Now that the serial pest Julian Assange has finally been arrested, it might be worth looking at him and his Wikileaks scandal a bit more closely. The immediate reason for his arrest is a rape charge, which is serious enough. But if he were in the military, he could also be up on charges of high treason, and putting the nation(s) at risk.
But hey, at least he’s getting his 15 minutes of fame out of all this. He seems to be big on ego as he seeks to take the high moral ground here. But you have to wonder whether there is any good at all to his cause, when all the usual suspects of the radical left are leaping to his defence.
Australian-born Assange thinks he is being oh so very important and clever in splashing around all these classified documents and pieces of information – many of which are vital for national security. These leaks are putting the lives of countless people at risk all around the world.
Yet the lefties think he is a new messiah, a new martyr. Yeah right. Just try this little thought experiment. Suppose I snuck into one of these lefties’ homes, and secretly recorded all the conversations and goings on taking place there. You know, all the remarks made which would never be made if these guys were in public.
Or the many arguments, tantrums, blow-ups and dust-ups that can so often occur in any home. It is one thing to be in a family where this stuff regularly occurs, but it is quite another matter when personal household secrets are splashed to the entire world. Most of these lefties would cry foul if this happened to them.
They would be screaming “invasion of privacy” and “how dare you deny me my rights”. But when it comes to exposing some inside info on America, or other nations, then all of a sudden it is fair game. No matter what the cost might be.
Rich Galen had a terrific article on all this recently and is well worth quoting from: “Assange is not a digital Robin Hood. He is a hacker, a thug, and an accused rapist. That last is a charge leveled, not by the U.S. Department of State, but by Sweden which has a pretty liberal view of such things, so if they have asked INTERPOL to help hunt Assange down to answer a rape charge it may well be legit.
“Here’s the thing about what Assange is doing: He has decided that he, among the 6.7 billion humans on the Earth, is solely qualified to decide what should be held secret and what should be made public. News outlets worldwide have taken to describing Wikileaks as a ‘whistleblower website.’ That’s like saying the Central and South American cocaine drug cartels are “entertainment entrepreneurs.”
“Anyone who has ever held any security clearance knows there are documents which are classified which have no reason to be, other than someone had the authority to have it classified, and so they did. Anyone who has had a very high security clearance (of whom I am not one) has seen documents which appear to have been classified at that very high level only to avoid any potential embarrassment to the writer.
“Nevertheless, I have never run into any person who had access to anything classified higher than the instruction booklet to the office coffee-maker who thought they had the right – much less an obligation – to decide what should be classified and what should be in the public domain.
“Forget about secret government cables covering sweeping international events. Go back through your emails from the past 30 days. Do you want some misfit from Sweden deciding which of them should be sent to the Washington Post, your employer, or your spouse, and which should not? Sweden? How about Toby Flenderson from H.R. making that decision? I didn’t think so.”
Quite right. If we expect and demand privacy for our own lives, why cannot governments demand the same right? Sure, there is a place for objective reporting of the news. And no government is above scrutiny. But governments do have the right to keep certain bits of information secret, especially if the publicising of them will put people or nations at risk.
Galen concludes his piece this way: “Assange is blackmailing the world to allow him to continue to play his part in this international game of Russian roulette. Like every megalomaniac from Napoleon to Lex Luthar he believes only he knows the path to truth.
“The international community has determined that communications between diplomatic outposts and their home governments are inviolate. Diplomatic pouches – as arcane as that term has become in the age of the internet – are not to be inspected, challenged, or opened by security, customs or immigration personnel at any border in the world. Embassies themselves are considered the soil of the country the Ambassador within represents. You walk into the Saudi Arabian Embassy next to the Kennedy Center in Washington and you are IN Saudi Arabia.
“I understand that the spy services of those very same countries are doing everything in their power to discover what those very same foreign diplomats are saying to their masters at home, but that’s the way this complex international waltz is danced. Agree or not, that’s the way the system has evolved. It is not for Julian Assange to decide, not just that the system is flawed, but that he has the right to put thousands of people at risk of physical harm because he doesn’t like it.”
Queensland letter writer Frank Bellet put it this way: “Apparently the scoffers at the importance and dangers of the Wikileaks documents are not aware that there is war on – different from WW2 but a war never the less. It was declared in New York years ago on the 11th September, just as the Pacific war was declared years before on the 7th December at Pearl Harbour.
“Could you imagine during WW2 some army private and his accomplices, for example, leaking information about that smart plan by the British, who tricked the Nazis as to where they intended to invade Europe to end the war.
“The authorities took possession of the body of a Welsh alcoholic, who died from pneumonia, contrary to how it was depicted in the movie ‘The Man Who Never Was’. They dropped it from a submarine, near the Spanish coast, with a set of false papers in a briefcase attached to his wrist with ‘details’ of the invasion. They were certain it would fall into the hands of the enemy. They also included papers suggesting he was a Catholic in the belief that the Spaniards would ensure he had a religious burial.
“If the newspapers had wind of that plot, there is no way they would have made headlines of the story, on the basis of the public’s right to know, nor would they have provided one of the leakers with an article defending himself. I have always been of the opinion that all is not fair in love, but it is fair in war.”
Like it or not, there can be times when keeping secrets is a very important matter – especially when the exposure of such secrets will put the lives of many at risk. So my humble opinion is this: let the bum rot in jail for a couple of years. That might help to cool his megalomaniac heels a bit.
http://townhall.com/columnists/RichGalen/2010/12/06/wiki_this
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