‘I am not there and I am not here’ : An American Palestinian bearing witness to atrocity…
Some years ago, David Ignatius wrote an article in the Washington Post titled, ‘Replant the American Dream’ (1), in which he told of travelling the world as a foreign correspondent some 35 years ago, and how he believed that as an American he carried a kind of white flag, presumably of purity and moral superiority, signifying that he – being an American – was ‘different’, and that “the world knew it”.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been freed from prison in the United Kingdom and is set to travel home to Australia after he pleads guilty to a single charge of breaching the espionage law in the United States.
Assange, 52, will plead guilty to one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents, according to a filing in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
He was freed from the UK’s high-security Belmarsh prison on Monday and taken to the airport whre he flew out of the country. Assange will appear at a court in Saipan, a US Pacific territory at 9am on Wednesday (23:00 GMT on Tuesday) where he will be sentenced to 62 months of time already served.
“Julian Assange is free,” Wikileaks said in a statement posted on X.
“He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”
At midday on Friday 5 February, 2016 Julian Assange, John Jones QC, Melinda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson and Baltasar Garzon will be speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club on the decision made by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on the Assange case.
