On the other hand, it appears that reports of a grand jury investigating an indictment under the 1917 espionage act may be baseless.
Truth be told, a good prosecutor can find an sitting already sitting grand jury, and Mr. Assange from a legal perspective is certainly a ham sandwich.
Were I a prosecutor, I would not begin any process until Assange were in Sweden, where extraditions appears to be more likely than in the UK.
Of course, while this is going on, the internet is still being roiled by attacks on both sides of the issue, with Anonymous emerging from 4chan to hit the financial and IT companies that cut Wikileaks off, and other hackers going after Wikileaks, in a game of dueling DDOS attacks.
Hanging over all this is Assange's poison pill file, which has been distributed to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people, waiting for the decryption key that will be distributed if anything happens to him or Wikileaks by a dozen or so of his colleagues.
And then there is the absurdity that Amazon, after tossing Wikileaks from their servers, is now selling copies of the cables for the Kindles.
In the mean time, here are the crucial government secrets that we now know as a result of the cables:
- The pharmaceutical company Pfizer, after engaging in illegal human tests on children during a meningitis epidemic in Nigeria, attempted to dig up blackmail material to be used against the attorney general to prevent him from investigation.
- That senior officials in the ZANU-PF, including Robert Mugabe and his family, are heavily involved in the "blood diamonds" mined in Zimbabwe's Marange diamond fields.
- That a US security contractor (mercenaries), DynCorp, paid for with US tax dollars, "threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring trafficked boys as the entertainment. Bacha bazi is the Afghan tradition of "boy play" where young boys are dressed up in women's clothing, forced to dance for leering men, and then sold for sex to the highest bidder."
- That British security forces were likely involved in the assassination of an Irish civil rights attorney.
Merciful heavens, we can't let the citizenry know about that.
The final word on this is Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg's, "EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."
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