Why can't our own Cybermen zap the WikiLeaks man?

By Richard Littlejohn
Last updated at 9:06 AM on 17th December 2010

Assange: Inside a prison van on his way from court

This may seem like a silly question, but what is Julian Assange doing in Britain? He is an Australian who has been hacking into American government computers from a bunker in Sweden, where he is wanted on rape charges. Frankly, he’s none of our business.

If the Guardianistas want to work themselves up into a lather of self-righteous indignation, let them get on with it. Out here in the real world, the fate of the WikiLeaks founder is a matter of complete indifference to most of us.

How did this circus end up clogging the pavements outside the High Court in London, with a bunch of snappers dressed up like Nanook of the North clambering all over a security van from the Scrubs via Television Centre?

The script could have been taken straight from one of those Eighties’ conspiracy thrillers, such as Edge Of Darkness, or the other one about GCHQ with Michael Caine. They’ve even disinterred a couple of old Leftie hams — Aussie hack John Pilger and superannuated Trot Tariq Ali — for the sequel.

Last time I saw Tariq, he was sitting in a curry house in Crouch End boasting to some soppy birds with split ends in Laura Ashley smocks and CND badges about how he’d single-handedly brought down President Nixon and stopped the war in Vietnam.

In his mind’s eye, Pilger probably thinks Watergate was down to him. Soundtrack by Jimi Hendrix and treble Pulitzers all round. Maybe it’s the Antipodean connection which attracts him to the androgynous Assange.

Come to think about it, at second glance Assange could be Pilger’s kid brother.
There’s also an ex-military type, who put up bail and seems to have wandered off the set of The Wild Geese.

If this really is a CIA conspiracy, it’s not a very good one. Why bother fitting up Assange on a couple of dodgy rape allegations when you could have him topped in a heartbeat and be back in Langley, Virginia, for a pancake breakfast, side of sausage and easy on the maple syrup?

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Surely, if he really was a clear and present danger to America’s national security, he would have been secreted away in the night by Joe Don Baker on a NetJets special out of the private terminal at Stansted and would by now be billeted in Club Gitmo, wearing an orange jump suit and sharing a cell with Sheikh Mohammed Wossisname, the 9/11 mastermind.

In the movie, Assange would have died in a mysterious car accident on the A4 or been found under a tree in Oxfordshire with his wrists slashed and a dodgy dossier in his back pocket.
When you stand back from it, none of this makes any sense whatsoever. Why are we wasting time and money dragging this through the British courts?

Until a couple of weeks ago, few of us had ever heard of WikiLeaks. And now that we have, none of us are any the wiser.

Assange may fancy himself as The Whistleblower, but his revelations are pretty low grade. None of them pass the ‘Oi, Doris!’ test.

The problem with this kind of pantomime is that it takes on a life of its own.

And it’s how you end up with a blogger in a Lone Ranger mask and an iPhone headset being interviewed on the lunchtime news and threatening to bring down the entire British banking system unless Deep Throat is given a walk and a pound from the poor box pronto.

I’ve no idea how the presenters keep a straight face. Why do they give these people house room?

And this is where we get to the serious bit. You knew it was coming, didn’t you? We are asked to believe that a crowd of onanistic losers with laptops can collapse the likes of PayPal and Mastercard in a keystroke.

We’re also told that the Yellow Peril is bombarding us daily from cyberspace. Yet somehow, we manage to keep buggering on.

Here’s the conundrum. If a spotty bloke in a bedsit can cause chaos in a sophisticated government computer system, why doesn’t it work the other way round?

If the Cybermen can get into the CIA and MI5 mainframes, why can’t the Funny People simply raise the deflector shields, set the phasers to stun, and blow the little oiks out of the water?

If spy satellites can read a number plate from outer space and obliterate a Taliban Land Cruiser from a command centre in Tampa, why hasn’t WikiLeaks already been obliterated in a puff of smoke?

Ask a silly question . . .

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1339317/Julian-Assange-Why-Cybermen-zap-WikiLeaks-man.html#ixzz18NIQxQ4J