The Guardian Rejoices in the Silencing of Assange 509


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.


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509 thoughts on “The Guardian Rejoices in the Silencing of Assange

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  • bj

    Enhanced Security measures removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy:
    https://www.rt.com/news/427064-assange-security-measures-embassy/

    Together with this article:
    https://theintercept.com/2018/05/16/ecuadors-ex-president-rafael-correa-denounces-treatment-of-julian-assange-as-torture/
    and this one (caveat: an article on The Guardian’s website):
    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/aug/16/julian-assange-ecuador-embassy-asylum

    which states that the enhanced security was instated after the UK threatened it was within it rights (“You need to be aware that there is a legal base in the UK, the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987, that would allow us to take actions in order to arrest Mr Assange in the current premises of the embassy.”) to abduct Assange from the embassy, might be grounds for some worry that this abduction might indeed be in the works.

  • John Goss

    Today apparently they released Sergei Skripal from hospital to a “prison”, sorry safe house. At least that is what has been said.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sergei-skripal-latest-health-salisbury-hospital-nerve-agent-attack-poison-a8357271.html

    My sympathies are not particularly with Skripal, though he has served his sentence and the Russians have no interest in him according to the London ambassador Alexander Yakovenko. My interest is in his daughter Yulia who may be innocent in this pantomime. In her telephone call to her sister (or cousin, it’s not quite clear) she was obviously under duress though she kept calm and told Viktoria that her father was all right but sleeping. At that time we were being told that he was in a coma. The Times, that paragon of truth and honesty, even ran an article stating that Sergei was dead, but took it down the same day. Please sign and share this petition which only needs 14 more signatures to reach the first major milestone of 1,000.

    https://www.change.org/p/theresa-may-mp-let-yulia-skripal-speak

  • RD

    The Guardian is worse than The Daily Mail.

    Rationale for this assertion: Because, whereas intelligent people with influence don’t usually read the overtly trashy writing in the The Daily Mail, they still tend (for the time being) to read The Guardian. This makes The Guardian so much more dangerous, and therefore the real enemy of journalistic integrity.

    I’ve noticed this for several years now, because I get RSS feeds from The Guardian and some of the other propagandistic churner-outers to my homepage.

    Comparing those of The Guardian to those of Al Jazeera, for instance, shows up some glaring differences. Al Jazeera, for some reason, is kind of okay. Right now, the top headline is: ‘UN votes to send war crimes investigators to Gaza’

    I’ve looked all over The Guardian for something comparable, and there is nothing, and I think that absence says a lot. Even the Haaretz has this story at the top of the list right now.

    So one can only conclude that The Guardian is less interested in truth or reality than it is in the same old safely idiotic stories about Trump’s foolishness, everyday patriarchy and how nasty Venezuela, Russia and North Korea are.

  • Sharp Ears

    Keeping it in the family. Sarah Vine, Heil scribbler and Gove’s wife, roped in to review the papers on Marr. Along with Schama, Zionist Israel supporter.

  • Clive p

    Still waiting for Freedland to write a piece condemning Israel for the slaughter.

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