Julian Assange Is Not A Freedom Fighter

I believe there are very few secrets that a government should keep from its people.  That being said, Julian Assange crossed a line when he released a quarter of a million diplomatic cables passed onto him from Pfc. Bradley E. Manning. 

Some of the cables have identifying information about elders in Afghanistan that are actively helping the United States.  Even with the names redacted, enough information remains to endanger those that we will need to rely on when we leave the country so that it is even marginally better than before we invaded it.  Assange is a third party on these cables, not knowing the full extent of what should be redacted to protect the identities of those who may be put at risk.  In the cited article, the Taliban actually thanks Assange for letting them know who to target. 

When the judiciary rules on free speech, they often strike down laws that do not restrict speech but could be said to have a "chilling effect" on speech due to onerous requirements.  Assange's release of diplomatic cables could very well have a "chilling effect" on other countries which may want to share information off the record.  With two hot wars winding down, Iran pursuing a bomb, and North Korea launching offensives on South Korea, we need as much diplomatic leverage as possible.

Although Assange maintains no damage is done by his leaks, he maintains that he has stores of unredacted and damaging documents that he will release if he is imprisoned or in any other way held responsible for what he has done. 

Currently Assange is in jail for unrelated sexual assault charges stemming from, supposedly, his refusal to wear a condom despite two girl's wishes.  Others say the condom was not part of the charge while  Michael Moynihan of Reason.com, who lived in Sweden for many years, says that overly radical rape laws in Sweden can charge me for merely rejecting a woman's wish to wear a condom even if consensual sex follows. 

Some of the people defending Assange include MSNBC's Keith Olberman who believe the women are US operatives that lured Assange into a "honey trap."  Olbermann's source for this information was an article on the far-left website Counterpunch by the writers Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett.  Shamir is a fringe writer who has devoted his professional life to exposing the supposed criminality of “Jewish power," a paranoid anti-Semite who curates a website full of links to Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi sites, defenses of blood libel myths, and references to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Note:  For those who don't know, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was published by the Russian Empire in 1903 supposedly revealing a Jewish plot for world domination.  The text was conclusively determined to be fraudulent anti-semitic propaganda in 1921.   

 Olbermann later tweeted that he regretted citing the article and repudiated the author. 

It seems very likely that Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and some lawmakers of both parties have endorsed the idea.  Assange seems to get a pass from the same people who decried the Climategate E-mail dump and the outing of non-covert operative Valerie Plame.  He is even an early favorite for Time's Man-of-the-Year.  Just because Assange used the Internet to disseminate his intercepted cables does not make him any more noble than anyone else who has ever revealed state secrets.  Assange is not a freedom fighter, he may well have put America and her allies in danger and he belongs in a jail cell.