Celebrity culture gets in the way of Wikileaks release -

Wikileaks is already seeing the cost of having high profile Julian Assange as its front man while there are claims of harassment against him being made by two Swedish women.

The outfit, which released shedloads of material onto the world wide wibble showing how evil the Americans and the British had been lately, found the entire event overturned by hacks wanting to know about the allegations. He became the story.

Jules handled it in a slick way which turned the hacks into supporters and gained wide scale public support. Well, no he didn't really, he threw his toys out of the pram and stormed out of a press interview.

The CNN interview saw him briefly at his paranoid best. He denied the sex smears and suggested they were part of an American plot to discredit him. The fact that 12 of his own people have quit because they are worried that his sex life is grabbing all the attention has nothing to do with it.But that's the celebrity culture we're in and Assange is stuck with the curse of his personal goings on being reported.

The Australian-born Wikileaks founder was on the CNN show to discuss Friday's release of 400,000 military files from the Iraq war on his website. The file leak has caused some serious thinking in the UK where the government has apparently ordered an investigation into the conduct of troops fighting overseas.  Call us paranoid but we think being publicly brought to book has something to do with it.

However, all that goodness seems to be lost by the fact that Assange's sexual antics have become the focus of attention. Assange said: "I'm going to walk if you're going to contaminate this extremely serious interview with questions about my personal life."

CNN interviewer Atika Shubert continued with her questioning, and Assange said: "It's completely disgusting, Atika. I'm going to walk if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person."

Shubert replied: "I'm not. What I'm asking is if you think that this is an attack on WikiLeaks."

Assange removed his microphone and walked out.

Assange could have stepped down for a bit and let someone take over until the dust had settled. But since this could be Wikileaks' biggest leak ever it is fairly clear that he wanted the limelight. Unfortunately his image is a bit tainted at the moment.