I had planned on taking a day off from the blog, but developments with the Wikileaks email dump obliged me to stay on the job. Late last night a friend informed me that Julian Assange’s internet access had been disrupted. Let me give you a bit of background on Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange is an Australian citizen, computer programmer by occupation, who created the organization known as Wikileaks. Since its inception over ten years ago, Wikileaks has been dedicated to hacking into private government and business computer systems, and releasing to the public confidential information. The organization claims no political bias, and only releases information that it decides is in the public interest. You may recall that former U.S. Army soldier Bradley Manning was Court-martialed for sharing Top Secret military intelligence with Assange and Wikileaks. While Wikileaks was making a name for itself in the Bradley Manning affair, Assange found himself in “unrelated” difficulty with the Swedish police. Two women accuse Assange of sexual assault, relating to the time period that Assange was living in Sweden. Assange, who was in England when the accusations became public, has been hiding out at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in order to avoid extradition to Sweden to face trial. While he has been holed up in the Embassy of Ecuador, Assange has continued to control Wikileaks. In fact, Assange claimed that Wikileaks had hacked into Hillary Clinton’s server when she was Secretary of State, and that Wikileaks intended to release these emails in October, just prior to the U.S. presidential election.
When October rolled around, and Wikileaks started releasing Clinton emails, the U.S. media was busy giving airtime and legitimacy to a string of slanderous, false stories about Donald Trump. A number of us noted with anger the “coincidental” timing of the stories about Trump, but we also realized that the media could not distract the American public forever. The Wikileaks emails would eventually be disseminated, and barring any unforeseen developments, the release would take place before the November election. Imagine my surprise when I discovered Sunday night, that Assange’s email access had been disconnected, just prior to the release of another batch of emails. Wikileaks, which claims to have other methods of sharing the emails, announced that Assange’s access was terminated by the government of Ecuador. I have also read that the CIA was involved, but I doubt the veracity of that particular accusation. I am convinced that the Obama Administration put the heat on the Ecuadorians, strongly advising them to shut down Assange’s access in order to avoid an incident with the U.S. government. We all know just how popular Barack Obama is internationally, so I doubt the effort required much arm-twisting. continued>>
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