Adiós Julián Assange, enemy of America

The America-hating leaker finally can go home. But will he stay quiet? Plus, Israel's huge Supreme Court ruling.

Julian Assange spent seven years holed up in relative comfort, but still confinement, in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where GCHQ finally gave up watching him, and he eventually wore out his welcome. Then he became a guest of the crown for the last 62 months in a high-security British prison. Now, thanks to the United States Department of Justice, he will finally get to go home.

Assange in 2014. He doesn’t look like this anymore. Cancillería del Ecuador, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Brits have agreed to release Assange to U.S. authorities, who long sought his extradition on 17 espionage-related charges, but he will never touch U.S. soil, at least on this continent. Instead, Assange will be flown to his native Australia, with a brief stop in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, which happens to be a commonwealth of the United States, and therefore home to a federal courthouse. Assange will plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to disseminate national defense information, and the feds will recommend a 62-month sentence—time served in Belmarsh Prison in London. Then he will go home, free.

Twelve years spent first as a fugitive, then as a prisoner, have taken their toll on Assange. It’s been reported he’s got multiple medical problems that a 52-year-old in other circumstances should not be suffering, including a possible stroke while in British custody. From Assange’s point of view, at least he was suffering for a purpose. His Wikileaks played host to tens of thousands of documents, including video, of classified dirt on American clandestine activities and military secrets.

If there’s a Deep State, Assange made it his enemy. Wikileaks embarrassed the Bush administration by publishing a U.S. Army manual for dealing with captives at Gitmo, one stop in the War on Terror’s gulag archipelago, in 2007. Then, in September 2008, it posted hacked emails from Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo email account (another reason John McCain regretted his choice).

Just about everything the U.S. did since 9/11 was a target for Assange. In 2009, Wikileaks fed into “inside job” conspiracies on 9/11 that still circulate today by publishing what it claims were over a half-million pager messages from that day.

In 2010, Assange hit the mother load when Pfc. Bradley Manning (who is now going by the name Chelsea) leaked classified documents and combat videos. Manning was arrested in May and court-martialed a month later. Sentenced to 35 years at Leavenworth, Manning was pardoned after serving seven years in 2017, by President Barack Obama. Wikileaks went on to publish 75,000 top secret documents related to “The Afghan War Logs” and another 400,000 it called “The Iraq War Logs.”

In November of 2010, Wikileaks published the first tranche—250,000 of over 3 million U.S. diplomatic cables—spanning 44 years from 1966 to 2010. Assange continued to post embarrassing and damaging U.S. classified data as he was arrested on a Swedish charge of rape and faced extradition by British authorities.

In June, 2012, Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London rather than face his accusers. His feet have never touched free ground since—until, barring some unforeseen legal snag—he leaves the courthouse in Saipan and lands in Australia.

Even while in self-imposed exile, Assange posted embarrassing and damaging information, including 2,000 emails coming from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman. Wikileaks also posted thousands of emails from DNC servers, which he likely (he denies it) got from Russian intelligence or state-sponsored hackers. Trump praised these leaks, and trolled Clinton at a news conference.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump told the media. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

If anyone who hates the U.S. did more to get Donald Trump elected than Julian Assange, I don’t know who. I can imagine, in private moments, Vladimir Putin must have expressed some admiration for Assange’s timing and effectiveness. The most Russia did was spread some pushka fodder and cash in divisive, fringe social media groups. Assange went all in, not caring if his sources went to prison (and most did).

Julian Assange hates the United States. He hates it with a burning passion, willing to suffer years—decades—of isolation, prison, and a shortened life, in order to expose our most embarrassing secrets.

Who knows how many have died or been forced to flee because of Assange’s unrestricted warfare against America? Don’t say it’s zero. Many have been harmed, forced to flee, or driven into hiding. Some have been jailed, killed or had their families threatened (or killed). American troops lost their lives because of spilled operational secrets. NPR reported a few examples.

P.J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman when the WikiLeaks story erupted in 2010, said those most at risk were civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq who were secretly passing information to the U.S. military.

"A number of people went into hiding, a number of people had to move, particularly those civilians in war zones who had told U.S. soldiers about movements of the Taliban and al-Qaida," he said. "No doubt some of those people were harmed when their identities were compromised."

In 2013, traitor Edward Snowden worked with Wikileaks as he fled the U.S. through Hong Kong, eventually finding refuge in Moscow. Snowden’s betrayal was massive. He turned over a trove of NSA secrets, including how the agency had back doors to the latest encryption standards mandated by NIST and the government itself. The damage done to American credibility with allies and clandestine, friendly sources in hostile nations was incalculable.

But all bad things have a double edge to the blade. The U.S. was indeed doing some really awful things in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in the secret chain of CIA extra-judicial prisons run by the Bush, then the Obama, administration. The NSA’s subterfuge to get NIST to mandate a vulnerable cryptography system was worthy of the totalitarian regimes our nation is supposed to oppose. Many of the things Wikileaks (and The Intercept) called out were illegal and immoral overreaches by a government gone rogue.

Ah, but the cost of doing so much damage to legitimate efforts to promote things actually in our national interests, and the long-term problems Wikileaks created was not worth the price of the betrayal of our country. There are many ways of exposing government scandal: the Pentagon Papers, the Rockefeller Commission, Watergate, and the ten-thousand leaks of the Trump administration are some ways that at least have the benefit of some kind of journalistic check. (Though the excesses of the media during Trump’s years have damaged Americans’ trust in that institution for many years to come.)

Let me be clear: Assange’s motive was not to expose the worst of America in order to improve America, or to make America into a better version of what it should be. Assange’s motive (is) was to harm America by exposing whatever dirt he could find. He was (and is) no friend of our country, and believes America is evil to the core. He would rather rot in a British prison than set one foot on our continental land. The only way President Biden had to get rid of the forever extradition case awaiting Julian Assange was to fly him to (literally) the most remote place possible, on the way to dropping him at his home.

The big question is, will Assange stay quiet?

The other big question is, if Trump wins in November will he try again to go after Assange? Or will Trump make a deal with the master leaker?

We don’t know. But I think Assange should enjoy his freedom. It’s not really deserved. Sure, exposing American malfeasance makes a good living, and in some eyes makes one a hero. But the ghosts of all the well-meaning patriots (in the best sense of the word, those who love America) who died because of Assange’s actions should haunt him.

America, under every modern president, has done things we should not be proud of. But those things, most times (yes, with notable exceptions), were done with the motive to advance the interests of democracy over tyranny, self-determination over crushing totalitarianism, and personal freedom over state control. We have spent too many years employing the tools of tyranny in order to fight against it, and for exposing some of that, we can offer (very) faint praise to Wikileaks for fostering a kind of safe place for whistleblowers.

I am not going to thank Assange, or Wikileaks for having any of America’s best interest at heart. They don’t. Good riddance to Julian Assange. May he fade away quietly, or at least stay quiet.

ONE MORE THING: Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students must serve in the IDF, as all other Israelis are required to do. The last two years of Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have been all about appeasing the ultra-religious wing of his coalition. And the heart of that appeasement has been about the growing number of ultra-Orthodox (known as haredim) young Israelis (they are encouraged to have large families) at the age of service, but avoiding conscription.

The whole point of Netanyahu’s play to change Israel’s “Basic Law” to allow the Knesset to overrule the Supreme Court, and prevent the court from striking down what the Knesset passes into law, was to appease the ultra-Orthodox groups keeping him in power. This is the reason for all the street protests in 2023 and the political division in Israel that was halted to fight an enormously costly war with Hamas (and now, even Hizbollah).

We don’t know what the next move is for the haredim, up to 60,000 of whom now face the draft. But there’s talk of new elections. It’s not really what Israel needs right now, but maybe they do need it, because there’s more at stake here than the fate of thousands of young religious Jews. The future of Israeli politics, governance, judicial limits, and of course, the outcome of the Gaza war hangs in the balance. Elections is probably the best of the options for Israelis.

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