that will see the journalist enter a guilty plea to crimes under the Espionage Act.
“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 Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
After more than five years in a 2×3 meter 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.”
NBC News reports that the journalist will first be transferred from the UK’s Belmarsh Prison to the Pacific Island US territory. From there, he will enter a guilty plea and be sentenced to 62 months in prison, which he has already served. After the proceedings, Assange will return to Australia
Yeah no way would the US government allow Assange release without some sort of guilty plea.
Civil rights groups have argued that charging publishers for violating the Espionage Act is a violation of the First Amendment. Receiving and publishing classified information is considered a standard journalistic practice.
As the founder of WikiLeaks, Assange published some of the most important and revealing information about the crimes and corruption within the US government.
In any case, the message has been sent. Publish any information that points out potential corruption or war crimes; you will be hounded to the end of the earth. Mum’s the word.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/leaked-us-video-shows-deaths-of-reuters-iraqi-staffers-idUSTRE6344FW/
Classified U.S. military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff, was released on Monday by a group that promotes leaking to fight government and corporate corruption.
The group, WikiLeaks, told a news conference in Washington that it acquired encrypted video of the July 12, 2007, attack from military whistleblowers and had been able to view and investigate it after breaking the encryption code.