:23:02.000If you can jail for 175 years the publisher of a news organization for reporting truth to the American people or for criticizing our government, then all of them are in jeopardy and free speech itself is in jeopardy.
00:23:24.000And I'm very, very happy they recognize that.
00:23:27.000We have an administration right now Which is a Democratic and a Republican administration before that, which became engaged for the first time in our history that I know about in censoring free speech.
00:23:43.000There have been administrations before that have attempted to do that and have gotten away with little pieces, but this was systematic.
00:23:51.000During COVID, any criticism of government COVID policies, whether it was by doctors, scientists, journalists, Anybody who faced deplatforming, vilification, modification, marginalization, we know that the Biden White House contacted Twitter specifically and instructed them to censor me.
00:24:22.000There was nothing erroneous about it, but it was something that was embarrassing to government policies.
00:24:28.000And so I feel very, very grateful To Julian for what he's done, for standing up for free expression and free speech in the United States of America.
00:24:40.000And I'm very, very grateful to you, John Shipman, for making this movie.
00:25:04.000I'll just add briefly that all of the documents that WikiLeaks publish classified documents, not top secret.
00:25:14.000They're all released by an American soldier with a good conscience and they all demonstrate one way or another participation in Guantanamo Bay.
00:25:30.000In the illegal Iraq war and the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan.
00:25:43.000You can read them in the original and make your own views as to what has happened and what ought to have happened.
00:25:54.000And, you know, let me just sort of make a common sense recommendation, you know, that people can think about is, of course, the government, you know, the government of the United States particularly is supposed to be transparent and is supposed to be an open book to its citizens.
00:26:10.000But there are times of war and other times when it's important to also to be able to protect military secrets.
00:26:18.000During the World War II, we knew what the Japanese codes were, and it would be very, very dangerous for our citizens and for the war effort to report on that effort to the American public or to anybody.
00:26:34.000So the government does have legitimate reasons to protect secrets that have military value.
00:26:42.000The word espionage and the crime of espionage should be judged I should have the requirement that the court make a determination that the secret was, in fact, a military necessity.
00:27:01.000But also, it's important that we understand the motivation for the person to make the disclosure, because the government can classify anything it wants top secret.
00:27:12.000It can classify anything it wants as classified.
00:27:16.000I've seen this again and again, that the tendency of bureaucrats within these agencies is to use that classified stamp on every document that crossed their desk.
00:27:30.000You have to look at the motive of the person who did it.
00:27:34.000Were they trying to give information to our enemies?
00:27:38.000You know, was that the purpose, or were they trying to disclose something to the American people that the American people have a right to see?
00:27:45.000Well, you know, the documentation around warp speed, where the Department of Defense ran the COVID distribution and took responsibility for...
00:27:59.000removed, actually, indemnity and gave impunity...
00:28:05.000To the institutions that surrounded the distribution and research into the NRMA. There's no point at all in their argument that those documents ought to be retained or secret.
00:28:29.000Yes, the Pentagon was in charge of all the logistics for Operation Warp Speed, but the agency that actually was in command of Operation Warp Speed was the NSA, the National Security Agency, upon which the CIA director sits as its senior intelligent official and advisor to the president.
00:28:50.000And we have to ask ourselves, why would a spy agency be in charge of a public health action?
00:28:57.000Shouldn't HHS I've been in charge of safeguarding our public health.
00:29:03.000And then we should ask, why was a spy agency?
00:29:07.000The NSA and the CIA do not do public health.
00:29:50.000And, you know, that's not a patent that was written by somebody who is deeply concerned with American democracy, with freedom of expression, with our constitutional rights.