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.
Dude got off easy lol. He should spend the rest of his days counting his lucky stars or whatever god he believes in.
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.
It’s a bit more than embarrassment. Some of what he exposed was absolutely horrific. Other leaks directly compromised confidential war and spy intelligence that directly led to the execution of informants. There had to be consequences for the latter. Had he responsibly redacted names, as a journalist should, I may have had a different opinion.
The intelligence leaks were via media outlets that didn’t sanitize the publications. It was up to them to do what was needed on that front. And in the end, nobody has shown that those failures to censor information had anything like the consequences to intelligence assets that Libby/Cheney’s leaks had.
He created Wikileaks and personally hosted classified information. The release of the unredacted Afghan War Diary directly resulted in the execution of Afghani informants.
Source on the executions? I found that informants were named and when warned that this could result in their deaths Assange basically said, “lol, snitches get stitches.”
That said, I couldn’t find anything about the informants actually being executed.
See “Informants named”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_documents_leak_of_the_War_in_Afghanistan
So, to clarify, since zero deaths are listed there—we don’t have a source for that claim?
