Julian Assange’s Freedom Came at a Steep Price
At last, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a free man. Why was he ever locked up in the first place?
Before the Justice Department dropped its request for Assange to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, he had to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act. That cleared the way for Assange to walk out of the maximum-security prison in London where he was being held. But it also sets a legal precedent that threatens free speech and journalism worldwide. Assange isn’t a spy. He’s a publisher, guilty of embarrassing the U.S. government.
“Really anybody who is concerned about press freedom should be deeply concerned about the prosecution of Julian Assange,” says Trevor Timm, co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “Maybe [some] journalists don’t like Julian Assange, or they have criticized one or many of his actions over the years. That’s all well and good, but what really matters are the acts the Justice Department is trying to criminalize here.”
WikiLeaks first grabbed public attention with the 2010 release of a video titled “Collateral Murder.” It showed footage from a 2007 attack by soldiers in a U.S. Army Apache helicopter, who gunned down more than a dozen people in Baghdad who weren’t engaged in active combat, including two Reuters reporters.
The video generated international press and controversy. Assange said his intention was to expose “the ‘another day at the office’ [attitude of the soldiers], how routine it was.”
The release of the Iraq War logs that followed was the largest military leak in history, revealing that more than 15,000 civilian deaths hadn’t been publicly reported. And it exposed that the U.S. military had ignored reports of torture, rape, and murder by Iraqi authorities and soldiers.
For years, Assange’s critics have attacked him for supposedly meddling in the 2016 election by publishing internal Democratic National Committee emails. They’ve accused him of sexual assault in Sweden. And he’s been vilified for hosting a show on Russian state television.
But none of that is why the Justice Department prosecuted him. They prosecuted him because he published the details of U.S. military misadventures in the Middle East for the world to see. And that’s not
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