A desire on all sides to move forward gives Julian Assange freedom
As negotiations to end the long-running legal tussle between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a choice so crazy that one person involved thought it it sounded like a Monty Python joke. movie.“Guam or Saipan?”It was no joke. He had been told that his path to freedom would pass through one of the two American islands in the blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean.Mr. Assange, who feared lifelong imprisonment in the United States, had long insisted on a condition of any plea deal: never to set foot in the country. The U.S. government, in turn, had required Mr. Assange to plead guilty to a felony for violating the Espionage Act, which required him to appear before a federal judge.In April, a lawyer fo...