Harassing the whistleblowers: the punishment never ends

Intelligence services reflexively build bureaucratic empires and ceaselessly expand their reach because that’s what bureaucracies do. They can be useful in war, but the vast bulk of what they do in peacetime is pointless.

Here’s the thing: None of the information Julian Assange, pictured, released hurt anybody, and a lot of it needed to be revealed: war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and government surveillance of tens of millions of U.S. citizens. The CIA made it all secret because it could, not because it was necessary or justifiable, writes Gwynne Dyer. Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

October 4, 2021

LONDON, U.K.—A long time ago now I was asked to do a television series about the world’s intelligence services—and I turned it down flat. My main reason was a feeling that there was less to the whole intelligence world than met the eye, and the subsequent 30 years have only served to confirm t...

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