The founder of the website Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been released from a British prison after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy. In 2019, Assange was charged with 17 felonies, including:
- Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information;
- Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;
- Obtaining national defense information (seven counts); and
- Disclosure of national defense information (nine counts).
Assange pleaded guilty to one count "to obtain and disclose national defense information," court documents said, according to NBC News. Due to Assange's paranoia that if he landed on American soil, the U.S. government would assassinate him, he was flown to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S.-controlled territory north of Guam.
In 2010, Wikileaks released 91,000 classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan. Assange was going to release the documents with the real names of Afghan informants. During a meeting with reporters in London, Assange shocked his dinner companions by replying to a question with, "Well, they're informants. So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it."
The journalists convinced him not to release the names, but other identifying markers were included that resulted in at least three deaths, according to intelligence sources.
"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," said P.J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman at the time of the leaks. "No doubt some of those people were harmed when their identities were compromised."
In October of that year, Assange released 400,000 documents on the Iraq War, most of them classified. It's that act that convinced the Justice Department that Assange was far less concerned about "transparency" than he was exploiting anti-Americanism to gain notoriety and would reveal any secret just to keep his name in front of the public.
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Nick Cohen, former columnist for The Observer, worked at Wikileaks for Assange and debunked the notion that Assange was some kind of hero.
We need also to question the motives of the wider transparency movement. Anti-Americanism is one of its driving inspirations and helps explain its perfidies. If you believe that the American "military-industrial complex", Europe or Israel is the sole or main source of oppression, it is too easy to dismiss the victims of regimes whose excesses cannot be blamed on the west.
“This was an independent decision made by the Department of Justice and there was no White House involvement in the plea deal decision,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement Monday evening.
I call bull on that. Releasing Assange was a political decision. It wasn't done in a vacuum. It had nothing to do with "justice." This was the Biden campaign signaling to the far left that they have their back.
If it encourages others to leak documents and secrets out of "conscience," so much the better.
Assange is no hero. Even if you think his leaks aided "transparency," they also endangered innocent people's lives — people who helped save American lives and didn't deserve to live in fear for their service. That part of the equation is never mentioned by Assange apologists.
Assange will ride off into the sunset, a hero to the left and some misguided conservatives. But looking at the whole picture, Julian Assange was a traitor to the West and an unthinking, uncaring muckraker.
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