i've been mulling over a post about how the campaign against wikileaks is so focused on julian assange. but assange isn't wikileaks. wikileaks is an organization. it didn't stop releasing cables when assange was in a british jail and it won't stop if he ends up in a swedish jail, or dies, or gets sent to guantanamo, or whatever.
in this mulled post, i was going to compare the current campaign to how the u.s. government talked about iraq in the lead up to both the gulf war and the 2003 invasion, where saddam hussein was used to personalize the conflict. and how that is like what the u.s. did in the 1980s when libya was the bad guy and muammar qadhafi was the poster boy for the evils of that country.
this morning i was on the
wikileaks site (or at least the swiss one), saw the above banner on the home page and realized that it wasn't just the u.s. that was personalizing this. click on the
cablegate link and assange's face is there too. his image is either across the top or on the top left of every page of the "cablegate" section of the web site, but not on the pages for wikileaks'
three prior leaks.
so why is wikileaks building up assange to be the personification of their organization all of a sudden? is it an effort to support their embattled founder? are they just playing into what the u.s. is doing? or is something else going on?
