Judging Freedom - Julian Assange movie - ithaca

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, March 27, 2023. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. The young man who is joining us today is John Shipman. John is the father of one of the most courageous heroes on the planet, Julian Assange. Those of you who have been followers of my work and of Judging Freedom know of my steadfast defense of Julian. He created, owned, and operated WikiLeaks and in that capacity exposed war crimes by the United States government. He published truthful information, which is absolutely and totally protected speech under the United States Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in the now famous and highly regarded Pentagon Papers case. Nevertheless, the U.S. government indicted him for espionage. He was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, England. The British police broke in and arrested him, and he's been living in a hell hole called Belmarsh Prison in London ever since while the extradition proceedings are taking place.

His father, John, joins us now because John is on an international tour to publicize his movie, his documentary about Julian, and we'll show you a trailer from that documentary called Ithaca in just a moment. John Shipman, you know I love your son and have been a fan of his for years, and I'm a fan of yours. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Thank you, Judge. Pleasure to be here. Of course. So tell us what the purpose of the film is and how you put it together. It was produced by another son, Gabriel, Julian's brother. And really it follows me and Stella around as we advocate for Julian's freedom

and come across of course the reasons why Julian has been pursued and persecuted by the Swedish prosecuting authority, the United Kingdom's prosecuting authority and the Department of Justice, in particular the National Security Section. As we unearth those, the breadth of our advocacy deepens and spreads. Now it includes, of course, an understanding of the gold within the United States Constitution, that being the First Amendment, and equally the Bill of Rights, which I might add is envied and adopted by all of the nations of the West in one way or another.

It is something that we all seek to emulate, and we face incomprehension as to the chilling and truncating and blighting of that wonderful artifact of your constitution. Well, the Bill of Rights, of course, is supposed to articulate the rights that come from our humanity and supposed to restrain the government from interfering with those rights. Unfortunately, the Bill of Rights in America has become a bill of government privileges whereby the government will allow you to exercise those rights when it suits the government purposes. But when you expose the government, when you embarrass the government, when you humiliate the government, when the government commits crimes, when you humiliate the government,

when the government commits crimes and you reveal it to the people, then they come after you like they have to your son. I want to run the clip, but before we do, I'm a little curious. What is the significance of the title Ithaca? Ithaca is a city in New York State not far from where you are now. Ithaca is a poem by a Greek-Egyptian poet, C.P. Cavafy, and it describes the journey of Odysseus back to Penelope, whom he, of course, left to go and fight the Trojan Wars. So it's a journey of every man back to his heart or to his love. And in the case of Julian,

the arduous difficulties of the journey are exemplified by the poem. And also the poem teaches the reduction of fear not to not to contort your life with fears of one sort or another but just to move on and it's the journey and not the destiny. The journey is vital. Well, hopefully his journey will continue and he'll be home in Australia with you soon. It doesn't look that way, very optimistic right now, but who knows what could happen. Here's the trailer. This is about 90 seconds long, but you'll find it compelling. I am attempting

in my own modest way to get Julian out of the ship. Julian Assange is the hero of our time. He was the darling of the left. All of a sudden he's a puppet of Russia. My name is John Shipton. I'm Julian Assange's

father. WikiLeaks found that Julian Assange has been arrested. One of the most notorious and controversial figures in custody. Assange will remain behind bars until that extradition hearing, which has been set down for the end of February. I urge the Department of Justice to drop the charges. The maximum jail sentence of 175 years. Because he published the truth. How does it feel to be the father of such a controversial figure,

somebody who's well known around the world? Was that him on the phone before? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What are you talking about on a kind of regular basis? If Julian is extradited to the United States to face these charges, he will be the first, but not the last. What are your worst fears?

That it just collapses under the strain. It looks as though what journalists do for a living is seen to be a criminal act. Keep it up, man. Thank you. I wish I had your energy, I really do. Yeah. Why do you think there's not a great public love and support? This is really a trivia on good passion.

What's at stake? If he goes down, so will journalism. So will the freedom of speech go down, and the Bill of Rights will literally become a bill of government privileges. When did you see your son last, and what kind of shape is he in, John? Oh, it's been five months now. We've been on the road ever since.

Well, it's not the best. The circumstances are dire. The sort of limbo-like endlessness of the persecutions and the unfolding of one court case after another after another as

we continue to fight to get a reasonable judgment out of the English judiciary. Of course, I can't criticise the English judiciary because I want something from them. However, I was in Dublin and I was trying to describe my feelings on a platform to the Irish in Dublin about the English judiciary. And an Irishman got up and said, John, there's nothing you can tell us about the English judiciary. I can imagine.

What is the status of things with the judiciary? Has Julian exhausted and lost all of his appeals, or is there one or are there two appeals left before they put him into the tender mercies of the Justice Department? There's an application before the High Court for an appeal hearing. It was submitted on the 31st of October, complete with the Department of Justice and the defence's papers. And the judge makes the decision on the papers. Should that fail, should he refuse an appeal, then another appeal is possible and again it's made on the papers but this time before two judges. Should that fail, then the extradition goes ahead. There is some possibility after the exhausting of all English possibilities, all English court possibilities, to appeal to the

European Court of Human Rights. There has been an appeal to the Court of Human Rights, and they have said that they can accept an appeal, but only after the complete exhaustion of all of the English court procedures. If you've just joined us on Judging Freedom, we're speaking to John Shipman. John is the father of Julian Assange. Julian is the great hero of the freedom of speech, currently incarcerated in a deplorable place in London, awaiting the outcome of these various appeals. He's not been charged with any crime in England. He's been charged with espionage in the United States of America. If he is extradited, if he is charged here, if he is tried here, if he is convicted here, sounds absurd. He's exposed to 175 years in jail.

What did he do, John? What did your son do that the feds want to lock him up for nearly two centuries? Well, I don't get it, actually, you know, because he did exactly the same as the New York Times, Le Monde from France, El Pay from Spain, Der Spiegel from Germany and The Guardian from the United Kingdom. So it's incomprehensible to us that none of those great legacy newspapers or news outlets are in the same circumstances Julian. It's also the other current accusation that goes around is that he just dumped files, which is not true. The John Young's Krypton website was the first to publish the entire unredacted set of the cables and John remains

at work in his architectural practice in New York. I'm not advocating that any of those gentlemen be arraigned or indicted. What I'm pointing out is that it's an oddity that they have chosen Julian Assange, an Australian citizen working in the United Kingdom, to pursue an espionage case in order to truncate and blight the First Amendment. What relationship did Julian have with Chelsea Manning, who was the American military intelligence specialist who stole the documents and gave them to Julian? I mean, the law is that if the journalist receives the documents and they're newsworthy, it doesn't matter how the journalist got them.

If they're newsworthy, there's no crime in publishing them. The government claims that Julian might have been involved or was involved in the actual theft of the documents. But that theft, as I understand it, was perpetrated by Chelsea Manning, who pleaded guilty, who was sentenced to 45 years in jail, and whose jail term was commuted by President Obama. So Chelsea Manning is now free. In Chelsea Manning's trial, General Carr testified that there's been no damage nobody hurt from the revelations in the in the cable set or any of the files actually what's important for us to keep in mind is the benefits that these leaks were brought

to the United States government in order that they can correct their behaviour, also to the people of the, well, the world actually, the people of the world, and in particular the United States, to be able to discern what their government has done and insist that they straighten up and fly right. So it's not all depressing, grim scandal. It's beneficial and that's understood inherently in the First Amendment.

If you can get the information out, which becomes knowledge, you're able to act in your interests and in your nation's interests. It's clear as day. So we have great difficulty understanding what the Department of Justice National Security Section thinks it's doing with this case. So what, if anything, did Julian have to do with the actual theft of the data? Or did Chelsea Manning just deposit it in his hands? Before you answer that, the famous case, of course, in the U.S. is the Pentagon Papers case. uh daniel ellsberg the civilian employee of the pentagon copied 70 000 pages of documents

informed the new york times and the washington post ahead of time what he was doing and then when he finished doing it gave them the copies of that he. It showed that American generals and then former but still living President Lyndon Johnson were lying to the American public. This happened under Richard Nixon's watch. President Nixon and the Department of Justice went to a federal judge who signed an order prohibiting the release of the information. The Supreme Court heard the case in about 10 days and ruled just a few days thereafter that the release of the information was absolutely privileged and absolutely protected under the First Amendment. Ellsberg was tried for espionage. During the course of that trial, the FBI broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist,

stole his psychiatric records, and gave them to the prosecutors. When the federal judge learned what the FBI had done, instead of incarcerating the FBI agents who committed this burglary, he dismissed the case against Ellsberg. So Ellsberg was free, the New York Times was free, the Washington Post was free, and the public understood what Lyndon B. Johnson and his generals had done during Vietnam, which was to lie to them. Now, back to my question about Julian. Did he know what Chelsea Manning was doing before Chelsea did it?

No, no. Chelsea, as of her position, had complete access to SIPA net and had already downloaded the files and tried to get the New York Times to take them up and fail. There's an expression that Wikileaks is the publisher of last resort. Julian published those upon receiving them from, this is alleged actually, so it's not known, alleged from Chelsea Manning. Well, your son is a great human being. I don't know how this is going to end up.

I once told his lawyers when I was interviewing them, since I am a constitutional scholar, I'd be happy to be an expert witness in the case. The government won't like that at all, but maybe a jury will. Is there anything else you'd like to say to the judging freedom audience? The judging freedom audience are, as the name implies, passionate lovers of personal liberty, and I would imagine nearly to a person, supporters of your son. Just thanks for the hospitality we've received in the United States. It's very warm and embracing. And just the simplest thing, ring up your congressman and say, we've got a problem with the First Amendment

and this Assange matter and want to see it straightened out. Thirdly, go along and see the movie Ithaca. You'd be most welcome and we answer any questions you've got. Ithaca, the story of Julian Assange, a story that has not yet completely been told. It won't be complete until Julian is free. John Shipman, father of Julian Assange, as courageous as your son. Thank you very much for joining us

on this program. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.