Video: The War on Journalism – The Case of Julian Assange

The poster for ‘The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange’, directed by Juan Passarelli, and released in August 2020, and a screenshot of Andy Worthington, one of the WikiLeaks experts interviewed for the film.


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In a prison cell in HMP Belmarsh, in south east London, which is supposedly reserved for the most violent convicted criminals in the UK, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and a non-violent individual who has not been convicted of a crime, awaits a ruling regarding his proposed extradition to the United States, to face disgracefully inappropriate espionage charges related to his work as a publisher of classified US documents that were leaked by US soldier Chelsea Manning.

The first stage of hearings regarding Julian’s extradition took place in February, and were supposed to continue in May, but were derailed by the arrival of Covid-19. In February, I had submitted as evidence a statement in support of Julian, based on having worked with him as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011. I expected to be questioned about my evidence in May, but, in the end, it wasn’t until September that the hearings resumed.

To coincide with the resumption of the hearings, a 38-minute film was released, “The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange,” directed by filmmaker Juan Passarelli, for which I was interviewed, in the esteemed company of of John Pilger, UN torture rapporteur Nils Melzer, lawyers Jennifer Robinson and Renata Avila, Julian’s wife Stella Moris, journalists Barton Gellman, Margaret Sullivan, Iain Overton, Max Blumenthal and Matt Kennard, WikiLeaks’ editor in chief Kristin Hrafnsson, and Conservative MP David Davies.

The film is available below, via PeerTube, and provides a powerful summary of what WikiLeaks did, how and why the US, with the support of the UK, has responded so aggressively, and why that is both vindictive against Julian personally, but also a profound threat to press freedoms not just in the US, but worldwide.

To pick out a few highlights from the film, it includes a reflection on how President Obama — unlike Donald Trump — concluded that there was “no way to prosecute Julian Assange without endangering press freedom,” John Pilger discussing how the US’s intention is simply to “put Julian in a black hole and throw away the key,” and Nils Melzer talking about the long years to which Julian has been subjected to psychological torture.

Also significant is the section on the CIA co-opting a surveillance company to spy on Julian, via devices installed inside the embassy, in which it was revealed that meetings with his lawyers were spied on, an intrusion of attorney-client privilege that, on its own, as Matt Kennard explained, should have led to his extradition case being thrown out of court by the judge.

The month of hearings that took place at the Old Bailey has now passed, of course, and although it was a process that looked like it was legitimate — there was a judge, and lawyers on both sides, and evidence was submitted by numerous expert witnesses — it appeared to have been nothing more than a box-ticking exercise, an illusion intended to show that the process of extradition is subject to serious scrutiny, even though the conclusion has already been decided.

My own small involvement in the hearings was instructive. First of all — despite me travelling to the court to be a witness — the prosecution didn’t want to accept my statement, quibbling about aspects of it involving references to torture. There was then, as with other witness statements, protracted exchanges between the defence and the prosecution about changes demanded by the prosecution to enable statements to be read into the evidence without the witnesses being present. This was what happened with my evidence (my first statement, and a second submitted during the hearings), and, while I was spared a probably brutal encounter with prosecutor James Lewis, I didn’t get to see Julian, and my evidence — only a gist of which was was read into the evidence — was, as a result, unfairly watered down.

The ruling is due on January 4, 2021, and with the spotlight no longer on Julian — to the extent to which the mainstream media paid attention at all during the hearings — it concerns me that people will forget him. I’m stuck with one abiding memory of my efforts to present evidence in his case. On the first day that I was supposed to give evidence but didn’t get to do so (there was also a second occasion), I found myself thinking intensely about Julian’s long confinement — first in the Ecuadorian Embassy, for nearly seven years, and, for the last year and a half, in Belmarsh — as I cycled through London to the Old Bailey, as it was one of those luminous days on the cusp of summer and autumn, and the air was warm and calm. The freedom I felt, in a City whose streets were almost empty because of Covid, was intoxicating, and I felt acutely the extent to which Julian has been denied this freedom for so many years — and, if the US government has its way, will be entombed for the rest of his life.

In conclusion, I’m posting below some excerpts from an interview with John Pilger conducted by Arena, in Australia, just after the hearings ended, in which, responding to the question, “can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?”, John said:

The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five o’clock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of ‘security’ checks, including a dog’s snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: ‘I think I am losing my mind’.

I tried to assure him he wasn’t. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It  had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnson’s Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. That’s a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate [act] of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burke’s notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. That’s why his punishment is so extreme.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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