October 6, 2011. Copyright 2011, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Decision time for Julian Assange?
By Joanna Griffin

LONDON, October 6, Graphic News:  Julian Assange has inspired admiration and loathing in equal measure ever since he was thrust into the spotlight when the whistleblower website WikiLeaks went public in 2007. To some, its maverick founder and editor-in-chief is a brave idealist, ready to risk everything to reveal the truth. While to others he is a reckless extremist, prepared to risk others' lives in his quest to blow apart state secrecy.

As Assange awaits judgement on his possible extradition from the UK to Sweden, where he faces two sex assault charges, his stock may appear lower than at any time since WikiLeaks came out into the open. Poor sales of an unauthorised aubiography and falling-outs with former allies, such as Britain's Guardian newspaper, may mean he is not quite the media darling he once was, but there can be no doubt that the impact of WikiLeaks will continue to be felt around the world.

Born in 1971 in Queenstown, Australia, Assange led a peripatetic childhood with his mother and step-father. He has said that he attended up to 30 schools as his parents took their travelling theatre company around the country. Many details of his younger years are shady, but it is thought he fathered a son with a girlfriend at 18, and that he spent several months in and out of hospital with depression.

A fiercely intelligent teenage computer hacker, he was charged with hacking offences after being caught with passwords including one belonging to the U.S. Air Force 7th Command Group in the Pentagon. He studied physics and maths in Melbourne before setting up WikiLeaks in 2006. Within a year, it was claiming a database of more than 1.2 million documents from anonymous sources worldwide.

WikiLeaks has brought into the open sensitive material on subjects ranging from extra-judicial killings in Kenya to practices at Guantanamo Bay, but perhaps none more controversial than military information on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, deeply embarrassing the Pentagon. In May 2010 soldier Bradley Manning was arrested for allegedly leaking U.S. military documents and his imprisonment has become a rallying point for supporters of the anti-secrecy organisation.

The silver-haired Assange has been praised for publishing Tunisian documents that reportedly set the scene for the "Arab Spring", and been called a terrorist by powerful U.S. figures, including former Republican speaker Newt Gingrich. With no fixed abode and a network of influential allies, the boyish-looking Assange had stayed one step ahead of trouble until two female WikiLeaks volunteers accused him of sex crimes in Sweden. Assange, who denies the charges, now fears that he could face the death penalty if he is sent from Sweden to the United States.

One thing seems certain: his extradition to the U.S. would strengthen support for the organisation that has not only exposed the way in which states keep secrets but proved uniquely impossible for them to silence. 
/ENDS