Julian Assange: Fittingly pathetic end to tawdry tale of a traitor

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves the US Federal Courthouse in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan after being freed on Wednesday.

Finally, at long last, Julian Assange has confessed to being a traitor.

For who else disseminates our military or diplomatic secrets in a time of excruciating and bloodcurdling wars he never had to fight, bleed for, or watch his friends die in, and does so with unabashed “look at me” abandon?

Materials he disseminated without a conscious thought for the safety of the people or methods named in the documents he paraded, without a thought to anyone’s actual lives. Documents that, in the hands of a journalist, would have been equally revealed but with ethical and moral guardianship.

In the end, perhaps fittingly, the self-aggrandising saga of Assange has ended ignominiously on an island, in a far-off tiny commonwealth of the US in the Pacific Ocean, where he is due to plead guilty to a single US felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material.

Julian Assange walks free after 14 years

It may be a Pyrrhic victory, but it’s a victory nonetheless. Not only for our national security services, but for journalists as well.

For in the courtroom of public opinion and in the halls of justice, Tuesday was a condemnation not only of treason but a validation of high journalism. Julian Assange will no longer play the poster child of national security secret dumping masquerading as heroic selflessness in the name of freedom of the press.

As we have said before in the pages of this publication, there is a worthy, storied place for whistleblowers with the courage to stand up against those who wish to conceal secrets that should be made public – the ugly truths that must be told.

Julian Assange and lawyer Jennifer Robinson, a member of the WikiLeaks founder's legal team on a flight back to Australia. Picture: Instagram

But at some feverish and ludicrous point, Assange went from theatre, to farce, to tragedy. Until, finally, his story became about a sad little man with seemingly agonising personal issues who thought he was somehow more divine than the world of realpolitik he egotistically bumbled into.

A relentless but vital world in which he was proverbially run over by a tank.

It’s an evisceration that should, finally, give all true journalists some relief and breath.

For Assange sought to defraud the public, and his acolytes, into thinking he represented our journalistic profession. A profession some of us have lived or died for. Assange doesn’t have a clue where free speech begins nor ends. He doesn’t know when not to cry “fire” in a crowded theatre. He’s merely a digital garbage bin behind the great halls of true reporting. Indeed, he even derided on Twitter to never wanting to identify as a journalist. Undermining, one supposes, not only his legal defence but his own manufactured sense of identity and purpose.

Feted by those in foolish fugue and confused, who, now, will be saddled with him upon his release?

It would seem it will not be the Ecuadorians, not the Brits, nor the Americans who must now live with the soiled imprint and presence of Julian Assange. But us. Australia. For he is, after all, one of our “own”?

Should that be so, then let us be grateful because, if there is justice in this world, at least the Assange anguish could be over. For there is no winning, or winners, in his tale.

Thus, it is time to at last bury his lede. Headlines are his heroin. Maybe Australia will let him rest. Forget him, even? For to keep enabling this kind of headline-seeking addict is to promote precisely the wrong type of freedom of the press and services of truth to power to which we all aspire. And which truly serves our democracy.

For Assange is now yesterday’s news. Lest he cannot help himself. And betrays us again. But in any event, he should not be abetted. It’s beyond time we deprive Assange the attention he craves like the oxygen we breathe. There remain, and will continue to emerge, true whistleblowers to laud. It’s in them our energies and devotion must lie. Not in vacuous hacking vessels who crossed lines too numerous to count.

Yet Assange may yet still serve a noble purpose – as a cautionary tale. He may illuminate genuine whistleblowers, such as US Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman who, at career-ending cost, called out what he saw as Russian interference in Ukraine and US elections.

It’s time to bury Assange’s headline. For, after all, haven’t we all now served our time? Assange has served his, which we’ve read about endlessly. Let us hope he does not trouble us once more, and that we, all, do not have to serve our time again because of him.

Under law. Without question.

Michael Ware is a former CNN war correspondent. Justine A. Rosenthal is a former executive editor of Newsweek Magazine. Both are award-winning documentarians.