Julian Assange came home tonight after 15 years, either on the run, or incarcerated in a maximum security jail. A whistleblower, he's paid for his actions over the last 15 years in various ways - shut up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for many years, where he claimed asylum from the Americans.
Then, after some legal squabbling's, he was kept as a prisoner of the King at the high security Belmarsh Prison, where he was kept in near isolation for five years.
And then they put him on a plane to the Northern Marina Islands, a US Territory, where he's pleaded guilty to Espionage charges and let free after time served. There was no way he was going to set foot on US Mainland soil. The Yanks would never let him go.
And now he's back in Canberra.
There were a lot of people watching the Skyscanner, seeing if his plane would actually make it.
But we are Australia. Not Russia, where dissidents have a strange tendency to fall out of the sky.
But he's back.
And whether you believe that he did the right or wrong thing, he has to have been through conditions that nobody every wants to be put in.
And the man we saw come off the plan looked rather broken. Mind you, he went into this a healthy bloke in his late 30s. He's now in his early 50s and has been treated to the finest the British Penal system can provide for the last five years.
Part of me believe the US Government would be happy if he was still there.
It's one of those situations where everybody's going to have a different opinion. Me, I take my hats off to the whistleblowers for the things they do. I'm not sure I'd have the cohunes to do what he did. I'm not sure I agree with everything I did.
But like so many people who've been in the public eye for nefarious reasons, with any luck, like Schappelle Corby, may he find some peace and be left alone once the initial media circus is over.
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