Nearly fifteen years after the start of this legal saga, Julian Assange is finally free. This Wednesday, the United States accused him of putting people in “danger” by disseminating confidential documents via WikiLeaks in the 2010s.
“The released documents provided identifying information about individuals in contact with the State Department, including opposition leaders, human rights activists around the world, whose situations have been put at risk due to their public disclosure,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.
“It has also hampered the ability of American personnel to build relationships and have frank conversations,” he said, as revelations have shown that the United States was spying on its allies on a massive scale and that some American operations have resulted in the deaths of innocent people.
A hero of free speech for some
Earlier today, Julian Assange, 52, was released after a quick hearing in the US federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands. He returned to Australia, his country of origin. Under the agreement, the former computer scientist pleaded guilty to obtaining and disclosing national defense information.
American justice was pursuing him for having made public since 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Julian Assange is seen by his supporters as a free speech hero, but his detractors accuse him of releasing large quantities of government documents without any filtering.
At the time, the State Department “had to go out of its way to get people out of danger,” Matthew Miller further underlined, without being able to provide details. The spokesperson for American diplomacy refused to comment on either the justice agreement itself or the negotiations with Australia, in particular those which made it possible to resolve this legal saga of nearly 14 years.
