Wikileaks is suspending the publication of state secrets in order to ensure its financial survival.
According to The Daily Telegraph the whistleblowing website is halting its publishing operations to fight a ‘blockade’set up by credit card companies.
In a statement quoted by The Telegraph Wikileaks announced:
In order to ensure our future survival, WikiLeaks is now forced to temporarily suspend its publishing operations and aggressively fundraise in order to fight back against this blockade and its proponents.
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In the statement Wikileaks, which was set up by Julian Assange, said it had published the ‘biggest leaks in journalistic history’but that this had ‘triggered aggressive retaliation from powerful groups”.
It claimed that since 7 December 2010, when it began publishing the ‘Cablegate’ cache of embassy documents, it had been hit by a ‘arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade’by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union.
The statement continued:
The blockade came into force within ten days of the launch of Cablegate as part of a concerted US-based, political attack that included vitriol by senior right wing politicians, including assassination calls against WikiLeaks staff.
The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency.
As a result, WikiLeaks has been running on cash reserves for the past eleven months.
The blockade has cost the organization tens of millions of pounds in ost donations at a time of unprecedented operational costs resulting from publishing alliances in over 50 countries, and their inevitable counter-attacks.
Our scarce resources now must focus on fighting the unlawful banking blockade.
Wikileaks also claimed to have started pre-litigation action in Iceland, Denmark, the UK, Brussels, the United States and Australia, as well as lodgin an anti-trust complaint at the European Commission.
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