My first thought upon hearing about the warrant for the arrest (followed hard upon by the dropping of the charges) of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was “CIA”. It took me a long time to come to this sort of reflexive thinking. I remember back in the dim and distant past, the halcyon days of the sixties, thinking that all those people blaming the CIA for all kinds of things were merely indulging in paranoid conspiracy theories. Turned out that they were right on almost all counts, so I have slowly come around to their point of view, at least to the extent that I think of the CIA when something that doesn’t sound quite right pops up in the “national security” field.
Assange is a Swedish citizen, and assuming he stays in Sweden, probably beyond the jurisdiction of American criminal law, despite our recent propensity to extend jurisdiction to everyone, anywhere in the world. (Empires do that sort of thing) The Swedes were unlikely to indict him for the leaks, since he wasn’t breaking any Swedish laws, and everyone knows that the leaks caused no harm, other than exposing what everyone already knew: we are losing in Afghanistan, as we were always fated to do. If they wanted to teach Assange a lesson, they needed to get him for something the Swedes would actually prosecute.
I’m not saying I’m right about CIA involvement, but, as Alice said, the whole thing gets “curiouser and curiouser” the more it plays out.
UPDATE: I erred in saying Assange is a Swedish citizen, though he is currently residing in Sweden. He is Australian.
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