We were happy, moved and comforted by the sudden news of Julian Assange’s release, but we are concerned about possible agreements with the US and the final fate of the journalist.
The WikiLeaks page on He explained that Assange left Belmarsh prison on the morning of June 24, after spending 1,901 days in detention. He boarded a plane at Stansted Airport and is expected to land in Australia soon.
Let us remember who Julian Assange is and why he was arrested and imprisoned.
Julian Assange was born on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. A programmer and activist, he was part of the international subversive hacker group. An expert in the Haskell and Ocaml programming languages, Assange developed the Rubberhose encryption program, which served as the basis for TrueCrypt. He also contributed to the development of FreeBSD and PostgreSQL. In 1995, he created Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner.
He later co-invented the deniable encryption concept Rubberhose, a software package for GNU/Linux designed to provide plausible deniability in the face of coercive cryptanalysis. This system was originally conceived as a tool for human rights workers, who needed to protect sensitive information, such as lists of activists and details of abuses committed. Additionally, Assange is the author or co-author of free software, including the NNTP Usenet caching program and Surfraw.
In 2006, he founded WikiLeaks, a non-profit organization aimed at revealing classified information and confidential documents to the public, of which he is the editor and spokesman. Assange claimed that WikiLeaks published more classified documents than the entire world press combined. He participated in numerous conferences and appeared in international media. He traveled constantly and worked on the video “Collateral Murder” in Iceland.
Through WikiLeaks, together with several activists, they published more than 10 million classified documents provided by anonymous sources. The US suddenly found itself with a medium that revealed the darkest secrets leaked from the Pentagon, about its massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about its torture in Guantanamo prison, as well as confidential correspondence from the government and its embassies around the world.
In 2010, Assange was designated by the readers of Time magazine as person of the year, and the weekly Newsweek defined him in 2012 as one of the most revolutionary characters. Precisely in 2010, when WikiLeaks reached its greatest popularity, with its explosive leaks, Sweden demanded the arrest of Assange for two false accusations, one for the rape of a woman and another for sexual harassment, during a visit to Stockholm to give a conference. Those charges would eventually be dropped.
Why was Assange arrested and imprisoned?
Let us not forget that it all began when WikiLeaks published classified documents detailing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a video showing a US Apache military helicopter in Baghdad killing 12 civilians, including two Reuters journalists. WikiLeaks titled the video “Collateral Murder.” It was published on its platform in 2010. This material exposed the US government’s murderous and hegemonic operations overseas, which had always been known, but only until this video appeared could it be proven.
In short, WikiLeaks later brought to light, in 2010 and 2011, thousands of sensitive official files on military campaigns and crimes committed by the US Department of Defense during its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange was already charged in the US with 18 counts of espionage and computer intrusion, after the WikiLeaks website exposed alleged war crimes committed by the United States.
In July 2010, the portal published 70,000 confidential documents on international coalition operations in Afghanistan; In October of that year, 400,000 were published about the US invasion of Iraq and a month later 250,000 US diplomatic cables were published, initially facing a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
All these documents revealed multiple war crimes committed by the US and its allies in the invasions against countries in the Middle East. The crisis that this audiovisual caused internationally and the immense discredit for the White House at the time was gigantic.
From this moment on, the capture of Julián Assange became the first priority of the US government. It was then that the creator of WikiLeaks requested asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in England, where he remained for seven years. From there he was forcibly removed in 2019 and taken to a tough, high-security Belmarsh prison in London.
US authorities have charged Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act, which experts say means he could face up to 175 years in prison.
Finally, Assange has been released, on the one hand, thanks to the efforts, campaigns and complaints of many organizations and the efforts of lawyers, friends, among many other efforts to help Assange such as: grassroots organizers, defenders of freedom of press, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations.
He won his freedom after pleading guilty to violating the US Espionage Act, for which he was sentenced to a prison sentence of around five years, already served.
This release means that Assange is likely to reach a deal with the US government that would allow him to face a sentence of 62 months, equivalent to the time he was detained in Belmarsh.
He will plead guilty to a felony in a U.S. court as part of a deal that will allow him to go free, court documents revealed. More specifically, he is expected to plead guilty before a U.S. federal judge to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information in a U.S. federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has finally reached a plea deal with the US government that could allow for his release in the near future, according to newly filed court documents. This was achieved because Assange had an appeal hearing in the High Court in London, which was approved.
According to US media reports, the WikiLeaks founder is expected to return to his home country, Australia, following court proceedings later this week. Julian Assange’s wife, Stella Assange, announced that her husband boarded a flight out of the United Kingdom.
Now, according to judicial experts, Assange is free, but justice has not been done, since; Justice would be for Assange to receive a total and unconditional pardon and million-dollar compensation from the US government for the torment they subjected him to with his imprisonment in Belmarsh, starting in 2019, and his de facto imprisonment in the Ecuadorian embassy starting in 2012. , and his imprisonment and house arrest starting in 2010.
By the way, given the unexpected release of Assange, the former president of Ecuador Rafael Correa, when asked about the role of Lenín Moreno’s Government in this situation with Assange, Correa called it “a global shame that will go down in history.” . He acted “not only attacking the century-old institution of asylum, but directly against the Ecuadorian Constitution,” he declared, adding that “it is the first Government in history that gives permission for a foreign public force to enter its embassy, in this case , to detain a political asylum seeker.
In this sense, expert jurists and lawyers also point out that the following aspects remain to be seen:
- That the United States should introduce concrete legal and political changes to ensure that Washington could no longer use its power and influence around the world to destroy the life of a foreign journalist for reporting on facts that were uncomfortable for him, and that it should issue a formal apology to Julian Assange and his family.
- Arrest and prosecute the people whose war crimes Assange exposed, and arrest and prosecute all those who helped ruin his life for exposing those crimes. This would include a whole host of government agents and officials from numerous countries and several American presidents.
- A hero’s welcome and honours from Australia on arrival, and a serious review of Canberra’s servile relationship with Washington.
- Formal apologies to Assange and his family from the editorial boards of all mainstream media outlets that manufactured consent to their vicious persecution (including and especially The Guardian) and the complete destruction of the reputations of each and every one of the unscrupulous journalists who helped defame him over the years.
Finally, at a press conference, the WikiLeaks organization, with its lawyer spokespersons, pointed out that Assange sacrificed his freedom for freedom of expression, he had to plead guilty, it is the criminalization of journalism.
In turn, they added that it is unprecedented in the United States to use the espionage law to criminally prosecute a journalist or an editor. In the more than 100-year history of this law, it has never been used in this way. We certainly hope that it will never be used in this way again.
No one should spend a day in prison for giving the public important and newsworthy information. It was definitely in the public interest to have this information and Assange shared it openly. Hopefully this will be the end, not only of the case against Julian Assange, but also of the case against journalism.
All of the journalist’s supporters are absolutely delighted, after a very long and complex negotiation with the US Government, to have reached this agreement that allowed him to return to Australia as a free man.
However, to gain his freedom, Julian Assange pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, for having exposed US war crimes, human rights abuses and wrongdoing around the world.
Sources:
- https://www.buscabiografias.com/biografia/verDetalle/12493/Julian%20Assange.
- https://x.com/Stella_Assange/status/1805393089819033890
- https://espanol.almayadeen.net/noticias/politica/1876002/julian-assange-logra-atrabajo-con-ee–uu–para-quedar-en-libe.
- “Assange is free, but justice has not been done,” Caitlin Johnstone.
- https://t.me/canal_novaterra.
- Correa: “If the crimes that Assange denounced had been those of Russia or China, there would already be a monument in Washington,” Prensa Bolivariana, June 25, 2024.
- The Report-Chris Hedges Podcast, You Saved Julian Assange, June 26, 2024.
- “It’s about time: Julian Assange regains his freedom”, Santiago O’donnell and Guido Vassallo, https://www.lahaine.org/mundo.php/era-hora-julian-assange-recupera.
- “Assange is a free man after his date with US justice”, Colarebo Internacional, June 26, 2024.
https://www.lahaine.org/mm_ss_mundo.php/wikileaks-assange-sacrificed-his-freedom
La Columna is a space free of personal opinion from authors who are friends of Cuba, which does not necessarily represent the editorial line of Cubainformacion.
