The bad news

The Pentagon has Wikileaks in its crosshairs

Writing about the "Most Dangerous Man in Iceland," Julian Assange, the individual who founded the indispensible Wikileaks, Dylan Welch of The Sydney Morning Herald
reports that Assange's latest predicament:

…reads like a James Bond novel: an enigmatic white-haired computer hacker; a soldier turned whistleblower; secret government correspondence; and the world's most powerful country desperate to contain the situation.

Julian Assange, the Australian-born face of the web iconoclast WikiLeaks, is in hiding overseas after the US military arrested one of its own soldiers, Bradley Manning, and accused him of leaking a a [sic] secret video of a US Army helicopter gunning down civilians in Iraq in 2007.

Daniel Ellsberg, the source for the Pentagon Papers, which was, of course, one catalyst for the Watergate Crisis, addresses the physical dangers Assange now faces:

We've now been told by Dennis Blair, the late head of intelligence here, that President Obama has authorized the killing of American citizens overseas, who are suspected of involvement in terrorism. Assange is not American, so he doesn't even have that constraint. I would think that he is in some danger. Granted, I would think that his notoriety now would provide him some degree of protection. You would think that would protect him, but you could have said the same thing about me. I was the number one defendant. I was on trail but they brought up people to beat me up.

Update

A Help Bradley Manning website recently appeared and intends to be "a coordination point for support and aid to Bradley Manning," according to the Help Bradley Manning website.

Manning allegedly was the source for the Collateral Murder video and the named source for the cache of State Department communiqués that have the Pentagon looking for Julian Assange.

Update II

David Lindorff asks:

What does it say about the the [sic] American government, its president, and its military today, that the the [sic] largest military/intelligence organization in the history of mankind has launched a global manhunt for Julian Assange, head of the Wikileaks organization? And what does it say about corporate American journalists that they attack the only real journalist in the White House press corps, when she alone has shown the guts to speak truth?

These seem to be rhetorical questions although Lindorff answers in the rest of his article.

Last updated on June 14, 2010 at 6:05PM