“Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship.-Julian Assange”
Winston Churchill once said ”The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”
To some he is the New Che Guevara of the current generation and to the rest he is a cyber-criminal. The whistle-blower journalist cum hacker Julian Assange is indeed a hero to many. A cypherpunk who devised a novel use for technology to bring-forth a political revolution, his mere name sends shudders down the spine of even the most powerful people all around the world. From gory leaks on the U.S. military documents on the war in Iraq to the horrific Guantanamo Bay operating procedures, Assange has spared none. Pundits argue that the truth is causing more harm than good. So then should the truth be hidden forever? Assange has certainly changed the mindset of people. The leaks are clearly aimed at providing a view as to how the world is being run. The US has done everything in its power to plug the so called organization WikiLeaks. Right from freezing bank-accounts to snapping off its ties with PayPal and Master Card almost all funds going into WikiLeaks have been plugged. WikiLeaks has worked with several reputed organizations such as The New York Times,television channels such as CNN, Al Jazeera, and Britain’s Channel 4, the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. If the US wants to act sneaky by using its clout to influence Sweden into extraditing Assange on the pretext of questioning him in an alleged sexual-assault whereas the real motive being shipping him to US and taking action against him under the Espionage Act! Why cant these reputed news papers and channels be brought under trial of conspiring with a spy? Do they actually believe that a single man master-minded all these leaks? Julian Assange cheekily made a logically accurate comparison between himself and Mark Zuckerberg .
“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.”
Assange’s Forbes profile reads
“Information may want to be free, but sometimes it needs a little help. Genius provocateur behind Wikileaks, hard at work providing startling glimpse of near future, where confidential and classified documents are routinely made available to the general public. Governments and corporations with dirty laundry should be afraid, very afraid.”
A chilling intro by Forbes indeed!
Amnesty International conferred him with an International Media Award in 2009. He was listed 68th most powerful person in the world on the Forbes list of November 2010. He was also the runner up in the TIME person of the year 2010. Assange even made it to the cover of the coveted TIME magazine. There was a full fledged interview in there too. I could not upload the audio conversation though. Here is a link to it. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040-1,00.html. Now let the US sue TIME and Forbes for promoting a spy! Along with accolades and recognition, the bold journalist instantly became one of the most hated figures among his victims a.k.a the political honchos particularly in the US but he also became a cult figure among people all over the world. The modern day debunker as I call him, Assange’s leaks have fallen into the world like atom-bombs. These spectacular revelations have caused complete mayhem. For those of you who feel Assange is a bad person who has broken several laws and deserves punishment, I suggest you to please have a look at this video before making a fair judgement. It is one of the many leaked materials from the coffers of WikiLeaks. You call Assange an immoral man then what do you call these people in the video. Innocent civilians were brutally gunned down for the sake of “safety”. Has America lost it? The complete leak can be found here http://www.collateralmurder.com/.
Perhaps the most shocking leak of all was the one titled “911 messages” http://911.wikileaks.org/. One look at it and you will be stunned at the amount of messages in it. It contains several thousands of pager messages sent by people on that dreadful day September 11th 2001. How WikiLeaks managed to come across such massive information remains a mystery. Right from ordinary day to day conversations like “Did you turn the iron off?” to highly volatile information like “US military has go to a high level DEFCON alert. Fighter aircraft have been scrambled.” Youtube is littered with videos saying the real 9/11 has been caused by insiders. These conversations can be pieced together and may even bring out completely different reasons for the collapse of the twin towers. Will this be the right choice? Hasn’t humanity suffered enough post 9/11? Imagine the trauma the victims and their families have gone through.
There were a few wiki -bombs dropped on India too. My favorite being this particularly scathing leak : a diplomatic cable sent by the US slamming the statue lady “Mayawati”. Here is a link to it. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:_Uttar_Pradesh_Chief_Minister_Mayawati_sent_jet_to_collect_shoes. Here is a news article related to it.
Mayawati retorted by saying “Mr. Assange should be sent to mental asylum by the country he belongs to and in case if there was no place for him, he should be sent to Uttar Pradesh. We will put him in the Agra mental asylum.” She further went on to quote the most famous line ever said in politics “This is a conspiracy of the opponents to tarnish the image of our party, just ahead of the elections next year”. God knows who is going to buy her version of the story! There was even this one cable leaking volatile information on the rampant corruption prevalent during Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s reign as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. In the name of welfare schemes, he has swindled quite a lot of money. Coming to the hottest topic “black-money holed up in Swiss banks” is almost a cliché now as almost every Indian knows that the Swiss bank accounts have a ginormous amount of money belonging to high-profile Indians. There are rumors doing rounds that WikiLeaks might have passed on that list. This interview with Assange aired on Times Now a couple of months back will give you an insight into the black-money issue.
Julian Assange will go down in history as one of the most “controversially revered” person all around the world. So are you ready to face the truth?
Revolutionary!