He is irritating, but WikiLeaks founder is no enemy of the state

WITH his leather jackets and messy, bleached hair, Julian Assange could be the edgy one in a fashionable indie band. In more ways than one, the WikiLeaks founder is the poster boy for today’s unthinking, whistleblowing brand of newsmaking, which is what currently passes for investigative reporting.

True to his adolescent spirit, Assange is never happier than when making comments like, “Privacy is a western luxury” and, in response to why he doesn’t apply the same demands of transparency to himself as he demanded of other organisations, “Transparency should be in proportion to power”.

This makes him irritating but does it make him a terrorist as US Congressman, Peter King, has suggested? (Yes, I know it’s the same Peter King who flirted with the IRA for decades but I refuse to waste my pen on such an obvious hypocrite).