> Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.
> He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own the way 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.
The whole point was to paint him as a paranoid control freak, rather than someone who had completely legitimate fears of state surveillance. Does anyone seriously think that Assange was not under surveillance by multiple state intelligence agencies at that point?
Anyways, this is how they treated the person who provided them one of the biggest scoops in the paper's history. If you look at the NY Times page on the War Logs, they still feature the hit piece at the top: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/worl...
Yes, the NY Times has expressed opposition to the prosecution of Assange, but they've hardly reported on his extradition case. They should have this case on the front page every day, given how critical it is to the future of journalism in the US.