Let's Make Julian Assange Afraid to Walk Outside

Don't believe this stuff about the WikiLeaks cables dealing in harmless gossip, writes Charles Krauthammer, who maintains that the damage is real and far-reaching. Which has him carping about the "torpid and passive" response by the US and wondering why Julian Assange is still a free man. "It's time to show a little steel," he writes in the Washington Post. "To show that such miscreants don't get to walk away."

These leaks amount to espionage, or at least a modern version of it, and it's time to act. "Let the world see a man who can't sleep in the same bed on consecutive nights, who fears the long arm of American justice," he writes. "I'm not advocating that we bring out of retirement the KGB proxy who, on a London street, killed a Bulgarian dissident with a poisoned umbrella tip. But it would be nice if people like Assange were made to worry every time they go out in the rain." (More Wikileaks diplomatic cables stories.)