I know from first-hand experience what imprisonment feels like. Make no mistake. Assange might not have been beaten up or had his fingernails ripped out,but extended confinement with an uncertain future is its own particular kind of excruciating torture. Belmarsh came after Assange had already spent almost seven years seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
He went there to evade extradition to Sweden as part of a rape investigation he said was trumped-up and included the possibility of being sent on to the United States to face allegations of espionage.
When Ecuador eventually rescinded his asylum claim in 2019,he was dragged out of the embassy and arrested by UK police for absconding from bail.
The US wanted to extradite him for alleged conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and then 17 counts of espionage. Those charges,his supporters said,included the possibility of life behind bars.
Myordeal in Egypt,where I was imprisoned on terrorism charges in 2014-15,was nothing compared to Assange’s,but it was more than enough to understand the crushing mental and physical burden that incarceration imposes on inmates. I also understand the weird blend of elation,confusion and disorientation that sudden release brings. Assange’s journey home will be much longer than his flight back to Australia.
But Assange’s release does not end the questions this whole saga raised in the first place. It began when his company,WikiLeaks,published a series of documents exposing evidence of war crimes and abuses by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan.
WikiLeaks was doing what the First Amendment to the US Constitution was designed to achieve. It guarantees freedom of speech and press freedom,and,in the process,it grants people the right to speak out against abuses of government authority. That is a vitally important check on the awesome power that governments wield,and WikiLeaks should be celebrated for what it exposed.