Julian Assange’s plea deal: a suitable end to a grubby saga

When an unwanted house guest finally departs, the relief is palpable. So it is with the news that Julian Assange has left Britain. On June 24th the founder of WikiLeaks, a website that publishes classified and sensitive information, walked out of Belmarsh, a high-security prison in south-east London where he has spent the past five years, and hopped on a plane to Thailand. From there he is headed to the Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific, where he is expected to plead guilty to one charge of violating America’s espionage laws. That will fulfil his side of a reported deal with the American government, which in return will allow him to go home to Australia.

If the choreography plays out as planned, it will mark the end of a long and unedifying legal drama. Mr Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 after Sweden said it wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations (these were later dropped, and he denied them). He claimed asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he lived for seven years. After Ecuador ran out of patience with him (at one point it claimed that he had smeared faeces on the embassy wall), British police removed Mr Assange and arrested him again.

He was soon being pursued by America’s Department of Justice (DoJ), which wanted him to face charges that he had conspired to hack government computers. In 2010, four years after Mr Assange founded WikiLeaks, the website released hundreds of thousands of classified American military documents, including diplomatic cables and battlefield reports, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the largest such intelligence breach in American military history. Many of these documents are thought to have contained sensitive