This was quite a week in the annals of freedom of the press.
Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblower organization Wikileaks, after being hounded by the US with the help of its sycophantic allies in the governments of the UK, Sweden, Ecuador and, most shamefully, his native Australia, for 14 years since his Wikileaks organization obtained and released documents proving systemic war crimes by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been freed. He spent the last 14 years fighting efforts by the US to lock him up oar execute 9or even to assassinate him ,spending 12 of those years in the hell of confinement in a British maximum security prison and earlier seven years as an asylum seeker trapped in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.
His asylum ended and his imprisonment in Belmarsh began when the leftist president who had granted him asylum from British authorities who wanted to hand him over to the US for prosecution as a spy, lost an election and was replaced by a right-wing president who cancelled his asylum and called in the London Metropolitan Police, who dragged him out of the embassy and into solitary confinement in Belmarsh Prison pending extradition to the US.
Over the seven years he was trapped in the little embassy, or left alone in a tiny cell in hellish Belmarsh, his supporters — initially a handful of journalists and his family — a father, a half-brother and father and attorneys in Britain and the US, and one attorney, Sara Gonzalez Devant, who later bore him two sons who have never met him except in captivity worked to build a movement to defend and free him.
It was a tough struggle. The US and UK media organizations that benefitted from his Wikileaks organization’s documentation of US war crimes, including the gun-sight video of a US helicopter gunship slaughtering, amidst audible mocking laughter, 11 unarmed Iraqis including two local Reuters journalists, and from other scoops Wikileaks received from whistleblowers, largely turned on him when he was being pursued by US prosecutors.
Typically these same news organizations, when covering his case, would repeat in their articles about him (almost as if pasting in pre-set macro paragraphs”), the false accusation that he was wanted by Swedish prosecutors for allegedly “raping” two women in Sweden. They also would routinely include in such stories gratuitous quotes from politicians smearing his character and even from fellow journalists questioning his claim to be one of them, along with grudging acknowledgement that the US charge of espionage against him was a threat to press freedom,
But truth gradually prevailed and pressure kept building: in Britain against his being extradited and against the US obsession with pursuing the case against him, and in Australia for the government in Canberra to end its years of submissive and callous acceptance of the abuse of an Aussie citizen by a US government out for revenge. This international movement to free Assange grew larger and more vocal when a new Labour government replaced the prior conservative one in Australia and Labor PM Anthony Albanese openly called on President Biden to end the case against his countryman Assange.
In the end it was this slowly and painstakingly developed international movement to free Assange that compelled the Biden administration to offer Assange a deal. He and his attorneys were reportedly told that the US would agree to his freedom if he would plead guilty to one felony count of theft of US military secrets (the evidence of war crimes), and a sentence of five years, which would be satisfied by crediting the over five years he had spent being held in Belmarsh Prison without conviction of anything but denied bail while fighting the US’s extradition effort.
Much is being made now, of course, by US officials of that guilty plea, but it is important that what Assange was facing if he were extradited to a court in Washington DC. With an indictment on 17 felony counts under the 1917 Espionage Act an one felony count of encouraging hackers and of helping NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to escape to Russia, the total prison term if convicted on all those counts would have run to 175 years’ jail time served consecutively.
The urgency of the US plea deal offer, which apparently came as a something of a surprise to Assange and his........