The furor over Wikileaks has become Theatre of the Absurd. Consider:

• Senator Joe Lieberman says that he can’t understand why the DoJ hasn’t charged Assange with treason, a charge which applies only to US citizens. Assange is Australian.
• New York Times editor Bill Keller, speaking with the BBC, admits that they clear what Wikileaks cables to release with the government. The NYT reporting on the cables often matches pre-established administrative storylines even when the quoted cables, in their entirety, do not fully support that view.
• The Wall Street Journal muses that Assange might be an “enemy combatant” and hints (without stating outright) that assassination might be one way of dealing with him.
• Pravda, the one-time government-run newspaper for the USSR, publishes an op-ed about Wikileaks decrying the use of classified documents to hide wrong-doing.
• Government groups from the Department of Defense to NASA to the Library of Congress block Wikileaks and forbid their employees or contractors from reading any of the widely-available cables.
• The Swedish investigation against Julian Assange for rape and sexual misconduct, an investigation that has started and stopped and started again, led to Interpol issuing a red notice in a new-found commitment to helping catch those accused of rape.
• Mastercard and Visa block credit card charges for donations to Wikileaks, mere weeks after the New York Times showed that they couldn’t bother to shut down the account of an eyeglasses vendor whose business practices included customer intimidation.
• In response, the 4chan-based Anonymous group DDOSes Mastercard and other sites.
• Yesterday, the US announced that they would host World Press Freedom Day in 2011.

This is an infowar as written by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard and staged by Mel Brooks.