Gullible liberals adored him. But this traitor risked countless lives
THERE are those who believe that if we are to uphold our liberties, we must support our intelligence agencies because they risk their lives on a daily basis to keep us free and our values safe.
And then there are those – I call them ‘phoney liberals’ – who wantonly abuse human rights arguments to offer succour to the enemies of our way of life.
Jemima Khan, footballer Eric Cantona, former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and even Nigel Farage were among those who feted the pale-faced alleged rapist Julian Assange as a world champion of the freedom of the Press.
When this self-appointed protector of our liberty declared ‘ no entity including the National Security Agency shall be permitted to act against journalists’, he duped many who should have known better. That he might be doing this to subvert western democracies never even crossed their blinkered idealistic minds.
The outrage these phonies express at the proper, if belated, removal of Assange from the Ecuador embassy in London and his detention awaiting extradition is as repugnant as it is predictable.
For Assange is no friend of the freedoms they enjoy. He is their deadly enemy.
Through WikiLeaks, this narcissistic poseur was able to exploit a massive cache of 250,000 secret emails in three vast releases to undermine the US intelligence and diplomatic community, subvert the US political process and help Donald J Trump win the presidency of the world’s most powerful nation. It is no surprise that Trump said at the time ‘I love WikiLeaks’.
These emails were harvested from the NSA, we believe today, by the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, and then released by WikiLeaks. Small wonder the NSA said ‘WikiLeaks is a malicious foreign actor’, and put Assange on the same level as Edward Snowden (the former CIA employee who leaked highly classified information from the NSA and is still vladimir Putin’s long-term guest in Russia).
In immediate terms, their most deadly impact was the publication by WikiLeaks of the names of many of the brave men and women chosen to work as secret agents with US and UK forces in their critical work to contain and defeat the murderous Taliban in Afghanistan. We do not know how many were butchered because their identities were revealed but we know only too well what the Taliban and other Islamists do to those they regard as traitors.
Amnesty International rightly castigated Assange for the ‘deadly ramifications’ of his naming of ‘dozens’ of western intelligence agents. Assange’s brush-off response was characteristically conceited. ‘I am very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their own asses.’
These agents were actually saving the lives of Afghans under threat from the Taliban and also the lives of coalition personnel. Thousands of innocent people were put at grave risk by WikiLeaks.
Assange’s subversion of US democracy was less deadly but, in its own way, every bit as treacherous.
When on October 7, 2016 Trump’s election campaign was almost derailed by the publication of the infamous Access Hollywood video – where Trump boasted of his ability to grab women by their privates and ‘move on them, like a bitch’ – WikiLeaks released a flood of emails finessed to imply Hillary Clinton was incompetent and a liar.
The spotlight moved off Trump’s vile behaviour on to her record as US Secretary of State. Precisely where Trump and the Russians wanted it.
As Mrs Clinton rightly observed, Assange had understood that in our digitally connected era, he could ‘weaponise information’ to damage Western interests. Both Assange and Snowden, she said, were ‘serving the strategic goals of Putin’.
She concluded ‘he is either actually on the payroll of the Kremlin or supports their propaganda’.
Assange will now do all he can, aided by his wide-eyed and gullible chums, to resist extradition to the US. The great irony is that if this traitor does eventually end up in Trump’s America he will find the President has dropped him – and his new life could be solitary co nfinement in a supermax security prison.