Quick thoughts about Julian Assange and his arrest

Julian Assange is approximately the leader of wikileaks.  He was recently arrested in London, when he submitted himself for questioning.  I think he's probably in trouble. 

Wikileaks had been a public embarrassment to various governments for about three years before they posted a video of an American Helicopter crew killing a journalist.  At this point, they suddenly became high-profile in the USA.  Then they published some US diplomatic cables last month, and over the course of about a week, the organization was removed from several DNS servers, their paypal site was shut down, their finances were frozen, and Assange was arrested in connection to a very fishy-sounding sexual misconduct charge.

The pace of this sort of mounting of challenges for Wikileaks is intentional: it's there to indicate to the world that the US doesn't enjoy having it's secrets revealed.  It's not that the secrets were particularly damning or anything like that.  It's just that the Government doesn't want it to get worse.  This high-visibility attack of the site and it's principal human being are meant to be a message to those who might do what Wikileaks has done.  This is to discourage the dissemination of US secrets, not because they compromise military operations, but because they undermine American hegemony.

If they wished to stop Assange, the American military could probably have made him disappear.  But they didn't do that.  They appear to have contrived to have him arrested, and then they found a guy who appears to have actually stolen the secret information, and they disappeared him.  But they did it in the most public way possible, putting out his name and story, providing details of his means of stealing the information, and then making it clear where he was being held incommunicado, off US soil, where we are encouraged to believe that he is being tortured and humiliated. 

We are being sent a message with this entire chain of events.  The message is simple: don't you even think of messing with us, or we'll crush you.  We are meant to see this information and be terrified.  The US government is using this event to terrorize the world.  Just thought you might want to know.