As Julian Assange enjoys his first weekend of freedom in years, there appeared to be no question in the mind of his wife, Stella, about what the family’s priorities were.
The WikiLeaks co-founder would need time to recover, she told reporters after they were reunited in his native Australia, after a deal with US authorities that allowed him to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified defence documents.
What comes after that is one of the most intriguing questions for anyone familiar with how the site he founded in 2006 utterly changed the nature of whistleblowing. Will it return to its original mission?
James Harkin, the director of the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism, (said) “In retrospect, it’s striking that everything WikiLeaks published was true – no small feat in the era of “disinformation” – but the tragedy is that much of its energy and ethos has now passed to blowhards and conspiracy theorists. Perhaps, in the light of our tepid new involvements in the Middle East and Ukraine, we need a new WikiLeaks.”
I think we should still be mad at foreign adversary nations colluding with one of our politcal parties and a not at all impartial “whistleblower” to turn the tide of a presidential election.
The emails themselves were barely relevant at all politically. Out of some 30k of them, 3 were found to be inappropriately controlled. Thats hardly an earth shattering discovery.
The spectacle that Assange, the GOP and Russia manufactured was the issue. It was a coordinated and targeted attack on our democracy, and he deserves to be derided for his outsized part in it.