Julian Assange gets his just deserts.

Julian Assange, co-founder of Wikileaks, is regarded either as a hero of free speech or a villain. He played a leading part in publicising hundreds of thousands of classified US documents handed over to Wikileaks by Private Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning when he was serving in the military at a base west of Baghdad during the height of the Iraqi insurgency war. It was a gross betrayal by Manning who served prison time for his crimes, and Assange, through his complicity in the exposure of these secrets, is also guilty in the eyes of the US authorities of the crime of espionage. Jjournalists who benefited from this breach of secrecy, wrote scandalised stories that filled newspapers for years. Now that Assange has been carried out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London by Metropolitan police officers after living in the embassy for seven years as an asylum seeker, he is facing extradition to the US, trial and possible conviction for crimes meriting seven or more years in jail. Do I feel sympathy for Assange? Do I believe he is a hero that should win the Nobel prize for something or other? No to both questions in my view. I think the US has every right to put him on trial. He may be acquitted if he has a good defence lawyer who emphasises that he is just a journalist doing his job. Which is fine. But I have never seen Assange as a regular journalist. And I certainly don't see him as a hero. In the same way I never viewed Edward Snowden as a hero. He betrayed his employers at the National Security Agency, broke the trust the NSA had placed in him and ran away to Moscow of all places when the NSA secrets he had stolen were delivered to the Guardian newspaper in a hotel room in Hong Kong. Snowden was more of a traitor in that sense than Assange ever was. But the only way to decide once and for all whether either of these men were heroes or traitors is to put them on trial and let the jury decide. Assange, if extradited to the US, will be the first one for the courts to decide this issue. Snowden will probably spend the rest of his days in Moscow. Good riddance I say.