See You Next Tuesday (Julian Assange)

See You Next Tuesday is the Boomstick's first regular weekly column. Each Tuesday, I bring you the week's most laughable scumbags, idiots, and jerks for your reading and reviling pleasure. See previous editions here. 

Ju Ass, in a rare moment of shutting his damn mouth. 

On Sunday, a website called "Wikileaks" (no relation to the other "wiki-" prefixed sites run by Wikipedia), by their own admission "began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain." The website is a non-profit devoted to publishing secure or unavailable information from various anonymous sources.  It's  run by an Australian named Julian Assange, or, as I am going to call him, “Ju Ass,” for short.

The information ranges from the security-breaching to the scandalous. Other media outlets, while condemning the leak, are simultaneously reprinting its juiciest gossip. You can google "Wikileaks" for about 7,000 news stories "exposing" the leaks.

The ordeal is basically the equivalent of your 8th grade teacher confiscating a note between you and your friend where you describe all the hot boys in your class, and how you just got your period, and reading it out loud in front of everyone in your class; except instead of hot boys it's world leaders and instead of everyone in your class it's everyone in the entire world.  Sure, when some people hear this story, they're going to think it was your fault for passing notes in the first place. But most people, at least anyone who ever survived 8th grade themselves without being a total suck-up, is just going to think your teacher is a dick.

And that's kind of where we are on Wikileaks, too, because the leaks have spawned a rare kind of bipartisanship.  Republican Congressman Peter King, the incoming Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, says Wikileaks should be treated as a terrorist group, because the threat they pose to national security is no less severe than Al Qaeda.  Secretary of State Clinton said that the leaks are nothing short of an attack on the United States.  Bill O'Reilly, always a voice of moderation, says leakers should be executed.  Attorney General Eric Holder has launched a formal criminal investigation of Wikileaks, prompting some speculation that Ju Ass could be charged under The Espionage Act.

This leak raises a lot of questions: what's the line between public access to information and government security?  Are there legitimate legal remedies for this sort of disclosure?  Is Ju Ass a champion of government transparency or an international traitor?  Will mutual hatred for Wikileaks prompt the new Congress to reach across the aisle and, placing partisanship aside, work together to beat Ju Ass?  Let's hope so.

I'm sure there will be much more to report on this story in the coming weeks.  Until then, see you next Tuesday!

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