Wikileaks , of late, seems to be obsessed with leaking sensitive US documents,for seemingly no purpose except to embarrass the Government and increase its readership by providing salacious and perverted news to some.
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He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.
“By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.
In his remarkable journey to notoriety, Mr. Assange, founder of the WikiLeakswhistle-blowers’ Web site, sees the next few weeks as his most hazardous. Now he is making his most brazen disclosure yet: 391,832 secret documents on the Iraqi war. He held a news conference in London on Saturday, saying that the release “constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.”
Twelve weeks ago, he posted on his organization’s Web site some 77,000 classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict.
A civil war at the heart of Wikileaks has virtually paralysed the whistle-blowing website from publishing any new exposés outside of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, say former staffers and volunteers.
The website’s recent unveiling of more than 390,000 secret US military documents from the Iraq war – on top of the 77,000 Afghan war logs it published earlier this year – has been hailed as one of the most explosive intelligence leaks in living memory, providing an astonishing level of previously unknown detail on two deeply controversial conflicts.
But a number of former members say that the website’s obsession with pursuing the US military has resulted in Wikileaks losing sight of its founding principle that all leaks should be made available to the public no matter how large or small.
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