Julian Assange left Britain on Monday after five years in custody while fighting extradition to the United States. Being at liberty is not equivalent to innocence or exoneration, however. The founder of WikiLeaks walked free after reaching a deal with US prosecutors under which he will apparently plead guilty to conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defence documents.

Though Assange’s supporters hail him as a “generational hero” (in the phrase of the US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr) and the victim of “a grotesque miscarriage of justice” (according to Jeremy Corbyn), the truth is less elevated.

Assange and his organisation have purloined and put into the public domain hundreds of thousands of classified documents without redactions.

He has thereby served the interests of repressive regimes and recklessly endangered the lives of dissidents; it is unknown how many now lie dead.

It is absurd that the Committee to Protect Journalists, a non-governmental organisation, should depict the case as an assault on press freedom. Assange is not a whistleblower or even a journalist but a common thief. His release is an act of clemency by governments that might reasonably have pursued him, not a vindication of his activities.

Assange was indicted by the US Justice Depart- ment not for what he believes but for what he has done. He was charged on multiple counts of espionage after WikiLeaks published online hundreds of thousands of stolen classified documents.

This material mainly but not exclusively related to the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Assange’s supporters typically cite, among these disclosures, footage of a US airstrike that killed Iraqi journalists. But this genuinely newsworthy finding is exceptional.

WikiLeaks also published the names of more than 100 Afghans who were providing information on the Taliban to western intelligence agencies.

These brave people had every right to expect their identities would never be revealed. Many now lie dead. Even this is not the sum of Wiki- Leaks’s disrepute. The organisation dumped online a vast trove of data shortly before the assassination of Osama bin Laden by US Navy Seals in 2011. This might have alerted bin Laden that US intelligence was closing in on him and precipitated his flight. WikiLeaks further stole documents from servers belonging to the Democratic Party, aiding the efforts of the Kremlin to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.

Assange has paid a price for this record but he is the author of his misfortunes. Accused by two Swedish women of serious sexual assault, he chose to abscond from bail, and escape an international arrest warrant, by seeking refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012. When Ecuador had had enough of his apparently insanitary presence, it allowed the Metropolitan Police to enter the embassy and arrest Assange in 2019. Ever since, Assange has been treated with unyielding compassion by the courts. A judge refused to allow his extradition to the US in 2021, as his mental health meant he was a suicide risk.

It is welcome that the saga of Assange is now ending yet important it be demystified. His ordeal is self-inflicted. He might have faced decades in prison; he is instead heading to freedom in his native Australia. He has never faced charges for his alleged assault of the two Swedish women, who have been subject to a barrage of misogynistic insinuations and abuse from his supporters.

Assange hence stands as a beneficiary of the scrupulous procedures of constitutional societies subject to the rule of law. The autocratic regimes and causes whose interests he has advanced treat genuine journalists altogether differently. A long period of contrite self-examination on his part, and from his celebrity supporters, would be apt at this juncture. It is lamentably unlikely to come.