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    Former Ecuador consul addresses the Manafort hoax, corrects the record on Assange (pt 1) Archived Message

    Posted by margo on August 9, 2019, 11:36 am

    The Manafort hoax: 40 Rebuttals to CNN’s Bias on Assange
    Fidel Narváez

    HAVING WORKED AS a diplomat at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six out of the seven years that Julian Assange lived there as a political refugee, unlike others, I am privy to what actually happened there.

    I am alarmed by CNN’s June 15th 2019 story, alleging Assange turned the Ecuadorian embassy in London into a command post for election meddling.

    The story contains several substantive shortcomings and too many factual errors.

    I warned CNN about them when I was approached during their "investigation," but none of my points were included in the article. It is clear that CNN was not looking for balance in their publication, choosing instead to make assertions without showing actual proof, and to use props such as irrelevant CCTV images, a sensationalist collage and a miniature image of unreadable documents to make it seem as though the story was based on evidence.

    CNN’s story is based on the wrong premise that publishing information about an election—in this case the 2016 US presidential election—constitutes interference. Nobody refutes the authenticity of the material and nobody claims that the information was not in the public interest.

    In fact, New York Times editor Dean Baquet stated that had his newspaper obtained the same material, and regardless of the source or means by which the information had been obtained, the New York Times would have published it.

    Following CNN’s own logic, all major newsrooms should also be called "election interference centres," which is how CNN chooses to call the embassy where Julian Assange received political asylum while he was the publisher of WikiLeaks. CNN implies criminality in something that is a legitimate exercise in journalism.

    A trend in fake stories

    Prior to CNN’s story, the best example of this type of completely unsubstantiated reporting was the Guardian’s front page story “Manafort held secret conversations with Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy”, which was preceded by another libelous article entitled "Russia’s secret plan to help Julian Assange escape from UK.”

    Both of these stories were absolutely false; both were written by the same authors and propped using the same sources: reports written by employees of a private company in charge of security at the Ecuadorian embassy, as well as information provided by anonymous agents of Ecuador’s intelligence services.

    Eight months after publishing the Manafort story, neither The Guardian nor anybody else has been able to provide any proof of Manafort visiting what was at the time the most surveilled embassy in the world.

    Eight months after publishing the Russian secret plan story, my personal complaint to The Guardian for that article is still being judged by the internal complaint’s procedure of the paper.

    CNN evidently did not learn from the Guardian’s catastrophic failures and has chosen to use the same unreliable sources for their article. I know — because I was there — that security company UC Global produced exaggerated, misrepresented and hostile reports, loaded with paranoia and sometimes with false information, with the purpose of sowing suspicion about Assange and his visitors in order to justify their own continued employment.

    According to CNN, “An Ecuadorian intelligence official told CNN that the surveillance reports are authentic”. Even if we accept the troubling practice of quoting anonymous intelligence officials, is it acceptable from a journalistic point of view to take the word of an anonymous official from the current Ecuadorian government, which is an obvious party with interests in this story, while ignoring the former Ecuadorean Consul who question the logs’ reliability based on specific arguments?

    It is in the public domain that the company carried out illegal espionage and leaked confidential information. I know that the company actually forged an official document, falsified the signature of an ambassador, and presented it in a labor court in Spain when facing legal action by one of their employees; a fact that the ambassador himself denounced before the Foreign Ministry.

    False and illogical claims


    CNN claims, for example, that Assange "was even granted the power to delete names from the visitor logs…" in an attempt to introduce the absurd "…possibility that additional sensitive meetings took place but are still secret."


    It is naive to believe that at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, constantly surveilled by external and internal cameras video cameras, and by undercover police during those seven years, a besieged journalist would have been able to receive secret visitors without the approval of the ambassador, without security personnel knowing about it, without the visit being registered in the visitor’s log, without a copy of the visitors’ IDs being kept on file by the security guards, without being recorded by numerous security cameras, both inside belonging to the embassy, as well as outside belonging to the British secret services, some of which were pointed directly at the only entrance to the embassy.

    Likewise, CNN’s rehash that Assange "smeared feces on the walls out of anger" is a terrible smear, first uttered by Ecuadorian authorities to draw attention away from the crime of handing over a political refugee to his persecutors.

    I know for a fact that every single moment of Julian Assange’s stay in the embassy is registered on video. Why is it that these same agents who released short clips of supposed embarrassing moments in an attempt to ridicule Assange have not provided evidence for such grotesque claims?

    It is false that Assange ever participated in a fist fight with anyone at the embassy. It is false that Assange "regularly" threatened embassy employees with getting them fired. It is false that he demanded all kinds of "privileges" and it is false that Ecuador always provided them. Why is it that an Internet connection or access to regular visitors considered a privilege for a political refugee?

    In fact, there are so many factual errors and biased speculation in CNN’s story that it is hard to believe they are caused by nothing more than poor research and lack of rigor.

    The relentless Russiagate smear

    When Edward Snowden was trapped by the US Government at a Moscow airport in 2013 and I personally tried to assist him on his way to Ecuador, it was clear to me that Assange and WikiLeaks did not even have low-level contacts in the Russian government.

    Snowden was practically kidnapped at that airport, completely incommunicado for days, and when I finally managed to see him, it was thanks to my own diplomatic contacts.

    CNN’s derivative report follows an obsessive line of inquiry seeking a relationship between Julian Assange and Russia and suffers from an embarrassing case of confirmation bias by omitting inconvenient facts.

    WikiLeaks published thousands of documents on the Russian State spying apparatus and the invasion of the privacy of its population in the publication known as Spy files: Russia.

    Assange and WikiLeaks have publicly condemned the persecution of well-known Russian dissidents, such as members of Pussy Riot and Alexei Navalny.

    Further, CNN treats Robert Mueller’s unfounded assumptions as irrefutable facts; a report that is the subject of enormous scrutiny in the United States and which Mueller himself seemed confused about during his recent congressional hearing.

    The report lacks the basic chronological coherence required of any investigation: on June 12th, 2016, Julian Assange publicly announced in a stellar interview on British television that WikiLeaks was preparing a publication of Democratic Party materials. We can therefore conclude that by then WikiLeaks had already received those materials.

    The Mueller report states that the first contacts with two alleged sources happened on June 14th and 24th 2016. How is it possible for Assange to announce his publication prior to being contacted by the alleged sources?

    This lack of elementary logic thwarts all speculation in CNN’s report regarding which of the supposed "suspicious" people who visited Assange in June 2016 may have provided WikiLeaks with the publication materials.

    The psychological torture of Assange

    Since the arrest of Assange, the most relevant fact in his case is undoubtedly the strong pronouncement of Nils Melzner, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, who said that "in 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law."

    Why is there is no mention of this important and damning report in CNN’s piece? I did explain its relevance when I was contacted by the authors of the story, while at the same time warning them of the lack of credibility of the UC Global documents.

    CNN intends to set the stage for Julian Assange’s continued persecution at the hands of the US Government and perhaps did learn the leason from the Guardian’s Manafort hoax: news media are unaccountable to the public they misinform.

    The words of the UN rapporteur on torture are painfully accurate:

    "Julian Assange is the victim of a relentless and unrestricted campaign of public harassment, intimidation and defamation…which includes an endless flow of humiliating, degrading and threatening statements in the press."

    ---- end part one---

    LINK https://rutakritica.org/cnn-did-not-learn-the-lesson-from-the-manafort-hoax-40-rebuttals-to-cnns-bias-on-assange/

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