Julia and Julian

And in broken news, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has threatened to cancel Julian Assange’s passport.

Of course, she has since moderated her anti-Assange comments since polls are demonstrating that Australians agree that he has been betrayed by the Australian government, and she is doing what she does best:  fiddling with the “hot” and “cold” taps of her credibility to remain as lukewarm as fresh urine.

Perhaps the polls have alerted her to some small but rather relevant facts to the Australian public.  The first is that she is merely a minister, and cannot cancel a citizen’s passport on a whim.  The second is that Julian Assange hasn’t yet been convicted of any crime, and the crimes he has been arrested for are not only shonky and on the nose like aforementioned urine, but they are not ones which would ordinarily mean the cancellation of a passport.  The third is that in disseminating leaked information like Wikileaks has done breaches no law.

And the fourth one is that we know full well what she’s doing and why.  Julia Gillard is a total suck.  (As are Amazon, PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, the latter two of which are still accepting payments for the Ku Klux Klan, by the way.)  She’s a suck, and because the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly isn’t enough, she wants the US to say something nice about her next time Wikileaks informs the world what they really think of us.

People whom you would hope would know better are calling for Julian Assange’s arrest for leaking these documents, and even his execution.  That’s a hell of a tanty to be chucking just because you’re embarrassed, US of A.

And it is just embarrassment.  For all its claims of safety being compromised, these are just petulant cries which are variants on “It’s not fair!”.  It is diplomatic documents that Wikileaks has published, not security ones, and the only country their publication has endangered is the US, because it has now revealed the world’s most powerful nation not as the great and powerful Oz, but the man behind the curtain:  small, human, inherently faulted.  And the faults are serious.  Not so much that the US would stoop to talk of Russian leaders in epithets and describe our ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in a way not dissimilar to bitching about your boss on Facebook, but that these pat summations – reams and reams of them – of leaders and countries are taking the place of meaningful, intelligent analysis and dialogue at the highest levels.  Well you should be put in the naughty corner, US of A, despite your lashing out with fists and feet, until you can promise that you will play nice, and – security supposedly being your area of expertise – look after your toys.

Embarrassment is fear, of course.  What we are seeing is the US of A showing us how afraid it is of the way we really see it.  How afraid it is of us.  In what must have surely been another planet, John F. Kennedy once said:

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values.  For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood in an open market is afraid of its own people”.

Looking at the way the US is reacting to the leaking of these documents brings up a whole new set of questions about Kennedy’s assassination.  All of a sudden it’s not, “Who killed JFK?” but “How did JFK manage to live so long?”

The Internet is the last open market for us to source our information.  In a time when media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer all-powerful corporations, when 55% of the news in Australia is spinned from press releases (although PR experts put the figure at over 80% in the US), it is important for us to acknowledge the role that Wikileaks has to play in letting us judge truth and falsehood for ourselves.  It is no coincidence that much of Julian Assange’s bail money came from journalists:  he is not only fulfilling the role of an investigative journalist, but there is many an unemployed investigative journalist in this day and age who wants to see truth remain in light despite media outlets spoon-feeding us bland-but-palatable half-truths and advertorials cooked up in a secret agenda kitchen.

Or else… what?  What do we do with Julian Assange, Julia?  We jail him and strip him of his passport.  And every investigative journalist, too.  We lock them up and throw away the key, let them rot.  Or maybe let Tom Flanagan execute them, and torture them beforehand for good measure.  Except this is a bit old hat because this already happens.  But only in “those” countries, right?  Those with totalitarian governments and ritual violations of human rights. Not ours.  Not the US of A.  Surely not.