Assangian freedom; Assangian hubris
Well, the Albo ALP government got something right after all since Julian Assange is now officially a free man after a Saipan US District court just accepted his guilty plea and let him go a free man with his time served in the UK as sufficient punishment. None of this erases the fact that the US committed unmitigated war crimes in Iraq, beyond even the data Chelsea Manning gave Assange, and that the Bush administration and members of the US military need to face the dock and answer for those crimes.
Personally, I have never liked Julian Assange and have found him a little sus, since for all of his exposes on the US and its European allies, Wikileaks barely ever leaked anything on Israel. In fact, some believe that Assange and Wikileaks may have acted at one point as unwitting pawns to Israeli foreign policy and Netanyahu because the leaks in 2010 came at a time when the Obama administration tried to lean heavily on Netanyahu into a final 2-state solution with the Palestinians. The political brouhaha in 2010 over Wikileaks' disclosures sabotaged that process by weakening Obama (not that I am a fan of Obama or his administration).
Assange and Wikileaks once again made themselves pawns for dirty political actors in 2016 when it was their tips that helped Russian hackers hack and embarrass the Clinton campaign and the DNC. I am no fan of the Clintons and believe Killary deserved to lose that election in 2016. Nevertheless the alternative was Trump and the fascization of the West, a development that claimed the life of my wife. In so many ways, Wikileaks and Assange helped both the 2016 Brexit campaigns in the UK as well as the election of Trump, with Nigel Farage seen going in and out of the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK on a regular basis at that time. The UK f*cked itself with the Brexit referendum, but that is neither here nor there. Let them do that to themselves. They deserve it. Nevertheless Brexit was really about haulting attempts by the European institutions from seeking full and total transparency of the City of London with its nearly 10 centuries of total opacity and lack of accountability to anyone. Russia and Russian oligarchs especially stood to lose the most had the Brexit referendum failed since they have used the Square Mile in London as one of their many outposts for money laundering and hiding black money in general. Assange and Wikileaks were amongst the facilitators of that stupid referendum succeeding. Among other things, the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved this.
So while many people think that Julian Assange may be the man of the hour or a hero, in my Book he is certainly not. He was an irresponsible and reckless hack whose arrogance and hubris got the better of him and nailed his own ass to the wall. Did I also mention that disclosures by Wikileaks following the 2021 American pullout from Afghanistan compromised the lives of thousands of Afghans whom the Taliban went after immediately following the US retreat? What I say may not be a popular opinion, but I am not the diffuser of popular opinions. The Truth is often not what people think it is, nor are those whom majorities may think are heroes really that thing. The American response to Assange was not only over the top, but downright dangerous, never mind hypocritical to the extreme. However, whatever his fans say and think, the fact of the matter is that Julian Assange himself has blood on his hands! Anyone in contact with individuals connected to the Berlin-based International Hacker Collective knows this: a group of people (mostly Anarchists) who utterly despise Julian Assange.
