The Guardian's Vilification of Julian Assange
December 3, 2018
The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of
evidence. It did what it is designed to do, says Jonathan Cook.
By Jonathan Cook
Johanthan-Cook.net
It is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including from
leading journalists, to The Guardian's long-running vilification of Julian
Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.
Reporter Luke Harding's latest article, claiming that Donald Trump's
disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly visited Assange in
Ecuador's embassy in London on three occasions, is so full of holes that
even hardened opponents of Assange in the corporate media are struggling to
stand by it.
Faced with the backlash, The Guardian quickly - and very quietly - rowed
back its initial certainty that its story was based on verified facts.
Instead, it amended the text, without acknowledging it had done so, to
attribute the claims to unnamed, and uncheckable, "sources".
The propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide
evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with Trump,
and Trump's supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage Hillary Clinton
during the 2016 presidential race.
The Guardian's latest story provides a supposedly stronger foundation for an
existing narrative: that Assange and Wikileaks knowingly published emails
hacked by Russia from the Democratic party's servers. In truth, there is no
public evidence that the emails were hacked, or that Russia was involved.
Central actors have suggested instead that the emails were leaked from
within the Democratic party.
Nonetheless, this unverified allegation has been aggressively exploited by
the Democratic leadership because it shifts attention away both from its
failure to mount an effective electoral challenge to Trump and from the
damaging contents of the emails. These show that party bureaucrats sought to
rig the primaries to make sure Clinton's challenger for the Democratic
nomination, Bernie Sanders, lost.
To underscore the intended effect of the Guardian's new claims, Harding even
throws in a casual and unsubstantiated reference to "Russians" joining
Manafort in supposedly meeting Assange.
Manafort has denied the Guardian's claims, while Assange has threatened to
sue The Guardian for libel.
'Responsible for Trump'
The emotional impact ofThe Guardian is to suggest that Assange is
responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it
bolsters the otherwise risible claim that Assange is not a publisher - and
thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed by The
Guardian or The New York Times - but the head of an organization engaged in
espionage for a foreign power.
The intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the Wikileaks
organization, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That, in turn, will
make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital cause he represents:
the use of new media to hold to account the old, corporate media and
political elites through the imposition of far greater transparency.
The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuador's
rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the
embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.
It will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange on
self-serving bail violation charges and extradites him to the US. And it
will pave the way for the US legal system to lock Assange up for a very long
time.
For the best part of a decade, any claims by Assange's supporters that
avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in the
embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the Guardian.
Even when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in
2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily - and unlawfully - detained by the
UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN report. See here and
here.
Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An
administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department had
secretly filed criminal charges against Assange.
Heavy Surveillance
The problem forThe Guardian, which should have been obvious to its editors
from the outset, is that any visits by Manafort would be easily verifiable
without relying on unnamed "sources".
Glenn Greenwald is far from alone in noting that London is possibly the most
surveilled city in the world, with CCTV cameras everywhere. The environs of
the Ecuadorian embassy are monitored especially heavily, with continuous
filming by the UK and Ecuadorian authorities and most likely by the US and
other actors with an interest in Assange's fate.
The idea that Manafort or "Russians" could have wandered into the embassy to
meet Assange even once without their trail, entry and meeting being
intimately scrutinized and recorded is simply preposterous.
According to Greenwald: "If Paul Manafort . visited Assange at the Embassy,
there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof
demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none of that."
Former British ambassador Craig Murray also points out the extensive
security checks insisted on by the embassy to which any visitor to Assange
must submit. Any visits by Manafort would have been logged.
In fact, The Guardian obtained the embassy's logs in May, and has never made
any mention of either Manafort or "Russians" being identified in them. It
did not refer to the logs in its latest story.
Murray:
The problem with this latest fabrication is that [Ecuador's President]
Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither
Manafort nor these "Russians" are in the visitor logs . What possible motive
would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded
visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence
agency - who were in charge of the security - would not know the identity of
these alleged "Russians".
No Fact-Checking
It is worth noting it should be vitally important for a serious publication
like The Guardian to ensure its claims are unassailably true - both because
Assange's personal fate rests on their veracity, and because, even more
importantly, a fundamental right, the freedom of the press, is at stake.
Given this, one would have expected The Guardian's editors to have insisted
on the most stringent checks imaginable before going to press with Harding's
story. At a very minimum, they should have sought out a response from
Assange and Manafort before publication. Neither precaution was taken.
I worked for The Guardian for a number of years, and know well the layers of
checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through before publication.
In that lengthy process, a variety of commissioning editors, lawyers,
backbench editors and the editor herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist
on cuts to anything that could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.
And yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a green
light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a range of
well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.
That at the very least hints that The Guardian thought they had "insurance"
on this story. And the only people who could have promised that kind of
insurance are the security and intelligence services - presumably of
Britain, the United States and / or Ecuador.
It appears The Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks, at
face value. Even if it later turns out that Manafort did visit Assange, The
Guardian clearly had no compelling evidence for its claims when it published
them. That is profoundly irresponsible journalism - fake news - that should
be of the gravest concern to readers.
A Pattern, Not an Aberration
Despite all this, even analysts critical of The Guardian's behavior have
shown a glaring failure to understand that its latest coverage represents
not an aberration by the paper but decisively fits with a pattern.
Glenn Greenwald, who once had an influential column in The Guardian until an
apparent, though unacknowledged, falling out with his employer over the
Edward Snowden revelations, wrote a series of baffling observations about
The Guardian's latest story.
First, he suggested it was simply evidence of The Guardian's long-standing
(and well-documented) hostility towards Assange.
"The Guardian, an otherwise solid and reliable paper, has such a pervasive
and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has
frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign
him."
It was also apparently evidence of the paper's clickbait tendencies:
"They [Guardian editors] knew that publishing this story would cause
partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets
would hyperventilate over it, and that they'd reap the rewards regardless of
whether the story turned out to be true or false."
And finally, in a bizarre tweet, Greenwald opined, "I hope the story
[maligning Assange] turns out true" - apparently because maintenance of The
Guardian's reputation is more important than Assange's fate and the right of
journalists to dig up embarrassing secrets without fear of being imprisoned.
Deeper Malaise
What this misses is that The Guardian's attacks on Assange are not
exceptional or motivated solely by personal animosity. They are entirely
predictable and systematic. Rather than being the reason for The Guardian
violating basic journalistic standards and ethics, the paper's hatred of
Assange is a symptom of a deeper malaise in The Guardian and the wider
corporate media.
Even aside from its decade-long campaign against Assange, The Guardian is
far from "solid and reliable", as Greenwald claims. It has been at the
forefront of the relentless, and unhinged, attacks on Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn for prioritizing the rights of Palestinians over Israel's right to
continue its belligerent occupation. Over the past three years, The Guardian
has injected credibility into the Israel lobby's desperate efforts to tar
Corbyn as an anti-semite. See here, here and here.
Similarly, The Guardian worked tirelessly to promote Clinton and undermine
Sanders in the 2016 Democratic nomination process - another reason the paper
has been so assiduous in promoting the idea that Assange, aided by Russia,
was determined to promote Trump over Clinton for the presidency.
The Guardian's coverage of Latin America, especially of populist leftwing
governments that have rebelled against traditional and oppressive U.S.
hegemony in the region, has long grated with analysts and experts. Its
especial venom has been reserved for leftwing figures like Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez, democratically elected but official enemies of the U.S., rather than
the region's rightwing authoritarians beloved of Washington.
The Guardian has been vocal in the so-called "fake news" hysteria, decrying
the influence of social media, the only place where leftwing dissidents have
managed to find a small foothold to promote their politics and counter the
corporate media narrative.
The Guardian has painted social media chiefly as a platform overrun by
Russian trolls, arguing that this should justify ever-tighter restrictions
that have so far curbed critical voices of the dissident left more than the
right.
Heroes of the Neoliberal Order
Equally, The Guardian has made clear who its true heroes are. Certainly not
Corbyn or Assange, who threaten to disrupt the entrenched neoliberal order
that is hurtling us towards climate breakdown and economic collapse.
Its pages, however, are readily available to the latest effort to prop up
the status quo from Tony Blair, the man who led Britain, on false pretenses,
into the largest crime against humanity in living memory - the attack on
Iraq.
That "humanitarian intervention" cost the lives of many hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis and created a vacuum that destabilized much of the
Middle East, sucked in Islamic jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and
contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe that has fueled the resurgence
of the far-right. None of that is discussed in The Guardian or considered
grounds for disqualifying Blair as an arbiter of what is good for Britain
and the world's future.
The Guardian also has an especial soft spot for blogger Elliot Higgins, who,
aided by The Guardian, has shot to unlikely prominence as a self-styled
"weapons expert". Like Luke Harding, Higgins invariably seems ready to echo
whatever the British and American security services need verifying
"independently".
Higgins and his well-staffed website Bellingcat have taken on for themselves
the role of arbiters of truth on many foreign affairs issues, taking a
prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote U.S. and NATO
hegemony while demonizing Russia, especially in highly contested arenas such
as Syria.
That clear partisanship should be no surprise, given that Higgins now enjoys
an "academic" position at, and funding from, the Atlantic Council: a
high-level, Washington-based think-tank founded to drum up support for NATO
and justify its imperialist agenda.
Improbably, The Guardian has adopted Higgins as the poster-boy for a
supposed citizen journalism it has sought to undermine as "fake news"
whenever it occurs on social media without the endorsement of state-backed
organizations.
The truth is The Guardian has not erred in this latest story attacking
Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify him. With this
story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western
foreign policy interests are at stake - it simply regurgitates an
elite-serving, western narrative.
Its job is to shore up a consensus on the left for attacks on leading
threats to the existing, neoliberal order: whether they are a platform like
WikiLeaks promoting whistle-blowing against a corrupt western elite; or a
politician like Corbyn seeking to break apart the status quo on the
rapacious financial industries or Israel-Palestine; a radical leader like
Hugo Chavez who threatened to overturn damaging and exploitative U.S.
dominance of "America's backyard"; or social media dissidents, who've
started to chip away at the elite-friendly narratives of corporate media,
including The Guardian itself.
The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of
evidence. It did what it is designed to do.
This article originally appeared on jonathan-cook.net. Republished with
permission from the author.
Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth. He blogs at
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/.