If you have turned on a national news broadcast some time during the last month or so, the name WikiLeaks and Julian Assange may be familiar. For those that may not know who Assange is, or what WikiLeaks is, simply put: Assange is a journalist and WikiLeaks is his publication. WikiLeaks has gained access to secret documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and communications between American embassies and the nation’s capitol. Many have branded Assange as a “high-tech terrorist,” to use Vice President Joe Biden’s term, and as consummate presidential contender Mike Huckabee said, Assange should be hunted down and killed.
Surely, there must be some reason why top politicians and pundits alike want Assange’s head. I probably would too if someone took a wrecking ball to my house of lies. WikiLeaks’s release of hundreds of thousands of documents shows possible war crimes on the part of U.S. service members in Iraq, an Afghanistan conflict mired in corruption and in-fighting along with a request for the U.S. to invade Iran at Saudi Arabia’s behest. What is most interesting to note is at what point the fervor to quiet Assange went from a dull roar to a fever pitch. When the dirty little secrets of the U.S. State Department came out is when our D.C. overlords really got pissed. According to the rules of global dominance volume one, conducting the business of your country abroad requires back-room dealings, deceit, outright lying and withholding critical information from your citizens. Watching the government’s response to WikiLeaks’s release is somewhat similar to seeing a 5-year-old get caught stealing from a dollar store.
The government is now making the case Assange is guilty of espionage. The government finds its reasoning to accuse Assange of espionage in a law that is just shy of a century old. The Espionage and Sedition Act of 1917 was enacted during World War I to allow the government to basically throw anyone or any organization that it viewed as subverting the war effort in jail. The law worked, too; quite a few people were thrown in jail simply by exercising their unalienable right to free speech. How magnanimous of the U.S. government to find such a forthright way to deal with Assange. Nevermind U.S. outrage when one of our own real spies, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down in his U-2 spy plane and put in a show trial on germane charges of espionage by the then Soviet Union and thrown in prison.
One could argue that Assange was divulging classified information, giving away too many state secrets. Well, first, the war logs of Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly just daily patrol reports and other day-to-day reports from military units. I even looked up my old Army unit in the Iraq papers and it was very dry stuff.
The Afghanistan papers are a bit juicier. They offer an insight into the rife corruption and lack of motivation in the Afghani military and police. As I said above, the real hard-hitting stuff is in these over-classified State Department cables. The papers are hard hitting and embarrassing because it’s the truth. They show our government deviously scheming with other nations, eschewing our supposed moral authority as a nation founded on “In God We Trust.” The U.S. government seeks to shore up its unilateral global dominance by any means possible.
Why should anyone care about this? Instead of getting pissed off with the rest of the bureaucrats in Washington whose pants are on fire cause they got caught in a lie, the American people should feel some animosity toward our government which is supposed to be of the people, by the people and for the people. Clearly, the interests of the U.S. government do not coincide with the interests of the American people. We the people need to see that fact and hold government truly accountable. Being informed is the first and most powerful way to have an accountable government. Julian Assange gave us what we needed to see and not what we wanted, which is what good journalism is about at times. What’s most saddening is many Americans are entrenched so heavily in a delusion that dissent is tantamount to treason. Being critical of your government (and by government I don’t mean the party you happen to dislike) is the most American ideal. It’s not just those with an R or a D by their name, it’s the whole system that has been corrupted by those who are consistently becoming drunken with power. It’s political demigods serving their plutocratic masters. Assange just held up a mirror and we should be repulsed by what we see.
An editorial from the publisher of the Vicksburg Postsaid it best: if we are truly a global superpower, then why do we have to conduct our business like a third-rate pawnbroker?
For the people out there that need some biblical sourcing before they will listen to an argument, “There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops,” (Luke 12:2-3).
 
David Breland is the life editor of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].