Wikileaks Supporters Go on the Attack, While Assange Faces “Sex by Surprise” Charges

Over the past few days, WikiLeaks — the anti-secrecy website that has leaked thousands of confidential US documents regarding everything from the war in Afghanistan to our diplomatic opinions of various Arab leaders — has been under attack. First, its main website was shut down. Then, the hosting service that gave webspace for the site terminated their hosting account. Next, WikiLeaks major methods of processing transactions — Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal — began declining incoming donations intended for the website.

After all of this, Wikileaks is, according to the Washington Post, “stronger than ever.”

That’s because WikiLeaks’ supporters worldwide have surged into action to protect the fundamental freedom of information that the website represents. Small groups have organized denial-of-service attacks on Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and even the Swedish government’s homepage, flooding those websites with so many requests that they are shut down temporarily. (They attempted to perform the same kind of attack on Amazon, WikiLeaks’ former webhost, but Amazon proved resistant to the attack.)

That was only the beginning, however. In addition to attacking websites, supporters have also provided hundreds upon hundreds of alternate avenues for leaked documents to be spread online. Mirror sites — which numbered in the low three digits before WikiLeakswas ‘attacked’ by the corporate world — have more than quintupled in number in just four days, and now there are more than a thousand sites offering WikiLeaks’ documents for all comers.

The official WikiLeaks Mirror List.

Similarly, with their main methods of accepting donations suddenly down, WikiLeaks has wasted no time in finding alternate methods of receiving money. Working through organizations in Switzerland, Germany, and Iceland, the anti-secrecy group can still accept donations through credit card transfer, bank transfer, and — as always — by receiving a check in the mail to their address in Australia.

Through all of this, WikiLeaks’ main spokesperson, Julian Assange, sits in a British jail awaiting extradition to Sweden. While the blogosphere is abuzz with rumors of the allegations against Assange, the truth is quite mundane. Assange hasn’t been charged with a felony, and his extradition is in fact only to serve a subpoena forcing him to testify at his trial. A trial for a charge of “sex by surprise” — springing from an allegation that, during sex with a young woman, he deliberately allowed a condom to break.

The case is almost certainly going to devolve into a he-said/she-said affair, with little proof available on either side, but the media hasn’t hesitated to use it to unfairly portray Assange as a pervert and a sex offender.

The real question behind all of these attacks on WikiLeaks is why? Why is WikiLeaks so universally condemned by every corporate and governmental organization in the Western world? Andrew Gavin Marshall of Global Research puts Wikileaks in its proper historical perspective:

Wikileaks is a globally transformative event. Not simply in terms of awakening new people to ‘new’ information, but also in terms of the effect it is having upon global power structures, itself. With ambassadors resigning, diplomats being exposed as liars and tools, political rifts developing between Western imperial allies, and many careers and reputations of elites around the world at great risk, Wikileaks is creating the potential for an enormous deterioration in the effectiveness of imperialism and domination. That, in itself, is an admirable and worthy goal. That this is already a reality is representative of how truly transformative Wikileaks is and could be. People, globally, are starting to see their leaders through a lens not filtered by ‘public relations.’

And that, in the end, is what our leaders may end up fearing the most.

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