Brown: Wikileaks founder no war criminal

In paying attention to the whole WikiLeaks controversy that has led to approximately 900 secret… In paying attention to the whole WikiLeaks controversy that has led to approximately 900 secret diplomatic documents being released to the public over the past two weeks, I can’t help but feel bad for the site’s founder, Julian Assange.

Maybe he showboated a bit with his newfound notoriety, calling for the removal of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Time magazine for her alleged espionage assignment over the United Nations. And maybe his overzealous grandstanding on the international stage in newspapers like the Guardian and Der Spiegel has made him a bit of a target.

But I think his WikiLeaks have provided the resurgence in reporting that journalism needs to survive in the 21st century. His website has also forced diplomats to adhere to a greater level of accountability than they have for quite some time.

Unfortunately, no one else seems to agree with me.

According the Associated Press, the Swedish server that hosts WikiLeaks has come under widespread attack since Assange made the announcement last month that his site became the recipient of more than 250,000 documents. Paypal also cut off its association with WikiLeaks this past week after receiving pressure from the U.S. government.

To make matters worse, Interpol released a warrant for Assange’s arrest in November on alleged molestation charges.

It would appear that saying the elusive Assange is having a bad week might be something of an understatement. Then again, he probably didn’t expect a fallout of quite this magnitude.

Back in 2009, the hacker-turned-journalist-turned-activist won Amnesty International’s Media Award for exposing through WikiLeaks injustices and assassinations carried out by government entities. Now, he’s being hunted down as if he were Osama bin Laden.

History has shown that in threatening situations, the federal government has taken action against potential political threats. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland to prevent dissidents from joining the Confederacy or taking over Washington, D.C.

More recently, documents suggest the U.S. had a hand in the 1967 assassination of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia, perhaps in retaliation against the communist leader’s popularity during the height of the Cold War.

Classifying Assange as the same sort of threat, though, would be ridiculous. Assange is no terrorist. He has no intention of hacking the world’s government databases to control nuclear warheads.

He’s simply a guy looking for the truth — an Australian Fox Mulder, if you will, except without the alien abduction bit.

During a Q&A blog session with Guardian readers last Friday, Assange said Western powers should have no worries about publicizing materials.

“[They] have fiscali[z]ed its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on,” he said. “In such an environment it is easy for speech to be ‘free’ because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.”

He added that by comparison, “In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it.”

Assange didn’t hack any websites. In fact, reports have said that Private First Class Bradley Manning, a low-ranking officer, allegedly sent the documents to WikiLeaks.

Rather than make Assange the figurehead of some pseudo-New World Order so that our government can criminalize a computer nerd, perhaps our government should ask itself where the oversight was on these supposedly top secret memos.

So far, though, no documents have even posed a threat. The most controversial cables we have seen are a few intercepted middle-school-style “I don’t like you” notes from Middle East and Southeast Asian allies directed towards their uranium-enriching neighbors. It’s almost as if the government didn’t think we knew as much anyway.

The cables also uncovered a story of a 75-year-old American doctor who escaped from Iran imprisonment on horseback after bribing drug dealers to take him into Turkey. You can bet on seeing the story on the silver screen over the next few years.

None of the cables have been monumental. We haven’t discovered who killed JFK, and we still don’t know anything more about Area 51.

So to steal a term from Pitt News sex columnist Leah Trimble, it’s time to stop blue-balling Assange and let him continue his fight for transparency. He’s not a dangerous war criminal in the least.

And surely our government has more battles it should fight than one with a glorified celebrity hacker.

Free Pedro? No, free Julian. E-mail Jacob at jeb110@pitt.edu or check out his blog at thingsthatrhymewithcars.wordpress.com for uncut musings, ramblings and rants.