The US-led Empire is waging a massive and comprehensive propaganda war against its own populations, and sources like Wikileaks must be destroyed or access to their information severely restricted in order for the Empire's war-mongers to be successful in their pursuit of profits and domination throughout the world.
Because truth is the enemy of the Empire and Julian Assange and Wikileaks have been exposing so many of the Empire's lies and evil deeds, Assange and Wikileaks have become one of many of the Empire's list of enemies to be eliminated. Auken reports in this article the extent to which they have gone to silence him and Wikileaks, and their efforts to smear the many released embarrassing emails as contaminated by the nefarious machinations of Russia, another top enemy of theirs. He smells an odor of desperation in their efforts at suppressing reports of the Empire's war crimes, their ongoing theft of the wealth created by working people in the US and throughout the world, and the corrupt functioning of what is supposed to be a democratic system of rule.
The use of such tactics is a measure of how terrified the US ruling class has become in the face of growing mass hostility to both major political parties and their two abhorrent candidates. Their fear is that the relentless exposure of the inner workings of a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich is robbing the existing political setup of what little legitimacy it had left within the population, and creating the conditions for a political radicalization within the working class and social upheavals, whoever is elected on November 8.