Wikileaks’ Julian Assange Set Free from United Kingdom Prison, Travels to Australia
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been released in the United Kingdom and has left the country after spending over five years in a high-security prison at Belmarsh for what the U.S. government labeled as the “most significant breaches of classified information in the nation’s history.”
Concluding a 14-year legal ordeal, Assange, aged 52, admitted guilt to one criminal charge of collaborating to acquire and reveal classified U.S. national defense papers. He is set to receive a sentence for the time served, totaling 62 months, on the Pacific island of Saipan later this week.
Per the Associated Press, the trial is being conducted there due to Assange’s “reluctance to travel to the mainland U.S. and the proximity of the court to Australia.”
“This result was achieved through a worldwide effort that involved grassroots activists, advocates for press freedom, lawmakers, and officials from all political viewpoints, up to the United Nations,” WikiLeaks stated in a declaration.
“This allowed for an extensive period of discussions with the U.S. Department of Justice, culminating in an agreement that has yet to be formally completed.”
Assange, who was granted bail by the High Court in London on Monday, has boarded a flight to Australia. He also faced charges of sexual assault and rape in Sweden that he has refuted.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) in 2019 acknowledged Assange’s conduct “exposed significant threats to United States national security, benefitting our adversaries and endangering named individual sources with severe risk of physical harm and/or unjust incarceration.”
It is believed that the DoJ agreed to the plea deal without additional prison time as Assange had already been incarcerated longer than most individuals charged with a similar offense.
Established in 2006, WikiLeaks is estimated to have released over 10 million records concerning warfare, surveillance, and corruption, including military operation logs from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, as well as diplomatic messages from the United States (labeled as Cablegate) and details about captives at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Notably, they also disclosed a set of cyber warfare and surveillance tools supposedly developed by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (CIA), collectively named as Vault 7 and Vault 8, along with files illustrating the National Security Agency’s surveillance of France, Germany, Brazil, and Japan.
Joshua Schulte, a former CIA technician accused of divulging the confidential cache of cyber weaponry, has been sentenced to 40 years behind bars.
Another individual who collaborated with Assange, Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning), received a 35-year imprisonment term for disclosing hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, which became known as the Iraq War Logs and Afghan War Diary before then-President Barack Obama commuted her punishment in January 2017.
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