Tag Archives: The Guardian

The Guardian Could Help Assange By Retracting All The Lies It Published About Him, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on November 30, 2022 | Leave a comment

For unknown reasons, several mainstream media outlets are coming out in support of Julian Assange after years of hostility towards him. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

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.

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The Guardian’s deceit-riddled new statement betrays both Julian Assange and journalism, by Jonathan Cook

Posted on September 27, 2020 | Leave a comment

The Guardian sinks to new lows. From Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.net:

In my recent post on the current hearings at the Old Bailey over Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States, where he would almost certainly be locked away for the rest of his life for the crime of doing journalism, I made two main criticisms of the Guardian.

A decade ago, remember, the newspaper worked closely in collaboration with Assange and Wikileaks to publish the Iraq and Afghan war diaries, which are now the grounds on which the US is basing its case to lock Assange behind bars in a super-max jail.

My first criticism was that the paper had barely bothered to cover the hearing, even though it is the most concerted attack on press freedom in living memory. That position is unconscionably irresponsible, given its own role in publishing the war diaries. But sadly it is not inexplicable. In fact, it is all too easily explained by my second criticism.

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The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Assange for life. Why is the paper so silent? by Jonathan Cook

Posted on September 23, 2020 | 1 comment

The Guardian may be the most execrable major newspaper in the world. From Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.com:

Julian Assange is not on trial simply for his liberty and his life. He is fighting for the right of every journalist to do hard-hitting investigative journalism without fear of arrest and extradition to the United States. Assange faces 175 years in a US super-max prison on the basis of claims by Donald Trump’s administration that his exposure of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to “espionage”.

The charges against Assange rewrite the meaning of “espionage” in unmistakably dangerous ways. Publishing evidence of state crimes, as Assange’s Wikileaks organisation has done, is covered by both free speech and public interest defences. Publishing evidence furnished by whistleblowers is at the heart of any journalism that aspires to hold power to account and in check. Whistleblowers typically emerge in reaction to parts of the executive turning rogue, when the state itself starts breaking its own laws. That is why journalism is protected in the US by the First Amendment. Jettison that and one can no longer claim to live in a free society.

Aware that journalists might understand this threat and rally in solidarity with Assange, US officials initially pretended that they were not seeking to prosecute the Wikileaks founder for journalism – in fact, they denied he was a journalist. That was why they preferred to charge him under the arcane, highly repressive Espionage Act of 1917. The goal was to isolate Assange and persuade other journalists that they would not share his fate.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, History, Intelligence, Law, Media, Military, Morality, Politics

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Advancing Propaganda For Evil Agendas Is The Same As Perpetrating Them Yourself, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on November 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

After relentlessly trashing Julian Assange for years the UK’s Guardian now believes he shouldn’t be extradited to the US. It’s too little, too late. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The Guardian has published an editorial titled “The Guardian view on extraditing Julian Assange: don’t do it”, subtitled “The US case against the WikiLeaks founder is an assault on press freedom and the public’s right to know”. The publication’s editorial board argues that since the Swedish investigation has once again been dropped, the time is now to oppose US extradition for the WikiLeaks founder.

“Sweden’s decision to drop an investigation into a rape allegation against Julian Assange has both illuminated the situation of the WikiLeaks founder and made it more pressing,” the editorial board writes.

Oh okay, now the issue is illuminated and pressing. Not two months ago, when Assange’s ridiculous bail sentence ended and he was still kept in prison explicitly and exclusively because of the US extradition request. Not six months ago, when the US government slammed Assange with 17 charges under the Espionage Act for publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks. Not seven months ago, when Assange was forcibly pried from the Ecuadorian embassy and slapped with the US extradition request. Not any time between his April arrest and his taking political asylum seven years ago, which the Ecuadorian government explicitly granted him because it believed there was a credible threat of US extradition. Not nine years ago when WikiLeaks was warning that the US government was scheming to extradite Assange and prosecute him under the Espionage Act.

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How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper, by Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis

Posted on September 12, 2019 | Leave a comment

MI5 and MI6, the British intelligence services, neutered a once respected newspaper. From Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis dailymaverick.co.za:

The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.

The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillanceoperated by both agencies.

According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.

“This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided engaging with the [committee] before publishing the first tranche of information,” state minutes of a 7 November 2013 meeting at the MOD.

The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small number of journalists are also invited to sit on the committee. Its stated purpose is to “prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations”. It can issue “notices” to the media to encourage them not to publish certain information.

The committee is currently chaired by the MOD’s director-general of security policy Dominic Wilson, who was previously director of security and intelligence in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who describeshimself as an “accomplished, senior ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level leadership”.

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Assange, Attack, Guardian, Journalism, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on August 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

An attack on a reporter is being construed as an attack on journalism, but the reporter in question works for a media organ that used then betrayed Julian Assange, and now won’t life a finger to help him. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

Guardian columnist Owen Jones, a self-described left activist and socialist, was attacked in the streets of London at 2 am Saturday morning in what he himself describes as “a blatant premeditated assault” by a bunch of guys. He says he was kicked, punched, but then saved by the friends he was with, and nothing really happened to him. Or he would have taken photos and published them. Owen was fine, before and after. But his pride was not.

No pictures of black eyes or anything, but a brick load of indignation. No matter that in Britain, people are attacked all the time, certainly at that hour, in bar fights, in knife fights, people die every weekend. But for some reason Owen Jones thinks his role in this is special. That the incident happened because of his political views, and because the far right is getting more aggressive.

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Never, Ever Forget The Guardian/Politico Psyop Against WikiLeaks, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on December 1, 2018 | Leave a comment

The number of people who believe the mainstream media is dwindling, and this latest by The Guardian and Politico will accelerate the process. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

For the first few hours after any new “bombshell” Russiagate story comes out, my social media notifications always light up with poorly written posts by liberal establishment loyalists saying things like “HAHAHA @caitoz this proves you wrong now will you FINALLY stop denying Russian collusion???” Then, when people start actually analyzing that story and noting that it comes nowhere remotely close to proving that Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, those same people always forget to come back afterward and admit to me that they were wrong again.

This happens every single time, including this past Tuesday when the Guardian published a new “bombshell” report saying that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had had secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. When experts all across the political spectrum began pointing out that the story contained no evidence for its nonsensical claims and was entirely anonymously sourced, nobody ever came back and said “Hey sorry for calling you a Russian propagandist, Caitlin; turns out that story wasn’t as fact-based as I’d thought!” When evidence for a single one of the article’s claims failed to turn up for a day, then two days, then three days, nobody came back and said “Gosh Caitlin, I owe you an apology for mocking you and calling you Assange’s bitch; turns out WikiLeaks and Manafort are suing that publication and its claims remain completely unproven.”

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Long-Volatility Fund Manager Slams Media ‘Fake News’: “I Am Not A Bond Villain”, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 14, 2018 | Leave a comment

Anybody who’s ever played craps and won big on a Don’t Pass bet when the rest of the table has their money on Pass knows the kind of glowering resentment, even hatred, the crowd has for those individuals who successfully bet against it. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Chris Cole, Founder and CIO of Artemis Capital, has often been mentioned on this site (“Beware the false calm”, “It’s Not The Everything Bubble, It’s The Global Short Volatility Bubble”, “The Coming Crash Will Be Like 1987…But Worse“, “This Is Just An Appetizer” )

His insights and experience in volatility markets have frequently brought a breath of fresh air (and realism) to a narrative of ‘everything is awesome’ that generally consists of so-called professionals who have lived their trading lives in a “first, put on pants; second, sell vol; third, make money”-world…

That is until last week.

As Cole’s fund, Artemis, weathered the stormy market very well, The Guardian contacted him  – presumably as someone smart to see this debacle coming and profiting from it. The story did not quite come out that way…

All of which prompted Chris to pen a letter to The Guardian and its readers to expose the truth, as he notes “Unfortunately the truth does not sell newspaper, but sensationalism does.”

Dear Guardian Readers and Editor of the Guardian:

I am deeply disappointed in the recent Guardian article, “Making millions from chaos: the fund cashing in on the stock market collapse” by Rupert Neate, highlighting my firm, Artemis Capital Management and myself, Christopher Cole.

With that in mind, let me apologize to the readers of The Guardian for a gross misrepresentation of what my firm does, which runs counter to our values.

The article is an example of sensationalist journalism, where under the guise of a request for market commentary, my comments were quoted in part, rather than taken in context, in order to depict me as a grandiose high stakes gambler. The article fundamentally misunderstands the hedge fund industry, Artemis’s long volatility strategy, and how institutional portfolio management actually works.

To continue reading: Long-Volatility Fund Manager Slams Media ‘Fake News’: “I Am Not A Bond Villain”

 

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