Thursday, May 17, 2018

Craig Murray - The Guardian Rejoices in the Silencing of Assange

Craig Murray

The Guardian has today published a whole series of attack piece articles on Julian Assange which plainly exult in the fact he has now been silenced by the cutting of his communication with the outside world. They also include outright lies such as this one by Dan Collyns:

In fact Julian Assange was questioned for two days solid in the Embassy by Swedish procurators and police in November 2016. The statement he gave to them at that time I published in full. Following that questioning it was plain that there was no hope of a successful prosecution, particularly as the only physical evidence Swedish Police had was a condom Anna Ardin claimed he had worn but which had no trace of his DNA – a physical impossibility.
Dan Collyns is a freelance based in Peru, but the Guardian’s editors certainly know it is blatantly untrue that the investigation into Assange was dropped because he could not be questioned. They have knowingly published a lie. “Facts are sacred” there, apparently.
The Guardian article gives another complete lie, this time in the Harding penned section, where it says that “sources” reveal that Assange had hacked into the Embassy’s communications. That is completely untrue as are the “facts” given about Julian’s relationship with the Embassy staff, whom I know well. It is plain that these “sources” are separate from the Ecuadorean security dossier published in Focus Ecuador by the CIA. I would bet any money that these anonymous “sources” are as always Harding’s mates in the UK security services. That the Guardian should allow itself to be used in a security service disinformation campaign designed to provoke distrust between Assange and Embassy staff, is appalling.
I had a front row seat in 2010 when the Guardian suddenly switched from championing Assange to attacking him, in a deeply unedifying row about the rights and money from a projected autobiography. But they have sunk to a new low today in a collaboration between long term MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding and the CIA financed neo-con propagandists of Focus Ecuador.
The Guardian pieces are full of truly startling revelations. Would you ever have guessed, for example, that Julian Assange was visited by his Wikileaks colleague Sarah Harrison, his friends Vaughn Smith and, err, me, and his lawyer Gareth Peirce?! This great scandal, Harding states in an assertion as evidence-free as his entire “Russia hacked the elections” book, “will interest Mueller”. Despite the fact none of these visits was secret and mine was broadcast live to the world by Wikileaks on Brexit referendum night.
The aim of the “Guardian” piece is of course to help urge Ecuador to expel Julian from the Embassy. There is no doubt that the actions of Lenin Moreno, under extreme pressure from the USA, have been severely disappointing, though I am more inclined to praise Ecuador for its courageous defiance of the US than blame it for eventually caving in to the vast resources the CIA is spending on undermining it. It is also worth noting that, post the Francoist human rights abuses in Catalonia, it was Spain and the EU joining in US pressure which tipped the balance.
Julian’s principled refusal to abandon the Catalan cause, against direct Ecuadorean threats to do precisely what they have now done, has not received the credit it deserves.
The same Blairites who supported the latest Israeli massacre will this morning be revelling in the Guardian’s celebration of the silencing of a key dissident voice. I have no wish to try and understand these people.

KV  - Why I Stopped Buying The Guardian 

Boy, do I hate The Guardian. I bought that paper for years and carried it about as a badge of honour, and maybe it was okay once, but I suspect that to some degree it was always leading me away from the truth to protect the establishment's interests.

When I was a teen I was buying the Daily Mirror every day when I found a discarded Guardian on a train and as it was a big, important looking broadsheet, I assumed it was a Tory rag but when I read it I thought, wow, this is my paper, and from that day on I bought it. Anyway, years later I still supported the Guardian by buying the kindle version because it was cheep, but I still wanted to contribute despite the fact I could read it for free online. But then came the big crunch, in the evenings I started writing on CiF arguing with the right wingers because I couldn't understand why there wasn't more left wing views in CiF; it seems the right was especially prevalent.

George Monbiot said some of these writers were being paid to flood the left wing media with right wing views to make it look that its readers, and the nation, were mainly on the right. It was strange how everyday the first 20 or so posts were from right wingers, and in those days the first to write in would stay up front all day for everyone to see. So, when I was on holiday once I got up at 5am in the morning and these posts by right wingers were already there, so they had to be sitting there waiting all night to get in first, although they were probably American so they could do it through the day.

So I decided to take them on ans set about dismantling their arguments by putting out real facts, quotes, and links to sites and I thought the Guardian would be pleased with me, but guess what, the Guardian moderators started removing my posts.  I felt really guilty at first feeling I had done something wrong. Then one day the Guardian had an article about an advert for some posh apartments in the Canary Wharf which showed the extravagant opulence of the rich which many people found distasteful and there was lots of complaints from the public. But the the right were there again saying that the One Percent were the job creators and through trickle down economics we all got to earn a living. So I found a blog by a London policeman who was an expert on City of London crime and he said the Square Mile was the biggest financial crime centre of the world, so I put out quotes from his blog and links but the Guardian removed them. I now knew why the left was under represented in CiF, the Guardian was simply removing all their posts. I never bought the Guardian again after that.

3 comments:

Konrad said...

“Boy, do I hate The Guardian. I bought that paper for years and carried it about as a badge of honour, and maybe it was okay once, but I suspect that to some degree it was always leading me away from the truth to protect the establishment's interests.” ~ Kaivey

The original Manchester Guardian was honest and colorful; even witty and insightful. In 1959 it became known as “The Guardian.” By the late 1980s it had really started to slip. In the 1990s it completely sold out to the neoliberal Establishment. Today it is not fit to line birdcages with. It is true that the Guardian is not part of Rupert Murdoch’s fiefdom, but it is still a tabloid rag that Britons read on the dreary train ride to and from work.

At home, Britons get their news from the radio, from TV, and from the Internet. Or from gossip in the pub. On the trains they get their news from broadsheet tabloids like the Guardian or the Sun, that intersperse sexy photos (e.g. “page 3 girls” meaning bare-breasted female glamour models) with pro-neoliberal, pro-war, pro-Israel trash.

Those privatized trains. Always trying to gouge you for more money when you buy tickets. (“That fare is only offered on Tuesdays from 2 to 2:30 pm.”)

When I was a young boy in the USA I listened to the BBC on short wave radio, and I loved what I took to be its cosmopolitan sophistication. I learned many things about faraway lands that I had not known before. As a little boy I fancied that the BBC made me into something of a James Bond, learning about foreign cultures.

Those were better days. The elderly in the U.K. know what I am talking about. The youth do not.

My late aunt and late grandmother were from England. They used to show me photos from the homeland (taken 1940-1970). That was a different world. Young people have no idea how far things have fallen. Our world today has become a “Mad Max” wasteland.

Matt Franko said...

I wouldnt say that Assange is looked upon that way here in the US...

I think here in US he has probably a wider acceptance... 99% of negativity against Assange is UK driven...

The UK intelligence community has a lot to hide wrt their involvement in the coup attempt against Trump... and will eventually be made to pay a price for this... maybe the whole UK will be made to pay a price...

Typical Trump people here imo probably support Assange... Trump is on the record as saying "I love wikileaks.."...

Noah Way said...

Tangentially related: the CIA has charged a former employee with espionage regarding the release of information about CIA hacking activity and techniques. But they don't have any evidence so they charged him with child pornography, claiming that they found "tens of thousands of pictures" on his computer.

Child porn stings and smears have been used repeatedly against people the Deep State doesn't care for, like Scott Ritter. Glenn Greenwald doesn't travel with electronic devices because he's concerned that such things could be planted on them and that he could then be arrested based on "routine search" while traveling.