by sarah ellison.
vanity fair owned by conde (owns wired).
6/10 Nick Davies read a four-paragraph story in his own paper about the arrest of Manning. Davies resolved to find Assange.
At the time of his meeting with Davies, Assange had repeatedly voiced frustration that his leaks hadn’t received the attention they deserved.
in BXL, Davis and Traynor went to the Hotel Leopold, woke up Assange, and began a conversation that lasted for the next 6 hrs
4th cache contains the personal files of all prisoners who had been held at Guantánamo.
Assange got on the phone and explained, falsely, according to Davies, that “it was always part of the agreement that I would introduce television at this stage.” Davies and Assange have not spoken since that afternoon.
In 2009, Guardian and Observer lost £37.9 mln and cut 203 jobs. Even after the job cuts, the two papers employ 630 journalists.
takze nyt&spiegel dostali via guardian via h brooke:
In October, while The Guardian was preparing to publish the Iraq War Logs and working on package three, Heather Brooke, a British freelance journalist who had written a book on freedom of information, had a copy of the package-three database leaked to her by a former WikiLeaks volunteer. Leigh shrewdly invited Brooke to join the Guardian team. He did not want her taking the story to another paper. Furthermore, by securing the same database from a source other than Assange, The Guardian might then be free of its promise to wait for Assange’s green light to publish. Leigh got the documents from Brooke, and the paper distributed them to Der Spiegel and The New York Times. The three news organizations were poised to publish the material on November 8.
That was when Assange stormed into Rusbridger’s office, threatening to sue. Rusbridger, Leigh, and the editors from Der Spiegel spent a marathon session with Assange, his lawyer, and Hrafnsson, eventually restoring an uneasy calm. Some in the Guardian camp had wanted to break off relations with Assange entirely. Rusbridger somehow kept all parties at the table—a process involving a great deal of coffee followed by a great deal of wine. Ultimately he agreed to a further delay, allowing Assange time to bring in other media partners, this time France’s Le Monde and Spain’s El País.
Justice Department lawyers were likely crossing their fingers that Assange would be extradited to Sweden and convicted, so they won’t have to attempt a tricky prosecution.
“He is short of money and short of secrets,” someone who has worked extensively with Assange told me. “The whole thing has collapsed.”
Smári McCarthy, who worked for WikiLeaks, maintained that “key people have become very concerned about the direction of WikiLeaks with regard to its strong focus on U.S. military files at the expense of ignoring everything else.” One associate of Assange’s says that, because of these departures, access to important elements of the site’s infrastructure has deteriorated, although Assange himself remains the key architect of the complex set of programs that underlie WikiLeaks and its content.
Domscheit-Berg’s book accuses Assange of “high-handedness, dishonesty, and grave mistakes,” and quotes him as dismissing criticism from colleagues with the words “I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end.”
Rusbridger: “Managing a relationship between a French afternoon paper, a Spanish daily, a German weekly, a paper on NY time, and a bunch of anarchists in hiding is trying!”
Assange’s former associates, disillusioned, likens Assange’s situation to the last scene in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs are shown to have become indistinguishable from the human beings they had rebelled against.