Craig Murray - The Guardian Rejoices in the Silencing of Assange

Craig Murray

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.

Craig Murray - The Guardian Rejoices in the Silencing of Assange

KV  - Why I Stopped Buying The Guardian 

Boy, do I hate The Guardian. I bought that paper for years and carried it about as a badge of honour, and maybe it was okay once, but I suspect that to some degree it was always leading me away from the truth to protect the establishment's interests.

When I was a teen I was buying the Daily Mirror every day when I found a discarded Guardian on a train and as it was a big, important looking broadsheet, I assumed it was a Tory rag but when I read it I thought, wow, this is my paper, and from that day on I bought it. Anyway, years later I still supported the Guardian by buying the kindle version because it was cheep, but I still wanted to contribute despite the fact I could read it for free online. But then came the big crunch, in the evenings I started writing on CiF arguing with the right wingers because I couldn't understand why there wasn't more left wing views in CiF; it seems the right was especially prevalent.

George Monbiot said some of these writers were being paid to flood the left wing media with right wing views to make it look that its readers, and the nation, were mainly on the right. It was strange how everyday the first 20 or so posts were from right wingers, and in those days the first to write in would stay up front all day for everyone to see. So, when I was on holiday once I got up at 5am in the morning and these posts by right wingers were already there, so they had to be sitting there waiting all night to get in first, although they were probably American so they could do it through the day.

So I decided to take them on ans set about dismantling their arguments by putting out real facts, quotes, and links to sites and I thought the Guardian would be pleased with me, but guess what, the Guardian moderators started removing my posts.  I felt really guilty at first feeling I had done something wrong. Then one day the Guardian had an article about an advert for some posh apartments in the Canary Wharf which showed the extravagant opulence of the rich which many people found distasteful and there was lots of complaints from the public. But the the right were there again saying that the One Percent were the job creators and through trickle down economics we all got to earn a living. So I found a blog by a London policeman who was an expert on City of London crime and he said the Square Mile was the biggest financial crime centre of the world, so I put out quotes from his blog and links but the Guardian removed them. I now knew why the left was under represented in CiF, the Guardian was simply removing all their posts. I never bought the Guardian again after that.