Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Julian Assange is free. As of this writing he is en route to the Northern Mariana Islands, a remote US territory in the western Pacific, to finalize a plea deal with the US government which will see him sentenced to time served in Belmarsh Prison. Barring any shady shenanigans from the empire in the process, he will then return to his home country of Australia a free man.
Importantly, according to experts I’ve seen commenting on this astonishing new development it doesn’t appear that his plea deal will set any new legal precedents that will be harmful to journalists going forward. Joe Lauria reports the following for Consortium News:
“Bruce Afran, a U.S. constitutional lawyer, told Consortium News that a plea deal does not create a legal precedent. Therefore Assange’s deal would not jeopardize journalists in the future of being prosecuted for accepting and publishing classified information from a source because of Assange’s agreeing to such a charge.”
I’ve obviously got a lot of big feels about all this, having followed this important case so closely for so long and having put so much work into writing about it. There’s so very, very much work to be done in our collective struggle to liberate the world from the talons of the imperial murder machine, but I am overjoyed for Assange and his family, and it feels good to mark a solid win in this fight.
None of this undoes the unforgivable evils the empire inflicted in its persecution of Julian Assange however, or reverses the worldwide damage that has been done by making a public example of him to show what happens to a journalist who tells inconvenient truths about the world’s most powerful government.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
