Julian Assange, the mysterious founder of WikiLeaks has been granted bail for $315,000 by a British Court today. But, he'll be unable to go free on his own. He's required to wear an electronic bracelet, surrender his passport and report to police on a daily basis.
Assange has been developing major controversy, ever since his website managed to obtain hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. Department documents (known as cables), from the FBI and CIA. In November, WikiLeaks released many of these cable documents, including the United States relationship with Saudi Arabia and were given to major national newspapers, among them including the New York Times and were published.
And, new cables continue to be published.
The released cables, immediately triggered the search and arrest of Assange.
Since this all started coming down last month, Assange and WikiLeaks have been deemed both a hero and a villain by liberals and conservatives, and vice-versa. His arrest triggered protests from followers in Europe, and even resulted in hacking into MasterCard and Visa, after the credit card companies payment services, including people donating money to the WikiLeaks website.
But the major scrutiny that is going around is what people are thinking of Assange. Perhaps, oddly enough, his most prominent critic is Fox News Channel. While I'd typically classify myself as a viewer of Fox News, I've noticed somewhat of a flip flop at times on issues. This is the same news channel that a year before the Tea Parties had even begun, would not allow Congressman Ron Paul to offer his perspective on our country's problems when he was running for President.
After President Obama was elected, the Tea Parties began, yet this is the same thing that Ron Paul had been advocating the entire time for years... a revolution to take our country back.
But I digress, back to Assange.
My point is when it comes to that kind of flip flopping, I've heard on a number of occasions since early 2009 from Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity that Americans were getting fed up with their government and they were tired of being lied to. Indeed, we all are. Well, when Assange released papers that exposed some of those lies from our government (again, OUR government that we pay for), all you hear from the left and the right is that Assange should be prosecuted and this is an act of terrorism and a threat to our national security. So people on the news that we tend to listen to, rant about the same thing, yet when it finally exposes the facts and a leap towards the truth, we instead are supposed to call it an act of terrorism.
I'd go further and say that I completely agree that diplomatic relations between the U.S. and other countries, if indeed it means for the protection of our country, it should be confidential. But I'd also take another Fox News commentator's perspective, Andrew Napolitano, who said yesterday on The Glenn Beck Program that he felt "the thief that steals the document, is the one who commits the crime... the person who disseminates them, as long as they are truthful documents, does not commit the crime..."
I actually agree with his notion. Now Glenn Beck did offer some good points, the fact that Assange has connections with far left liberal groups and individuals like George Soros. But the reasonable point he made was when it came to exposing the Global Warming lies, a liberal newspaper like the New York Times, refused to print those documents. Yet they all jumped on the story of WikiLeaks obtaining U.S. Diplomatic cables.
While those facts do bother me and it certainly shows the 'money trail' I think, it does not bother me enough to know that there are hidden secrets in our Government that the American people have wondered for years and were lied to. For that, I would say it was worth it.
Whatever the outcome may be with Julian Assange, he certainly has shown our Government's lack of honesty, and integrity. What else is new?
I don't think there really is a win or loose with this issue. It paints it all in black and white.
But one day, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not this week or next year, we'll finally know the truth to many things that have been going on in our Government. This is still supposed to be a Government by the People and for the People. Not the other way around, as has been depicted in those cables.
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