30 November 2022

(quote)
The Guardian has joined The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País in
signing a letter from the five papers which collaborated with WikiLeaks twelve
years ago in the publication of the Chelsea Manning leaks to call for the Biden
administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange. This sudden jolt of
mainstream support comes as news breaks that Australian Prime Minister Anthony
Albanese has been personally pushing the US government to bring the Assange case
to a close.

The Guardian's participation in this letter is particularly noteworthy, given
the leading role that publication has played in manufacturing public support for
his persecution in the first place. If The Guardian really wants to help end the
persecution of the heroic WikiLeaks founder, the best way to do that would be to
retract those many smears, spin jobs and outright lies, and to formally
apologize for publishing them.

This is after all the same Guardian which published the transparently ridiculous
and completely invalidated 2018 report that Trump lackey Paul Manafort had met
secretly with Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy, not once but multiple
times. Not one shred of evidence has ever been produced to substantiate this
claim despite the embassy being one of the most heavily surveilled buildings on
the planet at the time, and the Robert Mueller investigation, whose expansive
scope would obviously have included such meetings, reported absolutely nothing
to corroborate it. It was a bogus story which all accused parties have
forcefully denied and no serious person believes is true, yet to this day it
still sits on The Guardian's website without retraction of any kind.

This is the same Guardian which ran an article in 2018 titled "The only barrier
to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador's embassy is pride", arguing that Assange
looked ridiculous for continuing his political asylum in the embassy because
"The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US." The article
was authored by the odious James Ball, whose article begins: "According to
Debrett's, the arbiters of etiquette since 1769: 'Visitors, like fish, stink in
three days.' Given this, it's difficult to imagine what Ecuador's London embassy
smells like, more than five-and-a-half years after Julian Assange moved himself
into the confines of the small flat in Knightsbridge, just across the road from
Harrods."

This is the same Guardian which published an article titled "Definition of
paranoia: supporters of Julian Assange", arguing that Assange defenders are
crazy conspiracy theorists for believing the US would try to extradite Assange
because "Britain has a notoriously lax extradition treaty with the United
States," because "why would they bother to imprison him when he is making such a
good job of discrediting himself?", and "because there is no extradition
request."

This is the same Guardian which published a ludicrous report about Assange
potentially receiving documents as part of a strange Nigel Farage/Donald
Trump/Russia conspiracy, a claim based primarily on vague analysis by a single
anonymous source described as a "highly placed contact with links to US
intelligence". The same Guardian which has flushed standard journalistic
protocol down the toilet by reporting on Assange's "ties to the Kremlin" (not a
thing) without even bothering to use the word "alleged" on more than one
occasion. The same Guardian which advanced many more virulent smears as
documented in a 2018 article by The Canary titled "Guilty by innuendo: the
Guardian campaign against Julian Assange that breaks all the rules."

Even the wording of the joint letter itself is dishonest when coming from The
Guardian.

"This group of editors and publishers, all of whom had worked with Assange, felt
the need to publicly criticise his conduct in 2011 when unredacted copies of the
cables were released, and some of us are concerned about the allegations in the
indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified
database," the letter reads. "But we come together now to express our grave
concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and
publishing classified materials."

As we've discussed previously, the narrative that Assange recklessly published
unredacted documents in 2011 is itself a dishonest smear, and the unredacted
files were actually published elsewhere as the result of a real password being
recklessly published in a book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke
Harding (the same Luke Harding who co-authored the bogus Manafort-Assange
story). Assange took extraordinary measures to try and minimize the damage that
was done by those Guardian reporters, but wound up getting thrown under the bus
and blamed for their actions anyway.

If The Guardian is sincere in its stated desire to see the end of the
persecution of Julian Assange, the single most effective thing it could do to
help advance that goal would be to publicly acknowledge that it helped to
deceive the world about him, and work to correct the record.

The only reason Assange's case doesn't have more support currently is because so
much of the public has been deceived into believing that what's happening is not
the unconscionable persecution of a journalist for telling the truth, but rather
the righteous prosecution of a sinister Russian agent who has broken laws and
endangered lives. The Guardian easily played a larger role in manufacturing that
collective misconception than any other single news outlet in the world, and as
such it could do tremendous good by retracting and apologizing for its
publications which fed into it.

This is the sort of thing a publication would do if it was really interested in
truth, justice, and journalistic ethics. Is it what the people who run The
Guardian will choose to do? I highly doubt it.
(/quote)
-- https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/the-guardian-could-help-assange-by-retracting-all-the-lies-it-published-about-him-79b22fdecdd2