Why Assange and WikiLeaks have won this round
By Ian Welsh
The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies.
The massive and indiscriminate overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to:
- Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server
- Stopping domain name server propagation
- Paypal refusing to send payments
- VISA and Mastercard refusing to process payments
- The Swiss Bank PostFinance shutting down Assange's account
- Senator Lieberman pressuring firms over Wikileaks
- The odd behavior of prosecutors in the Assange rape accusations/case
Wikileaks and Assange have now been made in to cause celebres. If corporations and governments can destroy someone's access to the modern economy as they have Wikileaks, without even pretending due process of the law (Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, Amazon, etc... were not ordered by any court to cut Wikileaks) then we simply do not live in a free society of law, let alone a society of justice.
Ironically the Wikileaks files reveal that the British fixed their inquiry into the war, and that the US pressured the Spanish government to stop a war crimes court case against ex-members of the Bush administration. Assange and Wikileaks are subject to extreme judicial and extrajudicial sanctions, but people who engaged in aggressive war based on lies, tortured people and are responsible for deaths well into the six figures, walk free.
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