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
Part
1
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.
Source,
links:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/03/the-guardians-vilification-of-julian-assange/
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