Original subtitles

[people talking ]

[bus goes past]

[car horn beeps]

for your courage and leadership and

tenacity in journalism and publishing,

for your conviction that truth matters

and that justice depends on it.

The U.K. has no sovereignty!

U.K. has no sovereignty!

You can resist!

Resist this attempt by the Trump administration!

[Mysterious, tense harp music]

WikiLeaks is a non-state, hostile

intelligence service.

hostile intelligence service.

I think the man is a high-tech terrorist.

I think the man is a high-tech terrorist.

A high-tech terrorist.

A traitor, a treasonous.

He has to answer for what he has done.

Assange faces up to 175 years in prison

for publishing classified documents,

for publishing classified documents

exposing U.S. war crimes

in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has been detained since the 7th of

December 2010 in one form or another.

And we are now here

after years of imprisonment.

[Prison door slamming loudly]

[Mysterious, tense harp music]

[Atmospheric, sustained drone music]

[Heavy wind gust]

Julian Paul Assange was born in 1971

in Townsville, Australia.

In 2006, he founded WikiLeaks,

a non-profit media

organisation with the aim to provide

an innovative, secure and anonymous way

for sources to leak information.

In April 2010, the organization came to

international attention when they

released a video showing a war crime by

the US military in Iraq.

In may 2010, Private Manning was arrested and charged

with leaking classified documents to Wikileaks,

including the video previously mentioned,

the U.S. Diplomatic Cables,

and reports that came to be known as The Afghan War Diary

and The Iraq War Logs.

In July 2010 they released an

extraordinary compendium of over 91,000

internal US military logs

of the war in Afghanistan,

which revealed 195

previously unreported civilian deaths.

In August 2010, global mainstream media

published stories accusing Julian Assange

of raping two women in Sweden.

In October 2010,

WikiLeaks released the largest

classified military leak in history,

the Iraq war logs.

These logs revealed 15,000 previously

unreported civilian deaths.

In November 2010 they published Cablegate,

the largest set of confidential documents

ever released to the public,

giving us an unprecedented insight

into the US Government's foreign activities.

Just nine days later, Assange was

arrested at a London police station on a

European arrest warrant in relation to

the Swedish allegation.

Meanwhile, US officials confirmed to the

Australian Embassy in Washington

that the Justice Department

was conducting an active vigorous inquiry

into whether Assange could

be charged under the US law,

most likely the Espionage Act.

Two weeks later, the Australian

Embassy in London advised the

Australian government that media reports

of a secret grand jury in the US against

WikiLeaks were likely true.

On the 16th of December,

Assange was released on bail.

His passport was confiscated.

He was under house arrest

for the next two years.

In November 2011, the UK's Supreme Court,

ruled Assange, should be

extradited to Sweden

to face questioning of the allegation.

In June 2012, to avoid being taken into

custody by Sweden and then extradited to the US

Assange took asylum in the

Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

In the second half of 2016, the company

contracted to provide

security services at the embassy

by the government of Ecuador began assisting the

CIA in spying on Assange and his visitors in the embassy.

They uploaded the security camera footage to an

FTP server and gave the CIA access to it.

In March 2017, WikiLeaks published Vault 7,

detailing the activities and capabilities of the

CIA to perform electronic surveillance and cyber

warfare through smartphones and other devices.

It was the largest leak

in the history of the CIA.

In April 2017, the US said that it was now a

priority to arrest Assange.

In August 2017, Trump offered Assange a pardon

if he would disclose who was responsible for

leaking Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks

before the 2016 US presidential elections.

Assange refused to give up the source.

In December 2017, the US government gave the UK

government a sealed warrant for Assange's arrest.

In February 2019, the Ecuadorian government

received loans of $10.2 billion from various

multilateral institutions of which

the US is the majority shareholder.

The loans were provided with the agreement that

Assange could be removed from the embassy.

In April 2019, UK police entered the

Embassy of Ecuador,

forcibly carried Julian Assange

out of the building and took him away in van.

On the same day, the US indictment

against him was unsealed,

charging him with one count of computer intrusion.

He was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail

for breaching his bail conditions,

With the sentence to be carried out in Belmarsh Prison.

In the same month, Sweden reopened

the sexual assault investigation

and the US filed 17 new charges against him”.

In February 2020, the extradition hearing

began at Woolwich Crown Court in London.

In June 2020, the US Department of

Justice issued an

updated 18 count indictment.

If he faced trial in the US and was found guilty,

he would face a sentence

of 175 years in prison.

In November 2020 Sweden dropped the rape case

after reviewing the evidence.

On 4th January 2021, Judge Baraitser

ruled that Assange could not be

extradited due to his mental

health and risk of suicide.

In October 2021, in a two-day appeal by the US,

UK judges ruled in favor of the US

and overturned the

decision not to extradite Assange.

In April 2022, the Westminster

Magistrates' Court formally issued an

order to extradite Assange.

Eight weeks later, UK Home Secretary

Priti Patel signed off on the order.

In June 2023, London's High Court Justice

Jonathan Swift, rejected two separate applications

made by Assange's lawyers

to appeal his extradition,

striking down all submitted grounds.

In February 2024, Assange's lawyers began

an application for a final appeal against

his extradition with the UK High Court.

Five weeks later, the court issued a

written judgement that an

appeal would be heard unless

the U.S. administration was able to provide

level of national and

international interest around

the case.

In April 2024, a U.S. D.O.J. attorney

stationed in Europe sent an email to

colleagues back home stating:

"The urgency here has now reached a critical point,"

adding, "The case will head to appeal

and we will lose."

In May 2024, the UK courts found the U.S.

assurances regarding free speech

protections and discrimination to be insufficient.

Permission for Assange's

defence to appeal was granted and the

appeal hearing was

scheduled for seven weeks' time.

On 24 June 2024, two weeks before the

appeal hearing was to begin,

a plea bargain was struck

where Assange would plead guilty to a

single charge under the

Espionage Act in exchange

for his immediate release.

He would be required to admit to one of

the 18 counts of the indictment:

"conspiring to unlawfully obtain and

disseminate classified

national defence information."

Assange was released from Belmarsh prison

and boarded a chartered flight to Saipan.

On the 26th of June, 2024, a U.S. judge in

Saipan accepted Assange's guilty plea.

Assange left the courthouse a free man

and returned to the

chartered flight for the final

leg of the journey.

His plane arrived in

Canberra, Australia that evening.

After thirteen years of being detained in one

form or another,

Assange was finally free.

The following interviews took place

whilst Assange was still being detained indefinitely

at Belmarsh prison.

was still being detained indefinitely at Belmarsh prison.

[mysterious xylophone music]

Most people have heard of him in relation

to the Swedish

trumped up rape allegations.

And it's really important to debunk them,

to explain the role of the media in

mischaracterizing the case and

creating a smear campaign.

[Mysterious xylophone music]

The Swedish case is one of the most

anomalous crime investigations I have ever

anomalous crime investigation I have ever

seen as a journalist.

Two women went to the police for having

Julian Assange testing for sexually

transmitted illness.

The evidence was really manufactured

and turned out to be complete

distortion of the actual situation

where two women wanted him to get an HIV test,

not to have him

prosecuted in any way.

And they were distraught

that he was being prosecuted.

The public understanding

of this case was terrible.

The people couldn't

understand what was really going on.

The UN special rapporteur on torture,

Nils Melzer,

he reads and speaks Swedish.

So he was able to read the preliminary

investigation documentation and

to expose at least 40 perceived

violations of due process,

including active

manipulation of evidence.

The case was opened in 2010, closed in

2010 after five days,

reopening in 2010, kept artificially

open for six years when it was finally

questioned in November 2016

and in May 2017 the prosecutor

Marianne Ny closed the investigation and

dismissed the case and then when Julian

was arrested in April 2019

a new Swedish prosecutor reopened

the case but of course there

was no real.. there was no case at all.

was no real.. there was no case at all.

So she closed the investigation

once and for all in November 2019

[Door slamming]

and there were never charges.

You know this case was just a

preliminary investigation Julian was

never ever charged for

rape and I can assure you that if they

had any evidence they could have

immediately charged him

and immediately put him on trial and they didn't.

This case has been

used to destroy his reputation

his credibility and to focus the public

opinion attention on a

rape case that never was.

It was just part of this manipulated

firestorm that was created in

an effort to bring Assange down

Since 2015 I have been engaging in a real

trench warfare to

access the full documentation

because this allowed to answer to that

crucial question why

Julian was inside the embassy

with no end in sight and the reason was

that it was the UK authorities

who had told the

Swedish prosecutors not to go to London

to question him

and by doing this they had created

this legal paralysis.

[Mysterious xylophone music]

Once WikiLeaks published Vault 7

it was of course targeted by the CIA

and the intelligence community

and part of that smear campaign

was to paint WikiLeaks as a

surrogate or a front for a hostile power i.e. Russia.

The Mueller report which investigated

the Trump Russia saga and found no

collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia

exonerated WikiLeaks.

So there's zero evidence

that Russia provided any

leaks or information to WikiLeaks.

It should also be clear that WikiLeaks

published over 700,000

files on Russia itself which wouldn't

endear WikiLeaks or Julian to the Kremlin

[Mysterious xylophone music]

One of the arguments we hear about why

Julian Assange should be

targeted from those who believe

he should is that he somehow put people

at risk but what we've seen

in more than 10 years now is

a complete failure by the US government

to present any evidence of any concrete

harm caused to anybody.

At Chelsea Manning's trial at Fort Meade

which I attended, the charge

was made that lives were put at risk

through the disclosure of

information provided by WikiLeaks,

but even in that trial

the prosecution had to admit that that was not true.

[Mysterious xylophone music]

Apart from the CIA,

even journalistic enemies needed to cut him

out from the from the

the protections that uh would surround a journalist.

They needed something to distinguish it

and they couldn't really get one except this one

ah they fell they fell

upon this one he didn't redact.

It couldn't have been a more contrary position put.

In the final

weeks he had this material

in his possession and the final weeks

The Guardian, The New York

Times and Der Spiegel

became involved in processing and sifting

through this material and

had agreed on a joint launch.

The guy that redacted it,

that tried to put a halt to it,

was not any one of them.

The only one that said delay, was Julian Assange

and I was with him absolutely with him

and I'll say this in any

court certainly in an American court.

He was the one that firstly

tried to call a halt to it,

but it was Julian who tried to stop the

release until that full

redaction had been done.

From Thursday to the early hours

of Monday morning to redact

and I was with him,

we were sharing an apartment.

He redacted 10,000 names

by himself quite literally

he stayed up you know all night

on the main night that he sort of cracked it

I left him you know I saw him at 2am he was at it

and I next saw him

at 9am he was still at it.

That was the the fundamental work

that made that tranche of

documents safe.

There was 96 media partners

carefully redacting

the cables until David Leigh and Luke Harding

published the password in their book.

He had a great sense of

responsibility for the material for the

source who provided the

material and for the material itself.

He went to great pains,

he contacted Hillary Clinton to ask

for help in redacting names,

he offered that to the US government

and they declined.

The US military accounts of local informers that

they have they're given in

some detail... Yeah well, we've

withheld all those.

Do you lie awake at

night wondering whether

you have found all of those

whether you, you know... They have they have

a particular code ..

particular code within the

within the reports.

So you excise those as best you can..

It wasn't too hard,

now that said it is possible

I mean, there may be a stray report here or

a stray report there..

the choice, in the end we are forced to make hard choices

and those hard choices are

do we do best effort to

minimize harm which we have done,

with the understanding that this is an

extraordinary body of

material capable of producing

extraordinary reforms.

So what i want to

say to people looking at this

if you think

Assange is a traitor, he's a rapist,

he's a narcissist he's a hacker,

I don't blame you,

because you have been deceived

and if you think you've not been deceived,

that's normal because

otherwise it wouldn't be deception.

[strong wind gust]

[Contemplative piano and string music]

What if everything we thought we knew

about somebody, was a lie?

Would we have the courage to see through it

with a fresh perspective?

Would we be willing to go on a new

journey of understanding?

This is a story of deception, lies,

bravery, and a man who risked everything

to bring the truth to light.

[Traffic noise]

[Atmospheric, sustained music]

We're in the Redmond

Barry Lecture Theatre, which

is where we had those physics lectures,

and it's at the University of Melbourne

with Julian as a student.

Yeah, he was sitting here.

There's a couple of us who

went to the lectures together.

There wasn't many actually students that

had the crossover between physics,

science, the hard sciences

and politics and philosophy.

So it was really lovely to engage with someone

who was thinking about both of

those things and how to marry up those

kind of ideas of logic and political thought.

But that ability to, one, think clearly,

critically from original perspectives and

two, to have no fear in communicating them.

To think outside the box,

to think from a different angle.

It was clear that he was incredibly adept

at using computers,

miles ahead of, I think,

where most of us were with what we were

learning in science and

actually I think ahead of a

lot of the computer

science courses at the time.

There was a solar eclipse and the arc was

to go through south Australia

like a narrow window through the world.

Me, Julian and another mate of ours,

crammed into a car and we just

went on a road trip.

Julian shared a whole bunch of his songs

that he'd collected

from I don't know where,

but a bunch of amazing,

interesting science songs.

Tom Lehrer and Monty Python and all this

eclectic mix of scientific music,

people who are communicating science concepts,

really advanced physics concepts.

Gauss's law, Ampere's law of electro-magnetism.

[Very fast singing: "Europium, zirconium, lutetium.."]

["vanadium, and lanthanum and osmium"]

It was wonderful, incredibly nerdy, but

lovely experience to be

introduced to on that trip.

Often we have conversations where we

don't want to make anyone

uncomfortable or embarrass

anyone or call out something which will

ruin a dinner party

or cause some friction.

But actually Julian was

really fearless with it.

He had no compunction.

I got to know Julian because I was part

of an early internet

community here in Melbourne.

He was quirky, a observer of people,

clearly very smart.

He wasn't that interested in

what people thought of him.

Part of that I think is a little bit of

autism spectrum in

that he didn't notice it.

One of the things that he became most

interested in trying to address

was the issue of corruption.

He is at heart deeply, um intellectual,

deeply thinker.

He was very interested in

core root problems of things.

Where does the system

fall down at the foundation?

Corruption being something that if it was fixed,

would have this kindof enormous flow-on effect.

It would reduce inequity in society.

Poor people would be less poor.

Also, there'd be just less of a sense of

injustice across society.

He's such a super intellect that can burn

through the information.

I've never seen anybody so focused.

He would just stay up for a day, all day

and all night researching things.

The way he came to form WikiLeaks was a

kind of an iterative process over time.

It was like winemaking, you know?

He had a lot of ingredients,

had to be fine-tuned.

He had whiteboards that he'd rescued from tips,

so his house had whiteboards in every room.

Some people have paintings or posters.

And most of the

whiteboards were filled with things.

Sometimes they were equations.

Sometimes the equations were filled with

just words and

reflecting a mathematical language

of social phenomena.

And what he could see was that

information was becoming

transferable, copyable at little

to no cost in large quantities.

And so that churning desire for this

deeper social change

combined with these other overlays

enabled by technology, I think just meant

that everything came together

at the right moment for him.

My first contact with this was when

Julian sent me an email

describing to some extent

this project he had in mind of WikiLeaks.

The idea was to put out secrets,

classified secrets, of governments.

And that seemed to me extremely unlikely

that you could really

circumvent the National

Security Agency.

What Julian's idea was for WikiLeaks was

that maybe we don't need

to go through our mainstream

journalistic channels.

There is an ability that encryption can

give you, if it's done

in the right way, to allow

protection of that information,

say of a really valuable source,

a really valuable piece of information.

It's a really courageous, powerful concept

that a website could facilitate

anonymity of sources that

have information that could expose

wrongdoing by governments,

corporations, whoever it might be.

What WikiLeaks did was not to treat the

citizens of the world like

children, which is how the

politicians treat them.

They commit their crimes, they do their

misdeeds, but "never in

front of the children.

Don't let the children find

out what we're really doing".

Julian used to talk about the logo of WikiLeaks

when he was setting it up.

And it's like an hourglass

and there's two worlds.

There's one on the top

and one on the bottom.

The first world dripping down with

leaking into the second world.

And he said, this is a little bit of what

the world we could make, a world informed

by the leaks of the

previous world of corruption.

And if those leaks inform the world that

we'd like to make, it'll

make it at a better place.

And in some sense, the hourglass is,

there is some inevitability to it.

That people will only sustain corruption

and wrongdoing for so long

before they feel the

need to expose it.

He very much believed in it.

The media is completely manipulated and controlled

and more so now than ever before.

And so into this world came WikiLeaks.

[Heavy, dramatic music with drums and brass]

[Camera shutter sounds]

This disclosure is about the truth.

The single greatest contribution to our

expanding horizons is you.

You telling your friends what's up, what

you saw, what you

believe and who's full of it.

You form part of the largest bullshit

detecting machine

the world has ever seen.

[Tense piano music]

Information as such doesn't change the world,

especially the world in which we live today.

Where the power of the state and its

links to the media networks

is so strong that it's

not easy to fight against them.

WikiLeaks did that and they did that

extremely intelligently.

They never made up information.

They never manufactured information.

They just succeeded in finding documents

that existed and making

them available to the world public.

I mean, what could be more

honorable than that?

Their releases are a 100 percent correct.

They're authentic.

There's no body of journalism can ever

claim to be that, however good it is.

So the importance of WikiLeaks

can never be overstated.

That transparency is an extraordinary

journalistic achievement.

What the media do is that they filter

information and they present you with

what they think you should know.

When I worked in a newsroom, there were

so many instances when

people made judgments.

Oh, no, that's a bit too unsavory or

that's a bit too confronting.

What Julian and WikiLeaks have done is

that they've shown the

way for other journalists

in terms of the protection of source.

Now this anonymous Dropbox has become a

norm for media organisations all over the world.

And he's developed a public library of

documents that are going

to be mined for generations to come

by citizens, scholars, students, journalists.

The WikiLeaks documents will be a

permanent and lasting

gain for serious historians.

Julian Assange opened a new era

an honourable, brave, courageous era

in journalism which made

me proud to be a journalist again.

We understood how dangerous it was

and how powerful it was

when WikiLeaks published a Kenyan

government report that led to the

changing of government in Kenya.

And it was at that point that

really started to understand like

this is you know something that is going

to change the world.

[Slow, heavy piano music]

The best journalism in my

experience has always come

originally from a source within.

The most authentic

voices, the truthful voices,

come from within

governments, within organisations,

that tell you what's really going on.

At critical times, in the

highest places possible,

you have someone with a conscience

who sees a piece of information,

or witnesses an atrocity or something,

which is so against the grain

of what is being told

to the public at large

that this person can't take it anymore,

and they feel it would be immoral

to keep quiet.

Whistleblowers are actually highly

motivated, highly ethical people,

and we believe that we

are meant to be truthful,

we are meant to follow the law.

When we come across our own organisation,

not following our own stated

principles, we say, "Hang on."

The organisation is

breaking the law, lying to us,

and unless we do something, it's not

going to fix itself.

Most whistleblowers say we didn't feel

like we had a choice.

Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning

said at one point that she

was ready to go to prison

or even be killed in capital punishment

in order to get this out.

And I recognize that as the same mood,

the same imperative that

I'd felt 39 years earlier.

[Dramatic, emotional piano and synths music]

I worked in the Defense Department as a

special assistant to the Assistant

Secretary of Defense.

I volunteered to go to Vietnam in 1965,

and I was in the field and

saw the war quite close up.

And that made me realize that there was

no progress of the sort that the

president was proclaiming.

So you had a war in which many, many

people were dying, especially of the

occupied country, 10 to 1 perhaps.

And I became aware that Nixon actually

intended to continue it with air power,

even nuclear weapons.

I felt that this was a recipe for endless war

in the sense of

enormous moral loss of life.

I then saw Vietnam as an aberration.

That the U.S. participation had been

wrong from the start.

That it was unjustified homicide,

which meant murder, mass murder.

And that was something I shouldn't

compromise with or keep silent about.

And to end that,

I was ready to go to prison for life.

In 1967, I'd been working on a study of

the origins of the war

and the decision-making of the war,

a 7,000-page top-secret study.

I took the documents out of my top-secret safe,

copied them all on the Xerox machine,

and ultimately sent them or gave them to

the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Then when they didn't put it out,

I did get in touch with the New York Times.

And it began to be

published in June 13, 1971.

[Archive audio: "First to follow the times was

the Washington Post.

They too have now been

suppressed by court order at

the government's request.

But then the Boston Globe and

Congressman Paul McCloskey

announced they too had copies

of the secret study."]

I was charged with 12 felony counts,

a possible 115 years in prison.

During my trial, what we didn't know was

that President Nixon was taking criminal

actions against me secretly.

He did various things.

He sent people into my former

psychoanalyst's office in

hopes of getting information

with which to blackmail me into silence.

My case was the first to be prosecuted

under the Espionage Act.

All the way up here! All the way up here!

It comes out that a presidential prosecution

that was started for political reasons

is ending for political reasons.

The facts are out of the safes, just as

the Pentagon Papers are out of the safes.

Can it be worth telling truths at the

cost of your own imprisonment

for a small chance of changing events?

Well, yes, a war's worth

of lives may be at stake.

[Sombre, slow piano music]

[Slow middle eastern cello music]

[People talking in background]

[Children playing in background]

As long as it was just written documents,

obviously the United States was very angry.

What completely freaked them out was when

WikiLeaks managed to

get hold of video archive

Many people questioned

that name as too provocative,

collateral murder, instead of

collateral damage,

which is the euphemism.

But as a former Marine company commander,

I knew enough about war law, laws of war,

to know that that was in fact murder.

There is no video of war like it in

history in the public domain.

There is no videotape that shows how a

country like the

United States has waged war.

There's nothing out there that is so

unvarnished, that is uncensored,

that shows what war in the

modern era is really like.

Nothing.

And that's why the US government doesn't

want it in a courtroom where

they want to try Julian Assange.

That's why it's not part of the

indictment against him,

because it's so embarrassing.

I think it's really important that,

especially young people, they watch it.

I know it's tough, but watch it and

absorb it and understand why it is such a

significant piece of journalism.

There's one, yeah.

Oh yeah.

Hey Bushmaster element copy on the one-six.

Thats a weapon.

Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight

Copy on the one-six, Bushmaster Six-Romeo. Roger.

Fucking prick.

Hotel Two-Six this is Crazy Horse One-Eight

Have individuals with weapons.

Yup. He's got a weapon too.

Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight.

Have five to six individuals with AK47s

Request permission to engage

Roger that.

Uh, we have no personnel east of our position

So, uh, you are free to engage. Over.

All right, we'll be engaging

Roger, go ahead.

Problem is I can't get 'em now

because they're behind that building.

Um, hey Bushmaster element...

Um, hey Bushmaster element... He's got an RPG

All right, we got a guy with an RPG.

All right, we got a guy with an RPG.

I'm going to fire. OK

Okay, we're gonna come around.

Hotel Two-Six; have eyes on individual with RPG

Getting ready to fire.

We won't.... Yeah, we had a guy shoot

and now he's behind the building.

Just fuckin', once you get on 'em just open 'em up.

All right.

I see you Element, you got about four Humvees

uh, out along...

You're clear.

All right, firing.

Let me know when you've got them.

Let's shoot

Light 'em all up.

Come on, fire!

[Helicopter gunfire]

Keep shooting, keep shooting

[Helicopter gunfire]

Keep shooting

Hotel.. Bushmaster Two-Six, Bushmaster Two-Six,

Ooops, I'm sorry what was going on?

God damn it, Kyle

All right, hahaha, I hit 'em, I have

Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.

Nice

Good shooting.

Thank you

There's one guy moving down there but he's uh

he's wounded.

All right, we'll let 'em know

so they can hurry up and get over here.

One-Eight, we also have one individual,

uh, appears to be wounded trying to crawl away.

Roger, we're gonna move down there.

Roger, we'll cease fire.

Yeah, we won't shoot anymore.

He's getting up.

Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand?

No, I haven't seen one yet.

I see you guys got that guy

crawling right now on that curb.

Yeah, I got him. I put two rounds near him,

and you guys were shooting over there too, so

uh we'll see.

Yeah, roger that.

Bushmaster Thirty-Six Element;

this is uh Hotel Two-Seven over.

Hotel Two-Seven; Bushmaster Seven go ahead.

Roger I'm just trying to make sure

you guys have my turf, over.

Roger we got your turf.

Come on, buddy.

All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.

If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage.

Bushmaster; Crazyhorse.

We have individuals going to the scene,

looks like possibly uh

picking up bodies and weapons.

Let me engage.

Can I shoot?

Roger.

Break. Uh Crazyhorse One-Eight

request permission to uh engage.

Picking up the wounded?

Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage.

Come on, let us shoot!

Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.

They're taking him.

Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.

This is Bushmaster Seven, go ahead.

Roger. We have a black

SUV-uh Bongo truck picking up the bodies.

Request permission to engage.

This is Bushmaster Seven, roger.

This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.

One-Eight, engage.

Clear

Come on!

[Helicopter gunfire]

Clear

[Helicopter gunfire]

Clear

We're engaging

Coming around. Clear.

Roger.

Trying to uh

Clear

I hear 'em co.. I lost 'em in the dust.

I got 'em

I'm firing.

This is Bushmaster Forty

got any BDA on that truck. Over.

You're clear

This is ah Crazyhorse. Stand by.

I can't shoot for some reason.

Go ahead. I think the van's disabled..

Go ahead and shoot it.

[Helicopter gunfire]

Go left.

[Helicopter gunfire]

Clear left.

[Helicopter gunfire]

Oh yeah, look at that.

Right through the windshield!

Ha ha!

July 12, 2007 was a Thursday.

Suddenly, a young Iraqi

cameraman burst through the door.

He was wailing, and he just said, "Namir

and Saeed have been killed

in a US helicopter attack."

Just after midnight, the US

military put out a statement,

12 people had been

killed, including two civilians,

who had been identified as being

employees of the Reuters news service.

But that these people had

been killed in a firefight,

an exchange of fire

between US forces and insurgents.

And the statement was very categorical

that there had been a firefight.

Our Iraqi staff spoke to witnesses and

residents in the area and seven of these

witnesses told me

that there was no clash,

no firefight taking place

when this attack occurred.

And so

we were demanding that the US military

conduct a thorough investigation

into what had happened because the

evidence that we had

was casting very grave doubt on the US

military's version of events.

[Sad, slow, middle eastern cello music]

The footage is from the TV camera that's

mounted on the gun of the Apache.

They very quickly misidentified the

cameras that Namir and Saeed were

carrying as weapons.

They also identified other men as

carrying AK-47s and very quickly they

sought permission to attack.

Have five to six individuals with AK47s

Request permission to engage

Roger that.

Uh, we have no personnel east of our position

So, uh, you are free to engage. Over.

Julian Assange to his credit, made

very clear that the order

to open fire had been given

before Namir peered around that corner

and he's got his long lens

camera out taking a photo.

[All right, we got a guy with an RPG.]

[I'm going to fire. OK]

[Just fuckin', once you get on 'em just open 'em up.]

[Let's shoot]

[Light 'em all up.]

That basically showed U.S. pilots

laughing and joking as they

strafed and killed civilians

on the streets of Baghdad.

[Oh yeah, look at that. ]

[Right through the windshield!]

[Ha ha!]

So this whole pretense that somehow this

was a war for democracy

received a heavy blow

So the importance, the significance of

that particular footage

shouldn't be underestimated.

The American crew supplying their hideous

soundtrack and commentary

[Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.]

about how it was nice to kill people.

It was revealing. It was a very important

disclosure and that's when WikiLeaks

became an enemy of those

who perpetrated this crime.

Then the attack on the van, I mean, no

one was holding any weapons.

So that was a clear case

of a potential war crime.

[Sad, slow, western cello music]

The father was taking the

two children, Sajad and Doaha,

to lessons in the mosque.

And they drive up to the scene and Saeed

is basically on all fours,

heavily injured,

and they do what people do.

They stop and try to take them into the

van to drive them to a hospital.

This is when the second round happened,

the shooting upon the van.

And Sajad and Doaha were sitting in the

front with their father.

[Sad, slow, western cello music]

The only reason why their lives were

saved is that he threw

himself and his body,

shielding them from the explosive bullets

that were coming from the Apache gunship.

[Sad, slow, western cello music]

I thought it was extremely important to

get witness statements from

people who had been affected.

But I said we need names and faces, we

need to see who these

people are, why were they there?

I mean, these are common questions,

journalistic questions.

And just two days before the release of

the video, we met the

widow and the children.

[Sad, slow, western cello music]

We tend to see a warzone as a warzone, as the

playground for the people with the guns.

But this is where people

live, it's their neighborhood.

It's where they try to have some

normality in life, despite the war,

despite the conflict.

[Sad, slow, western cello music]

Was there someone armed with you in the car?

And what were you doing there?

We came from my uncle's house

on the way home from school.

Who were you trying to save?

To those who were wounded.

Can you explain to us

what happened there ?

and how you were saving

those who were wounded?

By recovering them

Why were you there?

Do you want to explain more?

They hurt me.

How did the Americans hurt you?

They shot me here.

They don't have big brothers

to take care of them.

I have no one to save me,

he took care of a family of seven.

Now we are in dire straits

with no home or anything.

They put us in this situation,

we don't get salary or anything to save us

What did we do wrong?

Two wounded boys, how can I heal them?

And the daughters, who will take

care of us, how should we live?

We have nothing left.

[Helicopter gunfire]

[Crying, sobbing]

[Crying, sobbing]

While Julian is held in prison, no one

has ever been held

accountable for the consequences

of those two wars that have been waged on

those two countries.

And I just find that

incredibly hypocritical.

Because having seen what

the US-led invasion of Iraq

has done to that country,

it's an absolute travesty.

And that videotape that

Chelsea Manning bravely sent

to WikiLeaks and

which Julian has published

will go down as one of the

most important videotapes ever

released.

What WikiLeaks showed us was what the

American Empire was up to.

And that they won't forgive.

So that is what created the fuss.

That is what determined the United States

to punish this guy, come what may.

That is what started a huge campaign of

slander against him in the

Western media to discredit him.

[Tense, dramatic, piano and synth music]

I've watched the tsunami of

lies and smear engulf him.

Endlessly, vindictively, perfidiously.

And I know why they smear him.

In 2008, a plan to destroy

both WikiLeaks and Julian

was laid out in a secret document.

The authors were the Cyber Counter

Intelligence Assessment Branch

of the US Defense Department.

They described in detail how important it

was to destroy, and I quote,

"the feeling of trust that is

WikiLeaks' center of gravity."

This would be achieved with threats of

exposure and criminal prosecution

[Gavel sound]

and an unrelenting assault on reputation.

It was as if they planned a

war on a single human being

and on the very

principle of freedom of speech.

The firm Stratfor advised the US

government on strategy.

The strategy was to

keep him in jail for years,

to drag him from country to country.

Back in 2010, when they first released

the Chelsea Manning leaks,

WikiLeaks came under an

extra legal banking blockade.

So WikiLeaks had their PayPal cancelled,

Visa Mastercard cut off donations.

It was the first time that all the major

credit card companies

are united in creating a

blockade on a media organisation.

Julian even had his

personal bank account closed.

They adopted Bitcoin as their currency.

Over the years, that the subject has suffered

What we see is that there is an evolution

In which the rigor

of the environment

to which he is subjected gradually increases.

There is a first stage where he can't leave the country

he wears an electronic bracelet

and must report daily to the police.

This is creating a feeling of

progressive anguish and mental prison.

We knew when Julian was in the embassy

that there was a high likelihood

that the embassy was being spied upon

by the United Kingdom, by the United States.

What we didn't know until a

whistleblower came forward,

that the security company

employed by the Ecuadorian embassy

to provide security to

Julian and to embassy staff,

was capturing information in breach of

the terms of their agreement with the

Ecuadorian government

and providing it to

parties in the United States.

It is alleged that they were doing it at

the behest of the CIA.

Through solitary confinement,

through character assassination,

through the Orwellian legal process,

through the violation of his most basic

human and legal rights,

one thing after another was like this

theater of the absurd,

stripping him of his basic human dignity.

We have a person who is restricted

in a very small area of space

and he is monitored 24 hours

visually and auditorily,

that is,

he lives in a panopticon

in which everything you do, even in the bathroom,

is being recorded and heard.

He has constant sleep problems.

He has a circadian rhythm reversal.

He can't have a natural rhythm

because he doesn't have natural light

During many periods,

the only visitors that are allowed are his legal advisors.

Visits from family and friends are restricted

and he is left in complete isolation.

During the weekends,

he can't even get a visit from his legal team.

In the prison

what I find is a person

in a condition of profound deterioration,

he has a short attention span,

he has concentration failures, memory failures,

that is, he has a cognitive deterioration,

which is obviously disproportionate for the age

and intellectual capacity of the person examined, right?

And that shows how

the conditions of confinement were already

causing problems on a mental level.

Besides this, uh, well,

this is a person who has been for a long time in a situation

of confinement

and this has generated depressive symptoms and

serious symptoms appear, even with suicidal ideation.

Nils Melzer is a

Swiss academic and author.

He is also a

professor of international law

at the University of Glasgow.

From 2016 until 22,

he was the United Nations Special Rapporteur

on torture and other cruel, inhuman,

or degrading punishment.

When his lawyers first

contacted me in December 2018,

I frankly just kind of pushed this aside

and I had this

emotional reaction thinking,

oh, this is this hacker,

this rapist, this traitor.

And I basically ignored the case.

And so his lawyers came

back about three months later,

just before he was

expelled from the embassy

and then they transmitted some evidence,

some medical opinions to me.

And only when I

actually looked at those facts,

I started realizing

that this doesn't add up

with this whole public narrative

that had been spread

about him in the media

for about 10 years.

And I also realized

that my negative emotions

towards Assange really,

I didn't know where I had them from.

I had never really

dealt with his case before,

but I was convinced that I knew

everything about him.

I was emotionally convinced.

And that's what's so

striking because I realized that

I as a human rights expert,

was convinced that

this narrative was true

without actually knowing

the facts behind the case.

I started seeing that

actually nothing of this added up.

And the deeper I got into it,

the more dirt came out,

but it was not on the side

of Assange and WikiLeaks.

It was on the side of the governments.

And I thought, I have to go

and personally investigate this case

because something's not right here.

And so I went to see him

in Belmarsh together with a medical team

Specialists who specialise in examining torture victims.

He invited doctor Duarte Nuno Vieira

as a medical forensic doctor

and in my case, as a psychiatrist

to carry out an evaluation in accordance

with the Istanbul protocol,

which is the United Nations tool

for evaluating cases of torture.

From a medical and

psychological point of view,

we speak of torture when we create a series of

conditions that seek to break a person's will.

The medical findings

that we produced during this visit

Is that Mr. Assange shows all the

the symptoms that are typical

for a person that has been exposed to

pshycological torture over a

prolonged period of time.

Psychological torture

is by no means torture light.

It is very serious.

The CIA repeatedly proposed kidnapping

the WikiLeaks founder from the Ecuadorian

Embassy in London and

flying him to the United States.

Some senior Trump administration

officials and CIA executives

even discussed assassinating Assange,

according to former intelligence officials.

The Spanish courts had evidence that

there were discussions of poisoning

Julian and kidnapping

him from the embassy.

These operations were being planned under

the directorship of Mike Pompeo.

I want to recall just a single moment in

this afternoon's hearing.

When Mark Summers Q.C. for Julian

first raised the question of the Yahoo story,

that is that the CIA plot, to either

kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange.

The judge lent forward and halted him for

a moment and said, "Yes, yes, I'm sure we

know that the CIA is

interested in Mr Assange."

And Mark Summers had to stop him and say,

"It's not about them being interested,

it's about them plotting

to kidnap and kill him."

How can these courts approve an

extradition request

under these conditions?

How can they accept an extradition to the

country that plotted to kill Julian,

that plotted to kill a publisher

because of what he published?

This goes to the fundamentals

of press freedom and of democracy.

[Slow, minimalist, sad piano music]

At the end of the day, we left Belmarsh

prison and took a black

cab back to central London.

And I remember I sat in the back of the

car and stared through

the raindrops on the window.

And in my mind, I kept replaying the

moment we had said goodbye to Assange.

We had shaken hands, I wished him well

and was about to leave. The doctors were

already standing at the door.

When suddenly Assange's grip on my hand

tightened and he held me back.

He looked at me intensely

and said, "I hate to say this."

He then hesitated, visibly troubled and

searching for words.

And then he finally said:

"Please,"

"Save my life."

During our conversation Assange had made

it absolutely clear that he would not be

extradited to the United States alive.

In his opinion, this was the only

rational decision in view

of what awaited him there.

During a cell search two days before our visit,

prison staff had confiscated a

razor blade hidden by

Assange just in case.

I knew he was serious

and we both knew that his fate

was not in my hands.

All I could do in this moment was to give

him a silent hug

from one person to another.

Then I heard myself reply,

as if from far away,

"I'll do my best."

[Mysterious, atmospheric piano, strings & synth music]

He knew how dangerous it was.

He was on the run

in those key moments before it

became a huge organisation,

it was pretty much Julian

and whatever secret communication devices

he had in his laptop.

What he had in his small bag was a,

you know, a hand grenade,

a nuclear bomb in fact.

He was a young man

with vision and big ideas

and the most massive leak

and the most important leak

that had ever occurred in his backpack.

Holy fuck!

[Camera flashes]

He did talk about the consequences

and I have to say

what he thought the consequences would be

is that they would hound him

to the ends of the earth.

He was dead right and I was dead wrong.

I would never have anticipated that they

would have acted with

such endless ferocity.

He did. So, I mean, quite a man

to walk into that.

and that's what he expected,

and indeed that's what he got.

If he knew the consequences that might eventuate

then this was not an act of

naivety or foolhardiness.

It was an act of trust.

So now the question became;

in taking this incredible risk,

Who was it that he was trusting

to save him from a terrible fate?

[Dramatic, heavy synch and drum music]

Press freedom is steadily getting worse

around the world year by year.

We publish a World Press Freedom Index

each year, which assesses the press

freedom climate in 180

countries around the world.

Each country is ranked comparatively to

each other, but also scored based on

performance against a

number of indicators.

It can capture everything from sort of

physical attacks on journalists,

killings of journalists,

imprisonment of journalists,

a staggering more than 500 journalists

are behind bars today in connection with

their work all around the world.

Over the past ten years

press freedom has been crumbling all over the world

and has been declining in every country.

The political powers scare journalists

kill some of them, hurt others,

threaten many of them,

especially through social networks

and this seriously alters the capacity

of these journalists to make

correct investigations for the citizens.

I've spent my career

in the mainstream media.

I've never known it as closed

as it is today.

The denial of Julian Assange's status as a journalist

is part of the arsenal of discrediting

that his ememies have launched against him.

Julian Assange is a journalist.

He has a journalist's card

from the International Federation of Journalists.

When he's criticized as

not being a journalist,

it's not something

that is comprehensible.

He's received the highest accolade

in Australian journalism,

which is the Walkley Award

for most outstanding

contribution to journalism.

He's won awards all over the world.

The Martha Gellhorn Prize,

the Voltaire Award,

the Sam Adams Award,

two dozen at last count

for his courage,

for his achievement in journalism,

but also for his defence of human rights

and his defence of the truth.

If Julian Assange isn't a journalist,

what the hell is he?

I mean, he has found material,

made it available,

edited it before it's put out.

That's what journalists do.

He isn't a journalist who just publishes

foreign office or

home department handouts.

He actually gets

information which people need.

And that is what good, honest

investigative journalists

should be doing all the time.

It's crucial to the

preservation of our First Amendment

protections of free speech and free press

that Julian Assange not be prosecuted,

that he not be convicted.

Julian Assange is the first publisher

that the US government

is attempting to pursue

under the Espionage Act.

The Espionage Act was

passed as the United States

entered World War I.

It's an antiquated piece of legislation

in the United States

intended to criminalize spying.

Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange were

both indicted under the Espionage Act.

Ellsberg himself was the leaker, whereas

Julian Assange was the publisher.

So whilst of course what happened to

Daniel Ellsberg never

should have happened,

it's even going another step further to

target a publisher in this way.

Up until the Trump administration,

no journalist was charged

under the Espionage Act.

You had people who had access

to classified information

and provided it usually to the press.

And it was with the release of Vault 7,

the information that exposed the CIA's

hacking tools into our smartphones,

cars, televisions and everything else,

that they went after a

publisher or a journalist.

And that's what's so chilling for all of us.

In some sense, they've already won.

What journalist in their right mind

will go and expose

structural power in that way again,

without fear of being

chucked in a jail

and left to rot.

This has hurt the reputation already

of the United Kingdom

and the West's position

of this claim of being the vanguard

of free journalism and freedom of speech.

And you could see that in interviews that

not so democratic regimes have given.

Absolutely. We have free media.

We have free Internet.

You raise this question.

Can I ask you also one?

How do you assess what happened to Mr. Assange?

Is it a reflection

of free media in your country?

How many years has he spent in Ecuadorian embassy

and for what?

And where is he now?

For journalistic activity,

you kept that person hostage,

actually killing him

morally and physically.

You did it, not us.

And now he's in prison.

So you have no moral right to talk about

free media when you do these things.

It won't just be Julian Assange.

If the US is successful, the same

precedent could be

applied to any journalist,

any publisher, any source.

So we're extremely worried about the

implications that that will have for journalism,

not just in the United States,

but around the world.

This case is just about journalism.

It's just about the persecution of a journalist,

Of a publisher who is doing his job,

and in doing so, it is creating

a precedent for all of you and your

colleagues that can be used by the United

States in the future or by any other

country that is paying attention

and going to pursue

their dissidents,

their journalists in the same way.

Journalism is in serious danger.

It's already been undermined.

Mainstream media have lost

the plot and have sold out.

It's all the more reason why journalism

is more and more important.

Real journalism where

people tell the truth.

Once it has become a crime

to tell the truth,

we are living in a tyranny.

[Tense, rhythmic piano & beats music]

How did we get to this point?

Are our rights to freedom of expression

and a free press expanding and developing

or are they eroding?

To understand our present,

we must know our past.

[Contemplative, sustained, drone synth music]

Ever since we have had the ability to

articulate our thoughts through vocalization,

we have wanted to express ourselves

without fear of retaliation,

censorship, or sanction.

For 5,000 years, human civilization

has been battling to establish,

maintain, and defend our right to free speech.

Ego, impulse

and a thirst for unabridged power

have always been

and continue to be a threat

to free speech,

democracy and a free press.

States are still using persecution,

torture and violence

to ward off challenges from their citizens.

The playbook of autocracy

has been well learnt and repeated.

Gandhi's philosophy of

nonviolent resistance

known as Satyagraha,

which means holding firm to truth,

would later influence activists

including Martin Luther King Jr.,

Nelson Mandela,

and Daniel Ellsberg.

After all this time,

authorities are still adverse to being challenged.

[Tense, rhythmic harp & synths music]

When the indictment against Julian was

updated in the extradition case,

they included allegations that Julian was

planning to hurt

Icelandic infrastructure,

eavesdropping on telephone conversations

of Icelandic members of parliament,

because they saw how hollow

that part of the indictment was.

They were trying to support

it with his witness statement.

Siggi Thordarson is the star witness for the

United States in respect of the

additional allegations that were added.

Thordarson was a WikiLeaks volunteer who was

involved for 10 months in 2010 and 11,

and he stole money from the organization.

And when that was found out, he decided

to offer his help as a witness for the

FBI in return for protection.

What they did was so

grotesque and so shameless.

They used witnesses who

later said they were lying.

This was not accepted

by the British court.

He is, according to court documents,

a sociopath,

a sexual predator against boys

and has been sentenced for

violation against 10 minors.

There is no credible factual basis for a

large part of the U.S.'s indictment.

And yet they are still pursuing it.

Please Julian Assange, now!

It's just absurd that

the case is still ongoing.

Because there is no case.

[Woeful, heavy strings & keyboard music]

My impression of him when I first saw him

in 2011 was that he was

young and he was healthy.

And he was extraordinarily courageous.

[Applause]

When he was presented to court for the

first time, and he tries to

stand and to talk to the judge,

and he cannot stand up,

you have a person that is destroyed.

The isolation that Julian was forced

to undergo in the Ecuadoran embassy

was clearly very hard on him.

He had deteriorated physically,

not mentally, but physically very much.

I was very concerned about it.

People complain of being at home

with everything and simply

because of lockdown.

Try to be in his

situation for one week.

And he was there for seven years.

Doctors could come in, but they obviously

couldn't bring much treatment.

They couldn't bring an x-ray

or an MRI scanner and so on.

So he was having a lot of problems.

And Doctors for Assange were writing

letters all over the place

that really helped alert

the medical profession.

And what was going on at that time and

still now is really like

a four alarm fire for medical emergencies

and a profound medical injustice.

[Woeful, heavy strings & keyboard music]

It was just really agonizing to watch

this man deteriorate in the face

of brutality against his human

rights and his medical rights.

Being deprived of sunlight

is actually a very big deal.

And that alone can really

mess with your immune system and

can make all kinds of things happen.

I went into Belmarsh once

with Gabriel, his brother.

And we were both shocked to find Julian

had lost something

like 15 kilos in weight.

The worst condition that I saw him in

during any of the

proceedings were the two

days in October when the High Court was

considering the appeal.

I mean, he did not look well

physically or mentally.

It did not look like he was properly

following proceedings,

that he possibly didn't

know much of what was going on.

From the outset, Doctors for Assange

had expressed concern about the potential for

depression and suicide.

But in particular that psychological

stress predisposes to

cardiovascular consequences;

heart attacks and strokes.

I saw it on the monitor.

Julian looked ragged.

He looked very unwell.

He looked unkempt.

He looked like

somebody heavily medicated.

In fact, the Chief

Justice informed the court

he couldn't appear actually in person

because he was heavily medicated.

So that was that.

Off he went.

He couldn't be there.

That was of course the two days

that we later found out the second day

he had suffered a mini stroke in prison.

So clearly there were

health issues going on there.

And the fact that

he didn't have this recognized

for months after it had occurred,

speaks volumes about

what medical care is like

in the prison system.

The irony is that in the

course of that hearing,

while they were claiming

that the US could assure

his quality health care,

they were overlooking a

stroke that he was having

right under their noses.

Doctors for Assange strongly believes

that the case should be dropped.

Julian Assange should walk free

and he should walk into a hospital

and get immediate, independent,

high quality medical care.

It's no surprise that he

actually did have a stroke

and it makes it

a continuing matter of urgency

that he be released.

[Woeful, heavy strings & keyboard music]

In other countries,

he could be done away

with much more quickly.

Here it can't really happen like that.

But the persecution of Julian

has been a kind of long,

slow form of

killing somebody.

[Woeful, heavy strings & keyboard music]

[Dogs barking, men screaming]

[Loud talking, men screaming]

[Continuous background noise]

[Contemplative, slow, sombre piano music]

On the 8th of February, 2021,

21 human rights,

free speech and civil liberty

advocacy organizations wrote a joint letter

to the US Attorney General

expressing their profound concern

that the ongoing

criminal and extradition proceedings

relating to Julian Assange

posed a grave threat

to press freedom

both in the United States and abroad.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration

of Human Rights protects

the right to free speech.

We have the right to free speech but that

can be limited in

certain circumstances,

for example to protect public health

and safety, or to protect the

reputation of others,

or to protect national security.

In Julian's case,

he is protected by that right.

By publishing information and sharing

information with the public,

he was exercising the right

to free speech.

He did so in the public interest,

pursuing a publisher at all

for publishing information

in the public interest,

does not comply with international

standards on free speech.

And that protection

under the Universal Declaration,

under the European Convention on Human Rights

Article 10,

ought to protect

Julian from this extradition.

We went to the United Nations Working Group

on Arbitrary Detention,

which came down with a ruling

saying that because he was forced

to remain in the embassy to protect himself

from US extradition,

Julian's position inside the embassy

amounted to detention,

and that that detention was unlawful and arbitrary.

[Melancholic, slow piano]

An indictment is a criminal charge

in relation to a

serious criminal accusation.

The second superseding indictment

involves 18 different charges,

which include 17 charges

under the Espionage Act,

and one charge under the CFAA.

This indictment relates to

the 2010 WikiLeaks publications

so the Collateral Murder publication,

the Rules Of Engagement Of Iraq,

The Diplomatic Cables,

The War Logs in

respect of Iraq and Afghanistan

and the Guantanamo Bay files.

We filed a legal challenge

against that extradition,

which was heard over the

course of around 18 months.

course of around 18 months.

We raised concern about abuse of process

related to the spying

on us as his legal team

and on Julian and his

medical professionals,

the way in which the United States

misdescribed the facts

in order to justify his extradition.

We also raised concern

about the application

of the UK-US treaty.

That treaty prohibits extraditing someone

for a political offence.

[Sneaky, whimsical orchestral music with clarinet solo]

The United States has

applied for his extradition,

but he's treated as a criminal

in this glass corridor.

This is as if Julian is

a dangerous terrorist,

who's going to whip out an AK

and start gunning everyone down in the court.

I was sitting up in the gallery watching

this astonishing spectacle of injustice.

In order to talk to his lawyers,

he had to kneel down,

press his ear to the glass

so he could hear what they had to say

and to talk to him.

It was absurd.

It makes it very difficult for us as his

legal team to take

instructions from Julian.

When he's sitting behind us, we have to

be constantly watching to

see if he's got instructions

on what's happening during the course of

the hearing,

and it's very difficult to talk to him

in a secure and confidential way,

because in order for him to communicate to us,

he has to say it loud enough so that the

people next to us can often hear it,

our opposing counsel.

That's unsatisfactory, of course.

And while our legal team

made an application

during the course of the hearing

to have him sit with them, it was denied.

There's been case, after case, after case

brought against him.

This is what I would call

punishment by process.

We are doing our best to push back on this

using legal process,

but it is incredibly political,

and anyone who observes this case

ought to recognise that

this is a case that is political,

and it requires a political resolution.

[Melancholic, slow piano]

It's not a legal battle at all.

It's a political battle.

It is based on hateful and spiteful

revenge of a powerful entity

that wants to get back at the individual

who exposed the truth about it.

It is that simple.

This has made just a complete farce

out of the UK and the US judicial system,

our Department of Justice.

All we have ever asked

is that the states obey their own laws

and stop these procedural irregularities.

The level of unlawful activity

in the pursuit of Julian Assange

should be enough to

have this entire case thrown out.

In the case of Daniel Ellsberg,

when it emerged that they had

broken into his psychiatrist's office

and stolen his records,

that was enough to throw out the entire case.

This is a political

persecution that has used the law,

extradition law, as a tool

to further its political agenda.

For all these matters to be argued as

points of law is obscene.

It's obscene in any terms

of natural justice.

What the English judiciary showed

[Sinister, slow piano and cello]

was that by and large these judges are

genetically bent. They basically do what

the state tells them to do.

They are ultra-deferential to the

intelligence agencies

because they are part of that system.

[Atmospheric, drone synth music]

The response of

various Australian Prime Ministers

and various Australian governments

has either been one of silence,

just wanting to sweep it under the carpet

and forget about it.

Alternatively it's been one of

complete and utter acquiescence

and subservience to the United States,

like we're somehow an

extra state of America

and that we have to do whatever they want.

Julia Gillard was lock in step

with the United States.

I can recall all sorts of

negative aspersions cast on Julian Assange

like he was some sort of terrorist.

Gillard started the official Australian

persecution of Julian.

Kevin Rudd largely didn't say anything

about Julian Assange,

same with Tony Abbott.

Then we got onto Malcolm Turnbull wanting

to just say that this guy

deserved to face justice.

Same with Scott Morrison.

Well what sort of justice do they want

him to face, justice for what?

For doing the work of a journalist?

It is time for this matter

to be brought to a conclusion.

In that I don't express any personal

sympathy with some of

the actions of Mr Assange.

Albanese did say that he thinks

this matter should be

brought to a close quickly.

I don't know what that means.

I don't know whether that means

just get on with it.

Get him over there, put him on trial.

It's almost as if they're saying

like the previous government

that he should have been

brought to trial earlier

and punished and convicted earlier.

That's not talking to

the core problem here.

The core problem isn't that he hasn't

been prosecuted and

persecuted quickly enough.

The core problem is that he's been

prosecuted and persecuted

in the first place.

The quiet diplomacy we're seeing in

relation to Julian Assange

really does look a lot like

bugger all diplomacy.

This literally could happen to anybody

if they travel overseas

and they offend the US government

and it shouldn't matter which government

is targeting Australians.

You should always have your own

government in your corner

to try and protect you.

Isn't it ironic that no-one

who instigated that illegal and immoral war

has been brought to justice,

but the great truth-teller sits behind bars,

waiting 175 years

a virtual death sentence.

Are we going to let that stand?

This is the Australian parliament.

Julian Assange is an Australian citizen.

It is un-Australian

for us to turn our back on a mate.

When the government can't say

what they're doing

to bring an Australian citizen home

- who's facing potentially a life imprisonment

and they're refusing to give that answer

when they're directly questioned

on the floor of parliament,

well, we have ourselves a democratic problem?

The message they are sending

is if you disclose our lies

and our corruption, our war crimes,

we will come after you

with the full power of our state

and we will do everything we possibly can

to crush you.

That's the message they are sending.

That is why they are not

giving up on Julian Assange.

Are we going to let that stand?

No we are not.

[Atmospheric, drone synth music]

I some time ago made my point

that enough is enough.

Yeah, it was a cryptic terminology.

They've chosen their words carefully

because they feel like

they're in between,

the devil and the deep blue sea.

They say, enough is enough

and they want to end it

but it's quite ambiguous

about how they want to end it.

The fact that neither our Prime Minister

or the Attorney General

will publicly criticise

the United States,

the fact that they're refusing to do that

even in the most obscene circumstances,

goes to show just how subservient

the Australian government has become

to this kind of overarching policy

position for the United States.

That's not a relationship of friends and equals,

that's a relationship of deputy/ sheriff.

There's a Friends of Julian Assange group

in the federal parliament

and the numbers are building

- not just in the Greens but across parliament.

But what is critically missing,

it's getting the Attorney-General

and the Prime Minister.

The one government I think that can possibly

change this

almost inexorable journey

to the United States,

is the Australian government.

I don't believe for a moment they want to

because they are integrated in the United States

strategic control of their part of the world.

But this government hasn't had enough

public outcry, enough pressure.

People saying:

"this is a man who has committed no crime,

bring him home,

declare yourself independent".

They're all highly improbable, all these things

because I've never known

an Australian government since 1975

that has declared itself independent.

How the hell has this situation

been allowed to get this far?

From day dot someone should have said:

"No, no, no, no, no.

Julian Assange is an Australian citizen

who has afforded all the rights and liberties

of an Australian.

And I don't care what country you are,

you are not going to have

your laws apply to our citizen

when they're not even in your bloody country.

Obama decided not to call for Julian's

extradition because what

WikiLeaks did by publishing this

leaked material was no different from

what the New York Times did.

They called it "the New York Times problem".

The Trump administration,

after the release of Vault 7,

was essentially coerced by the CIA

and the intelligence community

to extradite or call for

the extradition of Julian.

The Biden administration, again beholden

to the intelligence community,

has continued that process

of attempting to extradite Julian.

If I became president,

I would pardon Julian Assange

on day one.

We're supposed to be the

exemplary democracy.

We're supposed to be the

world's global champion

for freedom of speech,

freedom of expression.

We're supposed to stand for the idea that

the people own the government

and we have the capacity

and the power to criticize our government

without fear of reprisal

without fear of imprisonment or punishment.

On 27 June 2024,

after Assange arrived home a free man,

Australian Prime Minister Albanese took credit for his

freedom stating: "We have got this done",

and thanking Australian officials who quote:

"worked tirelessly on his case".

At no time, however, during the two years

of Albanese's leadership whilst Julian was in prison,

did he call for the outright freedom of Assange,

or update the public on any details

regarding the progress of

negotiations for his freedom.

[Tense, foreboding piano & synth music]

We live in societies that afford us many

freedoms, certainly,

but there are societies with facades.

And behind those facades of democracy

and popular participation,

there is ruthless power.

[Explosion sound]

And this power regards WikiLeaks and Julian

[Explosion sound]

as a threat.

Much of the rage that's directed against

Julian is centered around

the fact that WikiLeaks exposed

not just the war crimes,

but the illegalities,

the lies, the uses of torture,

the widespread killing of civilians,

all of the internal

dynamics of war and empire.

And that portrait of the machinery of empire

is so sordid and so brutal

that it challenges or demolishes

the facade that empire puts up

to project itself as a good and virtuous nation

that seeks to

overthrow tyranny in the

case of Saddam Hussein or

fight terrorism in the case of the

occupation of Afghanistan.

All of those cliches that are used to

justify the crimes of

empire were imploded.

The way in which they've dealt with Julian

shows how panic-stricken

our rulers have become.

The American government is determined to have him

on this, Trump and Biden, no differences at all.

Get him in and lock him up

and let him die in prison.

That's the message.

It's only through the attacks,

through Julian's persecution, you know,

through the corruption

that lets us really understand

how important the releases are,

the extent that these people will go to

to cover up their crimes.

The Central Intelligence Agency,

one of their tasks, is to assassinate people.

I mean, we shouldn't be surprised by that.

They've done it for,

you know, nearly a hundred years now.

That's their job, to rub out people

who are considered risks

or who they think would

seriously damage U.S. interests.

In most cases, these are political opponents of

the American Empire and they

have been rubbing them out in

most parts of the world.

I mean, from that point of view,

they're like a mafia.

"X, take him out". And the fact that they

considered doing this to Julian

is appalling, of course,

but we shouldn't be surprised.

What we saw with WikiLeaks

is certainly the most important

window into the inner

workings of the American Empire,

in our generation. That's why the

persecution against Julian

is so egregious.

This U.S extradition case has been falling apart

since the moment it started.

And it is also proving

to be devastating for the U.S. in the courts,

not only because

the U.S. prison system

and its inhumane conditions

is exposed before these courts

in its full barbarity,

but also because the crimes

that have been undertaken by

the U.S. government against Julian are

also exposed before these courts.

Governments now live by secrets.

They don't live by elections.

They live by secrets.

That's why they don't want you to have them.

That's why they don't want you to know about

the wars that they conduct secretly.

International law is equally under threat.

The Americans break it every day.

They're a lawless state. All the more reason why a

Assange shouldn't be sent there.

It's a crime that we have to be here

in support of the person

who more than anyone else

has exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The criminals walk free

and Julian Assange is persecuted.

That is a crime.

[Heavy whoosh & impact sound]

[Heavy whoosh & impact sound]

[Heavy whoosh & impact sound]

[Heavy whoosh & impact sound]

[Heavy whoosh & impact sound]

[Heavy whoosh & impact sound]

[Heavy whoosh & impact sound]

[Sad keyboard synth music]

[Dreamy, melancholic piano music]

It's the big picture of the war,

how nearly all the deaths are in

incidences that kill just one

or two people. A little girl on the

street in a yellow dress who would

frequently go to collect

candy and so on from US troops,

one day a tank goes past and

for an inexplicable reason

a shooter comes out of the US tank and

blows her away.

There are just so many of these instances.

[Explosion sound]

It's not unless we're confronted with the

full impact of what's happening

that we become engaged not just with our

heads but with our hearts.

I'm a grandmother and I think

for people to be concerned about

press freedom, about democracy,

sometimes it's a concept

and they can't necessarily relate to it.

It's not going to bring

them out on the streets,

it's not going to you know trigger them

to go to their

politician, their local politician,

and say look you have to bring a stop to this.

But the lives of our families

are important to all of us,

to all of us

and this is what Julian's trying to prevent.

What he's saying is that if we

knew the truth about wars

then they wouldn't happen,

they wouldn't happen.

When people ask me about Julian and WikiLeaks and the

information they released

I say go to Iraq, ask an Iraqi,

ask a mother whose children were killed

by a drone strike

in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or Somalia,

or Syria - what they think of WikiLeaks.

What Julian and WikiLeaks

did was give a voice to

those who are denied a voice.

The goal is not

to completely subjugate Afghanistan,

the goal is to use Afghanistan

to wash money out of the tax

bases of the United States, out of the

tax bases of European countries through

Afghanistan and back

into the hands of a transnational

security elite. That is the goal, i.e.

the goal is to have

an endless war,

not a successful war.

Wars are a result of lies.

The Vietnam War and the push

for US involvement was a result of the

Gulf of Tonkin incident.

A lie.

The Iraq war famously

is a result of lies.

Wars in Somalia are

a result of lies.

The Second World War and the German

invasion of Poland was a result of

carefully constructed lies.

If wars can be started by lies,

peace can be started by truth.

[Applause sound]

[Sad, nostalgic, rhythmic piano music]

He's the most brilliant, beautiful human

being I've ever met.

He's incredibly caring and loving

and fun to be around.

Very funny.

Julian had received a gift of VR,

a virtual reality headset.

One day when I was in the embassy he told

me to put this headset on

and kind of led me through

this house that had these surprises in

and the last one was led me down some

stairs to the outside bit

and the beach and he told me to look up

and that was his proposal.

It was a long time coming,

our wedding and obviously when he got

arrested it seemed like it

was further away than ever

but then we decided well we should we should

go ahead and and get married,

even though circumstances aren't ideal.

The day itself we weren't

allowed to marry in the chapel.

We married in a featureless room.

The British authorities are

terrified of having

Julian's situation scrutinized.

What convinces me of this even more is

the fact that they're

terrified of our wedding picture

being made public.

We tried to get a photographer in

of our own choosing.

That was denied.

The wedding pictures were taken on condition

that we wouldn't give them to

the press, wouldn't put them

on social media.

I finally received the

wedding pictures a week or

so ago and they're printed on

normal A4 paper so not photographic paper.

Incredibly pixelated so you can

you know you can see

there's a smile but you can't see any

detail to the smile.

[Sad, pensive, slow piano music]

I don't use the word "prison."

They know he's somewhere

where he doesn't want to be.

I say, we're going to where daddy is.

It's strange how much in popular culture

there are a lot of references to prisons.

So I don't know when it will

click that that's a prison.

I don't see the point of telling them

the reality of the situation that

Julian's in a prison.

I don't tell them that

he's facing extradition,

that he might be taken away from us.

The attitude we have is to

make the most of the time

we have together because we

don't know how long

we have together.

So if these are the only

memories they have of their

father, then it has to be as

light and happy as possible.

[Crowd noises]

Free Julian Assange

Free Julian Assange

Last month, I went to visit

my brother Julian in Belmarsh prison.

It had been a year

since I had seen him last.

I hugged him, and he told me

this place he was in was hell.

I instantly understood what he meant.

A yellow inmate's armband

wound tightly around his arm,

exposed how emaciated he had become

underneath his baggy prison clothes.

Afterwards, my daughter

wanted to know why her uncle was

locked up.

Has he done something bad, Dad?

She asked.

I struggled to explain in

a way a five-year-old could understand.

Visiting hours are very, very precious.

Sorry, I'm a bit upset.

Yes, it's my first visit, yes.

What are you finding most upsetting?

Well, Julian is a

gentle intellectual

in a maximum security prison.

I've taken so many steps for so many

years and I feel like

Julian's life might be coming to an end.

It's been years of

breaking someone down,

of trying to destroy his life.

Somehow everyone has failed Julian.

We have the right to exist.

We have a right to live.

And we have a right

for this nightmare

to come to an end

once and for all.

Thank you.

[Unintelligible muffled talking, crowd noise]

[Heavy, atmospheric piano & synths music]

What we have to do if we don't want to

head towards a nuclear

Armageddon is to try and arrest

this process, try and make them more

accountable, support whistleblowers,

support proper journalism.

It's not clear where the fight stops or

what's going to end it,

but it's really clear that

we have to keep fighting it.

Intimidation is the

principle purpose of most torture.

It's being used against Julian Assange

to intimidate the world,

to show them if ever

you get the idea to expose our dirty laundry, to the world,

this is what's going to happen to you.

It's a deterrence.

They are basically saying to people,

"You want to leak stuff?

See what we did to Assange."

I have two children in primary school age.

I cannot leave a

world to them where it has

become a crime to tell the truth.

I mean, what has he done to

damage security? Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

He's just effectively

told the truth as a journalist.

Published it.

A truth that was

initially published

in all the top liberal

newspapers of the world.

It's true, they've defended him,

but it should be

a huge campaign.

I often put myself,

(try to, impossible),

in the same position.

And I know that it'd be impossible to

keep going like this. He's kept going.

He's had some terrible downs,

but his courage in keeping on going

has been astonishing to see.

He showed us that it's possible for a

person that's not part of

a power structure

to stand up for his principles.

For what he believes is right

and to be fearless.

It sends a chilling message that we are

going into possibly extremely dark times.

And we all see the signals all around us

about the growing fascism tendencies.

People often ask, "What can I do?"

The answer is not so difficult.

Learn how the world works.

Challenge the statements and intentions

of those who seek to control us

behind a facade of democracy and monarchy.

Unite in common purpose

and common principle

to design, build, document, finance, and defend.

Learn. Challenge. Act. Now.

WikiLeaks has performed this

extraordinary public service.

The constant threats and intimidation

that we have endured for years,

which has been terrorizing us

and has been terrorizing Julian

for over 10 years.

Julian and WikiLeaks have made

a massive contribution to democracy.

Threats against me.

Threats against our children.

Threats on Julian's life.

Threats of a 175-year prison sentence.

So how much do you need?

How many violations against the

individual have to be exposed

until people would just say, you know,

for heaven's sake,

this is just absolutely absurd.

And the actual ongoing imprisonment

of a journalist for doing his job.

They are about to take every right

away from you.

You will not be able to fight

for any other cause.

We are talking about the fundamentals here.

[Applause sound]

[Dramatic, inspirational piano & orchestral music]

Our hands are the tools of our minds,

and the implements of our creativity.

They connect our spiritual lives

to the material world.

But hands are made of flesh and bone,

which are temporary. Beneath our skin,

the power of our hearts

connects us through millennia.

Our connections to each other

are the treads that weave

the path of our combined fate.

Humans descend in an unbroken line,

through generations,

through eons of time.

We are joined together in a single strand

of a shared destiny.

The powerful would have us in chains of metal,

but chains of hearts that yearn for justice

are stronger than cold iron.

Messengers of truth deserve our ears and eyes,

and those who have the courage to speak

truth to power

are worthy of our support.

It's one thing to read, to watch,

to witness, to listen.

It's another thing to find our voices.

This is a radical action requiring

a leap of faith and a passion and inspiration,

so great that it enables

us to overcome our fears.

Do we have anything to say,

and the bravery to say it,

to step up

and stand on the empty chair?

They've stolen from this man the grace to

witness his children grow from babies to boys,

to witness the look of joy on the

face of his wife

in all the small moments.

Yet the most priceless thing these

robbers of rights have taken from him

is not air, light, space, voice, mind.

The most treasured thing

that can't be recovered

is time.

[Dramatic, inspirational piano & orchestral music]

How is it that one who is locked away,

disconnected and silenced, has become the

loudest voice for

free speech of our times?

Such is the significance of his achievements.

If his voice had no power,

they wouldn't try to silence it.

If what he exposed wasn't true,

they wouldn't try to hide it.

If minds couldn't learn,

they wouldn't try to stifle them.

If hearts couldn't unite,

they wouldn't try to divide them.

They hide behind desks,

camouflage behind platitudes and

cower behind a seat.

These saboteurs of truth, these vandals of justice,

these opponents of love.

That's why he constructed a library

that can't be burnt, demolished or erased.

All we need now, all he needs,

is for more of us to find our way there.

This is a watershed moment,

a pivotal point in history.

Those who persecute Julian

are committing espionage against humanity.

May future generations have the ability

to speak without restraint.

May future generations argue freely

according to their conscience.

May future generations be able to

tell people what they may not want to hear

and to hold authorities to account.

May our children and their children

know truth and have access

to information that leads to justice.

Wherever Julian goes,

free speech goes with him.

If we put our minds together,

our hearts together, our hands together.

If we drag our heads out from under the big black boot

and release our mouths out from

under the wretched gag cloth.

If we all rediscover that voice, that big voice

that once burst forth

out of the womb of the universe into the world,

took its first breath and cried out with the agony

and ecstatic rapture of burgeoning life.

If we unearth our divine voices

that struggled and evolved over the millennia

and fought for our freedoms.

If we remember that truth

was never meant

to be silenced.

[Silence]

Most just watch afraid to put even their

little toe out of line

in the march of compliance.

Most just watch as they set fire to the declarations,

as smoke and ashes rise from

the bonfire of our human rights.

Most just watch while the Mandela of our time

walks a long walk to freedom

every day around a six metre square cell.

Most just watch with their eyes firmly shut

as a brilliant mind, a diamond mind,

is placed under so much pressure

he might just crack.

And so things worsen from generation to generation

with centuries of watchers.

When young faces look up at us and say

"What did you do for Julian?"

Will we tell them

that we just watched.

[Elegant, melancholic, haunting piano & string music]

For thirteen years,

Assange endured progressively narrower,

darker, colder

and crueler spaces.

As his freedom became more confined,

so did our right to know.

As he was deprived of light,

so we were deprived of access

to truthful information.

As the dungeons of his captivity narrowed

the window of time for us to protect the

rights of future generations

became more slender

day by day.

20 feet high, one meter thick and one mile long,

prison walls of solid concrete

separate a man from freedom,

family, liberty, deliverance,

warmth, sun, air and space.

Yet, this wall is like dust

on the sleeve of humanity.

We can move it with one half breath

if enough voices combine.

Inhale, exhale,

look forwards and upwards

and remember our desire, our instinct

and our right to be free.

Only broken things leak.

When leaks fell from this

broken system, he channeled the

water downwards to

the serfs and slaves.

He channeled leaks through a

stream of innovation along a

river of diligence

to a lake of truth.

The water on this lake was so

clear and smooth,

it became a mirror.

The Empire don't like their

true nature being revealed.

They are trying to smash the mirror,

dry up the leaks

and plug the source.

But water cannot be destroyed.

Like water,

information will always flow.

Like water, there will always

be whistleblowers.

Like water, like love,

like courage,

justice is a natural element of humanity.

Humanity is tethered by a rope of greed

to a chain of criminality,

to an anchor

dragging on the

bottom of an ocean of lies.

But there are some with the

strength to cut the rope

to set us free.

If there is a sign on the right side of history,

it already has the words Julian Assange

engraved on it.

If there is a gong in the

theatre show that was his trial,

its metal has split

from being rung so loudly.

And if there is a bird that is

about to take flight,

stretch her wings

and rule the skies,

may it be a peace dove,

and no longer, a bald eagle.

If he had a river of leaks on

his computer screen revealing

their felonies and the choice

of whether to publish them,

if he knew that their empire is

run by dark three-letter orgs

and CEOs in camo gear.

If he knew that they would chase him

to the ends of the earth,

if he knew that they are rich, angry old men

capable of monstrous acrimony

and vengefulness,

if he knew that the hands of the many united

are strong enough

to move mountains,

if he knew that we have an ability

to realise that we've been deceived,

to finally and critically

and profoundly and devastatingly

open our eyes,

Then this is a trust fall

An incredibly brave trust fall.

And we

are the ones

who were meant

to be doing

the catching.

[Strong, emotive orchestral music]

[Rhythmic, folky acoustic guitar finger style riff]

No one gave enough

cause we're hiding

It's exactly how they

want us, we're fighting

And no one's asking why

We're leaving only

breaths of our guidance

Youth has no chance

breaking this silence

That we're forced under.

If we keep pushing

I know we'll break them

So keep on pushing

We'll leave no options

If we keep pushing

We'll finally break them

We're dancing on the

edge of our freedom

And questions only

lead us to feeling

That we ain't got control

The last time I

checked you ain't either

I'm trying to keep

the pace when I need it

Oh, but I'm losing somehow

If we keep pushing

I know we'll break them

So keep on pushing

We'll leave no options

If we keep pushing

We'll finally break them

When it's all building up

We don't want it to stop

Cause the fight's not enough

Well we ain't giving up

Just 'cause they want to stop

And I'm not giving up. And I hope that

it's not what they all want

Cause if we

Keep on pushing

I know we'll break them

So keep on pushing

We'll leave no options

If we keep pushing

We'll finally break them