i love it when my harmless threads turn into political battlegrounds. FWIW, Canada is the best country in the world, second to panda land.
Good. Come here instead, and you won't have to worry about being thrown into a "black prison" for going to the nation's capital to attempt to complain about a corrupt local official.
1. It is by definition that an Australian (or any other foreign national) cannot be tried for treason in the United States unless he or she is legally an American.
This is certainly quite true.
However, Australia is an ally of the United States. Its soldiers fought in Korea and Vietnam. Thus, it is not beyond the realm of imagination that if he were considered to have engaged in espionage against the United States that benefited its enemies, this might be considered to be treason
against Australia.
I think, though, that the poster just got "espionage" and "treason" mixed up.
As to the other points - so far, Wikileaks hasn't been releasing the sorts of things that some people have noted would be dangerous - i.e. the identities of people in repressive countries that have given information about abuses in their countries, or about dissidents in their countries and their fates, to American diplomats. If they had done that, I wouldn't see this as a free speech issue at all.
So far, while they are releasing classified material, which is generally illegal, one might recall the case of the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times wasn't successfully prosecuted for that one. However, since then, some laws were amended under Reagan... and Obama seems fully comfortable with making use of the new legal framework that Reagan gave him.
This might be surprising to some.
