THE WAR AGAINST WIKILEAKS

In January of this year the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for an 'unfettered' internet and condemned all those who conducted cyberattacks.

'We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas,' boasted Clinton in a major address that cited China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt among countries that censored the Internet or harassed bloggers.

Addressing concerns about cyber spying in China that prompted Google to threaten to quit that country, Clinton said 'countries or individuals that engage in cyberattacks should face consequences and international condemnation.'

But just a few months later Clinton and the Obama administration are engaged in exactly the same kind of behaviour that Clinton condemned in January.

Apparently it is not ok for the Chinese regime to launch a cyberattack on Google but it is ok for the United States to launch a cyberattack on Wikileaks.

The attack began not longer after the whistleblower site began releasing US diplomatic cables, which the United States Government would prefer that you and me didn't get to see.

In fact Wikileaks is fighting a battle on several fronts.

It is continuing to come under cyberattack but it has also had to deal with web servers refusing to host it.

Amazon Web Services dumped WikiLeaks from its servers after staffers from Senator Joe Lieberman's office called the California Internet company to 'inquire' about its relationship with Wikileaks.

In 2009 Lieberman was advocating a military strike against Iran in order to destroy its nuclear facilities.

On December 3 the American domain name provider for Wikileaks, EveryDNS, announced it had dropped Wikileaks because, it said, it too was coming under increasing attacks.

The war against Wikileaks has been unrelenting and in the last forty eight hours PayPal has refused to process donations to Wikileaks. On line donations are Wikileaks main source of funding. It is now solicitng donations via a German site.

Having previously happily processed such donations, PayPal has suddenly discovered a 'violation in terms';

'PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by Wikileaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action.'

Wikileaks was, of course, the site that released documents that revealed that there have been over six years of civilian killings in both Afghanistan and Iraq and cases of illegal torture had become routinely ignored by the authorities.

PayPal doesn't think we have to right to know this.

On top of all this Wikileaks is having to contend with a campaign to have its founder, Julian Assange, thrown in jail on sex charges.

One week after initial charges were dropped, Swedish prosecutors suddenly reopened an alleged case against him

Assange says its all part of the campaign against Wikileaks. His lawyers say that he has yet to receive formal notice of the allegations he faces - a legal requirement under European law.

Earlier this year, Wikileaks released the cockpit video of a US Apache gunship killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists and children,

Immediately following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home to Australia. The Labor government denied it had received requests from Washington to detain him. Assange wasn't convinced and decided Australia was no longer safe and left the country.

Of course the United States is not admitting it is engaged in an war against Wikileaks - the kind of war that Hillary Clinton said should be the subject of 'international condemnation'.

To muddy the waters, convenient stories have started to appear in the corporate media suggesting that the cyberattacks could be the work of a single 'patriotic individual'.

It has even been suggested that the Chinese government is responsible. Perhaps this story is meant to capitalise on anti--Chinese sentiment within the United States.

But as a Pentagon paper released in August said, the game plan of the White House is to 'marginalise Wikileaks'. It looks like it'll go to any lengths to achieve its goal.

Wikileaks has reopened its website on a server in Switzerland and three new websites in three countries are hosting its main page.