Julian Assange Walks Out of CNN Interview

He calls questions about his personal life 'completely disgusting'
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 23, 2010 2:00 PM CDT

Fall's hottest media move is shaping up to be the interview walk-out. Julian Assange "pulled a Whoopi" during a CNN interview yesterday about WikiLeaks' latest file release. When Atika Shubert began poking at his personal legal issues, Assange immediately shut down, calling her questions "completely disgusting" and threatening several times to leave. "This interview is about something else," Assange told Shubert. "I'm going to walk if you're going to contaminate us revealing the deaths of 104,000 people with attacks against my person." Moments later, he did just that.

Assange did make it through the entirety of a press conference today in London, during which he defended WikiLeaks' release of some 400,000 classified field reports. "This disclosure is about the truth. We hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued on since the war officially concluded." In response to the Pentagon's criticism that the leak endangered US troops and Iraqi collaborators, Assange insisted that there were no names or info that could be harmful to any group or individual in the documents, reports Time.
(More Julian Assange stories.)

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