Julian Assange, founder of whistle-blower media group WikiLeaks, pleaded guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that will allow him to return home to Australia after a 14-year-long legal saga.On its website, WikiLeaks says it is a multinational media organization that specializes in analyzing and publishing databases of censored or otherwise restricted materials involving wars, spying and corruption.
“WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents,” Assange said of the organization in an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel in 2015. “We give asylum to these documents, we analyze them, we promote them and we obtain more.” U.S. authorities said the leaks were reckless, damaged national security, and endangered the lives of agents. Assange’s many supporters said the site upheld free speech and attempts to prosecute him were an assault on journalism.In April 2010, WikiLeaks released a video showing a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff. In June, a U.S. military specialist named Bradley Manning was arrested for releasing the classified video.
In the meantime, Assange was fighting against an order by a Swedish court to detain him as a result of an investigation into allegations of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. He was arrested in December 2010 in Britain on a European warrant. Assange denied the allegations and said from the outset that it was a pretext to extradite him to the United States to face charges over the WikiLeaks releases.
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