Behind the scenes @ Wikileaks

There's a lot of buzz right now about the leaked documents related to the war in Afghanistan. I am not clear myself whether they teach us anything new - they may or may not. Also I have not seen any reports claiming that they were fake or not authentic.

However in view of the very recent flap about our credulity of anything we see online (see Sherrod, Shirley) I am interested that I have not yet seen any deep exposé or reporting about the reliability of Wikileaks, whatever or whoever that is. This thought came to be because, by coincidence, a few weeks ago I was following a pretty interesting thread/flame making all kinds of suspicious allegations about the invisible face/leader of Wikileaks (Julian Assange), for example:

"… What we have here is a high profile ex-hacker trawling for $600K operating expenses. Anyone with a few bucks can buy into Assange's snake oil, including fronts for any government agency anywhere. From that moment on audited accounts don't seem to be available…." (from Cryptome.org)

Also see this link for a whole bunch of other references.

Now I don't know who Cryptome is or who posts there. That can all be fabricated too. So don't listen to me.

I am just raising the question, why is everyone so quick to assume that the documents on Wikileaks are real? It seems totally possible that there's a mix of real and forged documents.

Let's see some in depth hard reporting on that organization.