It’s not a big ask to demand that journalists observe the laws meant to keep America’s men and women in uniform safe.
Joe Biden’s Justice Department has elected to resolve a decade-long standoff with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by surrendering.
On Monday, Assange agreed to travel to Saipan — an American outpost in the Pacific close to his native Australia — where he will plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing classified documents. There, Assange is expected to be sentenced to the time he has already served in a British prison following his forcible removal from a London-based Ecuadorian embassy in 2019. Save this exercise in process, Assange will not face American justice.
That’s a tragedy, but you wouldn’t know it to survey the reaction to the news from the malcontents who arbitrate the discourse on social media. Assange’s reprieve has been met with what the Washington Post describes as a “global celebration.” From right-wing influencers like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene to far-left activists including Medea Benjamin, Cornell West, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the news that Assange will face limited consequences for his nefarious work has been met with jubilation. It would be nice if this reaction was limited to those who are professionally committed to political “outsiderism” – a cohort that revels in its hatred of the status quo, wallows in and popularizes an ill-defined sense of persecution, and nihilistically promotes the degradation of American institutions. But it’s not.
“Incredible news,” declared Reason magazine video journalist Zach Weissmueller in a post indicative of those who retain some sympathy for Assange. “Always remember, his ‘crime’ was publishing true information. He almost died in prison for that.”
No, he didn’t.
In 2010 and 2011, WikiLeaks released a cache of illegally obtained classified documents revealing American methods, assets, and allies in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters where U.S. service personnel were actively engaged in counterinsurgency operations. His work outed the Afghans who worked directly with American servicemen, opening them up to retribution. And they most certainly did face retribution. The Taliban and other Islamist outfits, for example, used those documents to rally prospective insurgents and murder the tribal elders who helped the U.S. advance its mission in Afghanistan.
The release of this information, to say nothing of the private contacts opposition leaders and human rights activists had with U.S. diplomats, had a deleterious effect on America’s ability to build relationships with indigenous sources. As former State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley confessed, the information dumps even compelled the United States to withdraw diplomatic personnel from certain hotspots. “We had an ambassador in Libya, and we had to remove him from his post because he was directly threatened by Moammar Gadhafi’s thugs,” he mourned.
Assange’s “crime” was not limited only to the publication of documents that explicitly imperiled U.S. interests and provided insurgent organizations with actionable intelligence on military bases, prisons, and the movement of U.S. troops and local security forces. It was to facilitate the pilfering of those documents in the first place.
“Assange agreed to assist [Pfc. Bradley] Manning in cracking a password stored on United States Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, a United States government network used for classified documents and communications,” the indictment against Assange read. The WikiLeaks founder allegedly helped crack a Defense Department password so Manning could secure as many classified documents as possible and subsequently published them and promoted their contents. This is quite simply beyond the remit of any journalist. It’s more akin to the conduct we would expect from a hostile intelligence network.
Certainly, WikiLeaks was not above working with those outfits, either. In 2016, Assange’s organization published the contents of email accounts operated by top Democratic Party officials, which were obtained by a third party with demonstrable links to Russian military intelligence. It was after this escapade that some on the American Right joined the insurgency-adjacent Left in celebrating Assange’s work. In the intervening years, Assange’s support for this Russian intelligence coup has been clumsily folded into the GOP’s hazy recollections of the “Russia collusion hoax,” all of which they now deem suspect. But to adopt this view is to abandon discretion. Whatever you think of the Democratic Party’s conduct of its investigations into and allegations against Donald Trump vis-à-vis his connections to Moscow, a hostile foreign actor embarrassing the United States and successfully sowing discord between its political class and its intelligence community is nothing to celebrate.
That is, unless you’re not in the business of journalism — the act of chronicling events — but shaping those events to alter the course of American history. So many of Assange’s defenders have confused reportorial best practices with activism. Not just any activism, in this case, but acts of criminality designed to imperil U.S. interests and put American soldiers in additional danger.
It’s perhaps too much to ask that American journalists display a modicum of patriotism, but it’s not a big ask to demand that they observe the laws meant to keep America’s men and women in uniform safe. We should certainly expect the executor of America’s laws in the White House to mete out justice on behalf of the U.S. soldiers and their assets all over the globe who were harmed by Assange’s conduct. Alas, those expectations are apparently far too high.