When Julian Assange first emerged onto the international scene, he was lauded by many as a hero for trying to expose American misdeeds. For others, his questionable methods that put many lives at risk negated any goodwill attached to his quest for the free flow of information.
Over the years, that anger towards Assange gradually turned to pity as the Australian journalist wallowed in limbo.
Julian Assange boards a jet to fly to the Pacific for his US court date. Credit: Twitter/WikiLeaks
Initially, the Herald was unsympathetic when Assange became internationally notorious for the release of documents about US military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We noted that the most dubious aspect of the WikiLeaks exercise was the failure to block out the names and villages of dozens of Afghans who provided information to American forces or were otherwise friendly. “This is a virtual death warrant,” we said in our editorial of August 2, 2010.
But the WikiLeaks scoop had the potential to inflict huge damage on US credibility too. The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts, such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff.
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Assange fought extradition for 12 years to avoid facing charges for releasing the classified US information, but has agreed to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act.
Now 52, he spent seven years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy avoiding extradition until Ecuador became fed up and ended his asylum five years ago, when he was put behind British bars. He left Belmarsh Prison in London on Tuesday and flew out of the country to attend a US federal court in the western Pacific’s Mariana Islands.
Assange has agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defence of the US and is expected to return to Australia after the proceedings.
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