Julian Assange is out of prison, after agreeing to plead guilty to violating the US Espionage Act. [At the time of this writing,] he is expected to be freed after appearing in a US courtroom on the Northern Mariana Islands.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all that Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release.

He spent 1,901 days in a small cell in Britain’s notorious Belmarsh Prison and, according to WikiLeaks, was “isolated 23 hours a day.”

I know — from first-hand experience — what imprisonment feels like. Make no mistake. Assange might not have been beaten up or had his fingernails ripped out, but extended confinement with an uncertain future is its own particular kind of excruciating torture.

The crushing burden of incarceration

Belmarsh came after Assange had already spent almost seven years seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

He went there to evade extradition to Sweden, as part of a rape investigation he said was trumped up, and included the possibility of being sent on to the United States to face allegations of espionage.

The Wikileaks founder is finally free, but his ordeal is likely to have a chilling impact on press freedom and public-interest journalism

When Ecuador eventually rescinded his asylum claim in 2019, he was dragged out of the embassy and arrested by UK police for absconding from bail.

The US wanted to extradite him for alleged conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and then 17 counts of espionage. Those........

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