Julian Assange is free: WikiLeaks founder's brother Gabriel Shipton on the end of decadelong legal saga
(June 25, 2024) GUEST: Gabriel Shipton, filmmaker (ithaka.movie) and Julian Assange’s half-brother.
Gay Pres. Obama vs. Chelsea Manning |
After a decade-plus of legal challenges, Assange will plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material for publishing classified documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan [serving as a negative model for many other countries to do so] on WikiLeaks [in massive data releases and websites the U.S. was desperate to have Americans avoid and not dare go near for fear of surveillance and prosecution, coercing service providers into pulling their platforms from WikiLeaks].
Why did US prosecute him? To silence him with torture or ruin.
How can the System thank Obama for his service? |
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(Reuters) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty on Wednesday to violating U.S. espionage law, in a deal that will end his imprisonment in Britain and allow him to return home to Australia, ending a 14-year legal odyssey.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was at a location given as London, Britain, in a video released June 25, 2024. He is presumably in a British jail at the moment.
Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defense documents, according to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The deal marks the end of a legal saga in which Assange spent years in a British high-security jail and in the Ecuadorean embassy in London and fought allegations of sex crimes in Sweden, while battling extradition to the U.S., where he faced [trumped up] criminal charges.
Portrayed as a villain by the U.S. government for potentially putting classified government sources at risk [by exposing them for their crimes by showing their own records to the world], he has been hailed as a hero by free press advocates for exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes.
On Wednesday, he is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, at 9:00 am local time (2300 GMT Tuesday).
The U.S. territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange's opposition to travelling to the mainland U.S. and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange set to be freed after pleading guilty to US espionage charge
- Sky News Australia; Alasdair Pal and Sarah N. Lynch, Reuters, Reuters via MSN.com, 6/24/24; Seth Auberon, Pfc. Sandoval (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
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