Every Yalie knows the words, “For God, for Country and for Yale.” Disgracefully, some choose to omit more than just the Oxford comma.
Former CIA analyst Asif Rahman ’12 — a member of the Yale Daily News Managing Board of 2012 — pleaded guilty on Friday to retaining and transmitting Top Secret National Defense Information that he had sworn an oath to protect. According to the executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, “Rahman acknowledges he betrayed the trust of his country by sharing classified information in spite of the risk to the United States and our allies.” He faces up to 20 years in prison for his violations of the Espionage Act.
How does a Yale-educated, high school valedictorian become a confessed traitor? The Department of Justice suggests that Rahman was motivated by “his personal opinions on U.S. policy” toward Israel. His leaks successfully delayed Israel’s retaliatory strike on Iran, an adversary that seeks “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”
We do not yet know when Rahman was radicalized, but it is hard not to suspect his “bright college years.” Yale Students for Justice in Palestine, which sought “to find ways that we as students in the United States can intervene on a local and international scale to end the injustice of colonization and discrimination,” first posted on Facebook in October 2011. By February 2012, Yale had hired the self-described “radical Muslim” professor who posted on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.” Even if Rahman was radicalized “in after years,” Yale College failed in its mission to cultivate “citizens with a rich awareness of our heritage to lead and serve in every sphere of human activity.”
As I remarked at the MIT Free Speech Alliance conference in 2024, “We are an American university. We serve this country. We served this country in World War II. It’s one of the reasons that we won. We’re not some global university that exists in a bubble where it’s utopia. We serve the United States.” In short, we are for Country. Let us strive that ever we may let these words our watch-cry be.
WILL SUSSMAN graduated from Yale College in 2021. He can be reached at will.sussman@aya.yale.edu.