Julian Assange is Free After US Plea Deal

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (right) was released from a UK prison and making his way back to his home country Australia after his 12-year battle against extradition to the United States ended in a plea deal. 

 

Assange has spent the past five years in UK’s high-security Belmarsh prison and nearly seven years before that holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, trying to avoid arrest that could have led to life imprisonment. 

 

On Monday, the fifty-two-year-old agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge related to his alleged role in one of the largest US government breaches of classified materials after his whistleblowing website published nearly half a million secret military documents relating to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

 

The plea deal caps a long-running legal saga, allowing Assange to avoid prison in the US and return to Australia as a free man – but not until he has made a court appearance in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, a US Pacific territory, at 09:00 AM on Wednesday (23:00 GMT on Tuesday), where he will be sentenced to 62 months of the time already served.

 

Public interest journalism is no crime, and the USA and UK erred big time in pursuing after him. Anyway, his No.1 priority is to get his life back together again.