His story of hacking and leaks, aviation and imprisonment, courtroom theatrics and now perhaps approaching discharge is inspiring, scary, tragic – depending on how you look at Assange.
The case raised, but by no means unquestionably answered, important questions on what it means to be a journalist, a writer, and a whistleblower.
Was he a non-state actor endangering America’s national security, as CIA Director Mike Pompeo once alleged?
Or a hero, as many of his supporters believed him to be when Assange’s lawyers were fighting his extradition to the US while he was piling up an hour before the British courts.
Assange’s defenders have argued for years that his First Amendment rights – to present leaked, embarrassing, newsworthy details about American habits in foreign wars – were under attack.
Federal prosecutors took great notice of this, filing an 18-count indictment charging him with former military inspector Chelsea Manning of seeking backup hacks through classified methods and carrying out an espionage campaign by publishing hundreds of pages of military and diplomatic secrets. Accused of violating. Cable regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Assange’s lawyers say the charges could see him face up to 175 years in prison. Lawyers representing the US government informed the British courts considering his extradition that, if he had been found accountable, he would likely have been sentenced to 48 to 63 months.
Assange is also going to win, the hour has also lost.
An unsealed court filing revealed he was preparing to plead guilty to a single criminal count of violating an espionage operation for his role in obtaining and disseminating classified military and diplomatic documents from 2009 to 2011.
Assange has left Britain, where he has been since 2010, with a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday morning in the US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. WikiLeaks posted on Twitter that he left Belmarsh Prison on Monday morning, approximately 1,901 days there, and departed on a plane from Stansted Airport within the afternoon.
If his request to work moves forward, he may be able to travel independently again to his home, Australia, for service hours.
But they have paid a high price.
Archival footage from the time when he emerged as the leading founder of the rebellion, WikiLeaks shows an attractive, silver-haired hacker-activist-journalist in a leather jacket, his hand raised into a fist. He was about to change sector.
In his peak appearance at the London court, appearing behind a tumbler wall, he appeared to be a man of physically diminutive stature. He looked ill and was speaking little.
His team said Assange was too unwell, too weak to wait for his latest court hearing in London.
His medical condition is unknown. His lawyers have said he is battling depression – that a blade was once found in his mobile phone and that if imprisoned in the US, he might have fought to detonate himself.
His supporters argue that he was harassed for years under American protection and the established system.
Ultimately the Obama administration declined to charge Assange and commuted Manning’s sentence. Although the closest President Donald Trump was in office, Attorney General Jeff Klaas asked prosecutors in Virginia to take another look at the Assange case.
One of the most significant news releases released by Assange and WikiLeaks in 2010 was a classified US military “gunsight video” showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopter on Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters newshounds.
Information outlets around the world, including the Washington Post, are chronicling leaked photos and alternative WikiLeaks documents to tell their stories.
Prosecutors said the WikiLeaks revelations, combined with the unredacted names of the resources, put lives at risk.
The indictment was not related to WikiLeaks’ release of Democrats’ emails, which the government alleged was stolen through Russia to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. Russia denied the accusation. Trump, who later became a presidential candidate, declared at a rally, “I love WikiLeaks.”
In 2010, Swedish police sought an ECU arrest warrant for Assange, not for his journalism or whistleblowing, but to question him about a sexual assault allegation in the Nordic nation. (The investigation was canceled in 2019.)
After posting bond and abandoning his appeal against the warrant, Assange sought safe haven at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012. He was granted political asylum by Ecuador’s leftist government, which said Assange feared political persecution and eventual extradition. to America.
Assange lived in the embassy for almost seven years, living in a series of small rooms, never leaving except for brief appearances on the balcony to address supporters or the clique.
It was here that he fell in love with one of his lawyers, Stella Morris, who converted first his wife and then his wife. The couple gave birth to their two sons while Assange lived in the embassy.
However Ecuador said he was not a good guest – that he mistreated the staff, smeared feces on the walls. He may also have played a role in the release of documents confirming that Ecuador’s president had profited from offshore accounts.
In 2019, he was expelled by his hosts and arrested by London’s Metropolitan Police on US charges.
Video of the arrest shows the grey-bearded Assange climbing the embassy stairs and being pushed straight into a police van. He gave the impression of protesting. In front of him was a book with folded hands, holding a novella from Gore Vidal’s “History of the National Security State.”
Assange was taken to Belmarsh Prison on the outskirts of London, a high security facility filled with sunbathing criminals. He will spend 5 years there and apparently have endless hearings in the British courts over whether he should be protected from extradition or not.
The fees have generated a mild torrent of complaints from human rights advocates and independent press activists.
At the most serious court hearing in London, Timon Gehr, 34, a computer scientist from Switzerland, stood outside and described Assange’s time in prison as “psychological torture”, and he doubted Assange would probably receive any punishment. Is. Even in America they are listening. “It is clear that this is a political prosecution,” he said.
Earlier this year, the Australian Parliament called on Assange to be prepared to remain free.
The Committee to Protect Journalists and the Coalition of Press Democracy groups warned in a public letter that prosecuting Assange under the espionage campaign and the PC Fraud and Abuse Operation would allow the prosecution of newspapers “that just “Working jobs.”
He called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop all charges against Assange.
Salvador Rizzo at Untouched York contributed to this document.
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