Cupboard boy descends to the toilet

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012. Picture: AFP

We all do it when we have a spare moment. Bang our names into Google’s search engine and see what comes up.

Julian Assange, who has a bit of time on his hands these days, did this yesterday and is miffed that I referred to him as Wikileaks’ Cupboard Boy in an article I penned last year.

Assange shunned the primary rule of Twitter — never tweet angry — and took to it with fingers twitching maniacally, complaining he was not only not Cupboard Boy but at 188 cm (6’2”), he is a hulking Gargantua.

Why, in another life, he could have got a game for the Washington Generals against their bêtes noires, the Harlem Globetrotters. “Quick, turn around Julian. They’re using a ladder.”

The Cupboard Boy moniker was a joke. In reality Assange lives in a single room; part office, part bathroom which had been used previously by the embassy’s female employees. Neither is he pale to the point of albinism from his years out of the sun as I also suggested. He uses a sun lamp.

In short, Assange is not a photophobic, gibbering paranoid dweeb, banged up in an armoire with the worst case of prison tan known to medical science. Rather Assange is a swarthy, gibbering paranoid, a giant of a man, living in a woman’s toilet.

This must be very frustrating for the embassy’s female workers who have had to cross their legs and try not to think of water cascading from a waterfall for what must seem like a lifetime. One imagines them peering down the stairwell periodically to see if the sign on the door has shifted to the green “Vacant”. After more than five years, it hasn’t.

Not content with expressing fury at the Cupboard Boy moniker, Assange also turned to the solar eclipse in the US yesterday, taking to Twitter to pooh-pooh the advice from the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

“You look away when you see it ending,” Assange tweeted. “Eyes also move to protect themselves. The hysteria seems to be sustained by glasses company profits.”

Did you know that 'journalists' are so cretinous they have launched 420k pages saying I live in a 'cupboard' and 261k in a 'basement'? pic.twitter.com/TVk8UVTGe4

— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) August 22, 2017

Clearly there was no health risk for him, what with him being in another hemisphere and locked in a toilet. Still that didn’t stop him from advancing the theory the established media was in the thrall of Big Ophthalmology. Apparently, it’s all a gigantic conspiracy involving reptile warlords from beyond Saturn, the Rothschilds and SpecSavers.

Thankfully almost all Americans ignored Assange’s street corner ocular advice, otherwise it’d be like The Day of the Triffids over there right now.

Forget the DNC hack and all that brouhaha for a moment, it is Assange’s publication of the Afghan War documents that will see him brought to account in a US Federal Court one day, and that day is coming.

What is the insecurity that drives this unprofessionalism? Imagining me stuffed in a cupboard soothes the pain. But what pain?

— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) August 22, 2017

Wikileaks hacktivist, Daniel Domscheit-­Berg, left Wikileaks after concerns over Wikileaks’ handling of the Afghan War documents leak in 2010. Despite denials from Assange and Wikileaks, the material put informants on the ground in Afghanistan at serious risk. There was no attempt from Wikileaks to conceal their identities. Domscheit-­Berg believed Wikileaks should have exercised some form of editorial control, some form of common sense, essentially to spare intelligence assets from being murdered by the Taliban.

Domscheit-­Berg offered this insight into Assange’s personality:

“He told me Siggi (hacker Siggi Thordarson and Assange confidante) was a notorious liar, but then again Julian told people I was a notorious liar probably because he’s a notorious liar. I think it’s psychological.”

Self-comforting by talking about Putin being short is surely an equivalent. I'm 6'2 (188cm) yet the cupboard snowflakes always avoid 'tall'.

— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) August 22, 2017

He means pathological but let’s move on.

One by one, Assange’s disciples have seen him for who he really he is and have walked away from Wikileaks.

Back when Assange was a darling of the Left he had every significant hacking organisation doing his dirty work: Lulzsec, Gnosis, Anonymous.

The principals of these loose groups of hackers were on a crime spree, publishing not just embarrassing national security data but personal details including banking and credit card details of consumers. It’s not journalism, it’s not whistleblowing. It’s theft.

Assange cherry-picked his way through it all. The US was a target. Russia and China were not. Wikileaks published a sanitised version of the material known as the Syria Files hacked by Anonymous, avoiding mention of a transfer of two billion Euros from the Assad regime to a Russian bank for reasons that have never been adequately explained.

One by one the hackers all went to jail. Lulzsec’s Jeremy Hammond and Ryan Ackroyd, Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks’ own Siggi Thordarson all have done time. Hector Monsegur from Anonymous did seven months in a US federal prison and became an informant for the FBI.

Ed Snowden notwithstanding, Assange is the last man standing. His time is coming. What we have learned as the hackers were arrested, charged and jailed is the FBI has methodically built up a case against Assange over seven long years. The agency has offered immunity to some hackers, lighter sentences for others. It is clear the big prize is Assange.

Assange is a fugitive and a scofflaw. The Brits still want a piece of Assange for jumping bail back in 2012. The cost of policing the Ecuadorean embassy now stands at a lazy $25 million and counting.

The truth is Assange is more toilet boy than cupboard boy. Like a naughty child avoiding consequence he is literally hiding in a brassco. But that’s the problem with toilets. Sure, it’s nice while you’re in there but you’ve got to come out some time.