 Hello, good evening. Welcome to SOAS University and thank you for being here for the SOAS ICOP event. Just going to have to tell you a little bit about SOAS ICOP before we kick things off. ICOP is an acronym for influencing the corridors of power. We're a group of students, staff and academic at SOAS. What we do is a range of things in order to bridge the gap between academia, students and Parliament. For example, we author briefings with experts on a variety of different topics, as well as holding events like this one, with a view to inform and to have some kind of impact on our leaders. This is a topic that we have covered a few times before, but of course it's still relevant. We are going to revisit the topic of journalism and the censorship of journalists. We're going to just start things with a short video clip just to contextualise things. We are focusing, as you can see with the flyer, we've got a picture of Julian Assange there, so we are focusing on the case of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. So for the benefit of people who don't know much about that, it's a very quick video. So just how powerful is WikiLeaks? Well, WikiLeaks was founded by Assange around 2006 as a journalistic platform for whistleblowers to share evidence of illegal or corrupt activities. However, since there is relative danger to mass publishing classified information, WikiLeaks acts as a sort of intermediary for whistleblowers. They're able to leak it to the press without having anonymous whistleblowers accidentally identified. According to WikiLeaks, they've released more classified intelligence documents than the rest of the world press combined. The organization first received global attention in 2010. WikiLeaks published the video of a US helicopter gunning down multiple journalists in Iraq entitled Collateral Murder. Later that year, they also released thousands of internal military logs concerning the Afghan war. Their release painted the war as a failure and disclosed the huge number of unreported civilian deaths, higher terrorist activity, and the sponsorship of terrorism by Pakistan and Iran. Several months later, WikiLeaks released a similar cache of documents concerning the Iraq war. They detailed 15,000 unaccounted civilian deaths and US tolerating torture by Iraqi security forces. But perhaps the most damaging leak was that of US diplomatic cables in late 2010. These were private communications between US State Department officials and diplomats discussing world leaders and international conflict. Many outlined corruption and human rights abuses in US friendly countries. The publication of these cables even contributed to the collapse of the Tunisian government when it was revealed that the president's family was corrupt and disproportionately wealthy. The response against WikiLeaks has been overwhelming. The US government has said these leaks could threaten national security and many countries have openly condemned the organization. The then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier. When Canadian political adviser even called for the assassination of Julian Assange. Additionally, since its inception, the US government and others have repeatedly attempted to shut down the site and arrest its founder. Amazon has since blocked WikiLeaks from using its servers and a number of countries have censored their internet to prevent WikiLeaks access. Payment services like Visa, Mastercard and PayPal have also blocked donations to WikiLeaks. But in recent years there have been a number of imitators including region specific whistleblowing organizations which have been met with their own takedown notices. WikiLeaks has sent governments scrambling, exposed corruption and garnered a massive international effort to dismantle its operation. No matter how you look at it, there is no question that WikiLeaks and the online whistleblowers that have followed in its wake yield tremendous power in this new age of information. We're very happy to be joined today by three excellent panellists. I'm just going to quickly introduce each one of them. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans for 15 years for the New York Times. Prior to that he worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for the Christian Science Monitor, NPR and Dallas Morning News. His books include War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning which was published in 2002 and American Fascists, The Christian Right and the War on America published in 2007. Also on the panel we have Stella Assange. Stella is a lawyer and human rights defender. She has campaigned tirelessly for the release of her husband Julian Assange. We're very happy to welcome her back to so us where she once studied law and politics. Matt Kennodd, he's an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified UK which is a news outlet covering British national security issues. He worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times in the US and UK and he's the author of two books, Irregular Army published in 2012 which investigated the degradation of the US military during the war on terror and The Racket published in 2015 which investigated how the US rigs the global economy for the benefit of its elite. Welcome to the panel. Stella, I think I'm going to start with you. We saw a video introduction into WikiLeaks and Julian. Can you bring us up to speed on where things are with his extradition case? Sure. Thank you. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here because it's always like coming home. While we're at a critical juncture because whereas Julian's extradition case has dragged on from now over four years we've just three weeks ago heard back from the High Court, a single court, a single judge who behind closed doors dismissed Julian's application for permission to appeal in a decision that was just three pages long. This was a dismissal of an application that was 152 pages long. So you can imagine what that ruling looked like. Julian is now at the final stage of his appeals in the sense that his avenues have narrowed dramatically and he just has one barrier to being extradited at this point because the High Court has refused his application to have a full appeal hearing. He can now apply to a separate panel of two judges of the High Court to say that the first judge got it wrong. You know, this is a case in which Julian should never have been imprisoned in the first place and if the justice system had actually done what it should, it would have been dismissed and he would be a free man. So the first thing to understand is that this is a political case. It's politically driven, it's politically motivated and it is on its face political because Julian is being prosecuted for having published evidence of US military, US officials, committing and covering up war crimes, committing torture, corrupting the judicial processes of European countries in Germany and France, sorry, in Germany and Spain. Initially I raised these countries because of specific cases that I'm thinking of but the evidence is of a system of impunity and of subversion of international legal obligations and protections that protect human rights and protect victims and a system that the US has imposed behind the scenes to get away with murder quite literally and that is really what is going on. That Julian opened the curtains to how this actually happens and there is a revenge that is taking place through the abuse of the legal process to count him, to keep him in prison, to make an example of him so that the rest of the press, not just the press but everyone else gets the message that if you actually try to exercise your rights, if you actually try to expose the abuser then you will be punished, and you will be silenced and you will be imprisoned. So that's the real situation. The legal situation is just a dress-up, it's called a dressing-up, pretending like there is some kind of fairness or process or whatever you want to call it, but the reality is that we have evidence of grave criminality and the guilty party is the US government and that is a government that is keeping Julian in prison and that wants to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Chris, if I can just bring you in here. Some people believe that Julian being extradited to the US may not be such a bad thing given that it might be an opportunity to reveal some of the injustices that have been intrinsic in his case. What would a trial look like if he is extradited to the US? He would be extradited to the Eastern District Court of Virginia, which is where the quote-unquote terrorism cases are held, and my good friend Sammy Allarian was a great Palestinian activist. Professor was tried there, and you can look at the burlesque of a trial that Sammy underwent. They finally extradited him who lives in Turkey, but he was held in county jails. The legal farce that defines the entire process here, the complete evisceration of any respect for the rule of law, international law or UK law, will continue in some ways it will be worse because after 9-11 a series of measures were adopted by the US legal system including special administrative measures known as SAMS, and I covered Fahad Hashmi. He was actually arrested in London. Right after 9-11, with the prompting of Israel, all of the major Palestinian organizations, the Holy Land Foundation, and Palestinian activists like Fahad and Sammy and others were swept up. None of them had committed acts of terrorism. None of them had committed illegal activity, but they used these new anti-terrorism laws and SAMS to crucify them. And that's what will happen to Julian. So what it means is that there are all sorts of draconian legal measures that the United States can impose so that even in the beginning with severe isolation, but also that they can prosecute based on secret evidence that even Julian's lawyers are not allowed to see. So one of the things that all of us who have spent time over the years observing in the UK courts is how the most basic elements of judicial protection are eradicated in Julian's case, attorney-client privilege. The fact that they are through UC Global, the CIA, spied on Julian's meetings with his lawyers, but not just that. The fact that the Espionage Act is a legitimate legal tool to prosecute someone who is not an American citizen. The fact that you have somebody who is granted political asylum and given even Ecuadorian citizenship and the reason that Julian was in the embassy is because the UK government would not give him safe passage to the airport. The fact that through Lenin Moreno, who was the new president of Ecuador, and he got quite a bit of money from, I believe, the IMF, a huge loan for doing the dirty work of the American government, and revoked Julian's citizenship, then Metropolitan Police entered the Ecuadorian embassy, that sovereign territory of Ecuador, to seize someone who's been granted political asylum. I mean, just endless. And I mean, we have to be clear, as Stella said, that not only has Julian not committed a crime, or certainly not the crime that he's charged with, but in fact, and I speak as a former investigative reporter for the New York Times, he has carried out the most important journalistic activity of any journalist of our generation. And he has the reason that he is a target is because what journalists such as myself did, we did on a much, much smaller scale. They have exposed malfeasans or lies or crimes. He exposed thousands of crimes through these documents and destroyed the kind of credibility of the US military, the US intelligence service, the State Department, and these institutions were wounded, certainly wounded in terms of public perception. And they can't forgive him for that. So, no, I don't think that the expedition, if it takes place, we're all praying that it won't, but it's probably going to happen. I don't think either his legal situation or his personal situation in terms of incarceration will improve in many ways will be worse and from all anecdotally, I know about Belmarsh, it's already really bad. Chris, you also closely followed the case of Chelsea Manning, who was pardoned eventually. Do you think that could be a possible outcome if Julian Assange was to go through trial in the US? No, because I did attend Chelsea's trial with Cornel West, who's now working on his presidential campaign. We both live in Princeton. We get up at three in the morning and drive down to afford me listening to the classic soul. Cornel drove, fortunately. But there it was a military trial. And there were many impositions, including which will happen to Julian, that Chelsea was not allowed to raise motivation. Why? It was Chelsea, for instance, who leaked the collateral murder video and that there were two Reuters correspondents who were killed. And the US government lied to Reuters repeatedly not only about what happened, but even said they didn't have the video. They couldn't find it. I think that's what they said. But either way. And I think that Chelsea was pardoned for two reasons. One, because the sentence was so draconian. And because when she leaked that material, she was so young. I think that what kind of sealed Julian's fate was the release of the files known as Vault 7, which exposed the CIA hacking tools into our telephones or even our TVs or cars, et cetera. And it doesn't matter. I think you've turned it off, but it's still on. And that was angering. It just gets into a whole discussion of the CIA and how it operates. And what it is, it's a state within a state. It's completely dark. It also doesn't really function as an intelligence service or 17 intelligence agencies in the United States. So the CIA has really transformed itself into a black paramilitary organization with its own death squads and drones and everything else. And I had a friend of mine who was a ranger in Afghanistan. And he said these kind of dark squads, which they knew nothing about, would carry out night raids and stuff. And by the time he walked in with his unit, the villager was a flame and everybody opened fire on them. They're often extremely counterproductive. But that's when you heard the stories about the discussion to assassinate in that Julian. And that's because that is the primary activity. After 9-11, it was open season. So all of the restraints that have been put on the CIA in the 70s under the Pike hearings and the Church hearings were lifted, which included massive numbers of targeted assassinations. So I think because Julian under Vulva 7 or WikiLeaks under Vulva 7 in particular went after the CIA, the campaign for vengeance was ratcheted up to a whole new level and put Julian in a position that is different from the position that Chelsea was in. I just want to bring Matt in here. Matt, we've got some clipings or some articles that you or a declassified UK has produced. I was wondering if you can see them. If you could just talk us through some of the work that you've done and some of the documents that you have exposed. I mean, just to carry on from what Chris has said. The case against Julian is political in every sense. And you see that reporting on the case. I mean, I've reported on it now since 2019, mostly with my colleague Mark Curtis. And it's astounding the stuff you find that just doesn't get covered in the media. And I often say this is that if anything we've done, declassified it appeared in The Guardian all the times, this case might have been very different. So the media is complicit in Julian's torture and possible extradition. But I mean, I did one this week about Keir Starmer, for example, a Labour leader who was head of the CPS from 2008 to 2013. So this was the period when the cable day releases happened. And I asked for their, firstly I got hold of his documents of his travels when he was at the CPS and it showed he'd been to Washington four times. So I sent a bridge of information at request to the CPS to say can I just get some itineraries or briefing notes about those trips. That's quite routine, you can usually get those from the Foreign Office or other ministries of state. And they said they'd destroyed them all. I didn't have to give an explanation. This story went out and declassified. It did quite well on social media and stuff, but again it wasn't covered in a single mainstream newspaper. And sometimes I feel like I'm living in 1984 genuinely. The stuff, for example, what Chris mentioned, this is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world superpower than anyone in history. He's sitting in a maximum security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversation with his lawyers. They're on record as plotting to assassinate him. I mean any of those things, if you tell someone from a different time, oh yeah this happened and he was sent anyway. Not only that, but the media didn't cover it at all. It's scary. It's a really scary thing, because if they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball, if the media can drop the ball, they can do it with any of us. And the assassination article was really interesting. Sorry, I will come to my articles. The assassination article was really interesting because that came I think at the end of 2021. Now 30 former US officials went on the record to say that the CIA had drawn up plans to assassinate Julian Assange. Now that's amazing in itself because obviously in Washington he's an unpopular figure, so 30 US officials thought it was serious enough that they would go on the record. Mike Pompeo subsequently said they should be prosecuted for that. How is that covered in the British media? The BBC, the most important media organisation in this country, there's never been a single word written about that. This is a journalist that was a plot to assassinate him in London. There's never been a single word about it. The only place that any words ever been written about that plot is BBC Somali. So if you read Somali and you read BBC, you might know about it. But that kind of goes to show how crazy the times we're living in is. We started working in 2019 when we started to classify straight away looking at this case because there were some open goals that we found straight away. For example, the Chief Magistrate who oversaw the case back then, she's called Lady Arbathnoff. She's since been promoted to the High Court, but she made two key decisions against Julian in 2018. Her husband is a former Defence Minister for the Tories. She actually received financial benefits from the Foreign Office before she made those rulings. So we did a stream of articles. I mean, there was tons of stuff. In fact, that came out and declassified, and she eventually stood aside on the case. We never heard that because of our articles, but the timing made sense. Subsequent to that, we've done one about how Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, who's the High Court judge, who overruled the lower court decision not to extra like Sange. He's a 40-year good friend of the Tory Minister and Sange's arrest. Again, not a single word has ever appeared in the mainstream media about this stuff. And if they had, there might have been movement because actually in the case of Lady Arbathnoff, there was an article in The Guardian about another case, and she had to publicly make a statement. So you know, the media could easily ratchet out the pressure on these people, but they don't. I mean, I could talk for days about this case just because it's so insane the legal system, and it's all happened, it's so brazen. Jonathan Swift's recent ruling was three pages. He took 10 months to write three pages, which basically, and the argument of that, if you read it was, their application was too long and can't be bothered to read it. They want to re-litigate the decision. It's like, yes, that's what an appeal is. You can re-litigate stuff, you think the former judge has got wrong. So I don't think Julian's ever going to get a fair hearing in the UK, and it has major implications for everyone in Britain because a major sign of authoritarianism is when the judiciary becomes under the control of the state. And in the case of Julian, that's happened. If it can happen with him, it can happen with anyone. So it's a very worrying thing for anyone because, as Chris said, we know that there's elements in Washington that want to get him, and will stop at nothing to get him. In a functioning democracy with an independent judiciary, that would be the protection for someone in the UK jurisdiction against those forces, but they become accomplices to those forces, so he's got no chance. I'll just finish by saying that I think that... We've covered a lot the legal case, but I think Julian exposed three major things with his work. Firstly, it was the US Empire and the War on Terror, which was just the explosion of violence which terrorised countries, societies, all over the Middle East. His work there will be remembered forever and actually changed the world, as that video mentioned. The Tunisian Revolution happened on the back of those releases. Can you rather... Good changes happened because of those releases. So there's that element of it. The other element I think he exposed was the mainstream media because we saw when a journalist was really doing their job and actually taking power on in the way that we're told journalists do, the reaction of the mainstream media, they hated him and they went to war with him immediately after those releases. I remember actually it was quite interesting. I was working for the Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened and the reaction of the office at the Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusion with the mainstream media because for me it was amazing. It was like, okay, someone is actually doing what we're told we're meant to do. We're exposing wrongdoing by the most powerful country in the world but the journalists there all hated him and would speak openly about what he'd done wrong and how you shouldn't do it like this, you shouldn't do it like that. One of those journalists actually was Stephanie Kerchgeser who later became a journalist with a guardian and was one of the major... She was an author of countless articles basically hammering Julian creating conditions for getting him out of the embassy. He exposed the mainstream media and that's obvious. It happened in real time at the time but it also happened subsequently as I'm saying with the fact that none of them covered this case. None of them in a critical way. There's been some critical coverage in the US with that Yahoo News article about the assassination. There's been good stuff in El País in Spain, some in Germany, zero in the UK. The third thing is the judiciary and he's basically just shown that the British judiciary as an independent organ is non-existent. It doesn't exist. They call it the Assange exception now that everything's out the wall and if there can be an exception for Assange as I keep saying, there can be for anyone. Rebecca Vincent is here who heads international advocacy reports without borders. She went to Belmarsh to just cover to meet to see Julian as civil society should do a political prisoner. She was barred entry. I think Rebecca has said before that she finds it harder to access Assange and access the case than political prisoners in Turkey or someone like that. So it's really scary. It goes to the real basics of what kind of society we live in and what it's revealed is quite ugly. Instead of just staying on the topic of the media coverage of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange's case, initially news outlets were all over WikiLeaks stories. Many benefited and sold papers and got exposure because of these stories. And then we saw that there was a focus more, eventually there was a focus more on Julian Assange as a personality as opposed to what he was exposing. So when did that change happen? Well, it wasn't pretty much a media shift. So what you saw was that while the media partners knew that Julian still had explosive material that still had to be released, they partners, and as soon as they had what they thought they wanted from him, then they turned around and attacked him. And that's really, you have to put yourself in the moment because where the press was at back in 2010 when these stories broke, they were really struggling for a financial model to survive. They hadn't really adapted to the age of the internet. And here you had Julian coming in with a completely new model of journalism that evolved journalism. There's an article called the WikiLeaksization of the American Press that basically argues that now every press outlet has adopted the innovations that WikiLeaks brought in in 2010. And so they didn't know what to do with this and of course Julian was a superstar. He came from outside the Old Boys Network. He talked about how these revelations should lead to reform and how the collateral murder video reveals that this is a war crime and he displayed why what we were seeing is a war crime. And also became a media critic because with the partners that WikiLeaks was publishing alongside he would say, well look at the Guardian, why look at the cable that the Guardian is basing this story on and they have redacted 85% of it and they're not saying this and that and the other because they're afraid to be sued but you know like it's published on the website so what are they afraid of and they're self-censoring for financial reasons because they have advertisers that might be embarrassed or whatever and so the publishers were exposed for their own hypocrisy for their own core journalism or their editorial choices were all out there for any discerning reader to analyse and this was basically Julian's idea of what he calls scientific journalism. I mean I find it very ironic now that you have all this talk of misinformation, right? I mean that's just covered for censorship. There are always new organisations that are subsidised to find misinformation and really it's just a means to control the narrative but WikiLeaks if this whole disinformation age really took truth seriously then all these kind of disinformation organisations would hold WikiLeaks up as the example, right? Because Julian's model of journalism is what he calls scientific journalism that should be verifiable that okay you can write an analysis of a news item but you have to show what you're basing it on and so the cables for example are the perfect example of this you write up an analysis of something that happened then you reference the cables and whatever else you're basing your news story on of course this was a completely new model of journalism and one that journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated and they didn't like the WikiLeaks model at all because of course WikiLeaks was completely reader funded and readers were global and responding enthusiastically and that's why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America and another one started the banking locate in December 2010 so now you see a lot about this has become a standardised model of censorship to demonetise, to cut channels off of their readership and their supporters but the very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks just within two or three days of the US State Department cables being published at that stage you had the complaints that PayPal allows donations to the cwcogs clan but you can't donate to WikiLeaks which has just been exposing US work arms so it really kind of exposed the true power structure and the way the mainstream media also as you say was complicit and depended on the authorities perhaps for their sources and here came WikiLeaks which was able to protect very high quality sources and a large volume of information and they had never been able to match that not even a little bit so this concerted effort to turn on Julian because Julian and WikiLeaks was a threat to their journalistic model to their perceived reputation and because WikiLeaks was bigger than all of them put together in terms of the journalistic impact in terms of the journalistic importance of these publications in terms of Julian's platform because he now had global attention and his message was journalism can lead to reform it can lead to justice it can help victims it can be used in court and it has been used in court in the European Court of Rights even at the UK Supreme Court in the Chegos case here it has been used as evidence and this is a completely new approach to journalism WikiLeaks is bigger than just journalism because it's authentic official documents so it's basically putting internal history onto the public record and putting it at the disposal of the public and victims of state sponsored crime for the first time were able to use these documents to seek justice and for example in the case of Calidol Maazru who was abducted and tortured by the CIA a German citizen he was able to use WikiLeaks cables out of the European Court of Human Rights when he sued Macedonia for the rendition there's a completely new approach to basically bringing journalism to its maximum potential I think I've heard Matt say that the Johnny Depp Amberhead trial was covered in the media a lot more thoroughly than the case of Julian Assange Chris, as somebody watching all of this unfold would you say that the media's treatment of Julian is a continuation of something that was already in existence or is this something new? I think it illustrates the bifurcation between the non-commercial media which has always been existent and the commercial media so traditionally the alternative media has always shamed the commercial media into doing this job so I work very closely with Robert Shear who now runs his own site Shearpost he was the editor of Ramparts magazine and he exposed Coentail Pro never made any money at Ramparts in fact very good book very funny book about Ramparts called a bomb in every issue Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew said that in Ramparts there was a bomb in every issue Bob had all sorts of desperate ways to try and make the magazine comfortable including filtering advertisement for Pan Am from the back of Time magazine putting on the back of Ramparts taking it around to potential advertisers to show that he was respectable and of course Pan Am sued him to take it off the iconic photo of the small girl making it running down the road in Vietnam that was burned by Napalm that was in Ramparts all the black power movement so Ice was in Ramparts so Julian, in any need of course everyone said even bigger way exposed the not just the bankruptcy but the collaboration between legacy media and the ruling elite and I come from the New York Times I say the real motto of the New York Times is to significantly alienate those on whom we depend for privilege and access that's a real motto and so as Stella said they turned on him immediately but in fact and I think as you mentioned when we were at the French role they hated him from the moment that it was published but if they didn't print that material then they would be completely exposed for who they are they were forced by the work that Julian and Wiki Weeks did to do their job and that is traditionally I.F. Stone all of the great journalists I remember when I was working at the New York Times some intern came to me and said well who do you think the best journalists are in the country and I said well I could tell you but you would have never heard of them and he said well they don't work for us the Times I said no, definitely and that's why I admire Julian so much and as does Bob Shear I write, there aren't many people in the States who write as much as I do about Julian the Massage but I can tell you that Bob Shear feels I never write enough and he has he and I both lost our jobs over our opposition to the invasion of Iraq I've been a Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times spent seven years there this wasn't an uninformed decision but both Bob and I feel very very passionately about what's happening not only because of the gross injustice that's being done to Julian as a person let's be clear it's a slow motion execution I mean they are consciously destroying him physically and psychologically and they know precisely what they're doing because they do it to people all around the globe in Blacksides it's what they did by the way to Fahed Ashman they kept him 23 months in isolation and when he walked into the court in Brooklyn he was virtually a zombie so that's why the press is so hostile it's because as Stella said that what happened, what WikiLeaks did and what it published exposed their own collaboration with the very centers of power that had committed these crimes and just to close the quid pro quo of legacy media organizations like the New York Times is that they will do the dirty work for the state so we had a journalist out of California Gary Webb was in San Diego wasn't a chronic Sacramento so I was in Central America at the time I covered the Contra War and he exposed the sale of cocaine that raises like Oakland flooding these or communities and the way they took him down and I have a friend who was at the time a colleague at the time who was part of that process they didn't go out and re-report the story they went to Langley and they got background briefings that from the CIA that poured contempt on the reporting but they didn't re-report it and it was so and of course it's always when you come from a smaller paper and I worked for other papers before I worked for the New York Times the weight of that those media organizations are intense because they intimidate your own editors as they are meant to and of course again eventually what created suicide so there's having worked at the time for 15 years if as a reporter you significantly alienate or anger those in positions of power they will cut off access and that hurts you that in the highway administration or the editors at the paper see that as a journalistic failing and so you're very careful about not crossing too many red lines to anger people in power and just to close I was a foreign correspondent because I was overseas for 20 years in places like Sarajevo and Gaza and not only was I at war with the narrative being spun by people in whatever administration whether it's Republican or Democrat but I was always at war with my own Washington Bureau because those people their idea of reporting is access their idea of reporting is having lunch with Dick Chang I was based in Paris after 9-11 covering Al Qaeda and the French had given carte blanche in terms of intelligence because they desperately wanted to prevent the invasion of Iraq they were the French intelligence service had human assets inside of Al Qaeda the CIA at the time did not and so I had amazing material and I covered I remember going into the counterterrorism ministry and I covered Richard Reid in the shoe bomber and the British intelligence by the way was useless and gave me nothing but the head of the counterinsurgency department said get him the Richard Reid file and there I am looking at pictures of Reid walking out of Brexit Brexit Moss etc when I would go back to New York of course the rest of the investigative team was being fed by the Bush by the Bush White House by Chang and they utterly dismissed real intelligence that I had through racism they just dismissed them because they were French so and that was a very shameful period because they, as with Russia Gate the New York Times perpetuated what we now know was a lie but there's no price for it because of course what they were doing is they were handmaidens for power and if you within those institutions those those reporters are not only promoted but lionized and given prizes I know reporters who never left the news world they just I'm not joking I mean for 30 years they just typed out what they were fed and and if you if you challenge power you can do it a little bit but if you challenge power consistently you become management problem and all of the really good reporters the ones with any integrity eventually get pushed out of these institutions so the film of killing fields was a friend of mine he was brought back from Cambodia and it was when the developers were seizing every inch of Manhattan to throw out the working class the middle class and he started writing it and the publishers and the publishers rich friends and the advertisers and the editor executive editor that I paid Rosenthal began to refer to Sydney as my little commie in the newsroom and then he was pushed out and so these institutions these big powerful institutions despite all the publicity about you know fearlessness and truth and our part of our integrated into the power elite and just for those people who fall for the myth of the Washington Post and the Watergate remember that all of the crimes that were exposed by the Nixon White House had been used for years against the anti-war movement the black power movement I mean the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton and the Post didn't write a work it was only when those tactics were used against part of the established power system that the Post would report it, that's why but there's nothing that Nixon's plumber's unit did to the Democratic headquarters that hadn't been done in works for years and years of years against dissidents we know that from Colin Toprow I think we're going to open up to audience questions now so if you have a question or any of the panelists if you just raise your hand and somebody will bring a mic to you and if you can just make your questions quite brief so we can get as many in as possible two on the back I'm in touch I just wanted to ask you Chris in that do you really think that there's actually journalists out there that are proper journalists are they really journalists or are they just in fact units of the establishment that are rolled out to do whatever we established once we've done this I'm talking about journalists within mainstream I'm talking about New York Times I'm talking about Washington Post I'm not talking about Matt who has declassified because you two are going to get called tin foil people and that you're the ones that are telling the truth however all these other people that are charlatans how do we go around them how do we stop them from the narrative so you know they're not charlatans they're careerists and they know what's good for their career and they know what isn't I mean for instance having covered the Middle East for seven years and I'm talking about fellow reporters who've covered the Middle East with me they know that it is not good for your career to speak about what the Israeli apartheid state has done to Palestinians that's very bad for your career so they keep their mouth shut we were all in Gaza I've been in refugee camps refugee camps and of course now they've just bombed and I covered 2002 of that encouragement but they will bombed camps and lie about surgical strikes against bomb making facilities and I'm literally looking at the bodies of the children so there are good reporters within these institutions but they either muzzle themselves or if they clash with the institution eventually as I did I mean you reach a moment in the road where you have a choice to either pay fealty to your career in my case I was speaking out about denouncing the calls to invade Iraq for all the reasons that are now obvious and I was given I was called in and given a formal written reprimand because I was quote unquote impuning the impartiality of the New York Times at the same time John Burns it was based in London was cheerleading the war in Iraq so it wasn't that reporters at the New York Times were forbidden from speaking about Iraq they were just forbidden from speaking about Iraq in a way that challenged the dominant narrative no Stephen Kinser is a great reporter he worked with The Times there are good reporters but they don't advance you know I was talking to Noam I like Noam's book Manufacturing Consent but Noam doesn't actually understand how newsrooms work he's not wrong in the conclusions that he makes there's never rules written on the wall but you learn you're astute enough to learn what will advance your career and what doesn't and it's hard to get a job in a paper like The Times and so and these people learn to play by those rules because they want to advance I will just add the tragedy is that you do get people who come in with integrity and the institution breaks them so I know reporters who you know by the time they're in their early 50s they are completely broken people those are an institution like The New York Times is a very stressful anxiety I knew a reporter who came in every day and the first thing he did was throw up in the bathroom because you you never know you're constantly on edge because if you cross those lines too much and they don't tell you especially at a place like The Times you know they nobody's screaming at you they don't but you know they they're kind of gently plunging the knife into your back you know when they when they go after you as they did with me they don't actually fire you it's like the old Soviet Union one day you're on the Politburo and the next day you're in Kazakhstan that's what they did with my friend Ray Bonner who exposed the Masote massacre what they do is put you on night or something which is right up there with obituaries but they and they know you're going to leave and you know you're never going to get out you're there forever but it's careerism it's careerism and you can have reporters who have integrity and are good reporters but ultimately they always face that choice and unfortunately the vast majority can see the institution and those reporters who advance within the hierarchy are advanced because they're selected because those who run the institution know that their primary loyalty is to the institution and to their own career and not either to good reporters or good reporting and those are the people that run it so in fact if you look at the hierarchy sometimes these are phenomenal mediocrities How do you break the monopoly that they have? How do you break the monopoly that you have? The monopoly that they have Send your money to WikiLeaks Matt did you want to add to that? Yeah I don't think you can be a good journalist in the mainstream media in this country it's not that there aren't good journalists working within that mainstream media it's just that structurally it's impossible I think as Chris says some people in a sort of implicit subconscious way are aware so when they get to their 50s they might have some sort of crisis because somewhere they're aware that they're doing bidding of powerful forces when they're telling themselves that they're doing the opposite because we do there is a free press quote-unquote in this country in the sense that you're not going to go to Gulag, when I showed you the science but generally he's the first journalist publisher that's being put in prison in this country so how you enforce the uniformity of thought the obedience to power within mainstream journalists is something that's really exercising me because it's quite amazing the obedience that there is in the mainstream media without any kind of stick in the background it's not like Soviet Russia where you get put in prison so it is I had a literal I was literally told when I was at the financial times because I went into the financial times with the same sort of politics and the same sort of idea about journalism as I have now but I just acted as if I was at the classified I just kept on writing all the stories that I wanted to write and covering the things I wanted to cover and it got to the point after like three years where the editor of the paper took me into a meeting and he said his words were you're a good journalist Matt but you're not an FT journalist you've saved the world stuff and come back maybe in a couple of years and that's essentially how they view it you know for them it's completely alien the idea that you might use journalism as a tool to to better the world and inform people of what's happening for them it's a career and it's a status symbol and I never had the problem I never had double crisis of conscious because I never wanted to be a journalist if I couldn't do that and luckily I've been able to but that's rare the other part of how the system works is there's no infrastructure for people to stay independent a few people come out of university or journalism school where do you go people get mortgages they have kids they want to have a normal life you can't you can't live like when I left Columbia journalism school in New York I wanted to work for democracy now and I did for three or four months but I wasn't paid and then I had to leave and then I saw this job at the financial times I didn't want to go to financial times but essentially that's what happens and then you enter the system and then you slowly get all your rough edges shorn off and you become part of the uniformity of thought and I saw it also explicitly in the financial times Chris mentioned Jomsky's work manufacturing consent which was obviously a formative influence on me and a lot of other people but I remember when I kept on writing how I wanted to write so when I mentioned the Egyptian president or dictator I'd write US backed as well as so you're allowed to write Iranian backed Hezbollah but you're not allowed to write US backed if it's a dictator US backed will have a dictatorship in Riyadh so I kept on writing and it was explicit actually at the financial times they would take out if I put US backed before dictator and that's a very interesting and a rare opportunity also mentioning Jomsky I remember when I was towards the end of my time I wanted to interview him for the paper and they I interviewed him for the paper and then I sent him the copy which was all about the socialist governments which were coming up in Latin America Chabez and Morales and people and they said no we can't publish this so I eventually had to publish it on a one, they had a little blog which they published it on but then a couple of weeks later it was the first time Chomsky had ever been interviewed by the financial times and it goes to this like no one's telling these journalists don't interview Chomsky he's the most important intellectual in the world it has been for decades but why does no one think to ask and then they were eventually embarrassed by my story and got one of their sort of establishment journalists to go and interview him and that got in the paper it was literally a couple of months later they did their first paper interview with him so it's a very insidious system and it's so insidious that journalists can say to themselves I can write what I like but obviously they can't and I think it was quite interesting starting to declassify it with Mark Kerr in the sense that journalists don't know how to react to us but we have a complete blackout in the mainstream media and no one will cover us but we do get approached by mainstream journalists who say we love what you're doing like can we come and work for you so there's a hunger on the inside or a structure where people can do proper journalism it's just that the way that the mainstream media has gone you can't do that anymore and I'll finish with this that in the case of Britain I think there has been something really sinister that's happened in the last 20 years particularly at The Guardian because although The Guardian now is a just a state-alive, state-affiliated media obviously the early WikiLeaks releases in 2010 were done with The Guardian and I remember in the 2010 when those releases were happening with The Guardian and The New York Times I'd read the same cables being covered in The Guardian and The New York Times and I'd always thought wow we're lucky to have The Guardian because The New York Times were taking a much more pro-US, pro-government position that's now flipped and now I much would prefer to read The New York Times covering this stuff not saying it's perfect, neither of them were perfect then but there was a difference and I think that's happened in a very literal way by state repression and also clever state repression so the first story we did declassified was we tried to work out what happened to The Guardian in after Martha the Snowden leaks because they also did the Snowden leaks in 2013 obviously that was a hugely brave story to do they didn't do it in a, they didn't do all the sort of everything they should have done with that stuff but they did do it now we looked at the denotes committee meetings which denotes committee is this committee which meets every six months of the Ministry of Defence which is a collection of journalists and security state officials where they discuss basically what you can and can't publish when I say that to American journalists they're sort of like this actually exists you meant to do it behind closed doors but it's very explicit in Britain because of this there's a lot of conspiracy theories around what happens at the denotes committee so one of their outward facing reforms was they started publishing the minutes of their meetings online and it covered the Snowden periods so we used that to do a whole long investigation of basically it showed that the security state were really panicking about the Snowden leaks and initiated an operation to close The Guardian down as a critical outlet and they succeeded now that involved firstly sending out loads of advisories that and then they weren't listening to by The Guardian now they should legally be advisories the denotes committee said oh no they're legally binding but they're not The Guardian ignored that and in the end they ended up sending GCHQ officials famously now into The Guardian to smash up laptops which again like so much of this stuff is not something you'd expect to see in the democracy but anyway after that they then appointed the deputy editor of The Guardian Paul Johnson who had been in the basement with the GCHQ officials smashing up laptops to the denotes committee and he served on the denotes committee for four years and in the last denotes committee meeting the minutes said I can't remember because some security official at the MOD said the words he said where we thank Paul Johnson for his service on the denotes committee he has been instrumental in reconnecting with The Guardian that's the list so you have a really clear black and white and it doesn't happen like that very often where you can really delineate how the security state brings organs in the house but that's why we have in Britain a much much much more neutered and weak and state-affiliated media because just to finish this I think it's because the state realised after the war in Iraq that they needed to come down on the freedom that there was in the British media because the daily mirror under Piers Morgan I don't know if anyone remembers back in 2003 but I know that he's a controversial character and he's hated by a lot of people including me but he he as editor in the Daily Mirror it was like a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it's doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war he did headlines with like the headlines made out oil company logos he did Bush and Blair with Blood all over their hands amazing stuff every day for months John Pyl drew on the front page stuff you would never see now and I think that and obviously there was a major class, sorry, street movement as well against the war and I think that the state really thought shit this is not good got clamped down and I think that we looked into the Guardian but I think if you looked across the board at how they have clamped down on the British media you'd see that's why we have such a I wouldn't even say we have a functioning media at all now in terms of the newspapers and we did kind of 20 years ago I just want to say that one of the unwritten rules in the New York Times is that Noam Chomsky's name never appeared in the New York Times and also with the Noam Chomsky interview the most ironic part of it all is he says that the Financial Times is his favorite newspaper so they have ignored him for, he was 84 at that point, they've ignored him his whole life and then he comes and says he likes the Financial Times, his favorite columnist is Martin Wolf and then so I think that probably freaks them out a bit made them do the proper one two months later OK, we're going to take another couple of questions Hello there are two questions I have one, I read some while but I thought the European Court of Human Rights was the last line of appeal but you mentioned that it turned to be two judges who's the last line of appeal will Julian be able to go to the European Court of Human Rights? That's one question also the other question is that there's been a lot of a lot of news or news coming through the New York Times and who ran some of the witty stuff that act just about this trial of Julian this time and about the First Amendment in America feeding of speeches to put that how will that scenario affect his case in America if he ends up in American? Yeah well you're correct that Julian can once having exhausted domestic remedies here in this country then appeal to the European Court of Human Rights however if you follow things how things have developed over the last few years and successive Conservative Governments here have been hinting that they want out of the if not entirely the European Court of Human Rights system at least the part that in which the court can compel the UK not to deport not to extradite this is the so-called Rule 39 which is an emergency injunction when there is an irreversible harm risk to life torture etc so very serious risk that is imminent that has to be stopped while the court resolves a case recently there was this Rule 39 injunction by the European Court which stopped the deportations of asylum seekers to Rwanda and the Tory Government is very upset about the European Court interfering with Parliament's decision to or the Home Secretary's policy on deporting asylum seekers so what's happened in the last few months is that there is now a think tank in Oxford that has produced an opinion about how Rule 39 is not binding after all it's total bullshit but it shows what the Tory Government thinking is and there is a real risk that the UK Government used Julian's case to depart from practice that it has followed for the past 60 years or whatever it's been following Rule 39 injunctions and when it comes to Julian's case you have to be prepared for the unexpected, the exception the thing that people thought wouldn't happen because that's what's happened again and again and again and that's why I say that really what we know, what we can anticipate is that there is this technically it's a reopening of the case to this panel of two High Court judges which have to be persuaded that the first judge got it wrong and then if they agree with the first judge then Julian then there is a real risk that Julian will be taken straight to the airport or that there will be an attempt to do that his his situation is really critical because there is no legal predictability there's no safeguard that appears to be robust and what we do know is that they're prepared to do things that they don't usually do so for example in 2012 when Julian was in the embassy and not yet been granted formal political asylum he went in on the 19th of June 2012 and then the Ecuadorian government took about two months to decide based on the evidence that was presented in his application about the risk of extradition to the United States and what was happening with Bradley Manning well Bradley Manning at the time Chelsea Manning and the US special reporter on torture having by then already written a report saying that what was happening, what was being done to Chelsea Manning was cruel and inhuman degrading treatment etc etc etc so Ecuador had this evidence before it and then on the 16th of June it was to announce its decision about whether to grant him political asylum and so they announced that they were going to do this and then the foreign office sent a letter saying we're going to invade the embassy and what Ecuador then did and Ecuador at the time was under President Correa I mean this was a government that had expelled the US military base from Manta and they said Correa said at the time sure you can have a military base in Manta if we can have one in Miami so that was the that was how the Correa Government was and instead of handing Julian over they made that letter public the FCO letter saying that they were going to invade and I can tell you that there were UK officials agents whatever in the building ready to come in so then the organization of American states was doing a joint statement condemning the UK for threatening the inviolability of mission etc and so it became impossible for the UK to go through with its threat and Ecuador granted political asylum and Julian was protected for seven years but on that day that Julian's that the announcement was going to be made there were cameras everywhere people had come outside the embassy to protect the embassy you know as human shields to bear witness to what was about to happen if they actually went into the embassy and so there are these there was press there with big lenses and I think it was a daily mail who managed to get a snap a snapshot of with one of these big lenses of a a notepad of one of the police officers and it said get a sange if in a diplomatic vehicle whether he has diplomatic protection diplomatic immunity whatever you just arrest him anyway so they were prepared to violate the Vienna convention and it's there in black and white those were their orders violate the law and get him so this is what we're dealing with the law has been violated again and again and again the only thing that is protecting Julian right now and I'm not saying that he's adequately or fully protected in any way but the attention of the world on this case is the thing that can save him I just had a private audience with the Pope on Friday and this kind of thing is signaling politically that there is that the world is watching what is happening here and that needs to be at every level people on the streets need to show that they like they did outside the embassy that this cannot be tolerated that Julian cannot be taken to the United States because they'll do whatever they can get away with and they do what they can get away with in secret that's why they need their secrecy because they want to violate the law because they want to they want to be impugned we'll talk a little bit about towards the end as well can I take a couple more questions first of all Stella thank you so much citizen I really appreciate the very agree that yourself Julian you know you've shown so kudos to you and thank you for standing up for the voice of the people and for what's right I come from Pakistan and I can clearly see what's happening there and I've been living here for the last about two decades and you can just see rather than the trajectory of progress there's nothing in developing countries it's fascism which has made its way here as well in the developed world clearly I think I mean I'm an optimist so I look at this more as an opportunity because we are in a run up to the election year both in the US and UK you've spoken about call to action I think clearly there is something with the public with people I believe in box popular what's with the people things need to be done and I think if you can make people realise that it's not about Julian it's about you he's just been made an example of and at the same time you know about journalism and everything I've been watching observing it's whole corporatisation I don't know if anyone has done the PhD degree on this one but corporatisation is a new form of slavery maybe I don't know but you've got to change that paradigm shift and you've got to monetise and I don't know how but that mindset and this is where people come into play just change that paradigm shift of you know maybe it's not monetising I don't know what but somewhere where the shift has to go that's standing up to what's right to your careers in the long run and I'm not entirely sure but that is something that needs to be done I mean one thing I admire the evil minds of the world is they work in cahoots one thing if one can learn from the good people I just divide the world into good and bad so if you have to admire something from the bad and the evil minds they work in cahoots so please let's learn something from them and just stand up for what the values are and in this run up to the election year let's see what we can do you know together as people and as citizens of this world it's not about Julian it's about us each and every one of us so thank you about call to action the question is about call to action as to what we can do and how we can perhaps use you know this run up to election to you know make a cause for Julian well in terms of organising there's a there's a little card there should be a card on the table that has a link to the emergency toolkit free assumption emergency toolkit please go there sign up and we're going to be putting actions on that on that toolkit we're calling for a big showing of support on the day of the hearing we're calling it day x because day x hasn't been announced yet but everyone should be ready to to go and show basically we need bodies on the ground and not just on social media and well there are many ways to support that you can see on on the website obviously people can donate if they're in a position to do so and but mainly to stay engaged and go on goingly to the different actions that there are not just once and bring people and talk to your friends, talk to your family talk to your colleagues there are several books now that are very good one by Neil Smeltzer the former UN Special Rapporteur on torture that goes take a deep dive dive into Julian's case and then another one by Stefania Marisi called WikiLeaks in its enemies and that's kind of that uses official documents that the journalist has managed to obtain through Freedom of Information Act requests and she reconstructs the conspiracy to Jail Julian so those are two kind of essential reading books if you want to take a deep dive into this persecution but you don't have to know everything in detail I mean we've already what's at stake in the big picture is that there's a journalist that's in prison for publishing the truth and that the freedom of the press in our future to be able to be told the truth and to seek the truth and to publish it is at stake and that is being decided with this case this is the most important case of our generation it's not just about the press it's about us freedom to speak freedom to know the truth the right to the truth and the free circulation of information in the age of the internet because right now we're going through a kind of there aren't many spaces left where we can speak freely I mean it's almost just in person it's the only thing that's not intermediated and the era of the internet as a place where information could be exchanged directly is over for the most part unless you're really into it there are still some projects and so on and then of course if we don't have the right to speak freely and we don't have the right to debate and to confront and to challenge that we're not in a democracy and we don't have a chance to democracy because if we're muzzled at the point of speaking or we're silenced because we spoke then the power imbalance in society has shifted forever go ahead as you said a few minutes ago that this is a political motivated case we know very well that a lot of political figures have said the things about the sergeant sided with him and asked for his release notably my president Lula in Brazil has done quite a few of that news conference and asked the journalist what is it that they're doing in this world that they're not siding with the sergeant, they are not protecting him, they are not siding with the sergeant and he did this in Paris he did this in London after his visit here and in Brazil there is a big movement now asking the president to offer asylum to a sergeant but how effective I know it's important this movement is not worldwide within Brazil but how effective will it be and how productive can it be and how can we actually do this if he is sitting in prison and we saw the question where he could very well descend there but how effective is this movement and Lula do because he is so high profile now he suffered a case himself for warfare and even his lawyer Zanin now is a supreme terminal and I suppose they can do something maybe you met him haven't you met Lula in Brazil can you tell us more about this did you ask him to do some more I suppose he could do I suppose he could do more I didn't meet Lula in Brazil the Wikipedia editor and ambassador met him in Brazil and I did meet him in Paris prior to becoming president again look all these initiatives are extremely important because what is needed is a constant pressure at every level increasingly over time it's not about a single initiative rendering as a particular result I mean who knows maybe it will work and Julian will end up having political asylum in Brazil you know who knows we just don't know and things are constantly shifting I mean I see for example a big development has been the Australian Prime Minister saying that this has gone on for too long that nothing is served by Julian spending another day in prison that this should be brought to an end etc this is a big shift because until that point for 12 years the Australian government has been playing along saying nothing to do with us he's an Australian citizen but this is just taking its course and now you have a Prime Minister saying no there's a problem here and we don't like this we don't want this and we're going to speak to the US and tell them that we don't like this why did that come about because there was a very strong grassroots movement in Australia there were elections and the candidates were getting harassed by their potential constituents saying well what is your position on Assange and in fact the shift of the power balance in the Australian government came about because there was a new group of independence called the Teals each of them having Julian as one of their campaign elements and they hold the power of balance in Parliament and of course the way it works here and there and in the US is you have individual politicians and they have an opinion and many of them have the opinion that Julian is a political prisoner that he's being persecuted that the case is bad for free speech and freedom of the press but they're going to keep their mouth shut if they think it doesn't benefit them politically so in Australia the shift comes down to people got organised and they shifted the power balance in Parliament and then it was safe for the Prime Minister to campaign and say well actually I want Assange out and now the latest poll showed I was in Australia about five weeks ago so about two or three weeks before that there was a poll that showed about 80%, 78% of Australians wanted Julian to be freed and then three weeks later it was 89% virtually all Australians are informed and want Julian home and free and I think globally this is the Julian is a hero globally I mean you go to most countries I go to and Julian is a reference point of bravery of a journalist who stood up and published religiously about what the press didn't have the guts to publish about and so I mean that shift has to also happen in the UK and the US We have slightly overrun some unfortunately we won't get any more questions but I'd just like to invite the panel to offer some closing remarks on final thoughts so can we start with you Chris? I think Stella kind of laid it out it's probably not one action by one government or one but it's cumulative the weight of many actions I mean to somebody who comes out of the media my and somebody who followed the hearings here I am deeply concerned that if Julian is extradited there just won't be good coverage worked with Ben Cohen to fund good core coverage with a great reporter who is formerly the Wall Street Journal because I don't want to Joe's going to do it I mean I'll go in and out but I mean Joe's going to be there every day and that's key because as I saw the mainstream media will cover the first day and the last day but they don't actually know what's going on and the coverage has just been horrendous so part of it is getting accurate information out on a daily basis and then Stella said using that information to mobilize the public that's key was very close friends with Michael Radner who was Julian's lawyer lost Michael a few years ago but I remember Michael telling me and he was a great civil rights attorney in many many cases including the those being held in London and I remember him telling me that in order for him to do his work in the courtroom it was absolutely vital that there be people in the streets that he couldn't achieve the legal victories that he did unless there was mass mobilization because essentially that mass mobilization created pressure on the legal system to do their job and not carry out judicial lynchings which eviscerate or ignore the rule of law which essentially define the kind of Dickensian farce that characterizes the assault against Julian so it's information good information but then that's got to be put in the hands of a public that's willing to stand up and defend their democracy their open society freedom of the press the right for free speech I think those are from where I'm coming from are the two most important elements I mean obviously it's depressing the situation but there's also hope in the sense that people have created conditions where this is a global issue and that wouldn't have happened if people hadn't acted in the way they have still particularly has been heroic and inspiring at making this issue a global issue and obviously there's hundreds of thousands of activists around the world doing the same thing because what they would have liked is for him to be put in Belmarsh and silence and no one talk about him ever again and then send him to the US and that's it it's over but they can't do that now it's become a global scandal this is a publisher who revealed war crimes who's being sent effectively to his death by the country that he exposed so there is and the other thing is how history will view this because we're in a situation now where there's a lot of powerful interests that want his reputation his work produced and ignored and denied and they have they're putting huge amounts of resources I mean there was a time actually so initially when he was when he was working and you'd tweet anything in support there'd be hundreds of CIA CIA troll bot people and then it stopped for a while and they've come back I have noticed there's a lot using those lines and it's because they're scared they know that they're losing the narrative and losing the conversation and when history's written in future generations those powerful forces won't be exerting all the pressure they're putting now and the truth will be that he will be seen and he is seen as a a global symbol for freedom democracy, human rights he might be seen as the last free man we don't know how it's going to end but we need to everyone needs to keep going because as that lady said this isn't just about science this is about all our futures future for our kids, our grandkids we hold dear democracy freedom of speech free press they're very fragile, they're much more fragile than we realise and that's been exposed by Assange if they get Assange the levees will break it's not like they're going to stop that's not how it works they don't take off one person and say ok we'll hold off they'll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them and I'll just finish with this we talked about the Guardian earlier I think that deterrent of Assange is already working because one of the elements of the whole neutering of the media that I talked about earlier that is probably true is that journalists implicitly, subconsciously have absorbed the example of Assange if you're working in an environment in London where there's a journalist in prison for exposing war crimes maybe not consciously but somewhere that's going to be going in that you shouldn't do that you shouldn't question power you shouldn't question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don't know what's going to happen and the end point of that and actually the UK Government is trying to introduce laws now which make it explicit that you can't publish they want to formalise what they've done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things that to me when you have laws when you have a psyche societal wide psyche that you cannot question power and they tell you what is in your interest that's fascism and that's where we will end that's where the end point of this all is and everything is moving towards that place now it's just in certain we had Trump in the United States but when you have the conditions that we're creating all it takes is some clever demagogue we had Boris Johnson but he's an idiot but someone a bit smarter than him and a bit more willing to to play people they will appear at some point so I think that I don't like the guy I don't know if he's a fascist he might be I'm doing that I'm doing that but yeah I think that this is not just about Assange it's about all of us it's about democracy it's about the future that we want to leave to our kids and you see that I'll finish with this with Daniel Ellsberg who died recently the pentagon papers leaker heroic individual he was hated when he revealed that the pentagon papers by large sections of the American society he was the called the most dangerous man in America he's now celebrated when he died and the leader too that he's celebrated as the good leaker that's what happens when the powerful interests take their foot off the gas in terms of the propaganda campaigns so we need to there is a righteousness that everyone has that we're on the right side with this but these are hugely important issues that I think if we can if Assange can be saved then we can always save but the main message is that the fight is on it's not unwindable on the contrary we should win this chewing can win this and everyone can see that this is just a parade of cruelty and of injustice so they'll try it on but that doesn't mean that they will succeed and the way of lessening their chances of succeeding is actually saying what we think and what can't happen is for Julian to be a taboo subject or a case that everyone just resigns themselves and says yeah well it's terrible what they're doing to him no that's not how you get someone out of prison his freedom depends on public opinion and the people who actually have an opinion about this case saying it out loud and not being apologetic about it and now is the critical time and if you're going to do something you do it now it's not something that can wait he can't wait because if they if they can get away with it they will whisk him off when they think no one's looking and that can't happen everyone I speak to knows that this case is a righteous one you know the pope doesn't just receive anyone it was a private meeting so I can't really talk about what the meeting, the contents of the meeting but he made the decision to have his photographers there his videographer there and to release that to the press that's a signal and that's very significant because he has lots of meetings all the time so don't underestimate our allies we have amnesty and we have rights watch and we have RSF and records without borders and the committee to protect journalists and yes the Guardian has put out an editorial and so has LeMonde and the Spiegel in New York Times and Washington Post etc everyone knows this case is wrong so there should be no taboo to talk about it not anymore and there are books that are written in case people want to do their deep dives but what's clear here is that this is the most important case of our lives the ability to speak the truth to be able to stand up for victims to expose war crimes and to be able to live in a democratic society thank you Stella and Stella mentioned the toolkit earlier on I'll put the link up here but anyone watching the video recording you can find the link the toolkit in the comments I'm afraid we don't have any more time just a simple question when do you think day X will be? it's just a guess I don't know your best guess is going to be before August holidays it could be before it could be after yeah as soon as I know anything we will let you know because obviously we want people to organise but I can't tell you anything because okay massive thank you to Chris, Stella and Matt for being here today and please follow us at soas icop because you'll let you know when we're doing more events like this one we did also bring a briefing on Julian's case that was authored by Deepa who's here today and you can read that on the website like I said please follow us at soas icop so we can let you know about more events like this one and thank you for coming out this evening