WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet on Wednesday, hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga.
The criminal case of international intrigue, which had played out for years, came to a surprise end in a most unusual setting with Assange, 52, entering his plea in a U.S. district court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Assange’s native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.
Assange was accused of receiving and publishing hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables that included details of U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. His activities drew an outpouring of support from press freedom advocates, who heralded his role in bringing to light military conduct that might otherwise have been concealed from view and warned of a chilling effect on journalists. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.
Assange raised his right fist as he emerged for the plane and his supporters at the Canberra airport cheered from a distance. Dressed in the same suit and tie he wore during his earlier court appearance, he embraced his wife Stella Assange and father John Shipton who were waiting on the tarmac.
ok.
Now, I’d die a happy person if I never have to hear about him or from any of his countless sycophants ever again. Thanks.
Little bro doesn’t care about human rights.
Dude got off easy lol. He should spend the rest of his days counting his lucky stars or whatever god he believes in.
he’s a journalist. he got one of the hardest deals any journalist has gotten.
Journalists do not pick sides.
He had email from the RNC andDNC via Russian government sponsored hacks. He chose to releaseonlyDNC emails to the benefit of pro Putin candidate Trump. Edit wordEdit edit: can’t find any info on RNC hacks parallel to the DNC ones
A real journalist would have redacted the names of Afghani informants so they wouldn’t run the risk of being killed by the Taliban
that doesn’t make him not a real journalist. sloppy, unprofessional, maybe, but he’s still a real journalist.
*who committed espionage.
some might call it espionage. others might just call it journalism.
12 years in prison is more than you get for killing a child while drunk driving
The man embarrassed the US by leaking their DMs.
The man embarrassed the US by leaking their DMs.
When you do that to a nation about their classified intel, it’s called espionage. It’s a biiiit more serious than a social media hack.
In practical terms, espionage can affect thousands of lives directly and change the course of a war. Imagined the shitshow if someone released that kind of info now. It could jeopardize the Ukraine conflict. It’s treated as more serious than murder because it can be.
On one hand, Assange is a shitty person. One woman woke up to him sticking his dick in her without her consent and without a condom. On the same trip he’d had sex with a different woman who had also insisted on his using a condom, which he reluctantly did… but then the condom mysteriously broke. While a guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was hiding out to duck the Swedish charges, he smeared shit on the walls and refused to bathe. He also helped the Russian GRU interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election, either as a useful idiot or a willing collaborator.
On the other hand, as shitty as he is, he was effectively a journalist. With Wikileaks he released leaked footage of a US helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq. He released reports on corruption by Kenyan leaders. He released internal scientology documents. The world needs journalists who will publish stories about things that powerful people, governments and churches don’t want people to know.
On the other, other hand, at times he hung his sources out to dry, like he did with Bradley / Chelsea Manning.
The plea deal he agreed to is bullshit. The charge of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” was basically encouraging a source to leak information to him. That’s journalism. “Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information” was again, journalism. He was encouraging whistleblowers to report on wrongdoing by the government.
Even the plea deal is bullshit. He pled to violating the espionage act for… what? He didn’t break into anything himself. He wasn’t given a security clearance which he then violated. He wasn’t even American, in America, or working for the government. He was acting as a journalist receiving information from a whistleblower.
So, IMO, there’s nothing much to celebrate here. A shitty person pled to a bullshit charge, setting a bad precedent for journalism, and is now free. Lose, lose.
That’s journalism.
Uh, no it fucking isn’t. Journalists absolutely are not permitted to entice people to commit crimes more than any other person. This is exactly why Greenwald and Poitras were not indicted, they didn’t ask Snowden to do anything, they just reported what he had already stolen.
The state calls everything it doesn’t want you to do a crime, including telling the people things they absolutely need to hear.
You are a person with opinions.
