The Story of The Wikileaks Cablegate Saga… Animated

Those mad geniuses at Tawain’s Next Media are at it again. The news story  they’ve animated this time is the Julian Assange/Wikileaks saga. It’s a pretty decent rundown of the last few days worth of the story, actually, and as always Next Media tells it with a slant and a nice sense of humor.

By the way, whatever you think of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, watching US corporations do the bidding of the US government the last few days has been chilling. It’s also been chilling to watch Joe Lieberman, a dedicated opponent of liberty, trying to remove basic freedoms of the press. What’s going on right now isn’t all that different from what happened to Daniel Ellsberg during the Pentagon Papers scandal, and Ellsberg himself sees the connection: “The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time,” he has said.

Consider that Visa and Mastercard will process payments to the KKK but not to Wikileaks. Something seems terribly wrong and off here (and it’s not just the dummies accusing Australian Assange of being a traitor); whatever your thoughts on the Wikileaks situation it must be accepted that the standard we have in this country is that the leaker gets punished and the press is allowed to publish the leaks. Wikileaks is the press, and the leaker’s already in custody. It’s also worth noting that no top secret documents have been leaked; the damage from the cablegate leaks has been minimal and is mostly limited to embarrassment and the US looking bad. Again, this isn’t about whether or not you like Assange or Wikileaks - it’s about press freedom.

Anyway, the Wikileaks story is only beginning, and I’m looking forward to what Next Media does with the continuing saga.