The Assange Story

 

John Shipton

The Assange Story

RT (2020)

Film Review

https://en.rtdoc.tv/films/206-the-assange-story

Mainly based on interviews with Assange’s father antiwar activist John Shipton, this 2020 documentary provides the first comprehensive biography on Julian Assange I’ve seen.

Julian grew up in Melbourne Australia, which in the late eighties and early nineties was the Australian center for international hackers and “experimenters.” As a teenager, Assange and his friends spend most of their spare time trading hacking programs. In 1989, the Melbourne hacking syndicate broke into the NASA computer and infected it with a “wank worm” containing a message about warmongering. The breach would force NASA to postpone a shuttle launch.

By 2006, Assange was less interested in hacking than in material he discovered on-line related to constant lies the US and other governments told the public. The same year he and hacking friends founded Wikileaks, using the Tor* server as an anonymizer for government whistleblowers to share embarrassing documents. The first leaks Wikileaks made public concerned Somali government malfeasance. In 2009, they exposed the Climategate emails revealing climate scientists were faking data about global warming.

In 2010, Wikileaks made world headlines after they published the Collateral Murder video. Shot by US troops from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, it clearly shows the deliberate unprovoked killing of 12-18 Iraqis civilians, including a Reuters journalist, his rescuers and two young children.

Wikileaks’ next major leak concerned monitoring by US intelligence of all private gmail, iPhone and Blackberry communications.

On November 28 2010, Wikileaks shared their third major leak, consisting of 400,000 classified cables from 2001-2009 about the US coverup of Iraqi civilian deaths, torture of Iraqi prisoners and child prostitution. The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel eagerly collaborated with them in releasing this explosive material.

Although Wikileaks offered the Obama White House the opportunity (which they declined) to review the logs before they were published, Obama immediately accused Wikileaks of endangering Afghans who helped US occupying forces in Afghanistan. On November 30, Interpol issued an Interpol Red Notice for Assange’s arrest for sexual assaults that allegedly occurred in Sweden mid-August.** He was arrested in Britain, having left Sweden after the Swedish prosecutor assured his lawyer there were no arrest charges against him.

In May 2012 after losing his Supreme Court appeal against extradition to Sweden (based on fears Sweden would extradite him to the US where he potentially faced the death penalty), Assange was granted asylum in London’s Ecuadoran embassy.

He spent the next eight years in the tiny Ecuadoran embassy (a three-bedroom apartment), confined to a single room and foregoing access to sunlight or dental or medical care. Wikileaks continued to operate from the Ecuadoran embassy, releasing another high profile leak in 2016, of DNC emails regarding a deliberate Democratic Party conspiracy to sabotage Bernie Sanders primary campaign.

Six years into his stay, Ecuador elected a pro-US government, and the new president Lenin Moreno did everything he could to force Assange to leave voluntarily. This included denying him access to his lawyers and razors, searching his visitors, putting surveillance cameras in his room and periodically neglecting to provide food and toilet paper. They Ecuadoran government also released media stories about Assange being messy, having poor hygiene and smearing feces on the walls. After 18 months, the Ecuadoran government allowed British police into the embassy (which is sovereign Ecuadoran territory under international law) to arrest him.

The US immediately filed for his extradition on espionage charges, but the UK forced him to serve his 11 month sentence first for breaching his parole.

Afternote: During his 2022 extradition trial and subsequent appeals, Assange was confined to Belmarsh high security prison, where he was denied Internet and telephone and forbidden to fraternize with other prisoners.

In June 2024 he was finally released from prison after pleading guilty to a single charge of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified US defense documents.” He was released at a hearing in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, and from there flew home to Australia.***

*Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. Built on free and open-source software and more than seven thousand volunteer-operated relays, users can have their Internet traffic routed via a random path through the network

**See Sex Lies and Julian Assange

***See Assange is Free: Wikileaks Founder Freed in Deal with US