Yes, he has too many letters in his name. Jerk! would be a good short form.

There is a global warrant for his "arrest" i.e., "Red Notice" to cooperate and extradite.

Interpol issues arrest warrant for Julian Assange

Glenda Kwek

December 1, 2010 - 12:26PM

[snip]

The Australian [Julian Assange] was added to the organisation's "wanted" list for alleged sex crimes committed in Sweden this year.

He is suspected of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion, after an investigation by Swedish prosecutors into his encounters with two women in Sweden in August.

The arrest warrant, called a "Red Notice", is "not an international arrest warrant" but means Mr Assange could be arrested and extradited to Sweden from any country if local authorities act on it.

"Many of Interpol's member countries consider a Red Notice to be a valid request for provisional arrest," Interpol said on its website.

Mr Assange, 39, is contesting the warrant in a Swedish appeals court.

Continues

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WikiLeaks 'embarrassing, awkward': Gates

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates says recent leaks are embarrassing and awkward, but adds the consequences would be modest.  [Video is at this link]

Interpol issues global arrest alert for WikiLeaks' Assange, over Swedish rape allegation

Meanwhile, let's get to the truth of the matter here.

What Hillary Clinton Didn't Do

The secretary of State didn't turn diplomats into spies.

By Marc Ambinder

Tuesday, November 30, 2010 | 2:48 p.m.

Updated at 3:13 p.m. on November 30.

In 1792, America's first secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, supervised a relatively small diplomatic corps of ambassadors in 16 countries worldwide. One of their prime duties, he wrote in an instruction to them, was to collect and report “such political and commercial intelligence as you may think interesting to the United States.”

The line between diplomacy and intelligence has never been bright red. But by the standards of some modern commentators, Mr. Jefferson should have tendered his resignation.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is being blamed for turning diplomats into spies, clandestinely, via the disclosure of a secret cable from April 2009 that Slate's Jack Shafer, who believes Clinton should resign, summarizes as requiring diplomats "to collect the 'biometric data,' including 'fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans,' of African leaders." Another cable "directed American diplomats posted around the world, including the United Nations, to obtain passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, and other data connected to diplomats."

Continues

 

Hillary is the best person, most diplomatic and most assertive person, who has handled the situation extremely well, especially considering that most of what has been spilled has come from the Bush era.

I, for one, am very glad to see that a couple of conservative bloggers (like Tunku Varadarajan) have found things to stand up and support Hillary Clinton for in this context.


As to Assange or anyone with far left leanings trying to justify this horrendous release of national security/confidential privileged release information material under their own rubric of 'transparency' -- well, sorry, Assange or whoever you are, you do not quite qualify as the government of the U.S.A.  It is NOT his or of any media to redact before publishing -- it is strictly property of the governments concerned.  The left is expecting formalized release of documents sooner than later, but that does NOT mean we want people to fish cabinets and spill guts of people and undercut their leg and render their diplomatic activities meaningless.  Never underestimate the power of the U.S. Government!

-- Edited by Sanders on Tuesday 30th of November 2010 09:25:27 PM

Building 4112 wrote:

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Bush was delibrate in leaking, and I'm think Obama has been falling into his footsteps.

He took an oath of office, and he can't seem to stand up right now for Hillary.

Bull****, that's what this is.

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If you want to read some REAL bull****, check out "Mr. Scum" Dick Morris' commentary at The Hill. This guy never misses an opportunity to slam Hillary.

I will post the link for those that can stomach it. His parents must have had a precognition of how their son was going to turn out considering his first name.

http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/dick-morris/131221-hillary-up-to-her-old-tricks

 

It's all a bunch of bull.  Obama's smug face hasn't said one word on this.  Condi requested the same info on foreign diplomats.  Hillary will whether this storm she's been through worse and if she does resign Obama needs step down right with her.  Can you imagine Oh I had no idea what my secretary of state was doing.  Not to mention that these freaking stolen cables were stolen throught the defense department that is run by Robert Gates.

(Emphasis added)

The Irony of Wikileaks

• James P. Rubin
• December 1, 2010 | 12:00 am

There’s no question that many of the Wikileaks documents are a great read. These diplomatic conversations between American officials and leaders from the Arab world, China, and Europe provide important insights about the subtleties of U.S. policy and the complexities of dealing with different personalities and governments around the world. But the disclosures are not just interesting; they are also ironic. That’s because they undermine the very worldview that Julian Assange and his colleagues at Wikileaks almost certainly support.

By and large, the hard left in America and around the world would prefer to see the peaceful resolution of disputes rather than the use of military force. World peace, however, is a lot harder to achieve if the U.S. State Department is cut off at the knees. And that is exactly what this mass revelation of documents is going to do. The essential tool of State Department diplomacy is trust between American officials and their foreign counterparts. Unlike the Pentagon which has military forces, or the Treasury Department which has financial tools, the State Department functions mainly by winning the trust of foreign officials, sharing information, and persuading. Those discussions have to be confidential to be successful. Destroying confidentiality means destroying diplomacy.

This is not to say there isn’t an important place for quality journalism that may, at times, rely on sensitive diplomatic exchanges or that seeks particular information through leaks. Without such journalism, the American public would have never known about the abuses at Abu Ghraib . . . [snip]

Fortunately, there is little or no discussion in the cables, as yet, of the Middle East peace process. Would the supporters of Wikileaks want secret Middle East diplomacy to promote peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis to be made public, too? Do they have any understanding of how difficult it is for Israeli and Palestinian leaders to make the compromises necessary for peace under the glare of public pressure? My guess is the special envoy for President Obama, former Senator George Mitchell, has created a separate reporting channel for his discussions with Arab and Israeli leaders, outside the normal State Department diplomatic channels. But had he not done so, there is every reason to believe that Wikileaks would have dumped that information, along with the other 250,000 cables. Would the likely outcome of such disclosures—the imperiling of the peace process—really have been something that accorded with the left’s professed goals in the Middle East?

There’s another irony here, too. The Wikileaks document dump, unlike the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, shows that American private communication with foreign leaders by and large reflects the same sentiments offered by U.S. officials in public. There is no grand conspiracy, no grand hypocrisy to uncover and expose. The big hypocrisies here are not being perpetrated by Americans; they are being perpetrated by foreign governments, namely non-democratic ones.

Yet those on the hard left are usually the loudest critics of America imposing its own values, its own way of doing business, and its own culture on other countries. For better or worse, in many parts of the world there’s a big difference between what government officials are prepared to do publicly and what they’re prepared to say and do privately. We may wish it otherwise, but those are the realities faced by U.S. officials. The hard left, so quick to demand that America accept other countries’ political systems, now seems blind to the fact that other governments want to have the right to say one thing in public and a different thing in private. By respecting that difference, American diplomats are doing their job. Surely the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, would prefer for Arab leaders to be as honest and open and transparent as we are in our country. Until such democratic values come to the Arab world, however, we have to work with what we’ve got. U.S. diplomacy has been damaged, not destroyed; it will recover after a time. But for now, Wikileaks is making diplomacy’s task a whole lot harder.

James P. Rubin teaches international affairs at Columbia University. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration.

Full article

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Yes, this is my issue with what was done with the leaks.  It is an imposition of values on the WORLD, en masse.  It fails to respect the role of and the importance of diplomacy in bringing forth world peace.

On top of that, Assange has the audacity to demand Hillary should quit.  He has simply no appreciation of what she has accomplished... Or... perhaps he does!