One Of The Best Things I've Seen Written On Wikileaks

And it comes from the pen of Christopher Hitchens, who considers Julian Assange 'an unscrupulous megalomaniac with a political agenda' and calls for him to turn himself in:

The moral "other half" of civil disobedience, as its historic heroes show, is that you stoically accept the consequences that come with it. Then there is diplomacy itself. One of civilization's oldest and best ideas is that all countries establish tiny sovereign enclaves in each other's capitals and invest these precious enclaves of peaceful resolution with special sorts of immunity. That this necessarily includes a high degree of privacy goes without saying. Even a single violation of this ancient tradition may have undesirable unintended consequences, and we rightly regard a serious breach of it with horror. We found out everything we would ever need to know about Ayatollah Khomeini and his ideology when he took diplomats as hostages.

The cunning of Julian Assange's strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers, you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure. In a couple of major instances, the disclosures are of great value to the regime-change die-hards among us. More Arab regimes want Washington to take on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and more urgently than anyone had guessed; I would very much rather know this now than 20 years later. Iran was able to acquire some missile capacity from North Korea; so would Saddam Hussein have been if we had left him in his so-called "box." We already know that his envoys were meeting North Korean missile dealers in Damascus before the threat of the coalition's intervention caused the vendors to return hastily to Pyongyang. The latest leaks complete an important part of an important case. {...}

And that, of course, prosecution or no prosecution, is what he really ought to do. If I had decided to shame the British authorities on Iraq in 1976, [ ed. note - Hitchens is referring to his actions during his own 'Wikileaks' moment, when he came across a classified British diplomatic memo approving of Saddam Hussein coup in Iraq] I would have accepted the challenge to see them in court or otherwise face the consequences. I couldn't have expected to help myself to secret documents, make myself a private arbiter of foreign policy, and disappear or retire on the proceeds. All you need to know about Assange is contained in the profile of him by the great John F. Burns and in his shockingly thuggish response to it. The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda. As I wrote before, when he says that his aim is "to end two wars," one knows at once what he means by the "ending." In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him.

Spot on, Mr. Hitchens. That's exactly what he is - a sordid peddler with an agenda and an exaggerated sense of his own worth and importance.

However the walls may be closing in on Mr. Assange and his playmates. His Swiss bank account has been closed, and Scotland Yard now has full arrest papers to apprehend him in the South of England, where he's reportedly hiding out.

Assange, like most thugs and blackmailers has reacted with threats - he's promised a document dump of everything he's stolen thus far if he's arrested.

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