By Atilio A. Boron on June 27, 2024
Assange arrives in Australia.
Julian Assange has left the city of Saipan, in the U.S. territory of the Mariana Islands where he formalized the plea agreement agreed with the U. S. government. Assange spent seven years as a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy in London during the presidency of Rafael Correa. But in April 2019, the traitor Lenín Moreno handed him over to the British police destroying with such an undignified act the honorable tradition of Latin American asylum. This was for Assange the starting point of an ordeal of five years spent in the maximum security prison of Belmarsh, subjected to a harsh regime designed to penalize terrorists or ferocious murderers.
That is the treatment that the British authorities granted to the man who committed the unforgivable sin of exposing the crimes of the empire and the price Assange had to pay to avoid extradition to the United States, where he faced a possible sentence of up to 175 years in prison for publishing classified documents that exposed the atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The leak was the work of former Army analyst Chelsea Manning, for which she was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but after serving just over seven years in prison, President Barack Obama granted her a pardon and she was released. Assange, therefore, did not steal secret documents from the U.S. government, which Manning did, but with a healthy criterion of promoting the dissemination of true information, he limited himself to make them available to some of the main newspapers in the West.
The agreement reached with U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors requires Assange to plead guilty to the crime of espionage – as stipulated in the Espionage Act of 1917 – for conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information related to the national defense of the United States, which carries a penalty of 62 months in prison. After appearing before the U.S. court in Saipan and establishing his guilt, Assange flew back to Canberra, where at the time of publishing this article he had already been received by his family, friends and activists of his cause.
Some U.S. analysts argue that since the Australian journalist has already been imprisoned in England for a little more than five years, his sentence could be considered served and the case could be closed. And although he is an Australian citizen, he is also aware that his country’s authorities cared little or nothing about his fate for so many years. Will they now be in a position to guarantee his safety, especially when Australia has become a giant CIA station, as the Australian Television series Pine Gap (later broadcast by Netflix) demonstrate, I believe that as Edward Snowden did, the best thing for Assange to do would be to seek refuge in Russia because his situation in Australia could leave him totally defenseless and at the mercy of his bitter enemies. Of course, the perpetrators of the crimes perpetrated by the Americans have not been brought to justice in that country. Washington preferred to prosecute those who denounced them, not those who committed them.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English