 This disclosure is about the truth. 400,000 documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks describes torture and abuse of Iraq detainees, including electrocutions and executions. For the first time, we now know most of those killed, 66,000 were unarmed civilians and... A sedan sped toward the patrol and failed to stop after visual signals were given. A shot was fired at the front tire, but the vehicle did not stop. The patrol engaged the vehicle, killing two civilians. When you read about a six-year-old being tortured to death with a drill, when you read about an entire family being wiped out in a split second because some 18-year-old American soldier has decided that the car was going too fast and just opened fire, when you hear about people being locked in a prison for two months and suspended from the ceiling, all these stories are horrific. There is very strong evidence, compelling evidence of war crimes having been committed by coalition forces. There is over 1,000 reports on the torture or abuse of detainees, cases of people trying to commit surrender and being killed in the process of community surrender. The Assange arrest is scandalous in several respects. One of them is just the effort of governments, and it's not just the U.S. government. The British are cooperating. Ecuador, of course, is now cooperating. The efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didn't want to cut the rascal multitude to know about, okay, that's basically what happened. It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses, and when powerful abuses are taken on, there is always a back reaction. So we see that controversy and we believe that is a good thing to engage in. At the same time that the U.S. government is chasing journalists all over the world. Look, let me tell you something. Be nice. They claim they have extra territory to lead. They have decided that all foreign journalists, which include many of you here, have no production under the First Amendment in other states. So they're close to show the gravity of this case. This sets a dangerous precedent for all media, organizations and journalists in Europe and elsewhere around the world. This precedent means that any journalist can be extradited for prosecution in the United States for having published truthful information about the United States. Following the reports of mistreatment at Belmarsh prison yesterday and again today, he did not look well. And frankly, the treatment is dehumanizing. The fact that he is an afterthought almost twice now this week, proceedings have started without a realization that he was not even yet present. This is not about left or right in politics. We can unite on this. It's a dark force versus us. We want justice, transparency, accountability and truth. We have the momentum with us. Please tell everybody that you know that they have to side with us and fight against this extradition. If they tell you, I would rather fight for the environment or dense animal cruelty or gender equality, tell them 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. We must fight against this extradition. We must save Julian Assange. Good afternoon and welcome everyone to this webinar hosted by the Don't Extradite Assange campaign. My name is Christian Rapson, the editor of Wikileaks. The topic of our event today is the Iraq War Logs. They were released by Wikileaks on the 22nd of October 2010 of the largest leak in military history. What was published that day was 391,832 field reports from the US military covering all events in Iraq up until 2009. It was the diary of the war. Never before had people seen such a detailed evaluation by the military itself on what went on. Wikileaks was working in an alliance with several media at the time. One of the media partners was the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, which puts all its efforts and its journalists working on going through these files and mining out stories. They produce content for media, including documentaries for Channel 4 and for Al Jazeera, English, and Arabic. All the media partners were the Guardian in London, their Spiegel in Germany, the New York Times in the US, and Le Monde in France, and several others including Swedish national television. Now, I have two guests here today to talk about this release and the importance of it, both in terms of content and on journalism in a broader sense, because never before had such a broad alliance of media from several countries being brought together and worked together on a single project. The stories were very noteworthy. They included things as previously unreported civilian deaths which were monitored by the US military but not released publicly. 15,000 deaths were unreported publicly. What were in those files? It included very many events of civilian killings such as at checkpoints where I believe 700 events were found where people were killed at the US checkpoints because the people didn't stop too early or driving too fast according to the estimate of the soldiers. Several things of the nature that I'm sure that my co-panelists here today will mention in their talk, but I would just want to mention before we go ahead that the importance of the Iraq warlock is also not worthy because they are one of the major foundation of the indictment against Julian Assange who is now facing 18 counts, 17 of them are based on an archaic legal structure called the Espionage Act never before used against a journalist. So the case of Julian Assange and the importance to fight against this extradition from the UK to the United States is extremely important not just on a personal level, but because of the implication it will have for the future of journalism if he is extradited. Now we will be taking questions later on after I introduce my panelists and give them a few minutes each to talk. You can write your questions on the Q&A on the Zoom or deliver the questions to us via social media where we picked up my colleagues. Now let me introduce the two panelists, the fine panelists here today, great journalist. We have Ian Overton, the investigative journalist who was director of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism back in 2010 where people didn't get much sleep and had to work under extreme time pressure and of course political pressure because of the animosity that we knew we would be facing from the United States because of this release. Then we have Chris Woods, a fantastic journalist who was up the bureau at the time, but moved on and is now, he was a founder of Air Wars, an awful profit transparency organization aiming to monitor military activity in war zones and civilians death. The website is airwars.org. Now thank you both of you for coming here today to this event. I would like to give you the first word Ian to discuss and reflect back on this eventful time back in 2010. Yeah indeed, a decade passes far too quickly, but so it was a remarkable moment, first meeting Julian. I met him at the frontline club where he was being interviewed by CNN and I think all of this was quite new to Julian really. He wasn't that accustomed to the media glare and I arrived, we had a brief chat and he was straight into an interview with CNN and the CNN journalist was, I would say quite robust, bordering on even hostile and Julian at the end of it came to me and he said, I think I might need some tips on how to handle interviews because he didn't feel comfortable and it struck me that what unfolded in the months and years later was probably quite a seismic shift in terms of his own experiences. I don't think it was what he was actively seeking in terms of all the exposure that followed. But Julian was working straight off the back of having come out with the Afghan leaks and the logs and that had obviously partnered with The Guardian and another print. But the bureau, we quickly established the bureau had an offering where people like Chris and myself had a broadcast background and we could work with WikiLeaks, work with the evidence found within the logs and as you articulated, tried to do work for broadcast. So we teamed up, it was quite a sort of an innovative approach in a way, taking a large body of evidence and then putting that out for BBC radio, for Arabic media, for dispatches on channel four and also we did some of the work for LeMond website as well as producing our own online content that we were very lucky went on to win an Amnesty Award. So I mean, in terms of the sort of enormity of it not only was it the world's largest ever military leak of information, but we were also doing something quite revolutionary, I think in terms of media output. We were getting out on radio, online, broadcast and in different languages. And so this was, you know, lots and lots of moving blocks and I was very, very lucky to have people of caliber like Chris and others working with me, somebody called James Ball who I know, some of you may know and others, who were very, very good, amazing journalists really, who really ran at this, understood the gravity of what we were doing, the historical importance of what we're doing. And so over the forthcoming months and well weeks and months that after Julian agreed to this basic premise that we would lead the charge on broadcast output. We had this, as you said, sleepless nights, a hive of activity. The oddity of the fact that the bureau was broken into a number of times and the theft of computers therein where there was never a suspect that was led towards prison at least. And a moment where I had, I was woken up very early one morning with a knock on the door and I went down and somebody I knew in the intelligence services just said to me, yeah, they're looking at you and then ran off, which I thought was a strange awakening. But the output, and we worked very closely with Julian looking, talking about the measures of output, what should be redacted, what should not be redacted, the ethical duties and the protection of civilians, the protection of sources, et cetera, et cetera in terms of the output was one element of what we were doing. Obviously we were doing standard investigative journalism process, triangulating evidence. And then on top of all of that was this remarkable effort to try and transform all this into broadcast. It wasn't just us hammering computers, putting out print. It was making films. It was creating radio, which takes a huge amount of effort and output. And it is really a testimony to the strengths of the team that I was lucky to bring together, that they produce some things that were not only revelatory and absolutely damning and condemning of the US military in that area. But I think I've had long-term reverberations and on a personal level, and I think Chris may attest to this as well. I mean, my life since then has very much been dominated by the legacy of the Iraq war logs. I've written a book on global gun violence. I've written a book on suicide bombers, both of which I relied on WikiLeaks evidence for the book. And I currently run a charity which investigates explosive violence used against civilians of which Iraq and the reverberating impact of the Iraq war on the rest of the Middle East has a fundamental impact. So I mean, I think, and this is probably a good time for Chris to pop in, but to talk about how the reverberations of the war logs on a personal level were profound. And I think on a societal level I have yet to be truly understood. Thank you very much again for that opening. We'll talk later about maybe the broader implication of the release, but Chris, your original or opening thoughts, go ahead. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, so my background to this was I had actually covered the invasion of Iraq, well, in fact, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq and then have been there for the invasion with the BBC and then have been back into Iraq almost every year from 2003 onwards. So I had a very deep personal knowledge of the disaster that was the Iraq conflict. And as we know, the war began with a lie and then was sustained by lies. And in 2010, when we published, the war was still ongoing. Of course, it would run for another three years before the US and UK eventually withdrew. We were routinely, as journalists, lied to and misled by the British and American militaries. To give you an example, I was in Basra in the late 2000s after British forces had pulled out of that city. And we had managed to get a film crew into Basra. One of the more extreme factions had got control of the city. And they were executing women on the street at the time for showing too much ankle. It was, you know, they were pushing apart couples who were in mixed Sunni Shia marriages. It was a disaster actually, the British withdrawal and the Americans in the Iraqi military eventually had to go in and recapture the city. I remember being on the British base, the British would not intervene, they would not stop. And a British military public affairs officer telling us to our face, a panorama team, that everything was fine in Basra, there was no problem. Nobody had any trouble there. And we said, this is ridiculous, we have a team there. We know what's happening, why are you telling us this? And of course, that was their job, their job was propaganda. And so when the Iraq war logs came along, it was immediately apparent what an extraordinary trove of material this was on a current conflict. And that was what was so remarkable about it that would immediately and fundamentally change our understanding of that conflict. And there was a moral duty on us as journalists to publish that information, to make it available and to change public perceptions around that war. And if you look at the caliber of news organizations that came in on the Iraq war logs, the Guardian, LeMond, Deschbegel, Al Jazeera, Channel 4 with dispatches, it was absolute top caliber. News organizations came in and invested very significantly in that project. And as Ian has talked to, what the logs contained, I mean, there was so much. There were so many stories. We had to simply triage it, we had to decide which were the most compelling stories that we would go with. What would we focus on that would most illuminate the disaster of this war? And two that always stood out for me was the very widespread killing of Iraqi civilians by American forces at roadblocks. So basically as the insurgency began to gain momentum in Iraq, American troops, they were incapable of distinguishing civilians from potential suicide bombers and they were just opening fire on Iraqi civilians and hundreds died and all of this had been kept secret. I had experienced it myself. I'd almost been opened fire on with my panorama crew going into an American base on one occasion. We knew how trigger happy they were. What we didn't know was this was systemic. This was a very profound problem and also one that the US military internally was aware of. They were aware that this was something happening across Iraq, but they weren't responding to it and putting that in the public domain. Kristen, you mentioned at the beginning about the 16,000 additional deaths. Of course, the Iraq war logs contain details of almost 70,000 civilian deaths. Many of those not killed by American British forces, by the way, they were tracked by the US and Britain as the insurgency grew and effectively a civil war had broken out in Iraq between city and sheer, which had been stoked by Al Qaeda in the ensuing chaos, a paste invasion. But within those 60,000 deaths in the war logs were 15,000 that Iraq body can have not previously known about so there were actually far more civilian deaths there. And again, back to this question of lies, we had been repeatedly told by the American military, we don't do body counts. And indeed, that's where the name Iraq body count comes from with that wonderful NGO that to this day still counts civilian deaths in Iraq. And the Iraq war logs stripped that veneer away and showed us quite clear that they had been tracking civilian deaths from the beginning. They had comprehensive data on those deaths. They chose not to reveal that information and chose to claim that they weren't gathering that information. And so morally, they were never in my mind been any doubt that it was entirely the right thing for WikiLeaks to make the material available and entirely proper for news organizations to publish that material. Thank you for mentioning the lies and about the documentation of the civilian deaths. It comes to mind that I was involved in the release of the collateral murder video where it shows the killing of a dozen civilians, many of them unarmed. Of course, in the field report, actually on that incident, only those who were killed were listed as enemy combatants. So it was quite difficult to gather to, of course, to go through the documents and stifle it through because there was this attempt to put the stamp of combatant on every civilian that was killed. Another thing that I want to mention which I think was very much a moral blow to the US military and the British forces in Iraq was the fact that it became known that these forces were handing over the detainees to Iraqi forces where they were then tortured and killed. There was demand to basically register all this, but strictly the US forces were forbidden from intervening. Now, how damaging was that? And maybe in a sense in totality as well, Ian, did this change the entire narrative? Did this change the view of the entire Iraq invasion rather than war? I was very struck around a year after the logs came out that I had been invited to Kazakhstan, give a talk as part of a forum of investigative journalism. And Daniel Finkelstein, who is now a member of the House of Lords, who was an FT colonist was there on the panel. And Finkelstein, who's very influential journalist in the UK said openly, and there was nothing new in the Iraq logs. We didn't find anything of any substance or newness. And I really lost my temper. I think I may have even sworn because I was so offended by this belief that, you know, and this was, I think, in a way, a media mantra that particularly came out of the sort of pro-government, pro-military papers, that there was nothing new in here, nothing to see and we should move on and don't cause a fuss. That was the number one. And I think it was probably a coordinated attempt to try and spike the story. The second thing which I thought was quite egregious was this way in which those media entities who were not part of the consortium almost saw it as their moral duty to do whatever they could to try and unpick the validity of our reporting partly through personal attacks on Julian Assange. And Julian, I think, so I recall being interviewed for two hours by the New Yorker for a piece they were doing on the Iraq war logs in Julian. And I basically said everything that we're probably gonna be saying in this podcast of great detail around the nature of what we found within there. I went through every single element of the big revelations. And then at the very end, she said, well, give me some personal detail on Julian. And I said, well, he was always wearing this leather jacket. I mean, that's all I said. It was a pithy sentence thrown away at the end of two hours and I think I was a bit tired. Anyway, that's the only thing that they included in the interview. And I saw this time and time again where Julian became the story, even though I don't think that he was deliberately trying to create that environment. And the revelations that we found within the logs were not amplified in the way that I felt they were. And then this later, I think had ultimate an impact in that the government, particularly the US government and the UK government's hand was not forced into doing any action. Nick Clegg made a claim at the time that he was gonna set up an historical allegations investigations unit that was called IHAT. And there was some funding put into this, but IHAT closed around a year ago with no valid prosecutions made. And when I began to investigate IHAT, the international historical allegations team in Iraq, the Iraq, sorry, the Iraq historical allegations team, when I began to interrogate their intent, their capacity and their function, I found out that there wasn't one person on this paid staff of IHAT who spoke Arabic as an example. So the UK government's own historical allegations team in Iraq didn't employ anyone who was an Arabist. And I think that that really sums up the response to the Iraq war logs. But at the same time though, I do think that there was virtue and valor in what we did in that we did create, as Chris has said, hard evidence that there was lies and repeated lies by the UK and the US governments. We showed that the military's in-ground force operations do do body counts. And I think that that has molded a lot of the work that Chris and I are involved in now in ensuring that civilians have a moral duty for their deaths and injuries to be recorded. And ultimately, I think that what it showed is that the militaries when they wage war are compiling a lot more data than they ever had admitted to before. And I think that's a very potent precedent in terms of future war's wage. Thank you. Chris, I have a question here from Malcolm Storick. He's asking, do we have a reliable number for civilian deaths in Iraq? I wanna ask this of you, Chris, but also I wanna mention you said this was released when the Iraq war was still going on. It has been maintained that the warlock release had an impact to end the presence of US troops in Iraq. When the al-Maliki government in Iraq denied the US troops the impunity that they were requesting. So maybe your thoughts on that and the original question about actually the civilian deaths in the country. The impunity question was certainly key to the Obama administration's decision to withdraw from Iraq. Although I think that was primarily actually driven by Eric Prince's mercenary organization, Black's, I can't remember the name of the organization. Off the top of my head, he's changed the name so many times, but that had gunned down multiple Iraqi civilians and the outrage over that and the fact that they had been given an effective immunity was, I think that was a bigger driver, but of course the Iraq war logs played into that. In terms of the question of civilian harm, is there a definitive number? It really depends, you know, how you count this. How many Iraqi civilians were directly killed by American and British forces? The most authoritative data on this is still with Iraq body count and we are looking at tens, many tens of thousands over the duration of the war. Then of course there are indirect deaths. I mean, far more Iraqis died in the civil war that was unleashed as a consequence of the invasion, really beginning around 2005 and absolutely atrocious civilian casualties occurred when that Sunni-Shia effective civil war began. And interestingly, the Americans, they did in the end intervene in that and I think it is fair to say that, you know, under betrayals, you know, America in the end did choose to pay a blood price to put troops into those communities that were fighting each other as a way of ending or trying to end that civil war. So I think it's fair to say that having sat on the sidelines for several years, the Americans eventually did intervene and very many, very many American soldiers lost their lives as well, several thousand I think died from 2006 through 2010. So, and then of course there's the broader indirect deaths. And we knew for many years, for example, very high infant mortality in Iraq that had preceded the invasion because of the sanctions and then the absolute collapse of Iraqi society and infrastructure that takes place in 2003. And to this day, much of Iraq hasn't recovered almost 20 years on from the invasion. So still obscenely high infant mortality, low life expectancy, poor educational outcomes. You know, you look at the city of Mosul today, there's no functioning hospital in Mosul, that's to do with a different war. But again, I just would never have happened without the invasion of Iraq. There are so, you know, how far do you want to go in trying to understand the desperate impact of that calamitous decision to invade Iraq? You're looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths overall if you go for that broadest count. So, you know, pick your number I guess. I guess there is a consensus that of course the situation in Iraq did create the breeding ground for ISIS just in the same way as the bombing of Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger created the scenario for the Khmer Rouge to come to power and all the atrocities and genocide that were happening in that country. In terms of the effect, of course we had Libya, we've had the involvement in Syria, we had the drone wars, but do you believe that there's a possibility that the release of the Iraq war laws, all the exposition of all the lies in justifying the war and during the war may have diminished the desire of the United States to enter into a conflict of on the same scale? Well, I think that certainly that there is a reticence of both the US government as well as the UK government putting boots on the ground. The, and I think that the work that again, Chris and I are very much involved in in our own way is analyzing the consequence of that decision because what we've seen is a shift from maybe Humvees on the ground to drones in the air. I think that it'll be difficult to say that the drones in the air is a direct consequence of one thing alone, it's advancements in technology, it's the very nature of the wars that are being fought mean that there is a belief by some that targeted killings is more effective when you take out certain Salafist jihadist group leaders, et cetera, et cetera. But I do think that the appetite for boots on the ground was certainly eroded to a degree by the revelations that the Iraq war logs revealed. And ultimately to me, the Iraq, I always go back to this question and I think this is a very compelling question when you sit down with members of the military, particularly in the UK, but also in the US, I ask them about the perception of who's the good guy in all this. And I think that soldiers genuinely believe, generally and genuinely, that they are doing the good thing, that they are not the Nazis of the modern age. And I'm not saying that the US and UK soldiers are, but the Nazis believe they were the good guys at the time they were doing it. People generally believe in the wars they're fighting that they are doing good. When the great systemic picture is revealed, when repeated incidents of violence are shown, like the deaths of civilians at checkpoints, like the torture of detainees in US-run prisons, these things become seismic shocks in the body politic. And I think that the US did not want a revisiting of the sins of the Vietnam War. And then they suddenly, it was revealed in the Iraq war logs that they were doing just the same in Iraq. And whilst it was very difficult for the bureau to secure US broadcast agreements and partnerships, so we weren't able to really spread out the content of the Iraq war logs in broadcast across the US, I still think that it had an impact on the cultural perception of the good of the Iraq war and of the Afghan war with the Afghan logs. And certainly when you sit down with senior military today and have conversations with them over coffee about what good came out of Iraq, what good came out of Afghanistan, they do pause for thought and they struggle to be able to articulate the sacrifices that their soldiers made on the fields. And I think that part of the journalistic compiling of evidence from the Iraq war logs and the triangulation of evidence on the ground as well with the work that people like Chris and myself, we've gone out to Iraq independently as journalists and reported therein. That sort of work, I think, combines with the Iraq war logs and has really shown that our intervention in Iraq was not necessarily something that the good guys did and that the reverberations of the UK's intervention and the US's intervention are still unfolding. I mean, I think you could even argue that the recent explosion in Beirut, I've spent a lot of time in Lebanon in recent years and certainly the reverberations of the conflicts in the whole of the Middle East has impacted Lebanese society in such a way that corruption and failure of the mechanisms of the state are second nature there. Corruption is endemic. And you could argue that the entire destabilization of the Middle East began with the invasion of Iraq and we're seeing it's unexpected reverberations even today. Chris, maybe I'll ask you to reflect on the same basic topic but I also have a question from the audience. Can you discuss what the finding regarding torture? Yeah, to torture is of course a shocking, sorry, we already knew before the Iraq war logs about Abu Ghraib. Again, we would never have known about Abu Ghraib had that material not leaked to a journalist that the US was torturing prisoners of war. And to this day, no, I don't believe a single US service person has been prosecuted for clear breaches of the Geneva Conventions, clear. And I can't think of a clearer and better documented case of torture. The war logs also, they didn't, there was an Abu Ghraib section there, I recall, and I think it meant to, but I think there was a higher level of classification than the war logs actually touched on. One of the interesting things about the war logs is that they were primarily the sort of day-to-day communications from and between units. So we weren't looking at the high classified stuff, highly classified stuff. We were looking at that interaction between units and that helped us to build a much deeper, more comprehensive understanding. And one of the things the war logs clearly demonstrated is that US military personnel were observing regularly their Iraqi colleagues torturing prisoners and not only, well, they were reporting it internally, but they were not intervening and they were not stopping this and they were not making this public. And again, the public value of having that story and the public domain was critical. You are obliged as a co-belligerent to report that. You are not complying with international humanitarian law if you don't report that you have observed acts of torture by a partner belligerent. And again, the very significant value. I just wanted to mention very briefly here. Of course, the fascinating thing here is that the war logs, only reflected what the American military was doing. We never had the British war logs. And as a journalist, were a data dump to be made available today showing the British role either in the invasion and occupation of Iraq 2003 through 11 or indeed the current UK war against ISIS and you will know absurdly, the British claim to have killed one civilian in thousands of airstrikes and absolutely absurd and false position. In fact, we demonstrated earlier this year that there was an investigation with the BBC, even where the American military was finding that British airstrikes have killed civilians, the American military, not us, the British were still saying, no, we're fine, we didn't kill those civilians. So if a data dump of the British campaign became available today, either of those campaigns, no journalist, no journalist would turn that down. And we would welcome the existence of an organization like WikiLeaks that perhaps facilitated if that was needed, such information entering into the public domain. This wasn't a one-off. There will always be a need to publish information like this and to hold militaries better to account. That is the job of journalists. Yeah, and the probably implication form on journalism in this very broad alliance and cooperation that I think was unheard of before, I think it was quite revolutionary that you could have so many media organizations of different nature in print and broadcast in different countries coordinating. I know actually, because I was there, there was not an easy task and actually sharing information. But we've seen these alliances in the last decade now forming on other platforms. What's the paradigm change in your opinion? The Bureau was very much interested in experimenting with this sort of thing. So we had done quite a detailed analysis of European Union structural fund mismanagement and we tied up with the Financial Times, Radio 4 and Al Jazeera for that as an experiment. But this was bigger, bolder, and yes, I think it showed what was possible. But as you, I think alluded to, it also showed the great complexities and challenges in collaborations. I think some people were not used to that collaborative work and they were more aligned towards pursuing their own goals. There were tensions inherent. We had one very awkward moment where one of the partners broadcast an hour before everyone else because they got the timing wrong and they didn't realize we were on UK summertime. And these were just annoyances that actually, I think because everyone was under stress, they were felt very fiercely and emotions and tensions ran high. I can't deny it was an incredibly stressful, collaborative approach. The thing which I've found more challenging though, ultimately from this is that I had hoped that some of the collaborative partners in that would have maybe given more support to the current situation that Julian finds himself in. And I've been, I think quite disappointed that some people who did work closely with Julian over the Iraq war logs and are now seeing the situation that Julian finds himself in which is directly linked to the Iraq war logs are not really being a vocal supporter. And I wish that I had a greater platform to really be a cheerleader for the protection of whistleblowers, the protection of sources and the fact that the great sin in all of this was in many ways the actions of US soldiers to civilians. Julian is not, I guess, the criminal in this. The criminal was the torturous and murderous behavior of some soldiers in the ground in Iraq. And of course, war is hell. Soldiers will behave appallingly. That is the nature of wars as the beast. But accountability has been lost in this. And so in the demand for accountability for Julian from the US government at the moment, what I would say in the counter responses, where is the US government's willingness to hold any sense of accountability, as Chris has mentioned, to those perpetrators of violent war crimes which we saw unfold in Iraq and the evidence is there in black and white. Chris, your reflection on the same topic. And maybe I'll include a question here. I'm being asked here by the audience. If the Bureau, the Guardian or the New York Times would get a throw of information directly as was published in 2010, would they dare to publish it giving the response now from the Trump administration and the indictment against Julian Assange? I think yes, is the answer. I think if an equivalent became available today, but we would probably see a similar partnership emerge, I suspect. I don't think one single news organization would necessarily take the risk of publishing. And that was part of what this was about. It was about multiple news organizations coming together and shouldering the responsibility of doing the due diligence of saying to the world, this is so important, we put aside our rivalries and are presenting to this to you across multiple platforms, multiple rivals. And I think you would see similar. I don't think news organizations would be cowed per se. And the Trump administration has its challenges, but let's not forget the Obama administration was pretty ferocious in pursuing the investigative journalists and those who'd received leaked government information as well. So this isn't a left-right issue. This is an issue of government and governance, I think. And I think we have to bear that in mind. I just, the question of, I mean, Ian mentioned about, you know, his book, Sighting, I just don't think we can ever underestimate the value of the broader leaks. I published a book a few years back on the history of arm drains. And I think I cited WikiLeaks 200 times in that book. It was an academic book, 200 times clear, straightforward citations where what had been real, not just Iraq, that was Afghanistan, that was Yemen, that was Pakistan, that was US behavior, bugging the UN and all sorts of stuff that we had found through the leaks. And I think also worth saying, and just following up on Ian's point, the reported source of this material has already paid a desperately terrible price and continues to pay a desperately terrible price, Chelsea Manning. And they've already pursued Chelsea brutally and continue to do so today, as I'm sure folk know. This is an attempt by the US with the collusion of the British to push upstream responsibility for the leak. And if they come for WikiLeaks at this time, is it gonna be ICIJ next for the Panama leaks? Or is it they're just gonna go for the source next time? They're gonna go for the Guardian. You know, it matters. This really matters, whatever individual feelings people might have around Julian or what WikiLeaks has done at different times. This is a fundamental issue. Defend Julian, defend WikiLeaks because if the US secures a prosecution here, that sets a terrible and dangerous precedent that has profound implications across the entire news establishment. Never mind the individual injustice that will be visited on Julian because once, you know, God forbid that Julian is swallowed up by the US federal criminal system. Really, I don't see a chance of any fair trial that having looked at how people are pulled into that system on federal indictments. And, you know, the UN Special Rapporteur has described this as cruel and unusual punishment. I mean, effectively you go into that US criminal justice system and your punishment begins on day one. There's no remand in the US system. You're in isolation. You're constantly at the mercy of intelligence agencies. You're gonna endlessly question you. You've got almost no access to your lawyers. It's true incarceration before you ever set foot in a court and faced actual charges. It is a desperately challenging situation and one that we should be aware of as well. So I simply don't think it's possible for there to be a fair trial, but there shouldn't be a trial. I mean, that's really the point here. There should not be a trial and the British government should not be colluding in attempts to extradite Julian into the federal criminal justice system of the United States. It simply should not. And I would also suggest as well that one of the, I mean, if you look at the justification for the extradition of Julian, then the question is as well, where does the buck then stop? I mean, should the editors who accepted the Iraq war logs data be guilty of the same thing that Julian is being accused of? So should I present myself at the US embassy for extradition? Should Alan Rusbridge be considered guilty for handling stolen data? I mean, at what points, the culpability issue, I think is problematic. And I think, arguably, if it doesn't stop with Julian, then where does it go next? And I think Chris is absolutely right. The precedent of this is chilling and unexplored. And my feeling is that the British government so willing, particularly in a kind of a Brexit environment to have close friendships with the US will do whatever it takes to try and get Julian over there. And the lawyers who will be valiantly fighting for Julian to stay in the UK and not be extradited, well, let's hope that they succeed, but precedents could be set here that would be, I think, as potent and as concerning as what we found in the war logs in many ways. Well, on that point, I've got a question here from both of you panelists here. It says, recently, BBC broadcasted a documentary called Once Upon a Time in Iraq, where they discussed the killings and torture of civilians by US military. How is it for BBC fine showing it yet Mr. Assange is being prosecuted for it? I just jump in there. I think that the framing by the US here is to sort of, to WikiLeaks was founded by and run by investigative journalists, but the US government has always tried to frame WikiLeaks as a sort of not really a journalistic organization as a sort of front or a sort of conduit. And I think that's how they're sort of trying to frame this. So would they go for the BBC? Absolutely not. And of course, that exceptional series that's on the BBC at the moment, for those who haven't seen it, you know, is very heavily informed by the Iraq war logs, by the way. But they're attempting to sort of hive off WikiLeaks and suggest that WikiLeaks is somehow different. But it's not, you know, it was a publisher. It was a journalistic organization providing a critical public function. And again, as Ian says, far too few journalists in the UK standing up on this. Every newspaper, every news magazine, every news organization should be very publicly challenged in changing this and pushing back hard against the attempt to extradite you. Well, Ian, how can we secure that this goes ahead? I mean, you've all seen agreeing on the fact that the UK journalists, where the battle is now with the UK courts is being fought. How can we get journalists in the UK to actually take a stand and care that this is about them, as much as it's about Sir Julian Sanz. It's about the future of journalism. And is there a chance to actually put pressure on politicians because this is a political persecution and there's no doubt about it? Well, I mean, the fundamental challenge and, you know, Chris and I, again, we both run separate organizations that lobby for the protection of civilians in conflict. But the problem is that the money and lobbying and advocacy available for the protection of individuals who either are whistleblowers or seeking to protect civilians in conflict, et cetera, you know, either us ourselves or the people we're lobbying and advocating for, there's precious little money for this sort of, so there's not really an ecosystem of advocacy. There's a huge ecosystem, you know, in the arms trade. There are lots of arms lobbyists and arms manufacturers, but, you know, those on the other side of the coin who would articulate for peace and protection of civilians aren't funded. And I think that this has a reverberation in terms of, you know, the civil society is not geared up in a way to protect individuals like Julian. I mean, you know, I've seen the pen international and hopefully English pen could be more vocal and we could be getting more writers and commentators supporting Julian. And I'd love to see pen international English pen engage more on that. I think as Chris has said, we should be hearing far more from journalists in the mainstream media articulating why this is a profoundly dangerous precedent to be set as I've often considered as a kind of a trick, as a kind of an act of theater to present myself at the US Embassy as an editor of an organization that handled the war logs saying that I should be extradited if Julian is to be because I do think it is as serious as the allegations. You know, this is such a serious issue that the democracy itself is a threat here and the right for freedom of expression. So, I mean, I think that the big challenge as I've said is, you know, there's no coordination possibly of this or there needs to be greater coordination and advocacy and lobbying. And, you know, of course, during a time of COVID, people are distracted. And of course each day ticks towards, you know, Julian's trial date and people are, you know, obviously much more interested in infection rates. So that is another blow towards the oxygen of publicity. I don't have an easy answer, but I think that, you know, it hopes that people watching this, you know, and I will speak out and I'm sure Chris will as well whenever we're asked to, but, you know, the coordination of this possibly relies in many ways on you, Christian, but know that you are supported by those who were intimately involved in the leaks at the time. I think there is one practical thing that maybe we could do and, you know, because we are approaching the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war logs. And clearly, you know, the original group of news organizations that worked together, we've drifted, different news organizations took different lines, the Guardian, and then we're quite a strong anti-wicky leaks position or rather a strong Julian position eventually. But perhaps there is an opportunity to bring back together all of those news organizations and have them collectively assert the value and importance of the Iraq war logs, which let's remind ourselves is part of Julian's extradition paperwork. It's cited in his paperwork. And I think that would send a strong signal, actually, if those major news organizations would come back together and reassert the critical importance and the moral imperative that we had to publish, the fact that we did practice due diligence, and that a decade on that the historic value of the leaks has stood completely, not a single pushback that I'm aware of on anything that we revealed 10 years ago. Nothing has really changed my understanding or worldview in the following decade of what we revealed at the time. We added to the public realm. And I think that is something we could perhaps do is maybe bring back together those original partners for a strong public statement. Maybe we could get those partners back here, I don't know. That's a good idea. I'll write to Vintner. Well, I'll write to Russ Bridger and suggest maybe he could lead the way. Very good idea, thank you. I was asked, how is Julian Assange? And that is, well, I can answer that one. Yesterday in management hearing, it was revealed that our recent psychiatric evaluation has shown that his health has deteriorated quite substantially over the last few weeks. And no wonder he has been locked in now without any hesitation from his family, his children. He's not even seen his lawyers for now five months. It also emerged in the management hearing yesterday that the US Justice Department under Attorney General Barr is doing the utmost to derail the hearing that was planned for September 7th by introducing a totally new or breast-over document at this last minute, which of course should be considered a travesty of justice to such a late stage. But before I let you go, before we end here, can I get your thoughts about the possibility you are seasoned UK journalist and of course, you know, the justice system in the UK better than I do. Is there a chance for Julian Assange to win this round in Magistrate Court, in your opinion? I think we've seen in the past some cases of extradition being shocking and people were extradited. And then sometimes the role of the die was such that they weren't. I think the issue here may lie within political will. And, you know, as, I mean, I'm continually struck by the fact that our officers were repeatedly broken to when we were doing the investigation and that I was informed by a very trusted contact that I was being heavily investigated myself. So, you know, the mechanisms of the intelligence services in this country were intimately involved as far as I could see in sending out strong messages of either disruption or intimidation in relation to the Iraq war logs. The UK government is not a friend of Mr Assange. The UK government is not a friend of the WikiLeaks. And largely speaking, the UK government was not very friendly to the Bureau. And as Chris has said, you know, we've shown that governments are repeated liars in this environment. Will political intent and intelligence security claims of national security bend the law? It wouldn't be unheard of. And, unfortunately, in the time of now, given, as you said, how Julian is being treated in prison and, you know, there was no leniency in relation to COVID, et cetera, et cetera, I think that he is a political pawn. And I obviously am hopeful that the UK justice system will prevail, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't. We have little time left, Chris, your final thoughts on this topic. Perhaps there's some hope. I would say that the English criminal justice system has sometimes been wary of extraditing UK citizens into the US criminal justice system. And I think if a case, if we can cut through the political nature of this deportation, this attempted deportation or extradition, and make the point, first of all, the moral case, and secondly, that it would result in Julian's cruel and unusual punishment, which is entirely unlawful. You cannot do that to somebody. That may, yet, with the right tailwind sway and magistrate, it has happened before in the UK, and perhaps it may happen again. But more voices need to be heard, more people need to be speaking up, and that needs to be public. It's great to have this discourse today. I want to also be reading editorials in the telegraph and the Daily Mail defending Assange here, because they need to. Indeed, Chris, more voices need to be heard. I want to thank you, Chris, for this hour, and thank you Ian Orton. It was a great pleasure to have you on this event today. Let's hope that we have a continuation of discussion about the importance of the Iraq work, as you mentioned. For you, all of you who are watching this, this will be available, of course, online afterwards. Thank you for watching this live broadcast on the Internet. And please support the campaign, the Don't Extrudeid campaign, Don't Extrudeid Assange campaign. Visit don'textrudeidassange.com website and take part in that very important struggle to avert this disaster, not just for an individual, but for the future of journalism. Thank you.