Just don’t call him a hero. Assange’s recklessness may have cost lives

A weary world needs heroes, and now we have a new one. Julian Assange has long been a hero to his natural supporters: the usual crowd of rich actors, preachy human rights lawyers and professional activists. Celebrities look after their own, and there is no doubt that Assange is in the club.

Now, with his dramatic release and the huge publicity attending his return, he has transcended his status as a darling of the glitterati to become a national figure. The ABC, in particular, could barely contain its elation, with wall-to-wall coverage. Patricia Karvelas described it as “undoubtedly the biggest political story of the week”, overlooking the more prosaic news of inflation rising to 4 per cent and the likelihood of yet higher interest rates – something with a lot more impact on Australians than the homecoming of a feted felon.

Julian Assange’s return to Australia last Wednesday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Assange’s repatriation was an exercise in stage management that would have made his Hollywood cheer squad proud. Being escorted by both an ambassador and a high commissioner was completely unnecessary, but it added gravitas to the show. What other convicted Australian receives a welcome home call from the prime minister?

Whatever else it was, Assange’s case was a flagrant violation of the consular principle that all Australians who get into trouble overseas should be treated equally by the government.

Of course, the fact that Assange is a criminal is of no concern to his admirers. No sooner had they got off the plane than his lawyers started to walk back the significance of the conviction. But a guilty plea is an admission of guilt, whether it’s part of a plea deal or not. The crime to which Assange pleaded – conspiracy to commit espionage – is a serious one, recognised, in one form or another, by every legal system in the world. If Assange had committed the same offence against Australian law, he would have been prosecuted under the Criminal Code. His culpability is no less because he committed the same offence against American law.

Assange’s supporters have never made any secret of the fact that he did what he was accused of. Many actually boast about the fact that this was the greatest release of classified documents in American history. The crime of espionage usually involves unlawfully obtaining, and communicating, classified information. Do those who celebrate Assange say that there should be no such law? Or that those who break it should not be prosecuted if their motives are pure?

Assange’s apologists argue that this was journalism. Certainly, it was publication, but since when is a massive data dump – unsifted, unanalysed and unredacted – journalism?

The fact that the documents published by Assange contained the unredacted names of numerous intelligence sources also shows how wickedly reckless his conduct was. These included people in Afghanistan and Iraq who put their lives on the line to help Western – including Australian – forces. It was painful to watch Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles on the ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, trying to walk away from his earlier, accurate statement that the leaks put the lives of Australian soldiers at risk.

We should see through Assange’s lawyers’ carefully worded formulation that “there is no evidence” that such people suffered harm. They have seized on a remark to that effect by the judge who sentenced him. But rubber-stamping a plea deal is not a fact-finding exercise. There was no evidence because none was put before the court. As is obvious from the fact that the proceedings lasted barely two hours, this was not a forensic process.

I know the view of Australian intelligence agencies (which briefed me when I was Australia’s attorney-general) that it was likely Assange’s leak cost lives. This assessment was shared by our Five Eyes partners. But you don’t need to be an intelligence professional (or a minister briefed by them) to understand how Assange imperilled those whose identities he exposed.

If a Western intelligence source in a hostile country is publicly named, what are the chances they will not be pursued by militants whose standard methods include assassination of domestic opponents? Does anyone seriously think the Taliban would have turned a blind eye to people they regarded as Western spies? At the weekend, News Corp newspapers carried the case of Majid Jamali Fashi, arrested by the Iranian theocracy as the clear result of the leak, and hanged.

Even if none of the sources exposed by Assange did come to harm, at the time he published the documents he could not have known that. At the very least, he hazarded innocent lives for his own gratification.

The comparison is sometimes made between Assange and Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. But the Pentagon Papers were a historical document – the CIA’s own internal history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. They did not expose current sources; their publication did not put innocent lives at risk.

If similarities with famous Americans are sought, the truer comparison is with Donald Trump. If you drew a Venn diagram of admirers of Assange and Trump supporters, the circles would not intersect. Yet the likenesses are endless. The same paranoid conviction that the “deep state” is out to get them. The same belief that they are above the law. The same refusal to accept the integrity of legal processes. The same egocentricity and self-righteousness. The same creepy narcissism. The same cultish devotion from their acolytes. They even affect the same defiant gesture: the vaguely fascistic raised fist.

For some Australians, Assange will forever be a favourite son. In a land where Ned Kelly is a national icon, being a criminal is no bar to public acclaim. I do not doubt that Anthony Albanese read the national mood correctly when he said last year that this had gone on for long enough. It was naturally touching to see Assange embraced by his overjoyed father and his stoic wife.

But let sentiment not blind us to the brutal truth that Julian Assange played dice with the lives of numberless, uncelebrated people, who had the courage to help Australia and our allies as we fought murderous enemies like the Taliban. They are the only heroes here.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at ANU.

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