Seemorerocks: The Guardian attacks Julian Assasnge

The Guardian Rejoices in the Silencing of Assange

Revealed: Ecuador spent millions on spy operation for Julian Assange

16 May, 2018

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.

The Guardian Publishes Smear Against Isolated, Arbitrarily Confined Journalist Julian Assange

Disobedient Media,

16 May, 2018

Update 5/16/18: After publication of this article, it was brought to our attention that the source of the Guardian’s ‘Operation Hotel’ smear, Fernando Villavicencio of FocusEcuador, has a history of publishing forged documents in the Guardian.

The Guardian recently published a patently disingenuous article which described WikiLeaks Editor-In-Chief Julian Assange hacking into the communications at the Ecuadorian embassy where he has been arbitrarily confined since 2012, and was cut off from the outside world since late March of this year.

The Guardian’s article, Revealed: Ecuador spent millions on spy operation for Julian Assange, was authored by Dan Collyns, Stephani Kirchgaessner and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks quickly took issue not only with the content of the report, but also with the involvement of Luke Harding, writing via Twitter that:

“Article is by Luke Harding, a MI6 apologist & serial fabricator, who literally won Plagiarist of the Year. The political utility of the article is to sabotage Assange’s asylum (“it costs so much!” “he hacks!”).”

WikiLeaks

✔@wikileaks

Article is by Luke Harding, a MI6 apologist & serial fabricator, who literally won Plagiarist of the Year. The political utility of the article is to sabotage Assange's asylum ("it costs so much!" "he hacks!"). Assange exposed him: http://www.newsweek.com/assange-how-guardian-milked-edward-snowdens-story-323480 … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ikf1uZli4g …

9:58 AM - May 16, 2018

YouTube ‎@YouTube

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The Guardian writes: “The security personnel recorded in minute detail Assange’s

daily activities, and his interactions with embassy staff, his legal team and other visitors. They also documented his changing moods.” Renata Avila, one of Julian Assange’s longtime legal representatives, expressed her deep concern in the wake

of the article’s release, saying that it would indicate that all legal meetings between Julian Assange and his legal counsel, including Baltasar Garzon, Jennifer Robinson, and other lawyers, were monitored or even filmed.

One particularly damning section of the Guardian’s disingenuous reporting claims that: “Assange managed to compromise the communications system within the embassy and had his own satellite Internet access, according to documents and a source who wished to remain anonymous. By penetrating the embassy’s firewall, Assange was able to access and intercept the official and personal communications of staff, the source claimed.” WikiLeaks immediately countered this claim via Twitter, writing:

It seems that the Guardian and the deceptive article authored in part by Harding is only the latest in a series of situations in which the Guardian has stabbed Julian Assange and the organization he leads in the back. In 2015, Assange wrote an opinion editorial in Newsweek magazine, in which he described the Guardian ‘milking’ the revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. Luke Harding was also named in the opinion piece, with Assange writing:

“The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (Guardian/Faber & Faber, 2014) by Luke Harding is a hack job in the purest sense of the term. Pieced together from secondary sources and written with minimal additional research to be the first to market, the book’s thrifty origins are hard to miss. The Guardian is a curiously inward-looking beast. If any other institution tried to market its own experience of its own work nearly as persistently as The Guardian, it would surely be called out for institutional narcissism. But because The Guardian is an embarrassingly central institution within the moribund “left-of-center” wing of the U.K. establishment, everyone holds their tongue…”

… In reality, The Guardian also caved to government pressure—something it continues to do. Originally, the paper wasn’t even going to publish the Snowden leaks—Glenn Greenwald had to force its hand. On request of the government, the paper later voluntarily destroyed its copies of the Snowden documents—and the computers they were saved on—in the basement of its London offices, under the supervision of [Britain’s electronic spying headquarters] GCHQ.

Greenwald eventually broke with The Guardian over reported censorship issues, which were later confirmed by Alan Rusbridger, keen to demonstrate the Guardian’s “patriotism” to a U.K. Home Affairs Select Committee, when he boasted that “there’s stuff in there about Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re not even going to look at it.”

TIt seems that the Guardian and the deceptive article authored in part by Harding is only the latest in a series of situations in which the Guardian has stabbed Julian Assange and the organization he leads in the back. In 2015, Assange wrote an opinion editorial in Newsweek magazine, in which he described the Guardian ‘milking’ the revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. Luke Harding was also named in the opinion piece, with Assange writing:

“The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man (Guardian/Faber & Faber, 2014) by Luke Harding is a hack job in the purest sense of the term. Pieced together from secondary sources and written with minimal additional research to be the first to market, the book’s thrifty origins are hard to miss. The Guardian is a curiously inward-looking beast. If any other institution tried to market its own experience of its own work nearly as persistently as The Guardian, it would surely be called out for institutional narcissism. But because The Guardian is an embarrassingly central institution within the moribund “left-of-center” wing of the U.K. establishment, everyone holds their tongue…”

No, @Guardian, @JulianAssange did not "hack into" embassy 
satellites. That's an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr. Assange's asylum--while he can't respond. You've gone too far this time. We're suing. https://www.newsweek.com/assange-how-guardian-milked-edward-snowdens-story-323480 …

6:19 AM - 16 May 2018

… In reality, The Guardian also caved to government pressure—something it continues to do. Originally, the paper wasn’t even going to publish the Snowden leaks—Glenn Greenwald had to force its hand. On request of the government, the paper later voluntarily destroyed its copies of the Snowden documents—and the computers they were saved on—in the basement of its London offices, under the supervision of [Britain’s electronic spying headquarters] GCHQ.

Greenwald eventually broke with The Guardian over reported censorship issues, which were later confirmed by Alan Rusbridger, keen to demonstrate the Guardian’s “patriotism” to a U.K. Home Affairs Select Committee, when he boasted that “there’s stuff in there about Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re not even going to look at it.”

The WikiLeaks co-founder also described Harding’s plagiarism, writing: “Notoriously, as the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian, Harding used to ply his trade ripping off work by other Moscow-based journalists before his plagiarism was pointed out by The eXile‘s Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, from whom he had misappropriated entire paragraphs without alteration. For this he was awarded “plagiarist of the year” by Private Eye in 2007.”

Though The Guardian’s screed does mention the support of Ecuador and prior Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa for the provision of ongoing asylum for Julian Assange as a political prisoner, the Guardian fails to note the US and UK’s efforts to undermine this support, which was noted by former UK Ambassador Craig Murray in 2012.

Murray related that the Pentagon had devoted $87 million USD towards supporting opposition efforts against Correa. Murray wrote of the use of such funds: “This will

find its way into opposition campaign coffers and be used to fund, bribe or blackmail media and officials.” This cash flow represented a significant burden placed on tax-payers in order to attack a journalistic organization and in so doing, meddle in the democratic process of a sovereign nation. Overwhelmingly important context of this kind was utterly absent in the Guardian’s article, despite the inclusion of a plethora

of claims unsupported by evidence.

With Luke Harding and The Guardian’s history of flawed reporting on Assange, WikiLeaks and the saga of Edward Snowden in mind, readers must question the claims made in this latest travesty of corporate media coverage, especially the allegations that cite an anonymous source while providing no independent verification or evidence of their claims. If anything, the Guardian’s latest article reveals more about the nature of the publication and its repeated willingness to support the agendas of US and UK military interests, than it does about WikiLeaks Editor-In-Chief Julian Assange.

The timing of the Guardian’s report is especially alarming, as Julian Assange cannot defend his reputation while utterly isolated in the Ecuadorian embassy. In late March, the Ecuadorian government under Lenin Moreno cut off all of Assange’s methods of communication with the outside world, including access to visitors, phone calls, and use of the Internet.

Those who wish to support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange during this difficult time are encouraged to sign the current petition on his behalf, to buy from the WikiLeaks shop, and to donate to WikiLeaks or Julian Assange’s legal defense fund.

Seemorerocks

Thursday, 17 May 2018

The Guardian attacks Julian Assasnge

Revealed: Ecuador spent millions on spy operation for Julian Assange

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Thursday, 17 May 2018

The Guardian attacks Julian Assasnge

Revealed: Ecuador spent millions on spy operation for Julian Assange

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