WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returns to Australia a free man after US legal battle ends
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returns to Australia a free man after US legal battle ends
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.
The criminal case of international intrigue, which had played out for years, came to a surprise end in a most unusual setting with Assange, 52, entering his plea in a U.S. district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Assange’s native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.
Assange was accused of receiving and publishing hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables that included details of U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. His activities drew an outpouring of support from press freedom advocates, who heralded his role in bringing to light military conduct that might otherwise have been concealed from view and warned of a chilling effect on journalists. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
Assange raised his right fist as he emerged for the plane and his supporters at the Canberra airport cheered from a distance. Dressed in the same suit and tie he wore during his earlier court appearance, he embraced his wife Stella Assange and father John Shipton who were waiting on the tarmac.
The detail I was interested in:
“The plea deal required Assange to admit guilt to a single felony count but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison. The judge sentenced him to the five years he’d already spent behind bars in the U.K. fighting extradition to the U.S. on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction. He was holed up for seven years before that in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
The conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of satisfaction.”
On one hand, Assange is a shitty person. One woman woke up to him sticking his dick in her without her consent and without a condom. On the same trip he'd had sex with a different woman who had also insisted on his using a condom, which he reluctantly did... but then the condom mysteriously broke. While a guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was hiding out to duck the Swedish charges, he smeared shit on the walls and refused to bathe. He also helped the Russian GRU interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election, either as a useful idiot or a willing collaborator.
On the other hand, as shitty as he is, he was effectively a journalist. With Wikileaks he released leaked footage of a US helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq. He released reports on corruption by Kenyan leaders. He released internal scientology documents. The world needs journalists who will publish stories about things that powerful people, governments and churches don't want people to know.
On the other, other hand, at times he hung his sources out to dry, like he did with Bradley / Chelsea Manning.
The plea deal he agreed to is bullshit. The charge of "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion" was basically encouraging a source to leak information to him. That's journalism. "Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information" was again, journalism. He was encouraging whistleblowers to report on wrongdoing by the government.
Even the plea deal is bullshit. He pled to violating the espionage act for... what? He didn't break into anything himself. He wasn't given a security clearance which he then violated. He wasn't even American, in America, or working for the government. He was acting as a journalist receiving information from a whistleblower.
So, IMO, there's nothing much to celebrate here. A shitty person pled to a bullshit charge, setting a bad precedent for journalism, and is now free. Lose, lose.
He sits down at the computer and immediately Tweets out that he has information about Hunter Biden's laptop and Hillary's emails.
So, I guess some art is saved¹ in this event
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$45M [of] Masterpieces Risk for Assange's Freedom: An artist threatens to destroy $45 million worth of masterpieces, including works by Picasso and Warhol, if WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange dies in prison, spotlighting the clash between art and activism.