"Whistleblowers Are Rarely Saints"

               In recent days the Australian-born founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has reportedly dyed his hair and been wearing disguises around London, while talking only on encrypted cell phones, spending cash instead of traceable credit cards, and sleeping on friends' sofas. Since releasing 400,000 more classified or highly-secretive documents about America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he's become, at least in his own mind, a hunted man. A few months ago, he published 77,000 such documents, but now he's unleashed an even bigger trove of what the U.S. government doesn't want us to know about its activities abroad. This time around, as with the last time, there's been a great hue and cry about the enormous disservice Assange has done to American interests abroad and to the military itself. Isn't he placing the lives of soldiers or undercover intelligence personnel in danger? Isn't he hurting the U.S. cause? And isn't he a weird character himself, with a strange personality, a number of psychological problems, and a penchant for self-drama?

               The answer to the last question may well be yes, yes, and yes. Those who take risks as great as Assange is taking in making public the underlying reality of these two wars are rarely paragons of what some call "normality." They very often have personal issues that are an integral part of what makes them stick their necks out beyond where most of us can imagine. But they are also the only people who'll do what's necessary to bring to light the results of the decisions American political and military leaders have made regarding these two wars during the past nine years. They're the ones willing to go far enough to give these wars an actuality that goes past what the media will report on and what the public is usually exposed to -- the very same public that's been asked to offer these wars our political, moral, and financial support, not to mention the blood of the young Americans who are fighting them. When government decides to act in secret, and to keep the public from knowing what it's up to, supposedly to protect us, only people like Assange are going to try to reveal more of the truth. He is no doubt a flawed man, but who else is this committed to bringing the details of these wars home?

               For the past 25 years, I've sat in courtrooms and watched murder trials. They are time-consuming, tedious, if not boring, expensive, and can be mind-numbingly repetitive. You often can't wait for them to end, but once they're finished a strange thing happens. When you look back on them, after someone guilty of a heinous crime has been convicted in an open setting according to the rules of due process, you feel a sense of pride and subtle satisfaction. Evil has been rooted out, identified, and someone has been held publicly accountable for doing atrocious things. The scoundrels have been named and shamed in front of the citizenry, but without violence or revenge. Our legal has once again worked as it was designed to. It is much like what Winston Churchill said about democracy -- absolutely awful, except compared to every other system in the world.

               Because nobody has ever been held accountable for anything having to do with how the war in Iraq was launched or what the consequences of this have been (with hundreds of thousands of lives now lost and trillions of dollars spent), people on the margins are the only ones left to try to expose the real nature of these conflicts and what they've cost us. No one in authority has lifted a finger to impose due process on any of this or tried to purge the evil set loose in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result we're left with Julian Assange, warts and all. In the future, when historians gaze backwards at this period and try to make sense of what we were involved in, they may have no better record than what Assange has given them. How will they view him then?

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