News: Wikileaks

Over the past three months, I feel that I have fallen progressively further from the United States and what has been happening there. In order to keep up with global events I made it a point to check BBC.com daily to see the biggest news stories. Since October, I haven’t been able to go more than 3 days without a headlining story about Julian Assange and Wikilieaks. It has been, hands down, the biggest and most talked about news story of the season.

            Wikileaks came to be in 2006 as a website devoted to global freedom of speech. Another goal was to bring to light certain atrocities that have occurred in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Julian Assange is the man credited with the sites creation. He is from Australia, but currently lives a life on the move. The information, or ‘cables’, that Wikileaks provides are leaked materials about military cover ups, casualty demographics, and correspondence between US diplomats and foreign leaders.

            Hundreds of thousands of articles are released at a time. The most recent cables released involved US diplomats making comments about foreign leaders like Putin of Russia or Sarkozy of France. The US government considers Mr. Assange and Wikileaks to be a high threat to national security and have been trying to shut them down for some time now. Recently, major companies like PayPal and Amazon have removed their services from the whistle-blowing website.

            Julian Assange was arrested in London last week because of a warrant that came from Sweden, where a criminal investigation was waiting for him. He allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women; however he maintains his innocence, claiming that the allegations were only made to smear his image. He is currently in prison in London awaiting his extradition. There have been some protests at British embassies, mainly in Spain, demanding his release.

            I am American, so I could consider Mr. Assange a direct enemy of me and my country. However, I don’t really have a problem with what he is doing. I believe in freedom of speech, and I don’t think that important information like the kind on Wikileaks should be kept from the people. My government is very secretive and does a lot of things that they don’t tell their people. They demand that Wikileaks be taken down, but they have the power themselves. All they have to do is stop the lies and bad dealings, and eventually Wikileaks will have very little to report.