Uh huh, I see.
And how do you expect the US Government to do that when they can't even try and convict known Al Queda terrorists currently residing in Gitmo? Once he is found guilty and executed his body should be pulverized into tiny pieces that should be thrown over the side of a fishing boat as chum.
While I'm sure that it would fulfill your desire for revenge, it would have no effect on Wikileaks. There are many other people in the shadows behind Assange -- some of which are annoyed at his attention whoring. But if even if he was gone tomorrow, nothing would change except the breathless headlines.
I just finished reading an interview with Assange in which he said they had more material than they could handle, and have disabled submissions for now. But he made one interesting point: they don't depend on the law (freedom of speech, etc.) to protect Wikileaks: their protection is technological.
It's not hard to read between the lines: Wikileaks volunteers are using various means to protect their identity, and have spread the material far and wide among themselves and the worldwide 'Net. Google for the "wikileaks insurance file" and you'll realize that there is undoubtedly a deadman switch somewhere -- if everyone associated with wikileaks were to disappear tomorrow, the AES key will be automatically released shortly thereafter.
Perhaps you're right. The US won't do anything about Wikileaks; however, the FSB (formerly KGB) just might. Are the Wikileaks' hackers that confident that they've covered their tracks carefully enough to prevent Russian hackers from uncovering them?
The things the Russians would do to the sources of the Wikileaks data would be much less pleasant than what I suggested.
Russians targeting Wikileaks to stop new data dump
Hot Air ^ | November 30, 2010 | Ed Morrissey
Posted on 11/30/2010 5:51:07 PM by cruise_missile
Until now, Julian Assange has selected his adversaries rather well. Despite humiliating the Obama administration three times, the White House has done little except announce a preliminary probe into potential criminal charges against Assange and his team at Wikileaks. The Daily Beast reports that when it came to Assange’s next adversary, he may have chosen … poorly:
The Russians, under the leadership of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, have not blanched at, well, much of anything. The death of Alexander Litvinenko from a slow-acting poison is widely believed to have been an assassination conducted by the FSB. The poisoning of Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko in the Orange Revolution was similarly suspicious, and dissident Boris Berezovsky survived at least one attempt on his life as well. That problem may be more acute for the people who supplied Assange with the data rather than Assange himself. The FSB has restrained itself mainly to attacking Russian expatriates rather than Westerners, but as the DB reports, Wikileaks almost certainly got whatever they have through that route, especially from the super-rich Russian industrialists that had to flee after Putin took power. Given Assange’s predilection for releasing information in its raw form, the FSB will likely have little problem finding the sources of the data and making sure that they won’t give Assange anything else ever.