Thoughts on Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and the film 'Ithaka'

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Video Notes/Links:

Selected quotes (modified for clarity):
“What Julian Assange and Wikileaks did was showcase to the world the nature of the US-Centralized War Machine’s war crimes…The charges against him are for publishing information regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. So essentially what Wikileaks and Julian Assange did is show to the world the monstrous nature of the War Machine.
What the film ‘Ithaka’ does is it helps to showcase yet more of the horrifying things that this anti-human War Machine has done.”
“‘Ithaka’ shines the spotlight on Julian Assange and his family, and humanizes them, showing us more about the true nature of the War Machine, and how it does not care about human beings. Because, as you will see as you watch this film, Julian Assange has a wonderful family–father, wife, two children, a brother–and these are all people whose sincerity shines through in the film.”
“Understanding the Assange Case is more about understanding the Case than it is about Julian Assange himself…In principle here, what really matters is, ultimately, not what kind of person Julian Assange is, because he could be a terrible person, and the case against him would still be wrong. The movie ‘Ithaka’ does explain the principles very well. It does two things: It explains, in principle, why this case being brought by the US government, charging a journalist under the Espionage Act–never been done before–why that is wrong; it does all of that, but it also does something else, which is it brings to us the human aspect of Julian Assange and his family, which is very important.”
“I think this is a good movie for people who don’t agree with me, essentially. Because I understand that this is about journalism, and about exposing war crimes, but a lot of people don’t understand that. As any Julian Assange supporter knows, when you argue with people who don’t know anything about this case, but who kind of agree with the government by default, they are happy to send someone who they know nothing about to prison to rot for the rest of their lives, and they don’t care about his family. But–it’s not necessarily because they’re bad people who wouldn’t care about those things, it’s because those things are abstract, and what this film does is it removes the abstraction around them. It shows you real people, real people for about 2 hours.
“To me, it’s like, ‘holy shit!’, people are so willing to just by default, doing no research, just condemn a man to a horrible life followed by a death that will come far too soon. I would think to myself that most of these people who are probably decent people–even if they don’t want to hear my cold, icy, principled case as to why they should care about this–maybe if they watch a movie like this they will see that, when they send Assange to jail forever, for exposing war crimes, this is pain they are causing his family, and if they see the pain that they’re inflicting, they will actually realize that it’s not worth it.”
“The sheer injustice of it–of knowing that someone is suffering in prison for doing nothing other than releasing information about the suffering of OTHER human beings. And for that, we’re going to send him to a slow, torturous death? And have children grow up without a father? A woman without her husband, and a father without his son, and a brother without his brother? We’re going to do that? I think this is a movie people need to see.”

Dismantling the Swedish ‘Rape’-Narrative against Julian Assange, by Nils Melzer
https://medium.com/@njmelzer/response-to-open-letter-of-1-july-2019-7222083dafc8