Assange flies to freedom
WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, left Stansted Airport this morning on a private jet bound for America, following shock news that he has agreed a plea bargain with the US to ensure his freedom.
This is a significant gesture of reconciliation from the Biden Administration.
The fifty-two-year-old whistle-blower is heading for the Northern Mariana Islands, a US overseas territory in the Pacific, where he will plead guilty to just one charge of violating the Espionage Act rather than the eighteen originally aimed against him in 2019.
The deal concludes a fourteen-year stand-off which saw Assange spend seven years holed up in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, and a further five years in UK prison attempting to evade extradition for charges of sedition and conspiracy.
It’s an extraordinary moment for Assange’s family. “It feels like it’s not real”, his wife, Stella, told the BBC.
American judges are seeking a fifty-week prison sentence for the guilty plea – a term more than offset by Assange’s stint at Belmarsh in East London, where he has resided pending an extradition order since his expulsion from the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge in 2019.
This is also an extraordinary climbdown from the US government. The man who published thousands of classified documents relating to US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including details of detentions in Guantanamo Bay and videos of attacks on Iraqi civilians and journalists, has been set free.
Outlets including The Guardian andThe New York Times spent years working with Assange to bring those secrets into the public eye. His supporters see him, along with US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, as a champion of public interest journalism.
But, like Snowden, Assange turned out to be a much more polarising figure than at first seemed clear. Both maintained uncomfortably close ties to Russia, the latter having been named by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as an unwitting accomplice to Russian election interference in 2016.
In 2019, Ecuador ended its offer of asylum to Assange in part because of his suspected connection to two Ecuador-based Russian hackers.
That Biden’s Justice Department is now willing to forget, if not quite forgive, is the result of many years of quiet diplomacy and, perhaps, a recognition that Assange’s fourteen years of self-imposed exile for allegations dating back nearly fifteen years have been punishment enough.
The Australian government has been crucial. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who argued today that Assange’s case “had dragged on for too long” and that there was “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration”, raised Assange at numerous high-level meetings with US and UK counterparts in an effort to bring him home.
Assange’s legal counsel in Britain, led by Jennifer Robson of Doughty Street Chambers – the firm that launched Keir Starmer’s career in human rights law – also worked tirelessly to clear the way for a plea deal, persuading the High Court in March to put up further blocks to his extradition.
Not everyone is happy about the latest developments. Mike Pence, vice president when the indictments were made, has derided the bargain as “a miscarriage of justice”. Undoubtedly Biden’s decision will be used against him in upcoming Presidential debates.
But for some defenders of press freedom, even journalism that involves the violation of state secrets, this week’s events are a long-awaited victory.
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