LONDON ? WikiLeaks ? the online anti-secrecy organization whose spectacular leaks of classified data shook Washington and other world capitals and exposed the inner workings of international diplomacy ? may be weeks away from collapse, the group's leader warned Monday.
Although its attention-grabbing disclosures spread outrage and embarrassment across military and diplomatic circles, WikiLeaks' inability to shake the restrictions imposed by American financial companies may prove its undoing.
"If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year," founder Julian Assange told journalists at London's Frontline Club. "If we don't knock down the blockade we simply will not be able to continue."
WikiLeaks, launched as an online repository for confidential information, shot to notoriety with the April 2010 disclosure of footage of two Reuters journalists killed by a U.S. military strike in Baghdad.
The Pentagon had claimed that the journalists were likely "intermixed among the insurgents," but the helicopter footage, which captured U.S. airmen firing on prone figures and joking about "dead bastards," unsettled many across the world.
But the video was just a foretaste. In the following months, WikiLeaks published nearly half a million secret military documents from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a whole the documents provided an unprecedented level of detail into the grueling, bloody conflicts. Individually, many raised concerns about the actions of the U.S. and its local allies ? for example by detailing evidence of abuse, torture and worse by Iraqi security forces.
Although U.S. officials railed against the disclosures, claiming that they were putting lives at risk, it wasn't until WikiLeaks began publishing a massive trove of 250,000 U.S. State Department cables late last year that the financial screws began to tighten.
One after the other, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Western Union stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks, starving the organization of cash as it was coming under intense political, financial and legal pressure.
Assange said Monday that the restrictions ? imposed in early December ? had cut off some 95 percent of the money he thinks his organization could have received.
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnson defended the estimate as "conservative," noting that in 2010 the average monthly donation to WikiLeaks had been more than 100,000 euros ($140,000), while in 2011 the amount had fallen to between 6,000 and 7,000 euros.
WikiLeaks has long shown signs of financial distress. In a recent statement about Assange's contested "autobiography" ? which was published without his consent ? the group said it did not have enough money to hire a lawyer.
Assange remains under legal pressure in Europe and the United States. A decision on whether to extradite him to Sweden to face sex crime allegations is expected in the next few weeks. He also being investigated by a grand jury in the United States.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is suspected of giving WikiLeaks much of its American material, remains in custody at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.
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Online:
http://wikileaks.ch/
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