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a deal for freedom..............

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will plead guilty to US criminal charges as part of a deal that allows him to go free, according to court documents. 

Assange, 52, was charged with conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. 

For years, the US has argued that the Wikileaks files - which disclosed information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - endangered lives.

He has spent the last five years in a British prison, from where he has been fighting extradition to the US. 

According to CBS, the BBC's US partner, Assange will spend no time in US custody and will receive credit for the time spent incarcerated in the UK. Before that, he had taken refuge in Ecuador's London embassy for seven years. 

Assange will return to Australia, according to a letter from the justice department. 

He and his lawyers had long claimed that the case against him was politically motivated.

In April, US President Joe Biden said that he was considering a request from Australia to drop the prosecution against Assange.

US prosecutors had originally wanted to try the Wikileaks founder on 18 counts - mostly under the Espionage Act - over the release of confidential US military records and diplomatic messages related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Wikileaks, which Assange founded in 2006, claims to have published over 10 million documents in what the US government later described as "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States".

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crgggyvp0j9o

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

FREE, FREE, FREE......

  • In short: Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is a free man after five years of imprisonment in the UK.
  • US prosecutors have filed paperwork suggesting an imminent plea deal in which Mr Assange pleads guilty to one count of espionage, ending years of legal proceedings over his extradition to the US from the UK.
  • What's next? The deal may allow Mr Assange to return home to Australia after taking into account time already served.

WikiLeaks says its founder, Julian Assange, has been released from a British prison and has flown out of the United Kingdom.

WikiLeaks announced Mr Assange's whereabouts shortly after court documents showed he was due to plead guilty this week to violating US espionage law, in a deal that would allow him to return home to Australia.

Mr Assange is due to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served at a hearing on the island of Saipan.

He is expected to return home after that hearing.

A lawyer for Mr Assange did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-25/julian-assange-released-from-prison-/104017664

 

FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE.........

freedom....

 

BY SCOTT RITTER

 

By allowing the US government to compel Julian Assange to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, America has condemned itself to be a land where telling the truth is a crime.

“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Justice Hugo Black, The New York Times versus The United States, 1971

Julian Assange is soon scheduled to appear before a US Court on the island of Saipan, where he is expected to plead guilty to a single violation of the Espionage Act, namely conspiring to obtain and disclose national defense information.

Assange is guilty of no crime. It is the United States government which operates in violation of the law and, by suppressing Julian Assange’s duty as a publisher to expose deception on part of the government about war crimes committed by American servicemembers in Iraq and other lies and deceptions perpetrated by the State Department and Department of Defense, in gross disregard for the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

By subjecting Julian Assange to five years of imprisonment under horrific conditions in a British maximum-security prison, where he was held under solitary confinement 23 hours a day, the US government broke the spirit and will of a man whose cause had come to personify the fundamental issue of free speech.

The UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, Juan E. Mendez, has declared that “[s]olitary confinement, [as a punishment] cannot be justified for any reason, precisely because it imposes severe mental pain and suffering beyond any reasonable retribution for criminal behavior and thus constitutes an act defined [as]…torture.”

Every American, whether they operate as a journalist or simply a citizen who believes in the fundamental right of free speech and a free press, must understand the significance of what Assange’s plea deal means—it is a frontal assault on free speech, effectively overturning the landmark Supreme Court decision in The New York Times versus The United States that spawned Hugo Black’s words in defense of this basic American freedom.

Let there be no doubt: Julian Assange is free, but free speech and the notion of a free press is dead in America today, killed by our collective passivity in the face of the brutalization of Julian Assange by the US government for the “crime” of exposing their crimes for all the world to see.

The truth no longer sets us free.

Rather, shining light on the inconvenient truth has become a crime.

America is a far worse place today than it was before our government compelled this plea agreement from Julian Assange.

This is a dark day in the history of our country.

https://scottritter.substack.com/p/americas-dark-day

 

A GREAT DAY FOR JULIAN NONETHELESS.....

 

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