When Julian Assange wakes these days, he looks out from a three-story Georgian mansion house overlooking a man-made lake. Under a blanket of snow, the 650-acre Ellingham Hall estate, a mile back from the closest public road, is as tranquil a spot as can be found in eastern England.
But Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who is fighting accusations of sexual misconduct in Sweden, strolls through this bucolic idyll with an electronic tag on his ankle and a required daily 20-minute drive to the part-time police station in the neighbouring town of Beccles.
There he signs a register and chats ?pleasantly? with the officers, according to their account, and returns to his curfew at the hall.
It is what Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has laconically referred to as ?my high-tech house arrest? in interviews since arriving last week from the high court in London, where he was granted bail of $370,000, much of it provided by wealthy celebrities and friends, including Vaughan Smith, Ellingham Hall?s owner.
From his rural redoubt, Assange has gone on a media offensive, continuing to charge that he is the victim of a smear campaign led by the US, which is weighing criminal prosecution for the leaks of nearly 750,000 classified documents.
In an interview with The Times of London on Tuesday, he compared himself to the Martin Luther King Jr, saying that when he was jailed at Wandsworth Prison in London, a black guard handed him a card saying, ?I only have two heroes in the world, Dr. King and you.? Assange added, ?That is representative of 50% of people.?
In the interview, he also compared the obloquy directed at WikiLeaks by the Obama administration and other critics with the ?persecution? endured by American Jews in the 1950s. He added, ?I?m not the Jewish people,? but suggested that the common thread was that supporters of WikiLeaks and American Jews were ?people who believe in freedom of speech and accountability.?
Assange also denied prior contact with Bradley Manning, the Army private jailed on charges that he leaked thousands of classified government documents to WikiLeaks. ?I never heard of the name Bradley Manning before it appeared in the media,? he said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday.
While there have been a number of prosecutions of government employees under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information, there has never been a successful prosecution of a journalist for receiving and publishing such information. But prosecutors have been studying online chats in which Private Manning reportedly talked about contacts with Assange to see if they suggest that the WikiLeaks leader solicited or encouraged the leaks.
Assange noted that it was standard journalistic practice to call government officials and ask for information. Criminalising such conduct would threaten the freedom of the press, he said.
?If they want to push the line that when a newspaperman talks to someone in the government about looking for things relating to potential abuses, that that is a conspiracy to commit espionage, that is going to take out all the good government journalism that takes place in the US,? Assange said.
In the interview with The Times of London, Assange also spoke of his ?feeling of betrayal? toward the two women in Sweden, who have said he forced sex on them without using a condom, and in one case while the woman, according to her account, was asleep. Over the weekend, The Guardian and The New York Times obtained copies of a 68-page police document detailing the accusations against Assange, leaks he said were ?clearly designed to undermine? his bail arrangements.
?Somebody in authority clearly intended to keep Julian in prison,? he said of himself.
Assange said the accusations had put at risk what WikiLeaks had achieved. ?We have changed governance, we have certainly changed many political figures within governments, we have caused new law reform efforts, we have caused police investigations into the abuses we expose, UN investigations, investigations here in the UK, especially in relation to our revelation of the circumstances of the deaths of 109,000 people in Iraq,? he said.
