Why is Julian Assange still breathing our air?

Would you waste a bullet on him? Besides, the Swedes might take care of things for us.

Hmm, how did Jack Holloway put it? "No cartridge fired at a target is really wasted."

The full quote in context:

Behind him, something moved in the brush with a dry rustling. He dropped the loose glove from his right hand and turned, reaching toward his hip. Then he saw what had made the noise—a hard-shelled thing a foot in length, with twelve legs, long antennae and two pairs of clawed mandibles. He stopped and picked up a shard of flint, throwing it with an oath. Another damned infernal land-prawn.

He detested land-prawns. They were horrible things, which, of course, wasn’t their fault. More to the point, they were destructive. They got into things at camp; they would try to eat anything. They crawled into machinery, possibly finding the lubrication tasty, and caused jams. They cut into electric insulation. And they got into his bedding, and bit, or rather pinched, painfully. Nobody loved a land-prawn, not even another land-prawn.

This one dodged the thrown flint, scuttled off a few feet and turned, waving its antennae in what looked like derision. Jack reached for his hip again, then checked the motion. Pistol cartridges cost like crazy; they weren’t to be wasted in fits of childish pique. Then he reflected that no cartridge fired at a target is really wasted, and that he hadn’t done any shooting recently. Stooping again, he picked up another stone and tossed it a foot short and to the left of the prawn. As soon as it was out of his fingers, his hand went for the butt of the long automatic. It was out and the safety off before the flint landed; as the prawn fled, he fired from the hip. The quasi-crustacean disintegrated. He nodded pleasantly.

"Ol' man Holloway's still hitting things he shoots at."

I'd say Julian Assange is probably about as low as a land-prawn, and well worth a cartridge or seven.

"Zatku! Zatku!"

:)

As satisfying as it would be to see him standing against a wall, blindfolded, I also relish the thought of some unforseen twist of fate proving his idea of the world so wrong that he becomes completely ... irrelevant. For someone like that to be cast aside as useless and not worth remembering ... that would be worse (or better, depending on your viewpoint) than death.

Puppets are inevitably cut from their strings, or hanged in them.

Well, as they say, revenge is a dish best served cold :)