Brendan O’Neill throws the kitchen sink at Julian Assange and his supporters without once touching on any of the issues (‘Left bows down to false WikiLeaks prophet’, 21/12).

We are told Assange is vain, his supporters love the sound of their own voices, they complained that Assange was imprisoned even though it was only temporary, some of them carry pictures of him, they tried to prosecute the Pope, and so on.

If O’Neill’s argument is that Wikileaks has done wrong, what was revealed should have remained covered up, and the U.S. is entitled to make an example of Assange using dirty black-ops, then he should say so – although this would sound a little jarring coming from a self-styled libertarian.

In fact his whole contention that this is a left-wing issue is off-target, the modern Right having thankfully disowned its authoritarian heritage.

O’Neill desperately tries to conclude that by releasing otherwise unobtainable information, Wikileaks has somehow trivialised Truth itself overnight by rendering people unable to discover it on their own, and then contradicts himself: “…only through engaging with the world… gathering facts and objectively analysing them, that we can arrive at any truth worth its name”, pretty much describing what Wikileaks, as opposed to say, Fox News, is trying to achieve.