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March 17, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender
30:30
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with Julian's Father John Shipton

Julian Assange's father, John Shipton, discusses Assange, whistleblowing, and censorship with RFK Jr. To learn more, watch their documentary film, Ithaka: https://ithaka.movie/

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Hey, everybody.
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.
He's currently detained at a British maximum security prison awaiting extradition to the United States.
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.
And it's been an incredible sag.
The documentary is this really beautiful 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...
Is Stella now married to Julian?
Yes, they're married in the jail.
Yeah, so I think at the time a lot of this filming took place, she was a fiancé.
But it's a beautiful story.
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.
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 States government did not want him to expose.
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.
But the sacrifice, the personal sacrifice he made by doing so has been extreme.
And let me start out by this, just asking about his health.
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.
But, you know, and also it's very hard to keep healthy in jail.
It's hard work.
Consequently, his Not really what you'd call well.
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.
Yeah.
Some malicious actions from the Crown Prosecuting Service.
All of that amounts to a circumstance where Julian recently had a stroke.
Other than the obvious, he's well.
He's doing all right.
You know, other than...
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,
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.
But ultimately, his welcome at the Ecuadorian embassy Ran out and the British government, they withdrew the asylum.
The British police went into the embassy and forcibly removed him.
Yes, just a couple of extra things there.
They never actually laid charges.
They rested always on allegations.
If they'd have laid charges, it would have to have evidence, which they didn't have any.
And the second thing is that there is a procedure for becoming an asylee and a procedure for removing the privilege of asylum.
In the case of Julian, removal of asylum was arbitrary.
And the scandal was that Ecuador allowed police to enter their territory, their embassy, and forcibly remove Julian.
So, you see, contraventions of due process, irregularities of administration, the Crown prosecuting service, the Swedish prosecuting authority.
And contravention, a scandalous contravention of the great gift of 1973 of the United Nations General Assembly, the conventions of asylum.
And there's been abuse of power from the beginning of this.
He's actually charged by the United States government with violating the Espionage Act of 1917.
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.
And it actually forbade profanity.
It forbade any lack of loyalty to the United States.
These kind of vague terms that could be applied against anybody.
It was, in fact, applied against A political journalist just doing political work.
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.
It was applied by J. Edgar Hoover, by the FBI, by the Justice Department to silence black people.
It was during World War I and at other times in our history.
And it was also applied against Daniel Ellsberg when he released the Pentagon Papers, which of course is absolutely critical now.
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.
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.
And from the beginning, he was a thorn in the side.
He had his own kind of ethical code.
He didn't crash sites.
He released everything he got.
But he was a thorn in the side of totalitarian authorities.
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.
From then, that radicalised his approach to information.
But Julian remains, of course, socially conservative, well-mannered and civic forms of address and structures.
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.
That was a wiki, of course, of the people and leaks.
I was unclear about why you said he got upset originally because he found something that made him angry.
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.
What you're talking about is how they're targeting certain civilians or enemies of our country for drone strikes, etc.?
Yes, yes.
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.
This caused Julian to move to a deeper understanding of the necessity of free information.
So basing his instincts on Upon the First Amendment, and also very deep in with the Californian movement of the cypherpunks, started a WikiLeaks.
Wiki meaning the people.
Leaks, of course, obvious, meaning revelations.
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.
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.
The pollution from E-West, I think, 120 villages died in that case.
After that, the Manning Leaks came.
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.
Included in that were the rules of engagement.
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.
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,
drone strikes that were US-sponsored in Yemen that were killing civilians, the actions of China to suppress dissent in Tibet.
And one of the most momentous ones at that time was the collateral killing.
So the killings by U.S. contractors in Iraq, Blackwater, and these other private contractors of 18 civilians from a helicopter.
So they were essentially joy shooting.
U.S. contractors were joy shooting civilians in an intersection in Baghdad, as I recall.
And the military had possession of that tape, but they were keeping it secret.
And they were obviously keeping it secret, not for a national security reason, but because it was embarrassing to policymakers.
And, you know, there was a period where it was being played constantly.
And it woke Americans up to a new side of our war in Iraq.
Yes, that collateral murder video, as its name, extends over about 17 minutes.
The file is still available for everybody to view on WikiLeaks.
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.
So it's not singularly focused.
The idea of WikiLeaks is to hold information there available to us for us to analyse.
And that has gone on.
The collateral murder video, you can divide into two.
One is the first blast, which killed 11 people, two of them Reuters journalists.
The second is a man and his friend driving their children to work in a bongo van.
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.
They were subsequently murdered and the children badly wounded.
And then the third element was a man walking along the street turned into a house.
The helicopter pilots got permission from Crazy Horse 1 to launch a Hellfire missile into that house which destroyed 11 people.
So in total, 18 people's lives destroyed.
Chelsea Manning got 35 years left.
Jail was commuted after seven years by Obama for releasing that file.
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.
The Department of Justice is now pursuing him for another 170 years, should he live so long.
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.
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.
Just a comment on that.
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is a guiding star.
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...
It's a strategic asset, if you're part of the populace, is an asset for you to contribute to government.
So there's no proper excuse for the truncation or oppression or chilling of that right.
There's no proper reason for it except to protect the crimes that some people in government commit.
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,
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.
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.
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.
Yes, that is actually, my laugh is ironic, because it's actually illegal.
You know, the NSA is not allowed to do that however they do, and they continue to do so.
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.
When we started this conversation, we have to give permission for the Zoom to record.
So, of course, we push the button.
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.
But another...
So just to clarify what you've said, Julian is...
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.
He's exposed those.
He's being persecuted now.
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.
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.
Consequently, tainting anything the Department of Justice would embark upon with illegality.
I'm not sure in the United States, Well, I think.
To report a crime, if you see it.
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.
The CIA, as I said, not only debated killing him but kidnapping him.
From, I think, the Ecuadorian Embassy, and then executing them.
Yes.
Again, the mess under Mike Pompeo's rule, administration, is as follows.
The Department of Justice National Security Section...
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?
Because we haven't yet got a crime.
So you were...
You would have somebody that we haven't got a crime to charge with.
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.
Let me see...
How can Americans who still believe in free expression support Julian and his case?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I'm very, very happy they recognize that.
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.
There have been administrations before that have attempted to do that and have gotten away with little pieces, but this was systematic.
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.
My speech was true speech.
There was nothing erroneous about it, but it was something that was embarrassing to government policies.
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.
And I'm very, very grateful to you, John Shipman, for making this movie.
I urge people to look at it.
It's called Ithaka, I-T-H-A-K-A. And it's about the long sojourn.
Of Julian Assange, which hopefully will take him back to his island home in Australia at some point.
Thank you, Robert.
I'll just add briefly that all of the documents that WikiLeaks publish classified documents, not top secret.
They're all released by an American soldier with a good conscience and they all demonstrate one way or another participation in Guantanamo Bay.
In the illegal Iraq war and the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan.
None of it is lies.
None of it is tilted.
You can read them in the original and make your own views as to what has happened and what ought to have happened.
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.
But there are times of war and other times when it's important to also to be able to protect military secrets.
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.
So the government does have legitimate reasons to protect secrets that have military value.
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.
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.
It can classify anything it wants as classified.
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.
You have to look at the motive of the person who did it.
Were they trying to give information to our enemies?
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?
Well, you know, the documentation around warp speed, where the Department of Defense ran the COVID distribution and took responsibility for...
removed, actually, indemnity and gave impunity...
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.
Nothing.
They concern only us.
Yeah, that's right.
And I want to point out something.
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.
And we have to ask ourselves, why would a spy agency be in charge of a public health action?
Shouldn't HHS I've been in charge of safeguarding our public health.
And then we should ask, why was a spy agency?
The NSA and the CIA do not do public health.
They have no expertise in it.
They do coup d'etats, and they do coup d'etats against democracies.
And we have to ask ourselves whether that...
Whether the COVID operation with NSA at the top and the second in command being the Pentagon, what exactly was happening there?
Remember, the NSA is the same agency that in 1999 patented this technology that allows them to transcribe every phone call you make.
And to store it in their archives.
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.
So thank you again, John Shipman.
Please look at his download, his documentary, Ithaca.
And write your congressman in support of Julian Assange's pardon.
Thanks, Robert.
It's been very kind of you.
Thank you, John.
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