Liz Cheney – former US vice president Dick Cheney’s daughter – has called upon US president Barack Obama to compel the Icelandic government to shutdown Wikileaks.
In the wake of the website’s release of thousands of pages of logs from the Afghanistan War, Cheney told Fox News that, “I would really like to see President Obama to move to ask the government of Iceland to shut that website down. I would like to see him move to shut it down ourselves if Iceland won’t do it. I would like to see them move aggressively to prosecute Mr. Assange and certainly ensure that he never again gets a visa to enter the United States.”
Cheney added that “[Assange] does clearly have blood on his hands potentially for the people whose names were in those documents who helped the US and I think that’s something he will have to live with now.”
While the president of the United States has yet to respond, Icelandic journalist Kristin Hrafnsson told Eyjan that Cheney’s statement demonstrates “ignorance” of how Wikileaks operates.
“Wikileaks has servers all over the world that mirror each other,” he told Eyjan. “So apart from technical aspects, it would be impossible for Iceland to shut the webpage down.”
In response to Cheney’s charge that Assange has “blood on his hands,” Hrafnsson pointed out that The Times in London investigated the effects of the log releases, and found among the names published within only one death – from a man who had died two years before the documents’ release.