Julian Assange

WikiLeaks has long claimed that it is taking measures to protect the men and women whose identities may be exposed in leaked documents for the first time. These people include spies, sources, and the like who never thought their names would appear on the Internet in a leaked State Department document. But now, from Spiegel, one of the media outlets that has cooperated with WikiLeaks in exposing America’s secrets, we learn:

During a span of 22 months the website WikiLeaks.org morphed from a digital anarchist demonstration project into a semisuccessful international campaign against the American government. WikiLeaks solicited classified documents and then orchestrated a global media typhoon around them.

Accused rapist Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, is supposed to be extradited to Sweden to face charges of rape. The Guardian reports:

In a major development that has been largely ignored or misrepresented in the American media, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten has obtained access to the full stash of over 250,000 classified American diplomatic cables previously obtained by WikiLeaks. The paper has been posting a steady stream of cables to its own website independently of the self-styled “whistleblower organization.”

The nomination of a scoundrel like Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize is not without precedent – in fact, there’s a good chance he could win it. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, would join the company of Palestinian terrorist-in-chief Yasser Arafat if he were to be awarded the prize.

Here is a new myth about Guantanamo. The attorneys for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claim that if Assange is extradited to Sweden he may end up detained in Cuba. The Guardian (UK) reports:

As America’s premier First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams is a force to be reckoned with. The force is on display at full power in today’s Wall Street Journal, where he takes up the subject of WikiLeaks and offers a very dim view of the activities of Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks founder and accused sex offender Julian Assange has been rewarded with a book deal, expected to be worth $1.7 million. The New York Times reports:

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has been released on bail from a British jail. He's currently staying put in Britain, waiting for an extradition trial to determine whether he will be sent to Sweden to face multiple charges of rape. The Daily Mail reports (my emphasis):

Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation is the principal fundraiser for WikiLeaks and indeed, on its own account, WikiLeaks’s de facto financial manager.

Last weekend, PayPal announced that it was freezing the PayPal account used by WikiLeaks. In a statement, PayPal explained that WikiLeaks was in violation of the company’s acceptable use policy, which “states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” But any violations of the law that WikiLeaks either encourages, promotes, facilitates, etc. are apparently not of interest to Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation, the principal collector of funds and de facto financial manager of WikiLeaks. At any rate, this appears to be the case for any violations of American law. German law, as will be seen below, is another matter.

In the middle of a February 28, 2008 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, we find this sentence: