The website organization, Wikileaks, is in the news again with quite a splash. Previously they were in the news over publishing a large collection of USA military documents concerning the Afghanistan & Iraq war.
This time, 28th November 2010 marked the start of their planed publication, spread out over a few months, of 1/4 Million internal communications of USA department of State with its many embassies. The statistics can be seen in their blog article, http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html , Secret US Embassy Cables. The communications involved 274 USA embassies world wide. Dates of coverage is 1966 through Feb. 2010.
The displeasure of national security parts of the USA government is obvious. Reports of troubles faced by Wikileaks and its founder likely are due to actions taken by US governmental agencies.
As of this writing, 4 Dec. 2010, Wikileaks original web site, hosted via Amazon.com, and their original domain name, wikileaks.org , registered with EveryDNS (owned by Dynamic Network Services Inc.), are down. They have had to go to Swiss web hosting provider and Swiss domain name, wikileaks.ch .
Amazon kicked Wikileaks out. Sen. Joe Lieberman praised Amazon’s action. EveryDNS had been pressured. They stated that wikileaks.org, and the registrar’s network had come under multiple ‘distributed denial of services attack’, to the extent that stability there was at risk. So they closed out that domain name. Today it has been reported that Wikileaks has been kicked out of Paypal orders payment service – – obviously also under pressure from the US government.
The founder of Wikileaks is said to be facing arrest orders in several countries including USA and Switzerland. His lawyers, though, have not received notification of the details. Australia, his country of origin, stated they would cooperate in his extradition, if they find him.
Consider, if you will, an African tie-in. It is previously known that USA intelligence agencies were involved in the region in that period of history. Somewhere buried in these many cables is information which sheds light on how a number of Affrican political leaders were murdered.
Suppose that the Wikileaks organization can keep on operating along its current course, and that its plans for multi-month phased publication of the leaked embassy cables are fulfilled as announced. I for one am hoping that will be so. The international public interest is well served by revelation of what has been done ‘in the name of the citizens’.
If that comes to pass, here we potentially have at present a rare opportunity to further see investigations of the circumstances surrounding the suspicious deaths of a number of leading political figures in the African region, notably Tom Mboya, Robert Ouko, Shamora Machel, etc..etc.
Recall the Pentagon Papers situation earlier in USA history. Danial Elsberg leaked classified think tank studies on policies and the military actions in the USA war in Indochina. It was published by news papers such as the New York Times. The US government sought court orders to stop such publications before they were printed and circulated. The cases were resolved to say that no, those publishers were not subject to prior restraint.
This may be compared with the present episode involving Wikileaks. US Courts in the Pentigon Papers case held that although the person disclosing security classified information, which he had access to, without authorization, could be subjected to criminal prosecution, the news media should not be criminally penalized or restrained in advance from publishing the information. Surely Wikileaks ought be treated as a publisher. In the present case it has been reported that a military man is being detained as a suspect in unauthorized release of the diplomatic cables.
– Octimotor –