Many Australians are revolted by Julian Assange’s return

Convicted spy Julian Assange has come home to Australia. Assange’s chartered private jet touched down in Australia’s capital, Canberra, early in the evening local time to a hero’s reception. That the plea-bargaining deal ensuring his freedom was executed in a remote courthouse on the American territorial island of Saipan, in the isolated western Pacific but satisfying American demand that Assange be convicted on American territory, added a bizarre touch of the exotic to the whole tawdry business. It was a rubber stamp stopover en route from London to Canberra.

It’s appropriate the deed was done on Saipan. After all, the island was liberated from brutal Japanese occupation in 1944 by American land and sea forces in bitter and bloody fighting costing tens of thousands of lives. The vital operation’s success was, in no small measure, due to top-secret planning and intelligence gathering that was not compromised by recklessly dangerous publicity of the sort that Assange and Wikileaks gave to security operations in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, through their mass dumps of ill-gotten documents.