Saipan’s dark history brought up in court hearing that freed WikiLeaks founder

With the proceedings over, Assange grasped the hands of his long-serving lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, the Australian barrister who had been by his side for more than a decade.

Turning to the prosecution bench, he shook hands and exchanged some light banter with US counsel Matthew McKenzie.

The decision to hold Assange’s sentencing hearing on Saipan, the capital of the barely known US-controlled Northern Mariana Islands, was critical to the deal his lawyers struck with US officials. In exchange, he pleaded guilty to one espionage charge while more than a dozen were dropped.

To his supporters, Assange became a political martyr who revealed the most egregious of government secrets – evidence of war crimes and torture – and paid the price with ailing mental and physical health as he fought extradition to the US to face espionage charges.

The island of Saipan became a compromise solution, closer to his Australian home than the US mainland, where, his lawyers argued in years-long appeals, he would not face a fair trial.

For Assange’s unrelenting critics – those who loathed him for revealing state secrets and regard him not as a journalist but a traitor – his freedom will be a bitter pill.

After 14 long years, choosing from simple labels like hero or villain is perhaps too difficult for many Australians.

The case of the peculiar, silver-haired computer savant has taken so many twists and turns over the years that it has been difficult to keep up.

There were rape charges laid and then dropped; a long and at times bizarre stint in an Ecuadorian embassy followed by five years in a London prison; allegations of collaborating with Russian intelligence to publish hacked US Democratic Party emails; and so many legal appeals that, by the end, even some of his staunchest detractors concluded that enough was enough.

With this chapter closed there will be inevitable questions about what comes next. One can’t imagine Assange going quietly into the night.

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