Oct. 27, 2010 (Huffington Post) -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst best known for leaking key memos about the Vietnam War 40 years ago, led a packed forum at London's Frontline Club last night to discuss the fallout over the non-profit group's disclosure of approximately 400,000 US Army files documenting the Iraq War. While the two men predictably levelled forceful criticism at the Pentagon, their main target for most of the evening was actually the New York Times.
Assange fumed openly about John Burns and Ravi Somaiya's expose from this past Sunday's Times that characterized the WikiLeaks mastermind as increasingly paranoid, erratic, and dangerously egotistical. "It's a smear piece, and more tabloid behavior by the Times," Assange said of the article. "Is it that only journalists with bad character work for the Times?" he added, before quickly shifting gears to argue that that the paper is beholden to the US military-industrial complex and, as a result, too often confuses a false sense of balance with accuracy. WikiLeaks, Assange maintained, is free from the political constraints that tie the hands of a mainstream media organization like the Times, and so does not have to make editorial concessions to the Pentagon that could compromise its accuracy.
For Assange, the Times's allegedly compromised sense of accuracy clearly extends to the "terrible" article by Burns and Somaiya that seeks to analyze -- though, he would say impugn -- his character and motives. "Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995," reads the beginning of one damning passage.
