Julian Assange, the nomadic cyber rebel who leads WikiLeaks, was not himself a cog in the machine, but he was of like mind with Manning in regard to individual responsibility. Before he got into the business of disclosing the dirty secrets of governments and corporations, he reflected in an essay, "Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act we become a party to injustice," adding, "Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility." In his own way, he, too, acted. In July WikiLeaks released more than 70,000 secret documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan, and then came the documentary tsunami from Iraq, which may have, in Assange's words, "constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record."
Assange is not in prison—on the contrary, this tall, white-haired, disciplined, well-spoken and somehow unearthly information guerrilla shows up regularly on television, where he performs with a kind of high-minded, cool scrappiness. But his organization has been cloudily but menacingly designated a "threat to the U.S. Army" in a classified Army document (also published by WikiLeaks), and he is a man on the run, moving from nation to nation in search of safety from possible legal jeopardy. (Assange is under investigation for sexual misconduct in Sweden but has denied all accusations.)
Among the flood of Afghan war documents there happens to be a report on one more instance of a man who, finding himself threatened with participation in the evil-doing of a malignant system, opted to withdraw. In Balkh province, a little more than a year ago, the report disclosed, Afghan police officers were beating and otherwise abusing civilians for their lack of cooperation. The police commander then sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl. When a civilian protested, the report stated, "The district commander ordered his bodyguard to open fire on the AC [Afghan civilian]. The bodyguard refused, at which time the district commander shot [the bodyguard] in front of the AC." At the time these documents came out, the official reaction to them, echoed widely in the media, was that they disclosed "nothing new." But let us pause to absorb this story. A police officer, unwilling, at the risk of his own life, to be a murderer, is himself murdered by his superior. He gives his life to spare the other person, possibly a stranger. It is the highest sacrifice that can be made.
The man's identity is unrecorded. His story is met with a yawn. But perhaps one day, when there is peace in Afghanistan, a monument will be erected in his honor there and schoolchildren will be taught his name. Perhaps here in the United States, when the country has found its moral bearings again, there will be recognition of the integrity and bravery of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. For now, the war- and torture-system rolls on, and it's all found to be "nothing new."
~TheNation.com
