WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange vowed to keep exposing secret documents and defended his controversial website, two years after it published a massive trove of sensitive US diplomatic cables. Marking the anniversary of "cablegate," Assange alleged in a commentary published Thursday that his self-styled anti-secrecy website had uncovered US attempts to hide atrocities, coerce other governments and dominate the global economy.
"Since 2010, Western governments have tried to portray WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation, enabling a disproportionate response from both political figures and private institutions," he wrote in the Huffington Post. "It is the case that WikiLeaks' publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better," he said, citing some of the once secret State Department cables that his site disclosed. "Two years on, no claim of individual harm has been presented, and the examples (cables) above clearly show precisely who has blood on their hands."
By exposing details of the deaths of Iraqi civilians and the corruption of the Tunisian regime, WikiLeaks had helped force the US military's withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 and had fuelled an uprising in Tunisia that spread across Arab countries, according to Assange.