Julian Assange heads Wikileaks and has begun publishing emails, cables, documents, and other communications that were given to him by government and financial institution insiders in heroic personal acts of conscience. He has been arrested in London for a sex crime for which he has been charged in Sweden.
Interestingly, Mr. Assange has broken no American law. His "sex crime" is beyond absurd. He is charged with continuing to have intercourse with a consensual partner after the condom broke. It carries a maximum fine of $715 even if it could be proven, and we must note that Assange denies that this occurred.
He will be persecuted for exposing the criminality of our governments and financial institutions even as he himself has committed no crime whatsoever.
Wikileaks has simply pulled back the curtain on the blackest diseases of our governments and financial systems. He is a hero on his way to becoming a martyr.
There has been no legal judgement against Julian Assange or his company but our government has pressured PayPal to cancel his account, his web hosts have been pressured to remove his web site, his bank accounts have been frozen, including his legal defense fund, even though he has been charged with not so much as a traffic ticket in every country except Sweden. We are witnesses on a global scale of an unusual facet of totalitarianism, not so much by governments themselves but by the financial institutions and oligarchs that pull the strings that run them.
As goes the fate of Julian Assange, so goes the tenuous liberty of the world's citizens.
Steve
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