I found out why they went after the DNS domain instead of the owners of the IP address.
The DNS domain was the weakest link the plaintiffs could exploit and at least make it appear the site was down. The registrar of the domain name is based in CA. The servers where the site is hosted he IP address are in Sweden and the servers are owned by two founders of Pirate Bay. The bank convinced the judge to force the registrar to longer point
http://www.wikileaks.org to the IP address (and servers) in Sweden.
I believe something similar happened to Storm2k, when a registrar messed up domain name registration a while back ago. The Storm2K was still up at the IP address, but
http://www.storm2k.org no longer pointed to the IP address.
All the "new" sites, are just domain names that point to Wikileaks' IP address and servers in Sweden.