FREEDOM FLIGHT: JULIAN ASSANGE

Trish Wood is Critical

Overnight, news broke that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was on a flight to freedom on the basis of a plea deal that would end six grim years in Belmarsh Prison. With a stop on a remote American territory to ratify the deal for time served, he’s off again to reunite with his wife and children in Australia.

Kit Klarenberg is British journalist, living in Serbia who is close to the Wikileaks organization. He joins me to talk about how western legacy media betrayed a man they once revered and what this means for the future of muckraking — something we need now more than ever.

At the beginning of the interview I suggest, wrongly I think now, that the deal might imperial journalism more generally, but experts are saying it won’t.

“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.”

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