greenwald writes , there is now a major , coordinated effort underway to smear wikileaks ' founder , julian assange , and to malign his mental healththe low point of this smear campaign was led by thenew yorktimes ' john burns , who authored a sleazy hit piece on assange -- filled with every tawdry , scurrilous tabloid rumor about him apparently , faced with hundreds of thousands of documents vividly highlighting stomach-turning war crimes and abuses -- death squads and widespread torture and civilian slaughter all as part of a war he admired for years and which his newspaper did more than any other single media outlet to enable -- john burns and his nyt editors decided that the most pressing question from this leak is this : what 's julian assange really like ?