Meeting Julian Assange again for the first time
A new documentary challenges us to question everything we thought we knew
“If you think Assange is a traitor, a rapist, a narcissist, 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.”
Prof. Nils Melzer, Former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture
There are no shortage of opinions about Julian Assange. Hosts of people have made up their mind about him one way or another, and there are probably even more who simply do not care. But I would like to begin by highlighting one simple distinction between them: those who have seen the leaked 2007 Baghdad Apache helicopter attack, and those who have not.
A new documentary about Julian Assange, The Trust Fall, was recently released just as the British High Court deliberates on his appeal against extradition to the US. The film, essential viewing for anyone who cares about press freedom and human rights, is filled with powerful, illuminating and moving testimony, but the one stick-in-your-head scene has to be that of American soldiers laughing and joking while gunning down eleven Iraqi civilians like drunken teenagers playing a video game. These images repeat in the memory long after, like bad food. Foul and indigestible.
Directed by Australian film maker Kym Staton, The Trust Fall shows this footage unedited in its entirety--part of 400,000 classified documents released by WikiLeaks that came to be known as the “Iraq war logs”. This is how it should be seen. Just as 22-year-old Private Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning saw it and made the fateful decision to smuggle it out of a US army intelligence facility copied onto a CD-RW labeled “Lady Gaga”.
The film explores the heavy cost of becoming the messenger of this and other such material, transposed upon an elevating vision of a world where wars cannot be waged in secret because their worst excesses are constrained by the truth tellers. Sacrifice and vision, hopelessness and hope, cycling through the story of a man who has consistently refused to bend even when he was broken.
Assange has been called many things: ‘rapist’, ‘narcissist’, ‘hacker’, ‘traitor’, ‘hi-tech terrorist’. I must admit that I have at times succumbed to at least one of these perceptions. But as you dig deeper into his story, you come to realize that none of these labels are actually true. Is Assange a perfect individual? Of course not. But human rights were not written to protect the perfect—or even the especially likeable—they were written to protect those abused by powers greater than themselves.
The viewer is led on a sinuous journey through Assange’s life; his formative university years, his political philosophy, his professional career, his legal battles, and the stages of his punishments that can only be described as a slow-motion execution. We come to see Assange not just through the eyes of a government that desperately wants to take him down, but those who know him well, as a colleague, a brother, a husband, a father, and friend. His wife, Stella Assange, mother of their two sons, Gabriel and Max, describes him as, “the most brilliant, beautiful human being I’ve ever met; incredibly caring and loving and funny.” She appears in the film as stoic but clearly under enormous stress in the fight for justice for her husband.
Assange has been detained in one form or another since December 2010 in a kind of legal suspended animation. He has held firm to his principles throughout, refusing to give up his sources despite being offered a pardon in exchange. But the personal, social and environmental deprivation along with constant attacks on his character, threats to his life, and the toll of daily humiliations, have reduced him to a shell of his former self.
Psychiatrist, Paul Pérez-Sales from the University of Madrid, examined Assange in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, where he has been held since April 2019. Known as the UK’s Guantanamo Bay, Belmarsh is a maximum-security prison intended for the most dangerous criminals, where inmates have been known to languish indefinitely without charge or legal representation. Pérez-Sales found Assange to be in a “condition of profound deterioration”. He concluded that the conditions of his confinement had led to a pronounced cognitive decline, depression and suicidal ideation. Professor of international law at the University of Glasgow and UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Prof. Nils Melzer Melzer, supervised a follow up psychiatric examination using the Istanbul Protocol--the UN standard for evaluating torture. Melzer concluded that Assange “shows all the symptoms typical of a person who has been exposed to psychological torture over a prolonged period of time.”
The CIA could easily have assassinated Assange over the course of the seven years he sought asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy. Leaked documents reveal that assassination was indeed on the table and that the CIA under Mike Pompeo had requested “options” including kidnapping or assassinating him by poison or other means. The strategic intelligence firm Stratfor advised against “creating a martyr”, suggesting instead that the US authorities choke off his choices and leave him nowhere to go.
After two years at the Embassy, Julian’s health was on a downward spiral. Separated from family and friends, deprived of fresh air and natural light, monitored and filmed 24 hours a day even in the bathroom, refused proper medical attention and the most basic legal rights, and subjected to a highly coordinated media smear campaign, it was, says the late journalist John Pilger, “as if they had planned a war on a single human being and on the very principal of freedom of speech.”
This is most probably Julian Assange’s last chance to avoid extradition to the United States where he could be facing a 175-year prison sentence. Many, including Assange himself, believe that he would not survive very long. On March 4th German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that British judges should protect Assange from extradition to the US, one of the few world leaders to speak out in his support.
“In some sense they’ve already won,” says former classmate Dr. Niraj Lal. “What journalist in their right mind would go and expose structural power in that way again without fear of being thrown into jail and left to rot?”
The message being sent is crystal clear. Don’t even think about stepping into this man’s shoes, because this is what we will do to you.
MEETING JULIAN ASSANGE AGAIN, FOR THE FIRST TIME
“It’s generally people’s view that they don’t know much about Assange. But you should know about him. Because whether you know it or not, he is fighting for you.” --
--Tariq Ali, journalist, writer and historian
Watching The Trust Fall, I realized that I was in a way meeting Julian Assange again for the very first time. Hearing from people who actually knew him both professionally and personally painted a very different picture to the one I had encountered in the media.
None of the sources that had fed me the perception I had of this man seemed reliable in light of so much new information. On top of this, all of the accusations against him: the rape charges, collusion with Russia, that he didn’t redact his reports, that he put lives at risk, that he’s somehow to blame for the Trump presidency (for some more serious than all the other accusations put together!) – all fall apart under analysis. (I’m going to address each one on my next post.) In fact, it is evident that the reason Assange’s character has been so assiduously attacked is because the case against him is astonishingly weak. Even the US government’s key witness, Sigurdur Thordason, withdrew his testimony admitting that he had lied and was, according to the court’s own documents, a sociopath and multiply convicted pedophile.
This would have been enough to throw out any other case. But this is not just any other case. It is only once you realize that Julian Assange is a political prisoner--however much you would like to believe such entities cannot exist within ‘liberal democracies’—that everything starts to make more sense.
There is a frighteningly vengeful element to the way the US government has treated the Assange case. That he has not been disposed of like other political dissidents in authoritarian regimes such as China or Iran is only due to the last remaining strength of our besieged democratic institutions. As former WikiLeaks Editor-in Chief, Kristin Hrafnsson puts it, “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 who wants to get back at the entity that exposed the truth about it. It is that simple.”
As WikiLeaks continued to publish more material exposing US operations, the full fury of the US intelligence agencies was discharged through the mouthpieces of public discourse. Said Guardian journalist Alan Rusbridger, “It was astonishing to sit in London reading of reasonably mainstream American figures calling for the assassination of Assange for what he had unleashed.” And it wasn’t just the US. Tom Flanagan, a former senior adviser to Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper, openly called for Assange’s assassination on mainstream television. He later expressed regret about these remarks, saying that he hoped Assange “receives a fair trial and due process of law.”
One of the goals of propaganda is to make the public become emotionally identified with ideas and beliefs that are not their own. UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Prof. Nils Melzer, describes how he himself had succumbed to the media hype. When he began receiving reports from Assange’s lawyers, he at first brushed them aside. “I had never really dealt with his case before, but I was convinced that I knew everything about him,” he admits. Melzer began to question his emotional reaction to Assange when he read the contents of those reports. It was then that he realized that “the public narrative that had been spread about him in the media didn’t add up.”
It is fascinating to hear from those who studied with Assange in the early years of his philosophical development. Physicist and TV presenter Dr. Niraj Lal who took classes with Assange at the University of Melbourne, Victoria, describes his intellectual fearlessness and creativity and his unusual marrying of physics, politics and philosophy. He speaks about Julian with admiration and affection while also admitting that could also be “incredibly nerdy.”
An early Assange associate, Suelette Dreyfus, now a lecturer at Melbourne University, describes Julian as “quirky, an observer of people”, probably on the autism spectrum, who filled his apartment with whiteboards expressing socio-political problems in mathematical language. Julian, was a “deep thinker” she says, who was interested in “the core, root problems of things.” She paints a picture of an idealist who believed that the exposure of corruption could put an end to poverty and injustice. Julian, says Dreyfus, had a “burning desire for deeper social change” using the tools of digital technology. The key to it all was encryption.
The concept behind WikiLeaks was both simple and ingenious. The platform allowed sources to leak information securely and anonymously. Assange called it “the largest bullshit detecting machine the world has ever seen”. A website where government wrongdoing could be exposed safely and anonymously circumventing the increasingly manipulated and controlled mainstream media. The anonymous drop box has since become the norm for media organizations. Even those who won’t deign to call Assange a journalist are forced to admit that he changed journalism forever.
The story of Julian Assange, whatever your opinion of the man, demands us to think again, to think deeper and better, and to follow the evidence wherever it leads. In short, to be our own “bullshit detecting machine”.
Some might look at Julian Assange’s story and surmise that he has failed. But the wider truth is that he is where he is because he was too successful. After watching The Trust Fall it seems that it is not Assange but the rest of us who have failed. We have failed to protect our best bulwark against structural violence, corruption and lies--a media invested in exposing the truth and journalists with the courage to speak it.
For information about how to organize a screening of the documentary The Trust Fall visit: