At Long Last, Assange’s Arrest

Julian Assange has gone from left wing hero to right wing hero to an arrestee of the United Kingdom awaiting extradition to the United States, where there’s no telling what might happen to him next.

By now you probably know that Assange is the founder and publisher and editor and seemingly the only employee of the Wikileaks web site, which has won a worldwide readership by exposing documents illegally obtained from governments around the world. Way back in ’10 he published a trove of documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq obtained from Army Private Bradley Manning, who somehow had access to the material that exposed to American allies and tactics to the enemy, and has since had government-paid sex change surgery and become Chelsea Manning while serving a 35-year prison sentence. Of course he or she became such a cause celebre on the left that his or her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama, which of course outraged everyone on the right.

In ’16 Wikileaks published a trove of illegally hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee that proved embarrassing for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, which might or might not have been but almost certainly were obtained from the Russian government, and at that point the left disavowed Assange and a strange new right embraced him. “I love Wikileaks,” Republican presidential nominee told his enthralled rally crowds, and his apologists were explaining how Assange was no different from The York Times publishing the “Pentagon Papers” about the Vietnam War Daniel Ellsberg had illegally purloined, which the left still celebrates and the right used to consider treason. Trump won the nomination either in spite of or because of his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well the war he draft-dodged in Vietnam, so his embrace of Assange seemed entirely fulsome.

Shortly after becoming a left-wing darling back in ’10 the Swedish government issued a warrant for Assange’s arrest on charges of sexual assault and rape, but Assange claimed he was the victim of a right-wing American plot that the Swedish government was somehow in on and thus gained refuge from the left-wing and anti-American Ecuadorian government at its embassy in the United Kingdom. He’d been stuck inside the building until Thursday, but after Wikileaks recently leaked some documents he was rather brusquely escorted out of the embassy and into the rough arms of the British authorities.

Although we assume that Ecuador’s embassy in London is a pleasant place to be, the years Assange spent entirely inside its walls do not seem to have been unkind. The last photos of Assange showed a rather dashing young fellow with a full head of distinguished wavy white hair, but the video of of him being dragged out showed a crouched and balding fellow with an ugly white beard, clutching a copy of some conspiracy theory book, hardly the sort of heroic figure that either the right or left could embrace.

The Brits plan to turn him over to the Americans, rather than the Swedes, which will surely prove interesting.

The “fake news” National Broadcasting Company has some all-too-real video of Trump praising Wikileaks 141 times at 56 campaign rallies, but on Thursday Trump was telling reporters that “I know nothing about Wikileaks. It’s not my thing. I know there’s something about Julian Assange, I’ve been seeing what happens with Julian Assange. And that will be a determination, I imagine, by the Attorney General.” Meanwhile, Assange’s erstwhile apologists on the left looked almost as ridiculous.

As modestly reluctant as we are to claim the moral high ground, we never did like this Assange fellow. Although we’re free press purists who will defend the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Wikileaks disclosures revealed the identities of American collaborators who were killed as a result, which was more than the Pentagon paper did and was far more than was necessary to make a case against an arguably unjust American policy, and we think that’s a crucial difference. We never cared much for the Democratic party or its presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, but we nonetheless thought it outrageous that someone would illegally hack the party’s e-mails and that her opponent would publicly ask the Russian government to illegally hack her e-mails.

By now Assange is a crouched and balding and white-bearded arrestee with no friends to his right or left, and from our current vantage point on the political sidelines we don’t much care what happens to him, although it will surely take up much news space..

— Bud Norman

Begging His or Her Pardon

One of President Barack Obama’s final official acts was commuting the sentence of the former Army Private Bradley Manning, who was convicted of providing classified information to Wikileaks and is now known as prisoner Chelsea Manning, and it seems an appropriately complicated story to end one presidency and begin another.

Having harbored a slight fear that Obama would let his freak flag fly and go full-blown leftist crazy with his final pardons and commutations to unleash an army of angry convicts into the coming street wars, we’ve been somewhat relieved by his relative restraint. Some rather unsavory offenders have somehow been granted his mercy, but not in any numbers that are remarkable even by the standards of past Republican administrations, and we can easily see why Manning would be irresistibly sympathetic to someone of Obama’s liberal instincts. Obama has been even more aggressive in plugging leaks than Nixon and his infamous “plumbers,” but what Manning leaked was considered embarrassing to the previous Republican administration of George W. Bush, and since then he’s become a she, which is quite the fashion these days, and there’s an opportunistically recurring enthusiasm among for liberals for bold truth tellers.

There’s always an opportunistically recurring enthusiasm among conservatives for guarding state secrets by force of law, too, and all the Republicans were in one of those moods back when Manning caught, convicted, and sent off to prison. We cheered on the process along with the rest, and wondered aloud why a mere private with such obvious mental health issues had access to such sensitive information in the first place, and nothing that has since transpired has changed our minds about it. Even Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan refers to Manning as Chelsea when denouncing the pardon, and although we have our quibbles about we are adamant that has nothing to do with Manning’s culpability, and we hope it has nothing to do with his commutation. We are still steadfastly against the illegal public dissemination of classified information, except perhaps in one of those far-fetched dystopian nightmare scenarios that have occasionally occurred in some places from time to time, and hopefully will be able to remain so during the next administration.

The next administration seems to have a more opportunistic opposition to such leaks, though, along with most of its many supporters. By now even president-elect Donald Trump admits that he thinks the Russians probably hacked all those WikiLeak-ed Democratic e-mails that he gleefully admitted gleefully pointed to during the past campaign, at one point telling one of his raucous rallies “Boy, do I love Wikileaks,” and we also his recall his jocular remarks about how great it would be if the Russians or the that possible 400 pound fat guy in New Jersey would also hack the e-mails his Democratic rival sent while Secretary of State, and there is by now a widespread agreement on the right and in the Republican party that some hacking and leaking and violation of the law is acceptable so long as it embarrasses the left and the Democratic party. This double standard always offended us when it came from the left, as it so often did and still does during the latest controversies, and we find it no less offensive when coming from the right.

All those leaks will no doubt go unplugged for at least another four years, and we’ll continue to call for locking the leakers up and eagerly poring through whatever they leaked, and keep an eye out, as always, for that dystopian nightmare scenario that might justify it all. At this point Bradley or Chelsea Manning or whatever you want to call him or her has done all the damage that he or she is likely do, so we’ll not make any big deal out of his her or commutation and wish him or her the very best for the rest of his or her life, but we’ll be holding the next administration to the same grumpy standards as the past one.

— Bud Norman

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