RFK Jr. The Defender - Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with Julian's Father John Shipton

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.

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:01.000 I'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.

00:00:14.000 He's currently detained at a British maximum security prison awaiting extradition to the United States.

00:00:24.000 And 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.

00:00:40.000 And it's been an incredible sag.

00:00:42.000 The documentary is this really beautiful story.

00:00:48.000 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...

00:01:04.000 Is Stella now married to Julian?

00:01:06.000 Yes, they're married in the jail.

00:01:09.000 Yeah, so I think at the time a lot of this filming took place, she was a fiancé.

00:01:13.000 But it's a beautiful story.

00:01:16.000 And 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.

00:01:24.000 Here is a journalist who has been imprisoned because he had political views and he had a hostility towards secrecy.

00:01:34.000 And he exposed things that the United States government did not want him to expose.

00:01:39.000 And 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.

00:01:57.000 But the sacrifice, the personal sacrifice he made by doing so has been extreme.

00:02:02.000 And let me start out by this, just asking about his health.

00:02:07.000 Well, 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.

00:02:19.000 But, you know, and also it's very hard to keep healthy in jail.

00:02:24.000 It's hard work.

00:02:27.000 Consequently, his Not really what you'd call well.

00:02:33.000 And 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.

00:02:48.000 Yeah.

00:02:49.000 Some malicious actions from the Crown Prosecuting Service.

00:02:55.000 All of that amounts to a circumstance where Julian recently had a stroke.

00:03:01.000 Other than the obvious, he's well.

00:03:05.000 He's doing all right.

00:03:07.000 You know, other than...

00:03:08.000 Prior 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,

00:03:37.000 the 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.

00:03:52.000 But ultimately, his welcome at the Ecuadorian embassy Ran out and the British government, they withdrew the asylum.

00:04:00.000 The British police went into the embassy and forcibly removed him.

00:04:04.000 Yes, just a couple of extra things there.

00:04:09.000 They never actually laid charges.

00:04:12.000 They rested always on allegations.

00:04:16.000 If they'd have laid charges, it would have to have evidence, which they didn't have any.

00:04:22.000 And the second thing is that there is a procedure for becoming an asylee and a procedure for removing the privilege of asylum.

00:04:34.000 In the case of Julian, removal of asylum was arbitrary.

00:04:39.000 And the scandal was that Ecuador allowed police to enter their territory, their embassy, and forcibly remove Julian.

00:04:51.000 So, you see, contraventions of due process, irregularities of administration, the Crown prosecuting service, the Swedish prosecuting authority.

00:05:02.000 And contravention, a scandalous contravention of the great gift of 1973 of the United Nations General Assembly, the conventions of asylum.

00:05:16.000 And there's been abuse of power from the beginning of this.

00:05:19.000 He's actually charged by the United States government with violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

00:05:26.000 Which 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.

00:05:40.000 And it actually forbade profanity.

00:05:44.000 It forbade any lack of loyalty to the United States.

00:05:47.000 These kind of vague terms that could be applied against anybody.

00:05:50.000 It was, in fact, applied against A political journalist just doing political work.

00:05:57.000 I 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.

00:06:07.000 It was applied by J. Edgar Hoover, by the FBI, by the Justice Department to silence black people.

00:06:15.000 It was during World War I and at other times in our history.

00:06:19.000 And it was also applied against Daniel Ellsberg when he released the Pentagon Papers, which of course is absolutely critical now.

00:06:29.000 I 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.

00:06:38.000 I 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.

00:06:50.000 And from the beginning, he was a thorn in the side.

00:06:53.000 He had his own kind of ethical code.

00:06:55.000 He didn't crash sites.

00:06:57.000 He released everything he got.

00:06:59.000 But he was a thorn in the side of totalitarian authorities.

00:07:04.000 Well, 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.

00:07:24.000 From then, that radicalised his approach to information.

00:07:28.000 But Julian remains, of course, socially conservative, well-mannered and civic forms of address and structures.

00:07:41.000 So 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.

00:08:03.000 That was a wiki, of course, of the people and leaks.

00:08:07.000 I was unclear about why you said he got upset originally because he found something that made him angry.

00:08:17.000 It 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.

00:08:35.000 What you're talking about is how they're targeting certain civilians or enemies of our country for drone strikes, etc.?

00:08:47.000 Yes, yes.

00:08:48.000 So 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.

00:09:14.000 This caused Julian to move to a deeper understanding of the necessity of free information.

00:09:23.000 So basing his instincts on Upon the First Amendment, and also very deep in with the Californian movement of the cypherpunks, started a WikiLeaks.

00:09:37.000 Wiki meaning the people.

00:09:39.000 Leaks, of course, obvious, meaning revelations.

00:09:43.000 As 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.

00:10:08.000 So 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. 0.56

00:10:29.000 The pollution from E-West, I think, 120 villages died in that case.

00:10:36.000 After that, the Manning Leaks came.

00:10:38.000 The Manning Leaks covered 250,000 SIPA net cables, 400,000 Iraq war files, and 90,000 Afghan war logs, and the Guantanamo Bay files.

00:10:55.000 Included in that were the rules of engagement.

00:10:59.000 So the great parcel of leaks joined together with the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El Pé, and released to the public.

00:11:14.000 And 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,

00:11:36.000 drone strikes that were US-sponsored in Yemen that were killing civilians, the actions of China to suppress dissent in Tibet.

00:11:47.000 And one of the most momentous ones at that time was the collateral killing.

00:11:53.000 So the killings by U.S. contractors in Iraq, Blackwater, and these other private contractors of 18 civilians from a helicopter.

00:12:08.000 So they were essentially joy shooting.

00:12:10.000 U.S. contractors were joy shooting civilians in an intersection in Baghdad, as I recall.

00:12:18.000 And the military had possession of that tape, but they were keeping it secret.

00:12:23.000 And they were obviously keeping it secret, not for a national security reason, but because it was embarrassing to policymakers.

00:12:32.000 And, you know, there was a period where it was being played constantly.

00:12:36.000 And it woke Americans up to a new side of our war in Iraq.

00:12:41.000 Yes, that collateral murder video, as its name, extends over about 17 minutes.

00:12:48.000 The file is still available for everybody to view on WikiLeaks.

00:12:52.000 I'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.

00:13:08.000 So it's not singularly focused.

00:13:12.000 The idea of WikiLeaks is to hold information there available to us for us to analyse.

00:13:21.000 And that has gone on.

00:13:24.000 The collateral murder video, you can divide into two.

00:13:28.000 One is the first blast, which killed 11 people, two of them Reuters journalists.

00:13:36.000 The second is a man and his friend driving their children to work in a bongo van. 0.97

00:13:44.000 We stopped to help a wounded man, one of the Reuters, crawling along the gutter to pick him up and put him in the van.

00:13:53.000 They were subsequently murdered and the children badly wounded.

00:13:58.000 And then the third element was a man walking along the street turned into a house.

00:14:05.000 The helicopter pilots got permission from Crazy Horse 1 to launch a Hellfire missile into that house which destroyed 11 people.

00:14:16.000 So in total, 18 people's lives destroyed.

00:14:21.000 Chelsea Manning got 35 years left.

00:14:25.000 Jail was commuted after seven years by Obama for releasing that file.

00:14:32.000 And Julian, well, is still, you know, now it's 13 years, so he's more or less spent 13 years in jail so far.

00:14:42.000 The Department of Justice is now pursuing him for another 170 years, should he live so long.

00:14:50.000 One 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.

00:15:04.000 And, 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.

00:15:28.000 Just a comment on that.

00:15:30.000 The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is a guiding star.

00:15:36.000 Most 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...

00:15:54.000 It's a strategic asset, if you're part of the populace, is an asset for you to contribute to government.

00:16:02.000 So there's no proper excuse for the truncation or oppression or chilling of that right.

00:16:11.000 There's no proper reason for it except to protect the crimes that some people in government commit.

00:16:21.000 Another 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,

00:16:49.000 And 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.

00:16:57.000 But 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.

00:17:11.000 You 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.

00:17:22.000 Yes, that is actually, my laugh is ironic, because it's actually illegal.

00:17:29.000 You know, the NSA is not allowed to do that however they do, and they continue to do so.

00:17:39.000 Proper 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.

00:18:10.000 When we started this conversation, we have to give permission for the Zoom to record.

00:18:17.000 So, of course, we push the button.

00:18:20.000 However, 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.

00:18:33.000 But another...

00:18:35.000 So just to clarify what you've said, Julian is...

00:18:38.000 People 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.

00:18:51.000 He's exposed those.

00:18:52.000 He's being persecuted now.

00:18:55.000 Because 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.

00:19:09.000 Yes, 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.

00:19:26.000 Consequently, tainting anything the Department of Justice would embark upon with illegality.

00:19:36.000 I'm not sure in the United States, Well, I think.

00:20:01.000 To report a crime, if you see it.

00:20:04.000 But 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.

00:20:13.000 The CIA, as I said, not only debated killing him but kidnapping him.

00:20:17.000 From, I think, the Ecuadorian Embassy, and then executing them.

00:20:23.000 Yes.

00:20:25.000 Again, the mess under Mike Pompeo's rule, administration, is as follows.

00:20:34.000 The Department of Justice National Security Section...

00:20:38.000 In 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?

00:20:51.000 Because we haven't yet got a crime.

00:20:54.000 So you were...

00:20:56.000 You would have somebody that we haven't got a crime to charge with.

00:21:02.000 The 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.

00:21:16.000 Let me see...

00:21:18.000 How can Americans who still believe in free expression support Julian and his case?

00:21:25.000 Well, 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.

00:21:51.000 We'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.

00:22:10.000 I 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.

00:22:34.000 So 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.

00:23:02.000 If 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.

00:23:24.000 And I'm very, very happy they recognize that.

00:23:27.000 We 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.

00:23:43.000 There have been administrations before that have attempted to do that and have gotten away with little pieces, but this was systematic.

00:23:51.000 During 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.

00:24:18.000 My speech was true speech.

00:24:22.000 There was nothing erroneous about it, but it was something that was embarrassing to government policies.

00:24:28.000 And 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.

00:24:40.000 And I'm very, very grateful to you, John Shipman, for making this movie.

00:24:45.000 I urge people to look at it.

00:24:47.000 It's called Ithaka, I-T-H-A-K-A. And it's about the long sojourn. 0.97

00:24:54.000 Of Julian Assange, which hopefully will take him back to his island home in Australia at some point.

00:25:01.000 Thank you, Robert.

00:25:04.000 I'll just add briefly that all of the documents that WikiLeaks publish classified documents, not top secret.

00:25:14.000 They're all released by an American soldier with a good conscience and they all demonstrate one way or another participation in Guantanamo Bay.

00:25:30.000 In the illegal Iraq war and the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan.

00:25:39.000 None of it is lies.

00:25:41.000 None of it is tilted.

00:25:43.000 You can read them in the original and make your own views as to what has happened and what ought to have happened.

00:25:54.000 And, 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.

00:26:10.000 But there are times of war and other times when it's important to also to be able to protect military secrets.

00:26:18.000 During 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.

00:26:34.000 So the government does have legitimate reasons to protect secrets that have military value.

00:26:42.000 The 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.

00:27:01.000 But 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.

00:27:12.000 It can classify anything it wants as classified.

00:27:16.000 I'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. 0.96

00:27:30.000 You have to look at the motive of the person who did it.

00:27:34.000 Were they trying to give information to our enemies?

00:27:38.000 You 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?

00:27:45.000 Well, you know, the documentation around warp speed, where the Department of Defense ran the COVID distribution and took responsibility for...

00:27:59.000 removed, actually, indemnity and gave impunity...

00:28:05.000 To 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.

00:28:21.000 Nothing.

00:28:22.000 They concern only us.

00:28:25.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:28:26.000 And I want to point out something.

00:28:29.000 Yes, 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.

00:28:50.000 And we have to ask ourselves, why would a spy agency be in charge of a public health action?

00:28:57.000 Shouldn't HHS I've been in charge of safeguarding our public health.

00:29:03.000 And then we should ask, why was a spy agency?

00:29:07.000 The NSA and the CIA do not do public health.

00:29:11.000 They have no expertise in it.

00:29:13.000 They do coup d'etats, and they do coup d'etats against democracies.

00:29:18.000 And we have to ask ourselves whether that...

00:29:21.000 Whether the COVID operation with NSA at the top and the second in command being the Pentagon, what exactly was happening there?

00:29:35.000 Remember, the NSA is the same agency that in 1999 patented this technology that allows them to transcribe every phone call you make.

00:29:47.000 And to store it in their archives.

00:29:50.000 And, 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.

00:30:03.000 So thank you again, John Shipman.

00:30:08.000 Please look at his download, his documentary, Ithaca.

00:30:15.000 And write your congressman in support of Julian Assange's pardon.

00:30:26.000 Thanks, Robert.

00:30:27.000 It's been very kind of you.

00:30:29.000 Thank you, John.

RFK Jr. The Defender - March 17, 2023

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with Julian's Father John Shipton

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