RRemember Julian Assange? The WikiLeaks founder, who dominated headlines in the 2010s, has been incarcerated in London’s Belmarsh Prison since 2019 and has disappeared from sight. And that was a plan, this impassioned documentary argues, with the help of staunch advocates including the late John Pilger. Tariq Ali, Jill Stein, Pentagon document leaker Daniel Ellsworth, and Assange’s family. “Julian’s persecution was a long, slow killing,” Pilger says. Having witnessed Assange’s trajectory from thuggish truth-teller to mentally scarred, frail prisoner forever denied justice, it’s hard to disagree.
According to this documentary by Australian filmmaker Kim Staton, Assange has been the subject of a coordinated smear campaign. The show claims the 2010 rape allegations against Assange by two Swedish women were a “trumped up” story, but considering we’ve only heard one side of the argument, it’s a complicated case. It is impossible for the viewer to reach an informed conclusion about (Assange was never formally charged, and the investigation closed in 2019.)
That’s the problem throughout this two-hour movie. Indeed, fears that Assange would be extradited to the United States if he went to Sweden were well-founded, so he skipped his bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he remained for seven years. lived. The film details WikiLeaks’ role in exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the 2007 attack that killed several innocent civilians and two Reuters cameramen. It also includes graphic footage of a helicopter attack in Baghdad. And since then, the United States has persuasively argued that it has been trying to punish him with the help of successive overbearing British and Australian governments.
Again, the debate is complex from a legal process and freedom of expression perspective, and this documentary is only interested in advocating Assange’s defense. For example, there is no mention of WikiLeaks’ role in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak that damaged Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and paved the way for Donald Trump’s election.
In any case, while Assange is facing criminal charges for leaking information, he is also charged with the much more serious crime of fabricating a pretext for the Iraq war and brutally waging the war, including torture, extradition, and extrajudicial killings. The plain fact remains that there are perpetrators. You can get away with no punishment at all. But in bringing this debate to a frenzied conclusion, the film is a dreamy, animated film backed by vivid, almost Biblical prose read by Roger Waters, Tom Morello, M.I.A., and more. An extended series of montages exaggerates that claim somewhat. Through the stream of innovation, along the river of diligence, leaking into the lake of truth. ”
That is precisely the problem (or plan, if you prefer) in that the jury is literally against Assange and there is little chance of him receiving justice anytime soon. The film deserves praise for its sincere efforts, even if it’s completely one-sided, but its persuasiveness really depends on where you already stand on the issue. Ru.
