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Why EL PAÍS chose to publish the leaks
1. The leak and its consequences. When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called my cellphone on a Friday afternoon in November, I could barely hear him. The conversation, held amid the usual tumult of Rome's airport on a weekend, was strangely short. Assange talked slowly, making sure to pronounce each word carefully, his deep, almost baritone voice, reducing itself almost to a whisper at the end of each sentence. A few moments before the conversation, I had noticed how the Italian police seemed particularly interested in the little luggage that I was carrying, and that as the phone had rung, they were examining the cloth that I had used to wipe the screen of my iPad. Were they looking for drugs, or explosives, or both?
Assange, as far as I could tell at that time, was willing to give EL PAÍS access to 250,000 cablegrams sent between the US State Department and its embassies in around 30 countries, garnered as a result of the largest leak of secret documents in history. When we talked again, two days later, this time in much greater depth, the full magnitude of the undertaking that has become known as "cablegate" began to make itself clear. At the same time, I began to realize the repercussions that publishing the material would have on US foreign policy, as well as on the reputation of the US government; that of its allies; its enemies; for the future of journalism; and on the debate regarding freedom of information in Western democracies.
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