Assange himself would agree that the emmotional impact was strengthened and has said so in his interviews: his aim is to get the biggest political impact to honour the courage of the submitter. The full video was an hour long if I recall and this was condensed into a watchable 10 minutes. Nothing was added apart from annotations and the original video was released. The New York Times is not to be trusted; they are begrudgingly reporting on these leaks. I shall give you concrete evidence that there is heavy censorship at that paper:

"Frago 242" (short for Fragmentary Order 242), was a high level dictat to troops to ignore torture by Iraqi forces, or at least not to intervene directly. This was a key expose for that release, and Assange talks of a story actually getting killed by the editors -

140 results Guardian.co.uk http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&...

And buried in some community comment section a solitary 1 result at NYTimes.com http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...

You are not being fair to Wikileaks.

When bringing up the "Collateral Murder" video, it's always worth remembering that WikiLeaks released the unedited original alongside their version.

I might be in the minority here but it seems to me they need not release their own version.

The Collateral Murder video was from before Wikileaks transitioned away from its own journalistic interpretations. So I think my point is still valid. The impact of the footage was powerful, but was diminished by criticisms that the title was biased, etc.

The question is: is it more trustworthy than your particular government? How will we know without Wikileaks to tell us when they're lying?

I don't think that's the question. No one is always trustworthy. You hope to approximate the truth from multiple sources, and the diversity of agendas and perspectives provides the best prism to look through.

Corroboration, in other words.

From that perspective I simply see Wikileaks as just another diverse agenda and perspective. We still have to approximate the truth.