The US government has hounded Julian Assange since WikiLeaks first revealed the extent of US war crimes in 2010. In the process of persecuting Assange, the federal government has used every tool at its disposal and even pushed beyond the boundaries that supposedly restrict state power in defense of civil liberties. One of the most insidious tactics is the use of the Espionage Act, which had not been used for against whistleblowers and journalists for almost a century before Assange’s case. In the first part of a two-part conversation, lawyer and human rights defender Stella Assange, spouse of Julian Assange, joins Chris Hedges for a look at the vast and vicious campaign by the US to silence Julian Assange, and what it all portends for our democracy.

Transcript

CHRIS
One of the things I want to talk about, and it’s something you know more intimately than I do, but it’s one of the things that is, aside from the fact that I’m a journalist, just published classified information. But one of the things that’s disturbed me from the start is how all of the international bodies and the legal entities that have gone after Julian, have broken their own rules and it’s so blatant. That’s what I find kind of incomprehensible because it’s public. It’s not a secret. I mean, there is many secret stuff they’ve done, too, of course. But, you know, revoking political asylum, allowing British police to go in on sovereign territory, charging him under the Espionage Act when he’s not an American citizen, recording his meeting with his attorneys. I mean, any one of these things in a normal legal procedure, would have seen the case dismissed and yet they keep doing it and doing it.

I sat in London, I can’t remember, it was with Baraitser when I was here and then watched and covered it online. But it’s in those details that the judicial farce is exposed and it’s not just one egregious violation, it’s repeated violations. Aside, of course, from what they’re doing to him personally. That, and the failure on the part of the public and in particular, the press, to react with a kind of outrage. Because if they eviscerate the rule of law, it’s not just going to be for Julian. They set those kinds of precedents and if they’re allowed to get away with it with anyone, it’s dangerous. That’s what, for me, is just so frustrating.

STELLA
But don’t you think they’re deliberately dismantling the system? They want to show that they are dismantling it.

CHRIS
Yes, of course, they are. But they’re dismantling it right in front of us and we’re just watching. I’m talking about the broader public and not reacting.
Yes, of course, that is the goal.

And so in a way, that passivity makes us complicit in what is ultimately our own enslavement. I mean, this is all, of course, even beyond Julian as a person and as a journalist. And that’s what, you know, having followed this case for several years and as you know, I was very close friends with Michael Ratner, which is how I met Julian, because I would come to London with Michael. I’m just kind of mystified at how people can’t see where this is going to lead.

STELLA
I think they’re maybe afraid. I can’t explain it otherwise. Or maybe they don’t really want to believe that it’s happening.

CHRIS
I think it’s because they have a demon. So, after 911, because I speak Arabic and spent seven years in the Middle East, we demonised Muslims in the United States. I don’t know how it was here, but it was really awful and there were all sorts of cases like this case of Syed Fahad Hashmi. I don’t know if you know that case? So what happened after 911 is, and of course they were serving the interests of Israel, is they went after Muslim groups and individuals in the United States who were outspoken about Palestine. So the Holy Land Foundation, my good friend Sami Al-Arian, wonderful man, but these were articulate, effective and they charged them under terrorism laws. And again, with Sami, it was like Julian. It was a completely fabricated case. And of course, where did they…it was Kromberg, in the eastern district of Virginia. So I watched them do it and with Hashmi, he had been a really charismatic Palestinian activist. I don’t think he’s Palestinian. I think he’s Pakistani, but he was at Brooklyn College and then he, I think, was at the London School of Economics or University of London or something and they were just determined to get him, and his roommate had sent; you can’t make this stuff up, waterproofs socks, I didn’t even know though they existed, or something to Pakistan to give to Al-Qaeda. We’re not talking about AK-47s or anything. And had used his phone…and so they nailed him on that and they brought him back and they held him in the MCC in New York for, I think it was 23 months in isolation. And by the time he got under SAMS, under Special Administrative Measures, so no communication. I mean, they had secret evidence that they used against him that even his lawyers weren’t allowed to see. By the time he got in court, he was a zombie. And so I watched that happen and of course, I said, “they are doing exactly what they are doing. They’re setting legal precedents by which they can strip us of any legal protection.” And again, it was actually not just watched passively by the American public, but cheered on because they had demonised the Muslims. And I think they’ve done a pretty effective job of demonising Julian. And that’s how they always do it, because they will demonise a particular group, then strip all legal protections from that group. And now, of course, you see, I don’t know if you’ve been following Cops City in Atlanta, where the police are building this kind of paramilitary compound with shooting ranges and all sort of stuff, helicopter landing pads, I mean, this is urban domestic warfare and so there have been heavy protests in Atlanta, but they’re charging all these people with the terrorism laws.
Animal rights activists are getting charged now with the terrorism laws. Eco-activists are, so yeah.

So that’s the playbook that they mount, as they did with Julian, a very vicious black propaganda campaign, and then they’re allowed to create these mechanisms by which nobody has any rights at all. And by the time people wake up, it’s too late. I mean, you know, it’s that famous Niemoeller quote, “first they came for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew.” I mean, but it is, it’s like that.

STELLA
Well, it also creates the mechanisms, as you said, and the energy that goes into creating, I don’t know, of a whole machinery behind going after the perceived threat.

CHRIS
Yes. Well, that’s right. It’s fear. Yes, that’s right.

STELLA
And then once that one threat is overcome, then that has to go somewhere. So it gets redirected to some other issue.

CHRIS
Yeah, that’s right. But although I think reading the CIA, which is a state within a state, it’s not even accountable within the Congress. And there was a few years ago, Feinstein, after the torture was exposed, tried to do a congressional report and there was this really revealing moment. I’m no fan of Feinstein, but she was, at that moment, trying to do the right thing.And she came out and she was just ashen. And I can’t remember the exact words, but it’s something like, “we can’t take on these people…”, because they had bugged all the computers in the congressional office, they destroyed information.

And I think it was that moment where she personally realised that we can’t control, there’s no regulation, there’s no oversight, there’s no control. And unlike the Church and the Pike committees that in the middle 70s, had exposed the crimes. That was it. That moment is gone. And I think that Vault 7, because of this kind of imperial attitude on the part of the CIA where they can do anything, because the CIA, we have 17 intelligence communities in the United States. I mean, the CIA as an intelligence organization is kind of redundant.

And what it has done is transformed itself into a paramilitary, especially after 9/11. And it’s completely in the dark. It has its own drones and special forces units. Having had friends who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, these people create more problems than they solve because they’ll go on extraction and night raids and anger an entire village and then the next day the Rangers will go through the village and they open fire on…I mean, they’re counterproductive. And I think that what happened with Vault 7 is that you now have an incredibly powerful organisation that is, in essence, a paramilitary organisation with huge resources and that exposure of Vault 7, they’re not used to being monitored, exposed in any way. I think the anger, I think it was more visceral. I think the anger within the CIA was ran really deep. And, you know, again, I haven’t spoken to anyone in the CIA, but my guess is that at that point, they laid down the law. We’re getting Julian. That’s my my guess.

I think it’s all being, because Biden, no matter who’s in the office, Obama, you can’t, at this point they talk about the Dark State. I mean, these are the, you know, figures like Biden are the puppets. In the military, you know, the US military has not been audited for a decade. I read somewhere we spend more on military bands than we do on the State Department. I mean, again, it’s like ancient Rome. I mean, it’s its own entity, almost severed from the government.
But that’s how I read what happened after Vault 7.

STELLA
When did you first meet Julian?

CHRIS
So I was very close friends with Michael Ratner, who we lost sadly. We were really good friends for many years. And he, of course, after 2010 and the Iraq War Logs, came to London and asked for a meeting with Julian. And according to Michael, you know, they said, “We think they’re going to come for you,” and Julian said “Why?” and he said, “Because that’s how they work and we think they’re going to charge you under the Espionage Act.”

STELLA
Right. Because until that point, there had been no. Well, it was only on…this was 2010, right?

Obama came in, what, early 2009 he started. And it was under the Obama administration that the Espionage Act started being used.

CHRIS
He used it flagrantly against whistleblowers. And we have to draw a distinction because Julian is the first journalist charged under the Espionage Act. So you had Daniel Ellsberg and these kinds of figures. But going back to 1917, the Espionage Act was primarily an instrument to destroy the left. So, they shut down the socialist publications under the Espionage Act, ‘The Masses’, and I think ‘Appeal to Reason. They put [Eugene] Debs in prison, the socialist candidate. I think he was actually in prison under the Sedition Act, which was kind of a twin act. They did the deportations of Emma Goldman and it’s always been an instrument that’s been used to destroy the left. But it was, as I have this, I believe this is right, that between 1917 and the Obama administration, it was only used three times against whistleblowers, once against Ellsberg and that case collapsed because they invaded a psychiatrist’s office and all this kind of dirty tricks.

STELLA
But another case was afterwards pardoned. It was really not used until Obama.

CHRIS
Obama’s assault on civil liberties was worse than Bush. And he went after anyone who leaked Kiriakou and all sorts of others. And that, of course, is the lifeblood of journalism. So we need people on the inside with a conscience who are willing to share information about malfeasance, crimes, lies that the government is committing. That’s how we do our work.
And because of wholesale surveillance, and that’s why Snowden fled, they know immediately who’s connecting with journalists. And I’ve been visiting, I visited and I write letters to Daniel Hale. This is just a really sad story. This young Air Force officer with incredible integrity and courage and saw that in the drone attacks, it was up to 90% of the victims were civilians, including children. And then he was sitting in these rooms where the drone operators had this jocular contempt, you know, killing…they knew they were killing children and they were calling them “pint-sized terrorists.” I mean, it was just sickening. And he exposed that, and he’s now sitting in Marion, Illinois, in a high security, used to be the highest security prison in the country, now we have ADX Florence, Colorado. But they have him in one of these management control units, which replicates, I mean, he has no…and it’s in the middle of nowhere. So if I visit, I have to fly to St. Louis and drive 3 hours down to Illinois in literally these cornfields, I mean, because, of course, they don’t want you to visit.
So in order for us to do our work, we need people like Daniel Hale. And it was really Obama who shut down any of that connection. And I can’t remember, it was either nine or eleven times he used it. And so I still have friends with the New York Times who do investigative journalism, but they have told me repeatedly that there is no investigative journalism now within the government, with the inner workings of government, because everyone’s too frightened to talk, because they they’re they can immediately be traced.
So the last readout of any kind of exposure of the the the crimes, the criminal activity of power comes through people who are like Chelsea manning or Snowden, who have access to documents and will leak them, or hackers like Jeremy Hammond, who when and I sued Obama in 2012 over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which he signed at midnight on the last day of 2011, hoping no one would notice, which overturn the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the government from using the military as a domestic police force.
And in Section 1021, it actually said that people are allowed to be held without ‘habeas corpus’, without due process, until, quote unquote, the end of hostilities, which is just in a more I mean, it’s really a terrifying kind of almost Orwellian. And I sued him in federal court and nobody thought we would win, including Michael Ratner. And we just got this judge with it and we won.
And then, of course, it was Obama. He freaked out. They freaked out. They had the NSA lawyers in her chambers an hour after the ruling and demanding she issued a temporary injunction, which meant that if American citizens were being held in Guantanamo like conditions anywhere in the black sites around the world, this was against the law.
And, you know, I and the lawyers were kind of curious. We wondered why were they so why did they respond with such alacrity? Well, because they were holding probably Afghan, you know, dual national, Iraqi, whatever. And she’s no longer on the on the southern district. She went back to private practice. She refused. So then they went to the appellate court. So in the American system, you have the federal court, then you have the appellate court, which is a panel of judges who review it.
And then your last chance is the Supreme Court. So they went to the appellate court. That was a Friday. They went to the court on Monday morning and they lifted the injunction in the name of national security. The problem with and this is gets back to Julian is the law was so black and white that this was such a clear violation.
They didn’t know how to rule and so they didn’t rule. They just waited and wait and wait months. And I had been one of the plaintiffs in Clapper versus Amnesty International, which did get to the Supreme Court, where journalists had challenged the government about surveillance, because we can’t work. Obviously, we can’t if we’re being surveilled, as well as people who are trying to reach out to us.
And there was a incredible line, because this was before Snowden, where the government lawyers assured the court that if any journalist was being surveilled, we would tell them.
I mean, it was patently absurd, but the court bought it. And then rather than hear the merit of the case, the appellate court said, I didn’t have standing. That’s the way they always get rid of you, right?
You don’t have a right to bring the case. They said Hedges doesn’t did not have standing to bring in Clapper versus Amnesty International. Therefore, he doesn’t have standing and Hedges versus Obama. And they threw it out. We filed a cert to go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court didn’t take it. So it’s law. It’s law. But, you know, having been involved this kind of detail and having done the kind of work, albeit on a much smaller level than as Julian did, and having watched all of this process, it is really been the death of investigative journalism.
Now. Now they will leak you. You know, the other things about leaks, as you know, is that governments will leak all sorts of highly classified material that makes them look it. So it’s not that you don’t get leaks of highly classified, but it’s selective leaks that that they want out. And and so now it’s over. I mean the and that’s really frightening.
It means there is no power is in no way accountable. There’s no transparency, and we know history has taught us that when that kind of secrecy is imposed on autocratic power, it just in abuse grows upon abuse grows upon abuse. And that is why they’re just determined to crucify Julian.
That’s the crisis that we’re in.
We’ve lost the ability to know what power is doing.

STELLA
I have this feeling that in order to establish the baseline, you would have to give a history lesson.
Because, for example, the use of the Espionage Act, you have to understand that it wasn’t used for almost 100 years against whistleblowers and journalists. There was a shift with Obama that opened the doors to maybe one day the Espionage Act being used against publishers in the same way now being used against whistleblowers. And the way it was being used against whistleblowers was as if they were spies to begin with. So, there was a progressive shift. And that’s why Julian was surprised when Michael Ratner told him that he tought the US would try him under the Espionage Act after he had published. Because it was unprecedented, because the First Amendment is clear. And the First Amendment is really a revolutionary instrument, and it is the gold standard in the world.
And I think perhaps, culturally, we are used to there being this gold standard through American cultural projection which is what I grew up with, I was born in the 80s. You know, very clearly the idea of liberal democratic Western freedom is attached to this idea of freedom of expression, and a press that is corageous, and brave, and powerful, in the sense that it is able to expose power and so on.
And then, with what’s been done to Julian, because it’s been so protracted, we’re in a completely different information and security environment, as in the powers of the security state are far greater and have eroded all these other rights that came. I think they have on the one hand the US Constitution and then you have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and these things that were a strong underpinning to the Western democracies for a long time. That’s kind of how Wikileaks was born out of this kind of environment. But since the surveillance state has become so powerful, there’s been an ability to control communication in such an aggressive and invisible manner.
In the 12 or 13 years since WikiLeaks published this, we’re in a completely different environment. So people who knew the before, on the one hand, we have like an information gap with people who don’t follow things so quick, clear, so in such detail, but also a knowledge like a historical knowledge gap.
So although we can see this progression, this rapid progression into like a totalitarian, not just authoritarian, but like really aggressively accelerating, I think, into a totalitarian environment for for many people who are, you know, just a bit younger than me, they don’t see it. Yeah, because they don’t have that reference.

CHRIS
Well, and also because it’s hidden. I mean, so, you know, you’re never going to get it. Trying to do 4 minutes on CNN, which is or someone like me would get when I used to get on CNN. Well, when I work for the New York Times, they don’t, you know, I used to say the real motto of the New York Times is “Do not significantly alienate those on whom we depend for money and access”. So as a reporter for the Times, if you wrote stories that harmed your access to the powerful, you were harmed professionally.

STELLA
So, would that happen like before the article was published or after?

CHRIS
No, you would write articles that would…you could alienate the powerful occasionally. But if you made a habit of it, the powerful would…I can give an example. I covered the war in Yugoslavia, and then I covered the Dayton peace agreement. So I was on the ground, and I fully understood that the Dayton peace agreement had just frozen the conflict. It was just kind of, it was the absence of war. It wasn’t a peace agreement because all of the killers and the warlords were still in control, terrorizing their own people in towns throughout Bosnia. And I started to write that, and Clinton was running part of his reelection campaign was on how he brought peace to Bosnia. So Sandy Berger who was the head of the National Security Council, he, they went after me, big time. And the way they do it is have lunch with the publisher and they start bad mouthing you, and then the editors get, they see the editors and they get uncomfortable.
So, you become a kind of management problem.

I think the only thing that saved me and allowed me to spend as long as I did with the Times is that I would put myself in really extreme situations like Sarajevo that nobody else wanted to.

When I volunteered for Sarajevo, the executive editor said, “Well, I guess the line starts and ends with you,” because by the time I got there, 45 journalists had been killed.

And then I didn’t have to interview officials because I was on the street. I mean, like when I covered the First Gulf War, I didn’t go to press conferences with Schwarzkopf.

I hardly interviewed anybody the rank of sergeant.

You know, I hung out with Lance Corporals. I was in the Marine Corps.
And so that kind of saved me. And the other thing about it is that the closer geographically you get to the centers of power, so I was overseas, but if you’re in Washington or New York, then the less tolerant they are about your confronting powers.

So that a journalist overseas that is trying to write a narrative, which is almost always in conflict with the official narrative, is not only at war with whatever administration is running the country, but their Washington bureau: that makes their journalism is contingent on them, you know, doing lunch.
So you’re battling… this has always been true. You take the great reporters on Vietnam, they were battling the Washington Bureau, their own bureau, as much as they were battling, you know, the people running.
So, an elite publication like The Times is very obsequious to power and will cater to power.
And, you know, I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I heard after the publication of the War Logs… why did these papers like The Guardian, which has been awful, or The Times, why did they turn on Julian?

Have I told you this story?
I said, “No, you don’t understand. They hated Julian from the moment he released that.

Because… and the only reason they ran it is because if they didn’t, they would have been exposed”.

He shamed them into doing their job. And they loathed him for that.

STELLA
But that doesn’t matter anymore, right? I think they don’t mind being shamed. They don’t have any shame because, for example, take the Twitter files.

CHRIS
Yeah, but the Twitter files were more nuanced and opaque, perhaps.
I think even to this day it would be pretty hard to ignore what Julian released. It was so cataclysmic, so huge, so important.
And people forget, not just in terms of exposing US lies and crimes, but around the world.

I mean, Haiti was convulsed by those revelations: there was traffic that showed how the US Embassy was working with the Haitian government because there are all these sweatshops to suppress the minimum wage. Stuff like that is part of the quid pro quo; let’s talk about the CIA, the quid pro quo is that you will do the dirty work to destroy journalists who expose, like Gary Webb, I don’t know if you know about Gary Webb.
Gary Webb, I think he was with the San Francisco Chronicle, one of those papers in California, and he exposed that whole, and I was in Central America at the time, that whole CIA relationship where they were supporting the Contras under the table and selling cocaine, and actually shipping cocaine to the states, flooding neighborhoods in Oakland and stuff with it.

Well, Gary Webb was destroyed by the press, because what happened was the CIA held briefings and I know the reporter from the New York Times who went to the briefing, and discredited the reporting.

A good reporter would go out and re-report it.
He would go out, check the sources, go and try and find out, follow the trail that Webb followed. That’s a good reporter. That didn’t happen.

So, the Washington Post, they all piled on Webb and they didn’t actually report. They went down there. They went down to Langley, they got a background briefing and, of course, he killed himself. I mean papers like The Times consider themselves part of the elite power system and they don’t want to lose that perch. At the same time, they’re trying to position themselves as adversarial journalists.
But when I was overseas, you know, I used to work overseas but when I didn’t work for the New York Times, I’d have to call 30 times for somebody calling back. You call once on the Times, they’d call you back. And the funny part about it is that these Times reporters would come down and have all this access and they thought it was them.

It wasn’t them, it was the institution.
They weren’t particularly good reporters necessarily. I was good friends with Sydney Shanberg, I don’t if you saw The Killing Fields, that was the movie about Sidney and Dith Pran who I also knew.

Sydney, although he’d won the Pulitzer and came back, was pushed out of the Times because after he saw how the developers were driving the working class and middle class out of Manhattan and destroying rent control, he started writing about it and all the rich friends of the publisher got angry and the executive editor started calling him, ‘Sydney my little commie’, and eventually was pushed out of the paper and worked for ‘The Village Voice’. I thought Sidney gave me the best description of how the Times or papers like the Times work. He said: “Well, we may not make things better, but if we do our job to the best of our ability, we stop things from getting worse.”
I think that’s a good definition of the commercial press.
And this gets back to Julian, because all of the great advances in journalism have come from the non-commercial press that has, going back to that, shamed, the way Julian did, shamed the traditional press into doing their job. So I write for Scheer Post. This is Bob Scheer’s website, which he pretty much funds from a Social Security check. But, you know, he’s one of the legendary journalist. He was the editor of Ramparts magazine, which was the leftist magazine in the and he broke Cointelpro.
He, that iconic picture of the little girl in Vietnam running naked down the road, that was first in Ramparts. And if you look at the inception of the war in Vietnam the coverage was all cheerleading.

And it was publications like Ramparts, in the same way that we saw with Julian, that forced these people against their will. But Bob, at the time of the Iraq War, was a columnist at the LA Times. They fired him because of his opposition, and I also got pushed out of the Times for my opposition to the war.
I remember once working for the Times, some intern, you know, probably went to Harvard or something, said, “Well, who do you think the best reporters in the country are?”

I said, “Well, I could tell you, but you would have never heard of them.”
He said, “They don’t work for us?”
I said, “No, they don’t work for you. They don’t work for us.”
And so, I mean, this is, of course, why I admire Julian so much. I mean, that’s what great journalism is. And I worked on the inside of the beast, I mean, and, with all the limitations of that, I was finally willing to become a management problem and get pushed out.

But I know how the system works. And that without figures like Julian, the system is morally bankrupt.

STELLA
Well, it’s very interesting what you just explained because I kind of imagined it being a bit like this when the story broke about Mike Pompeo making plans asking for the CIA to outline how they would kidnap, rendition or even kill Julian in the Embassy, and the story broke in 2021.
This was after the initial extradition case, and it was three National Security reporters at the Yahoo News Investigations Unit. And it was really detailed. And you look at these reporters and they have a track record with sources inside the CIA and so on.
And Pompeo’s reaction to it was to effectively confirm it because he then went out and said that the sources, and there were well over 30 of them, should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. And of course you only get prosecuted under the Espionage Act if the information is authentic.
So, a huge story and you couldn’t imagine a more interesting, newsworthy story than this one, right?

Because a journalist inside an embassy with political asylum, CIA head planning and asking his staff to come up with sketches and options.
It was quite detailed. Eventually it was re-reported by The Guardian. But the New York Times didn’t touch it, The Washington Post didn’t touch it. And I was actually, I brought it up on the BBC, on a radio interview that was live.
And the interviewer said, “Oh, but the CIA has denied it.”
And I said, “No, they haven’t. They haven’t denied it. They haven’t commented and Pompeo effectively… He just confirmed it”.
It was just like they were given this talking point that they had nothing to base it on.
Then, after the interview, I went back and I verified that the CIA had not denied it. The one time the New York Times did report this Pompeo murder plot was after the defense filed the story in the evidence in the extradition case. So, that gave them an excuse to be able to report it.
But before that, it was incredible.There was no mention of it, but they needed this court document in order to reference it. So, this showed to me that they needed this excuse. Because it was clearly newsworthy.

CHRIS

That’s right. Well, they didn’t really want to go after reporting because they didn’t want to run and they want to shutter their sources with the CIA. I mean, it’s a very delicate dance that you play and there are reporters within institutions like the New York Times, all they do are fed, especially the Washington Bureau.They’re just fed crap. I mean they dont actually report anything. And they’re held in very high regard by the institution.

So when I covered, after 9/11, I covered Al-Qaeda. I was based in Paris. And French intelligence did not want the Americans to invade Iraq. So, they had given me at the highest levels, I had complete carte blanche at the counter-terrorism office run by this crazy Corsican. But I could go in and just ask. I mean, I would, I covered Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and the Brits weren’t giving me anything, they were awful.And I would just go, “Okay, get the files.” And I’m looking at pictures of Richard Reid walking out of the [Brixton] mosque and all this kind of stuff. And the French knew that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. And the French, unlike the Americans, actually had human assets inside of Al Qaeda.The Americans didn’t have any.It was all electronic eavesdropping, a lot of which they couldn’t read, by the way. Yeah, it was interesting. So, they knew chatter. They could pick up chatter, but they couldn’t. As it was explained to me, they used to code it in pictures. I don’t understand any of this stuff. We’ll have to call Julian and ask him.But they would code the messages in pictures. So they knew something was happening, but they couldn’t read it, the Americans. And I would go back to New York. Now, remember, the New York Times at the time was a full partner in the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass… and all this kind of stuff.

So, I had really good actionable intelligence and I was just dismissed. Oh, that’s the French. No, literally. Louis Scooter Libby, who I actually went to prep school with him, He told us, Dick Cheney told us, and it was like their ears were full of wax. So they went after Judy Miller, who is loathsome, but it was an institutional failing. They didn’t want to hear it. And at a time of kind of national crisis, whether that’s real or manufactured, the press always falls into line, traditionally. It goes all the way back to the Crimean War. Every press has done it. And that’s the role the Times was playing. So even though I had better intelligence, it was dismissed in the name of racism because we didn’t eat French fries in America at that time. We ate freedom fries and stuff like this. I mean it was so childish and I just wanted to go back to Paris.

STELLA
Well you know part of the problem is that the US I’d say the Anglo-American press but mainly the US press drives a for European press at least. And so I was speaking to some European press and I was telling them this story about Pompeo having his whole CIA deployed to bring down Julian and WikiLeaks and even planned to rendition, an extraordinary rendition from the UK. There was mention of black sites and how the indictment had come after these plans because they then confronted with this problem that well what if we kidnap him and then there’s no indictment. So, that came, you know, that was a sequence. And this is the proof that this is a political…if you needed more evidence, but that this is a politically motivated prosecution. And the answer was…well, but the thing is the New York Times hasn’t reported it…the Washington Post and so on. And so their view from very mainstream newspapers was that, well, it may be true, but because the New York Times hasn’t reported it, then we’re not going to report it either.

CHRIS
It is worse than that. It’s because the New York Times hasn’t reported it, it didn’t happen. So when I worked for smaller papers, let’s say, and go back to the war in Salvador, when I was working for the Dallas Morning News, I would report stuff, I mean, pretty horrible stuff. And it made no impact because the Times…The Times had a horrible correspondent who never went out. She went to the embassy and what she was fed and published it which is not only criminal in and of itself, but it hurts real journalists because even my editors would say “Well, that’s not what The Times is reporting.” And I don’t know that The Times still has that kind of power. I know that when I worked for The Times, our power was, as you said, that we set the agenda. So for instance, I would write a story and then all the big networksCBS, ABC, NBC, the producers, who are the ones with the brains, would come find me and say “Well, what are you publishing tomorrow? Where did you go?” Because their editors would read it in the morning paper and then tell them to go do it. That’s how it worked. So the circulation of the Times when I was there, I don’t know, 800,000, a million, although you also have the wire service, which gets picked up, so papers around the country would be running my stories. But the real power was that it set the agenda. And so you’re right and if it wasn’t in the Times in a way it could be ignored or as I said it didn’t happen. And I felt that on the other end. It was very frustrating. There were even moments when we leaked, we gave stuff to New York Times, inept New York Times reporters because we were sick of not having any kind of an impact. You kind of would have to hold their hand.

STELLA
Who sets the agenda now?

CHRIS

The press has changed since…I mean, during my career, because at the time the New York Times, like the big networks, would try and reach a wide audience. Now they don’t make an effort. The press has become completely siloed, so they cater to a particular demographic, whether that’s Fox News, and you can see it in terms of the percentages of Republicans who watch Fox News of 94 percent, the percentage of Democrats…and the figure is maybe slightly off who watch MSNBC or like 90-something percent, I think it’s 87 percent of the Democrats read the New York Times.
Because the model of the press has changed, where you’re now feeding your readers or your viewers what they want, there’s no price anymore for stuff that turns out to be a lie. And in that way, as bad as the old model was, this new model is worse. Because accompanied with this feeding of your demographic what they want you’re demonizing the competing demographic. So the right media is demonizing liberals, liberals are demonizing the deplorables, and that gets to what I saw in Yugoslavia.

So you had the same thing in Yugoslavia when it broke up. You had ethnic entities, Serbs, Muslims, Croats, and they seized their own media outlets. The first people they persecute is not the opposing demographic, who in some ways they need in order to build there…but people within their own demographic who are actually still trying to report the truth.

Those are the most dangerous and they will destroy them first. And that’s what’s happening. So what’s happening in the United States is, and I don’t know about the UK, but it’s similar to that breakdown of Yugoslavia because neither side is rooted in any more verifiable fact.

I mean, at least in the old days the Times was rooted in selected verifiable fact, and I will concede that the lie of omission is still a lie. Now it’s not even rooted in verifiable fact. And I was walking through Montgomery, Alabama, with Bryan Stevenson, the great civil rights attorney, and half of Montgomery is black, and Bryan is showing me all the Confederate memorials that have been put up. And then he says most of these were put up in the last 10 years. And I said that’s exactly what happened in Yugoslavia. With the economic collapse and breakdown of Yugoslavia and that sense of disempowerment, dethronement, and people retreated into these mythic identities, in particular, kind of the white supremacy, white nationalism that’s gripped the states, and that’s what happened in Yugoslavia. But these are identities rooted in myth, they’re not rooted in truth. And I think we’re very far down that road, and the consequences of it are potentially, especially since the United States is awash in automatic weapons, is really frightening, whether that we already have of so many mass shootings, it’s not news. And it’s mass shootings of kids and schools. I mean It’s just the kind of nihilistic violence. And then, as the great sociologist Durkheim writes in his book on suicide, people who seek the annihilation of others are driven by desires for self-annihilation. So these killers go in, and it’s either suicide by cop or they shoot themselves. And that exposes a very dark pathology within the United States, which the press is now contributing to.

STELLA
Yes, I mean if they took mass shootings, preventing mass shootings, seriously, and not just as a, I mean, there’s a political debate about arms control, of course, but then there’s the fact the media, the way the media plays those mass shootings that seem to be…

CHRIS
It’s like climate change. It disconnects it. It’s always a one event that has no connection to anything else, you know. So there’s no water in Arizona… “Well, isn’t that an interesting story, and now Madonna is”… you know. I mean, so, that’s part of this disconnectedness, you know, and you spoke earlier about history, and there’s no context. And if you don’t have any context, it doesn’t matter what you report, you can’t understand it. And that’s what’s been completely erased from the media landscape, any context.

PART 2

Prison is always a political tool, and in the case of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, the use of incarceration to suppress, discourage, and silence dissent is self-evident. Since being imprisoned, Assange has married and even started a family—but has been kept apart from his wife and children. In the second part of a two-part conversation, Stella Assange and Chris Hedges discuss the conditions of Julian’s incarceration, and how it offers a glimpse into the overall brutality of the prison system.

Transcript

STELLA
I wanted to ask you a bit about your work in prisons. How did it start?

CHRIS
So it started, I’d come back from overseas and lost my job at the New York Times for denouncing the war in Iraq, given a formal written reprimand, told I couldn’t speak about it. This is classic. We had another reporter, John Burns, who was cheering on the war in Iraq. They didn’t give him a reprimand. So it wasn’t…

STELLA
He was also involved in the New York Times dealings with Julian.

CHRIS
Was he?

STELLA
Oh yeah. 

CHRIS

Okay.

So Burns was cheerleading the war and I was denouncing it. So it wasn’t a matter of speaking out about the war. I was just speaking out about the war and saying the wrong thing. So I was finally told I couldn’t speak publicly and I left the paper. And I kind of floundered…I wrote my first book: “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” which I didn’t expect anyone to read. It was kind of about the culture of war and it wasn’t autobiographical, and it wasn’t even sequential, but it was about the culture of war, what it’s like, and I’ve covered, you know, at least a half dozen conflicts in depth. And I was teaching at Princeton, and I was living in Princeton, I was teaching the university. And a friend of mine who was the head of the history department of the College of New Jersey was going into the prison and teaching college courses to people who had their high school equivalency, what we call the GED. Now it didn’t have academic validity and she bought the books and that’s how I started because of her. And then I just I loved it. I mean they and then in 2013 Rutgers started a college degree program, and I started teaching in that. And these are serious, serious students who have turned their cells into libraries, who never had a chance, and that space in a prison classroom is really sacred because you’re given agency, it’s the only time in the day you’re given agency, you’re treated with respect. 

I mean really ‘sacred’ is the only way to describe it. And so, you know, I’ve been teaching since 2010 and now I think I’ve tried to count about 600 students and a lot of my students are getting out. I help my students write a play, which was my book, our class was about that process. And it was, I know your mother’s a theater director your brother’s an actor, my wife is an actor. And I, but I, when I started it was kind of clueless. I was teaching drama, I was teaching August Wilson, all these great playwrights Baldwin and others but I realized from the first day they hadn’t seen any theater because they don’t have money to go see theater. Unlike in the old days in Europe where they used to subsidize. Even when I lived in Zagreb I could buy a ticket for $10 to go see great opera and they were all state employees. So whatever you say about communism, you know, they supported the arts and a great education. I mean, you could get through Charles University.

So I said, “Okay, well, why don’t you just try and…” I wanted to write in dramatic dialogue because that’s how emotions and information, everything is conveyed. And it turns out that one of my students had knew who I was and had recruited the best writers in the prison. So, I start reading through this stuff and I’m going, “Wow.” I mean, I have four or five really powerfully written. And so just I said to my wife 

“I think I’m going to try and help them write a play.” Not that I know anything about writing a play. And then it just unraveled. Because in a prison you don’t even tell your cellmate anything about yourself. Because when you express vulnerability then the predators come for you. And guys would get up and they started writing these scenes of their lives. And some of them couldn’t read them or they’d stand up and their hands were shaking and they were crying. It was really powerful and because it inadvertently and organically became their grief, their loss all of that was expressed in a group of 28 among the 28. And then eventually… when I first asked, I said, “Who wants parts? Who wants a part?” Only seven people wanted parts of the 28. But as we started writing all 28… so I had to write 28. I was editing it, they were writing it, but I’d read 28 parts. I mean it was like a Fabian tract, you know. And then we had a reading and we couldn’t produce it because there was stuff in there that would anger the guards. So, I brought in Cornel West and the great theologian James Cone to hear it. But when we got to the lobby the warden was there and he said, “You’re not going to your classroom”. And they hauled into the chapel and there was a phalanx of guards all white at the back and then they brought my class in and of course they had to immediately decide which parts of the play they could read out loud and which they couldn’t. And they all huddled like in a big circle and I wanted to hear what they were editing out but I purposely walked all the way to the back of the room because I said it’s theirs, it’s their play.

And you can’t replicate that power. However, they weren’t trained actors or anything, but it all came from here. And then my best writer, thank God, got out first. I met him at the gate. And we worked with a theater…a great director, Jeff Wise in New York, who workshopped it.And we had to reduce those parts back to seven parts. And then it was produced by the theater in Trenton New Jersey and and sold out every night for a month and then we had one night for the families and that was you know an amazing experience. So all of these families some of them had driven hours to get there. About four minutes into the play I hear people begin to cry and they just wept through the whole play. And so I wrote this book ‘Our Class’ that used that process of writing the play to talk about mass incarceration because…every scene in that play happened to someone in that classroom including stuff that would just seem improbable. Like the guy whose first night in Trenton, which is the high security prison in New Jersey, the guard comes and goes, “You know that was your father’s cell.”  

Or I said once to one of my…Okay, we were working on scenes, “we need to get a dialogue between the son and the mother”. And then a student comes up to me after class and goes “Well, what if we’re a product of rape?” And I said, “Well, that’s what you’ve got to write, Timmy.” So, he gets up he couldn’t read it, actually, and it was written into the play. And when we produced the play and he did read it he immediately went off stage and I said, “Where’s Timmy? Where’s Timmy?”. And I found him in the corner of the bathroom just shaking and sobbing. And the dialogue that he wrote, which was from his own experience, was he was product of rape and he was with his half-brother in a car and there was a weapon in the car and the car was searched by the police and it was his half-brother’s weapon and he said and he said “it’s mine.” And what he wrote was the phone call from the county jail to his mother which said “It doesn’t matter Ma, I was never supposed to be here anyway and you have the son you love”. That’s why he went to prison. 

STELLA
Oh my god. 

CHRIS

So it was, I mean, still even though I wrote the book, I pick it up and it kind of rips my heart out. So I’m really committed and they’re amazing guys. They remind me of war correspondents, actually. I don’t really like liberals too much. When I went to divinity school at Harvard, I lived in the inner city in Roxbury, I used to commute into Cambridge to go to school. I said, “That is where I learned to hate liberals.” All the people who talk about empowering people they never met.

So, now they’re getting out, a lot of them, and they’re brilliant. I’ve got several graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers and they’re tough, and they’re real, fiercely loyal. War correspondents are kind of rogues in many ways, but you earn your way into that fraternity by always watching the back of the person you’re with.

I mean, I can remember being in ambushes and every fiber in my body wanted to run. It’s terrifying, it’s scary, but you can’t until everyone goes out. And that kind of, they have that kind of loyalty. So, I’m, you know, now they’re… I’m getting back and going to court. As they get out, because it’s so hard to get work, you just get involved in their lives and I know their mothers and their kids.

STELLA
So, was this a specific prison with a management that thought this was a good idea? 

CHRIS
No, that’s interesting. 

So it was, the prison rights advocates organized to pass a law in New Jersey that said that if secondary education was provided, the prisons had to create a space for it. And so Rutgers, they raised several million dollars a year but it’s actually an entity within Rutgers, but it’s not Rutgers. So, at the beginning, the guards treated us really poorly because they were baiting us. They would treat us, I mean, just horrific stuff. The guards bring in the drugs, then there are overdoses, then the Special Investigation Division comes in and tries to find out who. So, one night I’m sitting there with a bunch of other Rutgers professors and we go into the rotunda at East Jersey State Prison which then the rotunda is completely surrounded by bars. And suddenly these guards come to us, now we’re all teachers. “Up against the bars! Up against the bars!”. So we all have to stand on the bars, we’re patted down and searched, then they bring the dogs to sniff us and then they go, “All right, get out, you’re not teaching tonight.”  So, that’s like classic. And of course what happens is most professors don’t come back. That’s what they want, very hard to retain professors. And they can be very…but you can’t respond because if you say one thing…I’m sure you know what I’m talking about…then they write it up and you don’t come back. So, they could be really…it’s better now, and I think it’s better because in the prison that I just taught in, we have 140 people out of 2,000 in the college degree program. It’s really hard to get in. And if you have a lot of charges, i.e. if your disciplinary record is not good, you can’t get in. So, I think we had for the 146 or 700 applications but it means that the behaviors in the prisons are modified because people want to get into the program. 

That’s my guess. And then you’ve got the class issue because the guards didn’t go to college. And they’re going, “Why do these people get free…”. And it’s a legitimate question, I mean, so… And then the other factor you’ve got is that most of these people, a lot of the guards were in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, they’ve got very bad PTSD. And I’ll pull in there and they’re all coming in their pickup trucks and totally pumped up probably on steroids. And it’s a job like cops where you can be paid very well to be a sadist. I mean, nobody’s gonna… 

STELLA
The vocational ones. 

CHRIS

 Yes. 

STELLA

 I think it’s…for people who haven’t been in that kind of environment it’s very difficult to understand the kind of dynamic that develops very quickly. Because I think maybe the first or second time you go in there and you kind of, you want to stand your ground on all sorts of small things. 

CHRIS
That’s a bad idea.

STELLA

It’s a bad idea. And you notice people who are new coming into the prison, you’re like, “just run with it”, you know, because, first of all, it’s a little fiefdom right. 

CHRIS
It’s a totalitarian system, I mean, completely. 

STELLA
And they control everything, I mean literally everything. 

CHRIS
On a whim too. It’s a whim. There’s no rule, they just feel like it, they do it. 

STELLA
Exactly. So you’re, you have to play along.

CHRIS
Yeah 

STELLA
You have to make compromises. Compromise in order to pick your battles. Because I mean at times I have to…I’ve tweeted about things that have happened in the prison but maybe one time out of every six because I have to do that calculation. Yeah, that’s right.

I was just, I was just in Rome. I don’t know if you know. Yes, I saw the Pope in a private audience and I gave… 

CHRIS
You speak Spanish too, right? 

STELLA
Yes. 

 
CHRIS
Did you speak spanish with him?

STELLA
Yes, we spoke spanish.

CHRIS
Except he speaks Argentine Spanish, but it’s alright.

STELLA
And I was thinking, I have to give him, I want to give him a gift, but what gift do you give the Pope? And so the gift that I ended up giving was two printouts of the famous wedding pictures. 

CHRIS
Oh, that’s nice. 

STELLA
Because, as you know, I mean, you were meant to be there, you were meant to be a witness. 

CHRIS
I was there, just as outside, that’s all, listening to Craig Murray. 

STELLA
Well, one of the objections they had to having you as a witness was that you were a journalist. 

CHRIS
I know. Well, they didn’t let your photographer in there. 

STELLA
Exactly. So, the prison took the pictures. A prison guard, who is the same prison guard that does the pictures for cell raids. And Julian and I sort of joked that our wedding pictures would look like a cell raid and they kind of do. So, we haven’t actually been given the digital files. We’ve been given, both Julian and I each, printed out copies of the wedding in A4, like porous, not photographic paper and that’s what I have, right. I just have that one copy. Supposedly the prison has been is retaining the digital copy. We got Julian’s solicitor to write to the prison and they said yes they would retain it. 

CHRIS
Right, that’s classic prison behavior. I mean, it’s just, yeah, they just invent like obstacles just because they like to do it, I guess. I don’t know. 

STELLA
Well, the thing is they said we weren’t allowed to bring the photographer in because it was a security issue. But then they chose a location. The location had to be a room with nothing on the wall. Like a blank wall 

CHRIS
As opposed to the chapel.  

STELLA
As opposed to the chapel. And then, so they had total control over the only thing in the picture is Julian and me in our wedding clothes. That’s it. So, anyway, this is, apparently this is also a security risk. 

CHRIS
The picture?  

STELLA
The picture. So, when they sent the pictures to me they also sent what they call a compact which is just this form. And asked me to sign it. I haven’t signed it. But, saying “here are your pictures, you’re not allowed to share this on social media and you’re not allowed to share it with the press.” And so they’re censored wedding pictures.

CHRIS
Wow 

STELLA
And I got asked because I wrote a tweet saying that I had given these pictures and that bizarrely the prison hasn’t allowed me to share it with the press or on social media and then I was reading the comments “Well, why don’t you do it anyway?” and that’s, I mean it’s a logical question, but it’s also, if your loved one…if someone is inside the prison they’re exposed to all sorts of… 

CHRIS
They’re exposed to retribution and they’re always looking for ways to keep you out. So, I have unfortunately… do you know the old character from the movies in America ‘Step and Fetch it’? from the 30s, it’s this horrible black stereotype you know, where step and fetch it, you know, he’s every black stereotype you could…racist stereotype you could want. Where he doesn’t want to work and he’s completely obsequious to white people and awful. But, that’s what I feel like in the prison. And it’s not my nature and it’s not yours but you got to swallow it because I’ve got to get in there for my students. And I know they’re looking. Like, I’m not allowed to have any email contact any phone contact any written contact with any of my students in the prison. And I don’t violate that rule because they monitor it. And I know the first time I would send an email that’s a hard and fast rule. And they don’t like me there. I mean, they’ve tried twice not to give me credentials. Fortunately, I mean one of the times I was teaching at the University of Princeton to call the commissioner. So, I mean, I could play that white privilege power game that got me back in, but they don’t like me in there. So, that’s what people don’t get. Yeah, and I think the other thing that people don’t get is that when you have someone you love in prison to a certain extent, your family is incarcerated as well. I mean, that’s hard to describe to people, but just the fact your children have to go to a prison, they have to see that. What mother  

 wants their children to see that naked face of the police state? I mean, and then you ask questions and then there’s of course the whole, I mean, one of the reasons I’m so fiercely against mass incarceration is what it does to families. And in the States, they jack up…it’s all privatized. I don’t know if it’s like the same here. So, the phone rates are really high. And the only way that incarcerated parents can communicate with their children is over the phone. And they’re gouging them. We’re talking about the poorest of the poor people really struggling, and it’s $15 for 15 minutes. And the people who run this…I just did a protest at Princeton Theological Seminary because the owner or the guy who owns…It used to be GlobalTelLink…of the prison phones, who’s worth, I don’t know, $10 billion. I’m not making that up. I mean, he’s the chairman of the trustee board of the seminary. And so, again, it gets into how corrupt the institutions, how wedded the institutions are. So, there’s this…and you have to pay in advance. I mean, it’s so awful. There’s so many little things like that I’m talking about the people who live outside, that becomes so burdensome and stressful, which you’re going through, that if you’re not connected to the prison system, you don’t get it. It’s not just the person who’s locked up. In a way, you’ve locked up the whole family. 

STELLA
Yep. Well, our kids only ever get an hour and a bit with Julian. And there’s something called Family Day, which we’ve never experienced because Julian is never on the list of favored prisoners 

CHRIS
Oh, you have to be selected for Family Day? 

STELLA
Yeah, I have to be selected for family day. And Family Day is, I think, five hours and you can watch a movie or something. I don’t know, I’ve only ever heard. It’s like a, it’s… I hear it’s real, but we’re never… 

CHRIS
But you’re still within the walls of the prison. 

STELLA
Yeah 

CHRIS
I mean, so when visiting hours would come… And we actually had a riot in the prison, I taught, because one guy was with his kids, and the guard came and started harassing and insulting him in front of his children. And he got up and he said out loud to the other prisoners, “This guy is disrespecting me in front of my kids.” There was a riot. Everyone started fighting. But what they do in that prison is that they stop the visit and you’ve got to move immediately. And they put all the prisoners on one side and they put all the families, including the children, on the other. And then they pull ha curtain like this. And then it’s strip searched. All the men are strip searched. And that in and of itself…and that’s why… and then they will also harass the families who come to visit. So, you can wait for hours. There’s no bathroom. If you wait, you’re off and outside in the rain. There’s no protection from the rain. Then the guards…so a lot of my students tell their mothers, “Don’t come,” because they are so upset and they’re powerless at seeing their mothers disrespected by the guards. That’s very common. They say, “Just, don’t come.” Then people who have long sentences, the first thing they do is they get the paralegals to write out the divorce papers. I say, “If you don’t walk out of that prison system angry, you don’t have a heart.” And people say, “What keeps you going?” I said, “Well, how can I walk out of that classroom I walk out, they don’t.” But it’s…and Julian’s detention conditions are probably even worse. I mean, they are worse, I think, than my students. And then let’s be clear. I mean, you know, what you’re doing is torture. Solitary confinement. I had a student, he had a cell phone sold to him by a guard. They catch it and they throw him in solitary for a year. I mean, he graduated summa cum laude he’s out now, he’s working as a community organizer. But, if you go back to that year, he’s never gotten over that trauma. And we know from just, you know, studies, six days in solitary confinement will start to really mess your head up. So, these are systems designed to torture, which is of course what they’re doing to Julian, but it’s not just Julian. I think Julian probably gets it worse than they do. In the supermax prisons though…

I taught a… They won’t put the college degree program in the supermax prison in the state of New Jersey because in the words of the warden “It’s a waste of time because they’re all going to die in here anyway.” That’s a quote. 

So, I was just buying the books and going in and teaching a course like I had done before with the college program. And I taught — you know these things like teaching Shakespeare in prison? Then all these academics write books about how it changed their lives. Well, I’ve taught Shakespeare in prison and it’s good for them, but it didn’t change their life. I think they couldn’t wait to finish. But I did. I taught Lear, a close read of Lear. It was a whole course, line by line, and I wish I’d taped it because I’d have them do summaries, you know, of like, “So yeah, Lear, he’s got like his posse and like his two bitches and you know, they don’t…” It was hilarious. But, we got to Gloucester of suicide and it turns out a third of my class had tried to kill themselves. A third. And that’s that supermax. I mean, there’s no rec time, they can’t lift weights they will go four or five days without getting out to the yard. It is, yeah it is…And the mood in that prison or that classroom is unlike any other. I teach mostly in maximum security prison, the supermax…it’s unlike any. 

And of course, Julian’s held under these same kind of conditions. I mean, he eats in a cell, right? He doesn’t, he eats in his cell. 

STELLA
Yeah, and these things become kind of…it’s very disturbing how this – I think as you’re exposed to it and as time goes by – you see, I saw this in myself. I kind of took a – I had this moment of objectivity at one point when we were getting our, what’s it called?  The bureaucratic stuff you have to do before getting married. You get the registrar to come and, so the registrar came to the prison, had to have us both present and so on. So this was in a different room to where we usually meet, which is a big hall. It was where the legal meetings take place and they are small rooms with a table and some chairs. And I came out of this meeting feeling so fortunate for having spent an hour and a half with Julian in a different space. And it’s very disturbing how you kind of assimilate the restrictions. And normal was in the visit hall and just being with Julian in this different room was, I felt like, I had been really fortunate. 

CHRIS
That’s what prison does. It reduces you, well, I mean, look, it’s bondage, it’s a form of slavery, really and it reduces you to rejoicing in the broader context insignificant privileges that the master grants you. 

STELLA
Yes, yes. Have you tried to get into or have you been in ADX Florence? 

CHRIS
No, it’s really hard to get in.

STELLA
This is a prison that Julian will likely be taken to if he…  

CHRIS

 Yeah, so I’ve been in Marion to visit Daniel Hale and he’s in the MCU which replicates – if Julian’s extradited – the conditions he’ll be held under. Like when I was visiting with Daniel…So, I couldn’t…It was behind a glass, behind plexiglass. Let’s remember, this is a guy who never committed a violent crime in his life, like Julian, ever. And so it was me and him talking and the guards were recording and I could hear in the other room, because they turned the volume up, I could hear our conversation being recorded, that they were playing. And that, of course is, you know, Baraitser is a pretty repugnant figure, but she did recognizes the savagery of the American prison system, to her credit. And it is savage, having been in it. It’s really savage. Yeah. 

STELLA
Has any documentary crew followed you into the prison? 

CHRIS
They can’t, they won’t allow it. There’s no electronics in the prison. You can’t do that. 

STELLA
Well, not in Belmarsh either, but then you have some TV programs about Belmarsh that make Belmarsh look good. 

CHRIS
Or, what my students hate is these shows like Real Prison or whatever it’s called where they are all animals, you know? So you can get TV, but you know, they’re not going to film two hours of us discussing James Baldwin. That would make really good TV. And that’s what all my experience in prison is. So, I love those students. And they come to my house now and, you know, they’re just amazing human beings and I spend a lot of time trying to get them jobs, which is hard. But, they’re really remarkable. I mean, to end up where they have ended up. I mean very few of us could have gone through what they went through and ended up where they end up. They are really remarkable people. Yeah, no they won’t allow it. I mean, I’m in there by sufferance because they don’t want the publicity, which I would of course generate if they threw me out. And I have heard anecdotally the governor said, “I don’t want to so just give them the clearance.” But yeah, they’re amazing human beings. And you know, August Wilson writes about it. So, does Solzhenitsyn. The finest people…I’m sure Julian says that, some of the finest people he’s met from prison. And there was that, remember there was in the prison that act of solidarity on the part of the prisoners on Julian’s behalf? I can’t remember the details of it. 

STELLA
Yes, I mean, Julian, when he was arrested, he spent a few weeks in the general population and then he was taken to the health care wing. 

CHRIS
Hell wing, is that what they call it? 

STELLA
Yeah, it’s a misnomer. And he was there for six months and this was the hardest period because the prison had the…The reasoning from the prison was that he was in severe suicide risk. They had found that he had hidden a razor in his cell. And he was kept in this “health wing” for six months. And you can just imagine in a prison like Belmarsh where you have about 750 prisoners, the health wing is maybe a dozen, a little, yeah, probably about a dozen prisoners. You have the acutely suicidal, the prisoners who are dying, and then people who were having some kind of mental health episode. And that’s who you find there. And they’re kept in isolation from each other. So when he would be let into the yard, that’s who he would find. And he was extremely… Yes, isolated during that period. And he also couldn’t make many phone calls, so it was the prisoners who worked as cleaners in that section who observed Julian’s state and put in a petition to the governor to ask for him to be moved into the general population. and eventually that worked. And the terrible period in the health wing…It’s been bad with COVID and so on. For six months I couldn’t visit him. There were periods where he was in solitary with this health reasoning. There was an outbreak in his wing, about 70% of prisoners…This was even early on in the pandemic. But, it was never as bad as it was when he was in this health wing. And it was thanks to these prisoners that he got moved. And there is that kind of thing in the prison. But, it’s not, you know, Belmarsh is a harsh prison. They keep people isolated a lot of the time. As you said, you eat in your cell. Sometimes, you have association within the wing, which is an hour where you can move in the corridor and speak to other prisoners. But they prefer it not to be that way because from the perspective of an underfunded prison management, the more you have prisoners interacting, the more risk you have of some incident. So, the incentives are just to keep people inside their cells. And of course, that in itself carries all sorts of consequences. 

CHRIS
Well, it makes their job easier. I mean, so, you know, when I was teaching in Trenton, I would post the class. And I did this, I don’t know, three or four times, and then the prison called and said, “Oh, we posted your class. Nobody wants to take it.” And the social worker at some risk called and said, “They never posted your class”. Because they don’t want the movement. They don’t want to deal with it. It’s something to keep them locked up for 23 hours a day. It’s easier. And that’s always the push in the prisons because any kind of social interaction or an education program requires more work and they don’t want to do it.

STELLA
Well, people are used to seeing these prisons ‘Prison Break’, these TV programs where everyone in this mess hall.

CHRIS
Mess hall.
 
STELLA
Do you call it that? 

CHRIS
Mess hall, yeah 

STELLA
People interacting for most of the time. It’s nothing like that, at least in Belmarsh. It’s really the exception to the rule that you are out of your cell. 

CHRIS
Right, so in a supermax prison you don’t get that. In a maximum security prison you will get a mess and a yard and all that kind of stuff. You have sections of the prison, management control units or what they call the hole or just isolation. So, you have sections in the prison where people are under those conditions. But, he’s of course held in a very high security prison. So, that’s typical for how they operate. And really the end is to keep them locked in their cells almost all the time. That’s how they cope with it. I don’t know what does he get, 23 hours a day in the cell? 

STELLA
Yes, sometimes. You know, you can leave your cell to collect medication. To go the shower. You can leave at certain times. But you know, they knock on the door and say, “Do you want a shower?” and then you come out. Its not like you can open the door… 

CHRIS
I have a question for you. I asked John (Shipton). I loved Ithaka. But I really loved Ithaka because John didn’t answer any question they asked him. I mean, I love John. I think it’s great, but every time they’d ask him a question, he was completely elliptical. It was so great. It was so funny. I mean, he’s a wonderful guy. But I was here, you know, the night of your wedding, and I said to John something about…I don’t know what came up, because, I don’t know if John’s religious or comes out of a religious tradition, but I do, and I sense he has a kind of… I said something about Julian being an atheist? He goes, “Well, I don’t know.” So I wanted to ask you, because I didn’t explore it with John, and I know Julian likes Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn went into the Gulag an atheist and walked out a Christian. And I’m just curious, and I know that there’s been some support from the Pope and that kind of stuff, I’m just curious about, as somebody went to seminary, what you’ve seen in terms of Julian’s perspective vis-a-vis faith? 

STELLA
Well, I don t think I can put words in his mouth. I can talk a bit about the process. I think that we ve both experienced through this. And I have seen people react rather viscerally when…For example, when I said that there was a Catholic chaplain in the prison who had blessed our wedding and this kind of thing. And people project a lot of things… 

CHRIS
Okay, I have to throw in the story because I remember you telling me and I thought it was great. This for me elevated this Catholic chaplain. Like you’re not allowed to hug 

but he kept saying, “Now you can kiss the bride. Now you can hold the bride.”

STELLA
I think we had both the registrar and the chaplain were…actually everyone in the room, even the guards, were I think quite moved and enthused by the situation. It was worth facilitating. So yeah, I heard John make some comments about how prolonged the kiss was. But I think you can’t go through something like this without going through some process of becoming quite spiritual. And I’ve gone through, I think, a process of…understanding the importance of…community and human connection. And I think it’s something that I’m constantly striving to understand and just kind of trying to make sense of what is happening. And how you can go forward when you have this complete cruelty being… 

CHRIS
Well, let’s call it what it is, it’s evil. 

STELLA
Well, it’s evil. It’s evil.
And you have to go through a process. You have to process it and you have to go through a process to learn how to manage your emotions and your… and understand humanity and how some things are completely… It’s also made me think a lot about justice and the justice system, which is just like…something that floats on top of reality and then sometimes it activates, sometimes it’s denied. But, then there’s a bigger sense of justice that people have a natural sense of. And then there are some people who are outside of that. What I can say is that inside the prison, the structure of the chaplaincy provides a place for humanity, for connection, in this brutal environment. So, in whatever way, I don’t know how Julian would describe it but I know that he’s found support within that structure and so have I. 

CHRIS
Well, because it’s stripped down to an existential battle and every time you walk into that prison with your kids, it’s the forces of life confronting, in a very palpable sense the forces of death. I certainly experienced that in war. So palpable that I could feel it. And these are non-rational, not irrational, but non-rational forces that go into… 

I mean, I think artists, you come out of an artistic family, deal with it. I think religious thinkers are the best ones who deal with it. But those forces go into making a complete life, and yet we can’t measure them. And because of where Julian is and because of where you are, and because of what you bring, which is really life, sustenance, eros, love. And you bring it into a space where everything is conspiring to crush, love, compassion and empathy. That is an existential experience that…I think, and I see it in my students in the prison, forces them to begin to ask questions that in a protected environment or an environment outside of that starkness, you don’t ask. And that’s why I love Solzhenitsyn.

I taught the Gulag Archipelago in the prison last fall, all three volumes, and I’m a Nazi. I would like, quiz them to make sure they did the reading. But that is the Gulag Archipelago. It is about his spiritual journey. And like Julian, he went into prison with this notoriety and power. He was a captain in the Red Army. He was a brilliant university graduate. And he talks about wearing his officer’s coat for the longest time, ’cause he couldn’t shed himself of that status.’ And then the last volume is about rebellion and resistance. So, I’m not surprised. I mean, that, you know, given, you know, working in a prison and knowing what you confront, you know, it is stripped down to the most basic level of human existence. And those of us who fight for life, when we’re in war, or when we’re in Belmarsh, we see the face of death. We do. And you know that there are forces, powerful forces that are trying to kill Julian. They’re trying to kill him. And you’re Joan of Arc.

STELLA
I don’t know if we can finish on that note.

CHRIS
Sure, we can. 

STELLA

Thanks, Chris. It’s been a pleasure. 

CHRIS
I’m going to cry, too.

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