Bill O'Reilly Says WikiLeaks Leaker Should Be Executed

On November 29, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly declared on air that those responsible for the leaked diplomatic documents are "traitors in America" and that they "should be executed" — adding "or put in prison for life" as a dismissive afterthought. It was the harshest position taken by any major American media figure in the debate over the WikiLeaks disclosures, and it set the tone for a week of escalating rhetoric.

O'Reilly was not alone at the hard end. The next day, Bill Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard that the government should "neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are" and called for a bipartisan effort "to degrade, defeat, and destroy WikiLeaks." Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook that Assange was "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands" who should be "pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders." Mike Huckabee said of the leaker that "anything less than execution is too kind a penalty."

The pushback was immediate. Press freedom advocates noted that applying treason or the Espionage Act to the publication of leaked material would criminalize newsgathering protected by the First Amendment — and that Assange, an Australian, could not logically be a traitor to the United States. None of the released cables, notably, were classified "top secret."

Even the Pentagon urged calm. Defense Secretary Robert Gates described the reactions as "fairly significantly overwrought," noting that fewer than 1,500 of the 251,000 cables had actually been released. Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department was examining whether Assange could be charged with a crime — stopping well short of O'Reilly's verdict.

The episode illuminated a genuine tension: between a public's right to know what its government does in its name, and a government's claim that some secrets keep people alive. O'Reilly's answer — execution — resolved the tension by eliminating one side of it. Most of America, whatever it thought of WikiLeaks, declined to follow him there.