The
Guardian’s direct collusion with media censorship by secret
services exposed
Minutes
of Ministry of Defence (MoD) meetings have confirmed the role of
Britain’s Guardian newspaper as a mouthpiece for the intelligence
agencies.
By
Thomas Scripps
WSWS,
22
June 2019
Last
week, independent journalist Matt Kennard revealed that the paper’s
deputy editor, Paul Johnson, was personally thanked by the Defence
and Security Media Advisory Notice (or D-Notice) committee for
integrating the Guardian into the operations of the security
services.
Minutes
of a meeting in 2018 read: “The Chairman thanked Paul Johnson for
his service to the Committee. Paul had joined the Committee in the
wake of the Snowden affair and had been instrumental in
re-establishing links with the Guardian.”
D-Notices
are used by the British state to veto the publication of news
damaging to its interests. The slavish collusion of the mainstream
media ensures that such notices function as gag orders.
Johnson
joined the committee in 2014 and evidently excelled in his
performance. A separate set of minutes from the first meeting
attended by Johnson records the Guardian’s close collaboration with
military officials.
Under
a section detailing “advice” given by the intelligence agencies
to the media, the document reads “most of the occurrences and
requests for advice were related to further publications by The
Guardian of extracts from the Snowden documents. The Secretary
reported that the engagement of DPBAC [Defence Press and Broadcasting
Advisory Committee] Secretariat with The Guardian had continued to
strengthen during the last six months, with regular dialogues between
the Secretary and Deputy Secretaries and Guardian journalists.”
The
secretary and deputy secretaries were Air Vice-Marshal Andrew
Vallance CB OBE, Air Commodore David Adams and Brigadier Geoffrey
Dodds OBE. The chairman was Peter Watkins CBE, the MoD’s director
general of Strategy, Security and Policy Operations.
Under
the direction of these military intelligence handlers, the Guardian
played a role in bringing other newspapers internationally to heel.
The minutes note, “because of an agreement between The Guardian and
allied publications overseas to coordinate their respective
disclosures of Snowden material, advice given to the Guardian has
been passed on to the New York Times and others, helping guide the
disclosures of these outlets.”
In
September 2014, the Guardian allowed the former head of GCHQ
(Government Communications Headquarters) Sir David Omand to publish
an article titled, “Edward Snowden’s leaks are misguided—they
risk exposing us to cyber-attacks.”
He
declared, “Journalists are not best placed to identify security
risks; we have to trust those who oversee the
intelligence-gathering.”
In
2016, Paul Johnson used an unprecedented interview with a serving
head of MI5, Andrew Parker, to propagandize for the antidemocratic,
warmongering interests of British imperialism.
These
facts are damning proof of the Guardian’s total integration into
the propaganda wing of the MoD following its involvement in the
WikiLeaks and Snowden files releases. Indeed, the work of WikiLeaks
and its founder Julian Assange has served to expose and confirm the
deep ties of the entire mainstream media to the military-intelligence
complex.
The
Guardian has been viewed historically as the voice of British liberal
dissent, critical of the worst excesses of British capitalism at home
and abroad. But it has always acted as a political
policeman—filtering the news “responsibly” and channelling the
resulting anger into impotent moral appeals to the state and other
authorities. Its dealings with Assange and Snowden transformed
political allegiance into direct subservience. Its liberal, critical
pretensions unravelled in a matter of a few months.
When
Assange looked to the Guardian and other papers internationally such
as the New York Times to publish the Afghan and Iraq war logs and
secret US diplomatic cables in 2010, the editors’ main concern was
damage control. Within a month of an initial publication of
documents, the Guardian had broken off relations with
Assange—publishing an infamous December 17 editorial “WikiLeaks:
the man and the idea.” It stated that the Guardian had only agreed
to publish “a small number of cables” to control the political
fall-out from the details of murder, torture, espionage and
corruption they revealed and give it the opportunity of “editing,
contextualising, explanation and redaction.”
The
main purpose of the editorial was to support Assange’s extradition
to Sweden on trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct relating to
a trip to that country a few months earlier.
In
an op-ed piece published last month by former Guardian editor Alan
Rusbridger, he assumes to take the moral high ground by claiming that
WikiLeaks issued leaks unredacted, and wanted to continue this
practise, in contrast with his “responsible” journalism. An
editorial published immediately prior to Rusbridger’s article,
again supporting Assange’s extradition to Sweden to face “charges”
that don’t exist, stated, “The Guardian disapproved of the mass
publication of unredacted documents ... and broke with Mr. Assange
over the issue.”
This
is a self-serving lie. WikiLeaks has pointed out that the editorial
“conveniently leaves out” that it was the Guardian—through a
book authored by David Leigh and Luke Harding—that disclosed the
password to the digital file Assange had given them in confidence.
The book was a hatchet job on WikiLeaks. The rights to it were sold,
becoming the basis of a slanderous Hollywood movie.
When
NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked files detailing blanket state
surveillance of the world’s population in 2013, the Guardian set
out to play the same “responsible” role. Asked afterwards if the
paper had held back from publishing anything about GCHQ and UK
security services because of “worries about national security,”
the ever-pliant Mr. Rusbridger replied, “Yes, we’ve held back a
great deal, we’ve published a small amount of what we have read.”
This
time, however, the Guardian was told by the security services that
even rigorously filtering the Snowden’s revelations was not good
enough. It must stop publishing immediately.
The
country’s top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood,
called the Guardian’s offices to pass on the demands of then Prime
Minister David Cameron that the Snowden material either be returned
to the government or destroyed. Editors were threatened with legal
action if they did not comply.
Rusbridger
later explained, “The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an
implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured
a far more draconian approach.” This is a masterpiece of
understatement. Emails obtained by the Associated Press in 2014
showed that this was an operation conducted in intimate collusion
between the government, the British security services and the US
National Security Agency, including then Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper.
In
the end, two GCHQ security officials directly oversaw the Guardian’s
destruction of its own material. Three Guardian staff members,
including Paul Johnson himself, destroyed the hard drives in the
Guardian’s possession with angle grinders and other equipment
provided by GCHQ officials.
The
Guardian had been put in a position it never wanted. Its liberal
reputation, and previous disclosures, had made it the newspaper of
choice for WikiLeaks’ and Snowden’s revelations. But the scale of
what had been uncovered threatened the fundamental interests of
British and US imperialism. It therefore rolled over when the
government told it to cease and desist, before taking its place
alongside the rest of the right-wing media on the secret committee
responsible for press censorship and propaganda dissemination.
One
of Assange’s persecutors-in-chief, Luke Harding, enjoys the most
intimate relations with the security services. His notorious November
2018 fabrication, claiming Assange held meetings with US President
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, was published
in the Guardian just two weeks after Johnson was thanked for
“re-establishing links” with the MoD. The story was widely cited
and formed a keystone of the efforts, spearheaded by the Democrats in
the US, to present WikiLeaks and “Russian interference” as the
causes of Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Harding
played a central role in silencing questions over the UK government’s
bogus account of the Skripal affair in mid-2018. These events were
the subject of at least one D-notice, issued while Paul Johnson was
on the responsible committee.
An
unintended but valuable consequence of the WikiLeaks exposures has
been to explode the fraud of the Guardian’s claim to any critical
independence from the state. The crimes of the major imperialist
powers against the world’s population made available by WikiLeaks
were so great that they could not be neutralised, even by the
Guardian’s professional gatekeepers of the “truth.” Not a word
published in this imperialist propaganda sheet can ever be taken at
face value.
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