As was to be expected China reacted with savage fury to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Liu Xiaobo calling the Nobel committee a bunch of clowns and the Prize ceremony a ' political farce.' By its very nature the Peace Prize has to be a political statement. It has to be awarded to someone who stands up to tyranny and oppression at some personal risk and not to some boy scout helping an old lady cross the road, laudable though that is. China is an uncivilised and barbaric country governed by a set of thugs no less brutal than the Nazis. A monkey wearing a suit does not become human. However, what about the US, where even pornography is legal under free speech? The US is behaving as brutally as China towards Wikileaks for releasing confidential messages sent by US ambassadors to the State department. It is certainly annoying and an invasion of privacy to reveal opinions and conjecture written in private that may lead to embarrassment but, so far, there has been no earth shaking secret revealed. Wikileaks did not steal the cables which were handed to them by a US army private, Bradley Manning and that every act made them public. Why did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein receive the Pulitzer Prize for publishing White House secrets which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon and was thus much more subversive in nature while Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is in prison on trumped up rape charges? How was Manning able to download a quarter of a million pages without detection? It is not unusual for countries to resort to misinformation to achieve political goals. Is the US trying to be too cute and play both ends against the middle.