Ex-staff tell of war within WikiLeaks

A civil war at the heart of WikiLeaks has virtually paralysed the whistle-blowing website from publishing any new exposes outside of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, say former staffers and volunteers.

The website's unveiling at the weekend of more than 390,000 secret United States 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 several former members say 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.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange yesterday hit back at the claims, accusing former colleagues of being "peripheral players ... spreading poisonous false rumours".

At least a dozen key supporters of the website are known to have left in recent months. They say WikiLeaks has ignored reams of new exposes because so much attention has been paid to the Iraq and Afghan conflicts.

The heavily encrypted arm of the website that allows users to safely send information to the organisation has been offline for four weeks, making new submissions impossible.

Former supporters say the submission section is down because several key personnel have fallen out with Assange over the direction of the website and his behaviour.

"Outside of the Iraq and Afghan dossiers, WikiLeaks has been incapacitated by internal turmoil and politics," said Smari McCarthy, a former WikiLeaks volunteer and freedom of information campaigner from Iceland.

"Key people have become very concerned about the direction of WikiLeaks with regard to its strong focus on US military files at the expense of ignoring everything else.

"There were also serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians; something which I'm pleased to see was not repeated with the Iraq dossiers."

WikiLeaks admits one member of the submission team has left but says that wing of the website is down for an overhaul and will be back online soon.

Part of the problem for WikiLeaks has been the huge amount of data it has had to mine in processing the Afghan and Iraq war logs, which comprised tens of thousands of field reports written in dense military jargon.

But some of those who have grown uncomfortable with the direction of the website say more attention should still have been paid to leaks from outside of the US military - specifically the dramatic rise in submissions from whistleblowers in closed countries, dictatorships and corporations.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland's Parliament who recently quit WikiLeaks, played a key role in the website's release this year of "Collateral Murder", the 39-minute video showing an Apache helicopter gunning down a group of armed men, civilians and two Reuters journalists in Baghdad.

Its release brought WikiLeaks global notoriety but Jonsdottir believes the website should have paid more attention to the smaller, less headline-grabbing leaks.

"I don't want to take away from the importance of the Iraq dossiers," she said yesterday. "But I have been saying for some time that before all these big scoops came along, WikiLeaks was very much about creating small hubs in different countries where people could leak important information to."

The sometimes erratic behaviour of WikiLeaks' founder has also caused problems within the organisation. The Australian-born 39-year-old walked out of a CNN interview when an interviewer pressed him on the disagreements within WikiLeaks and asked him to comment on an ongoing "molestation" investigation against him in Sweden.

Assange, who vehemently insists relationships he had with two women in Sweden were entirely consensual, criticised CNN's interviewer for dwelling on his private life.

- INDEPENDENT