The WikiLeaks revelations continue to flow, numerous governments being embarrassed almost on a daily basis as people begin to find out just how much they have been lied to by their so-called leaders and the underhand methods used to achieve political objectives.
Aside from the revelations themselves, many of which, it has to be said, came as no great surprise, there are other elements of the case causing opinion to be divided.
There are various calls for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be charged with publishing classified documents, espionage and there are even some US politicians suggesting his assassination.
The leaked documents were ‘stolen’, of that there is little doubt, but they were not stolen by Assange himself or upon his orders.
If publishing the documents is deemed a crime, then The Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, The New York Times, Washington Post and other media are also guilty, and there are some, mostly in America, who believe they should be charged.
However, this was tried in 1971 with the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers, a similar scenario, but was thrown out by the Supreme Court.
There are arguments that Assange should be charged with receiving and publishing files knowing them to have been stolen. Again, the same would surely apply to the media.
Even in America, though, the country suffering the most embarrassment due to its treatment of its ‘friends’, there is no consensus.
Texas Republican Ron Paul stood before the House of Representatives and after his speech, posed the following questions:
1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
There have also been protests in various cities in Spain against the arrest of Assange which, many believe, is politically motivated.
The Spanish government is now having to answer questions about suggestions that Spain came under pressure to stop a criminal investigation into the killing of Jose Couso, a Spanish cameraman who died when American soldiers fired a tank round into his hotel in Baghdad.