Given that he used to be frozen in ice for a few decades, we should not be surprised that Captain America has been a little slow in addressing the Wikileaks scandal. That silence was cracked in this week’s Secret Avengers issue no. 12.1.
Spoiler: Captain America is not down with Wikileaks, not if they’re going to leave the names of confidential informants un-redacted.
In the comic, America’s most patriotic super-hero doesn’t call out Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange by name. That’s because New Avengers writer Nick Spencer has wrapped the gauze of fiction around the whole affair. There’s no Assange in the comic and technically no Wikileaks. Instead, there’s a man who dresses in a version of the Captain America uniform that was popular in the late ’80s. This guy plays the Assange role, collecting a trove of information about the U.S. government’s secret dealings with members of super-villain terrorist organisations. He plans to release the information, complete with un-redacted references to confidential informants, in order to expose the arrogance of governments, to show them that they are not above the law. (Sound familiar?) His outlets of choice for the disclosure are The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Bugle, the last of which wasn’t leaked anything by the real Assange.
Captain America, not wearing his trademark uniform for complicated Marvel Comics reasons, leads a striketream to shut down this Marvel Assange. Cap isn’t outright against fake-Assange. In fact, it seems like he could have been swayed, but for the problem that those informants’ names weren’t blacked out. “We’d never let people die just to prove our damn point,” he said.
Somehow, this works. Nick Spencer’s Secret Avengers no. 12.1 is on sale now from Marvel Comics for $US3.
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