Julian Assange

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BAIL Denied - Cunts !!

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Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.

This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.

After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.

WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know.

As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.

Julian's freedom is our freedom.

^^ From wikileaks tweet

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Assange freed after pleading guilty in US espionage case

Updated / Tuesday, 25 Jun 2024 15:18

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is due to plead guilty tomorrow to violating US espionage law, in a deal that will set him free after a 14-year British legal odyssey and allow his return home to Australia.

Assange, 52, has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

The deal marks the end of a legal saga that has seen Assange spend more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London as he fought accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and battled extradition to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges.

The US government viewed him as a reckless villain who had endangered the lives of agents through WikiLeaks' mass release of secret US documents - the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.

But to free press advocates and his supporters, which includes world leaders, celebrities and some prominent journalists, he is credited with exposing wrongdoing and alleged war crimes, and was persecuted for embarrassing US authorities.

Tomorrow, Assange is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands.

The US territory in the Pacific was chosen due to Assange's opposition to travelling to the mainland US and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.

Australian-born Assange left Belmarsh maximum security jail in the early hours of yesterday, before being bailed by the London High Court and later boarding a flight, his wife, Stella Assange said.

He was currently on a stopover in Bangkok, she said.

"I feel elated," Ms Assange, who flew to Australia from London on Sunday with the couple's two children said.

"I also feel worried ... Until it's fully signed off, I worry, but it looks like we've got there."

A video posted on X by Wikileaks showed Assange dressed in a blue shirt and jeans signing a document before boarding a private jet. After the hearing in Saipan, Assange will fly to Canberra where he will arrive tomorrow, his wife said.

He had recently won permission to appeal against the approval of his US extradition and the case was due to be heard at London's High Court next month, a factor that Ms Assange said helped galvanise talks over a deal.

The Australian government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has been pressing US President Joe Biden for Assange's release but declined to comment on the legal proceedings as they were ongoing.

"There is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia,"Mr Albanese said in the country's parliament.

WikiLeaks came to prominence in 2010 after it released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with swathes of diplomatic cables.

The trove of more than 700,000 documents included battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.

"Julian Assange endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," said Mike Pence, who served as US vice president under Donald Trump when the charges were brought against Assange.

"The Biden administration's plea deal with Assange is a miscarriage of justice and dishonors (sic) the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families," he said on X.

The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters who have long argued that as the publisher of Wikileaks he should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.

Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange is a threat to free speech and journalism.

Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of the Guardian newspaper, one of the global titles which worked with WikiLeaks to publish some of the leaked material, said it was "pretty disturbing" that espionage laws were being used to target those who revealed uncomfortable information for states.

Ms Assange said the US government should have dropped the case against her husband altogether.

"We will be seeking a pardon, obviously, but the fact that there is a guilty plea, under the Espionage Act, in relation to obtaining and disclosing national defence information is obviously a very serious concern for journalists," she said.

Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped.

He fled to Ecuador's embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.

He and Stella Assange, a lawyer who worked on his case, had two children during his time there. He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 after Ecuador withdrew his asylum status.

He was jailed for skipping bail and has been in Belmarsh ever since, latterly fighting extradition to the United States.

"Millions of people who have been advocating for Julian, it is almost time for them to have a drink and a celebration," his brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters from France.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0625/1456502-julian-assange-wikileaks/

[Daffydd]

Free.

14 years.

Fking travesty and still don't trust those cnts.

[Martyboy]

I heard Pamela Anderson is a fan so he's always got that.

Took him a birthday cake while at the Ecuadorian embassy....Then wasn't seen for a while....apparently....