Two of us, Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, testified for Assange at his extradition hearing last year. In Ellsberg’s words then, the WikiLeaks publications that Assange is being charged for are “amongst the most important truthful revelations of hidden criminal state behavior that have been made public in U.S. history.” The American public “needed urgently to know what was being done routinely in their name, and there was no other way for them to learn it than by unauthorized disclosure.”
Dude dropped a bunch of stuff from well before that. What’s more they caught him editing the stuff he dropped to make it look like war crimes were committed, interfere in our elections, and to damage US relations with other countries.
Then they managed to to track some of his material back to the GRU. This is not the Pentagon Papers