Jason Bourne's CIA would has assassinated Julian Assange a long time ago. The real one just grumbles.
They'd need to "snatch" everyone who has access to it, which might be a very difficult proposition, not to mention a complete public relations disaster, considering Wikileaks is in the public spotlight right now.
I very much doubt the CIA is holding back out of the goodness of their hearts. No. What we are witnessing is simply cold, calculated realpolitik in action.
Assange is only a viable target if there is no other leader waiting at the wings if he dies. Our impression of WikiLeaks' organization structure is that no such "Assange" exists yet.
Wikileaks is more powerful as an idea than an organization. They've legitimized the idea of web-based distribution of leaks, much like Napster legitimized file-sharing services. That genie isn't going back into the bottle. Shutting down Napster only gave rise to a host of unaccountable, decentralized services. Shutting down Wikileaks would likewise only lead to the creation of new decentralized services that facilitate leaks without any of the human editorial control that Wikileaks currently provides.
Really, I think you overestimate Assange's importance to the operation of Wikileaks, and the amount of "disarray" the "organization" will be put in if something happens to him.
And, honestly, if someone chooses to leak info in the future and Wikileaks doesn't publish it for some reason, then some other website or news organization will.
The really critical people in this whole scheme are the leakers and whistleblowers themselves, and silencing Assange will do nothing to stop them. It's just shooting the messenger.
Of course Wikileaks is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, but killing Assange is not one of them.
I can't imagine that the public relations fallout from his arrest would be any worse than the public relations disaster they have with the release of these cables.
Are we still talking about the CIA? Has it become a law-enforcement agency and I didn't notice?
If your point is regarding the possibility of the US government going after Assange by legal means (not via some extralegal, shadowy CIA antics), I'm certain they would if they could.
The fact that they haven't leads me to believe their case against him isn't quite as airtight as you believe.
But regardless of what they do or try to do to Assange, it won't stop Wikileaks. The best that the US government could manage is to extract some sort of retribution or send out a warning to future leakers and whistleblowers.
I'm not sure whether he's broken any US laws or not. He did not, after all, leak the information, he merely publicised it after someone else (Bradley Manning, apparently) leaked it. Wikipedia mentions no warrants out for his arrest apart from the rape one, for which he's apparently right now "under arrest in absentia" in Sweden.
Bradley Manning, of course, remains in solitary at Quantico pending court martial -- he most certainly broke some laws.
If the US government (more specifically Obama's justice department) wanted to prosecute, surely they could, would, and would win.
There are political ramifications of that move. I would bet the negative (inflaming a lot of people against the Obama administration) outweigh the positive (not really sure what the positive is, the papers would still find their way out).
Thus, they are aiming their legal guns squarely at the guy who actually leaked this stuff in the first place.
You're assuming that they're not nefarious when another explanation explains the facts just as well: they might be nefarious but very incompetent. I mean, we know that CIA officers routinely sign into hotels and airlines using their real names so that they can collect frequent flier points. Any clandestine organization whose staff does that is...really stupid. It is an organization with an institutionalized culture of incompetence.
Jason Bourne's CIA would has assassinated Julian Assange a long time ago. The real one just grumbles.
Jason Bourne's CIA officers would not give their real names to everyone and their brother in order to collect a few measly reward points, so their relevance to the actual CIA is precisely zero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinen...
There is little reason to believe that the contents of these cables aren't already known to other governments, given that many soldiers from the rank of private on up had access to them; and that the UK, France, Israel, Germany, etc. also do extensive signals intelligence, crypto, and even good old fashioned human based spying.
The world is not black and white where we might send CIA or Special Forces to neutralize someone who we don't like. It's definitely more complicated than it seems.
There are other, more indirect ways to neutralize what he's doing. A good one is using the media to sway public opinion, etc. Another one is to discredit the guy by linking him to some "terrorist group/government" and say they're funding him, etc.
That and the fact that the last time they tried, he turned out the be more resilient than expected -- and the coupe leaders far more incompetent; the coupe failed at least in part because they left Chavez's own people guarding the presidential palace after they took it over. Oops -- and the whole thing ended up being a huge embarrassment and likely gave Hugo an extra push over the old crazy ledge.
Coupe: a hardtop two door car [1.]
Coup: an overthrow of a government by focused action against the central leadership [2.]
In this post-cold war world, he might be less important, so I would expect there would be less of an effort to oust him. The US does have, shall we say, a bit of a track record of unseating governments they don't like.
(Look at this list [http://www.zompist.com/latam.html] for Latin America alone...)