Good point by Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker:<p>> You've probably heard the refrain from well-meaning pundits: “You don't have to like him, but you should oppose threats to silence him.” But that refrain misses the point by reinforcing the manipulative tropes deployed against Assange.<p>> When setting a gravely dangerous precedent, governments don't typically persecute the most beloved individuals in the world. They target those who can be portrayed as subversive, unpatriotic – or simply weird. Then they actively distort public debate by emphasizing those traits.
I agree with half of it. Criticizing Assange for his hygiene or bringing into focus Manning's gender identity are obviously attempts at character assassination as the article points out but:<p>>for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk<p>his political affiliations and motivates as well as intent matter. The public has a legitimate interest to figure out if whistleblowers act on behalf of foreign powers, cooperate with domestic political parties or are in some other way potentially influenced. It can determine what they decide to leak, who they aim to attack, and so on. If it turns out that someone who leaks documents that concern national security has ties to a foreign power the situation becomes immediately much more suspect and it becomes much more likely that leaks are chosen in such a way as to deflect or confuse.
Litvinenko was when I realized that nation states only play by rules when it suits them and break them when they can get away with it. Putin can get away with murdering individuals or invading Crimea without any major repercussions. The US and Europe can extradite and jail spymasters (if the independent can assert Assange was a journalist I can assert he's a spymaster).<p>I don't find this situation to be black and white, I personally want Assange extradited and brought to trial. I'm sorry that Chelsea isn't cooperating.<p>Realpolitik: He played a game that regular people shouldn't participate in and after a decade he's experiencing the repercussions.<p>If his releases had been more even-handed towards Russia or he had not tried so hard to damage Hilary Clinton I may think he was some goodhearted neutral observer that just wants the truth out there, but it looks to me like he wanted to leverage the information he had to achieve desired outcomes (just as a spymaster at a nationstate agency would).