The Guardian hit a new low in Amelia Hill’s report on Julian Assange’s appearance at the Oxford Union. Hill moved beyond propaganda to downright lies.
This is easy to show. Read through Hill’s “report”. Then zip to 20 minutes and 55 seconds of the recording of Assange speaking at the event Hill misreports, and simply listen to the applause from the Oxford Union after Assange stops speaking.
Just that hearty applause is sufficient to show that the entire thrust and argument of Amelia Hill’s article moves beyong distortion or misreprentation – in themselves dreadful sins in a journalist – and into the field of outright lies. Her entire piece is intended to give the impression that the event was a failure and the audience were hostile to Assange. That is completely untrue.
Much of what Hill wrote is not journalism at all. What does this actually mean?
“His critics were reasoned, those who queued for over an hour in the snow to hear him speak were thoughtful. It was Julian Assange – the man at the centre of controversy – who refused to be gracious.”
Hill manages to quote five full sentences of the organiser of the anti-Assange demonstration (which I counted at 37 people) while giving us not one single sentence of Assange’s twenty minute address. Nor a single sentence of Tom Fingar, the senior US security official who was receiving the Sam Adams award. Even more remarkably, all three students Hill could find to interview were hostile to Assange. In a hall of 450 students who applauded Assange enthusiastically and many of whom crowded round to shake my hand after the event, Hill was apparently unable to find a single person who did not share the Rusbridger line on Julian Assange.
Hill is not a journalist – she is a pathetic grovelling lickspittle who should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
Here is the answer to the question about cyber-terrorism of which Amelia Hill writes:
“A question about cyber-terrorism was greeted with verbose warmth”
As you can see, Assange’s answer is serious, detailed, thoughtful and not patronising to the student. Hill’s characterisation – again without giving a word of Assange’s actual answer – is not one that could genuinely be maintained. Can anybody – and I mean this as a real question – can anybody look at that answer and believe that “Verbose warmth” is a fair and reasonable way to communicate what had been said to an audience who had not seen it? Or is it just an appalling piece of hostile propaganda by Hill?
The night before Assange’s contribution at the union, John Bolton had been there as guest speaker. John Bolton is a war criminal whose actions deliberately and directly contributed to the launching of an illegal war which killed hundreds of thousands of people. Yet there had not been one single Oxford student picketing the hosting of John Bolton, and Amelia Hill did not turn up to vilify him. My main contribution to the Sam Adams event was to point to this as an example of the way people are manipulated by the mainstream media into adopting seriously warped moral values.
Amelia Hill is one of the warpers, the distorters of reality. The Guardian calls her a “Special Investigative Correspondent.” She is actually a degraded purveyor of lies on behalf of the establishment. Sickening.
Clark, we’ll never control climate; gross features of planetary atmospheres are electrically controlled by the galactic circuit, through the sun. Weather, now, that’s maybe possible, but local.
http://www.holoscience.com/wp/science-politics-and-global-warming/
It’s even worse than I wrote above – we can’t even control our supposedly democratic governments.
Arbed @ 1:56
“Oxford Union spent two days, according to their own version of the truth, redacting the green screen background to Assange. The background was footage from the famous Collateral Murder video. Oxford Union claimed – falsely – that this footage was the property of the US government. The footage had of course been widely distributed online for over two years. And yet wonder of wonders: with two days work to remove that background, they didn’t attend to the missing audio feed.”
The murder video is what teed Obama off. The diplomatic embarrassments were just window dressing. When ‘National Security’ involves non-disclosure of crimes, or ex-parte communications, it’s time to revise the definition of LAW.
As an aside, Spielbergs movie on Wikileaks should flush out at bevy of hasbara/antisemitic trolls. I look forward to that 🙂
Donald MacDonald, it’s just a matter of scale, and Humanity will get there, 2.9% per year, year after year. That, or we won’t have got far enough by the time a dinosaur-killer asteroid hits Earth, or there’s a nearby supernova, or whatever. Here, check these out, courtesy of Vronsky who comments here occasionally:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/sustainable-means-bunkty-to-me/
What’s the alternative? Take up living in caves and making sacrifices to capricious gods? Why bother with the caves, or even clothes? Bow and arrows, what’s the point? We’ll never control the (pick something big enough).
Clark; All this talk puts a lot of pressure on control-freaks who can’t even control their own behavior. Just stop that. 🙂
@Ben – “I’m not sure if you are making a distinction as to ‘cycles’. What language would you use to describe climactic changes sans human presence?”
I’d just call them changes, unpredictable except perhaps, sometimes, in terms of current trend. ‘Cycles’ implies regularity. I’m opposing the idea that you’ve got this regular pattern and then along comes recent human activity pushing things out of the previous regularity. That’s just not how it’s been.
@Clark “At some point, humanity should learn how to at first influence, and eventually control Earth’s climate.”
I think that’s a mad idea and impossible too.
“Do we really want the next ice-age to happen?”
Yes. And it will happen anyway. Humanity cannot dominate Mother Nature.
“What about the next eruption of one of Earth’s super-volcanos?
Hadn’t heard of supervolcanos before. Seems to be a very recent propaganda term, dating from BBC popularisation about 2000. Are you suggesting neutralising the possibility of big volcano eruptions? Why not just let’s live away from where these might happen? The planet’s a big place.
“The question is how best to achieve climate control. At present we can’t even control our corporations. Most of us have trouble controlling ourselves at times.”
Quite so, except for the ‘our’ bit 🙂 But I don’t think your observations here justify the way you define what the question is.
The whole idea of ‘green’ is ultra-spun; it comes from the ‘corporations’ – which is a mystified term when people say corporations do this or need that…similar to divinities in that sense… (Although no apologies for using the term ‘Mother Nature’ above! Awe of nature if good.)
@Clark – do you propose preventing the next pole-shift? Or how about stopping the Sun from becoming a red giant and destroying the Earth?
Argh, typos!! I meant to type: “Awe of nature is good”, not “Awe of nature if good”.
Would it be feasible to have a ‘preview post’ facility here?
Arbed, thank you for mentioning the connection between the Thomas Quick cases and Borgstrom. Its very important that people understand that, being the person who had the Assange case reopened.
On Rixstep, i’m surprised that he forgot to mention that Assange’s supporters were sitting in the OU house where he received loud applause. That is the best testimony of the evening.
resident dissident
3 Feb, 2013 – 11:19 am
“Funny I didn’t hear your thoughts on the few thousand violations of the UN Charter already carried out by Assad and his thugs.”
If you are hearing other people’s thoughts I advise an appointment with your psychiatrist asap.
Perhaps you meant you haven’t read my views on the subject. Well my views are that Assad must go and a democracy acceptable to the Syrian people should come about. (NB not an installed “democracy” acceptable only to the US and Israel).
I don’t know about “the few thousand violations of the UN Charter”; have you got a list you could post?
I have no doubt that Assad and his military have committed crimes but I doubt they amount to any more than those committed by the rebels and the western false-flag attacks on civilian targets. They should all of course, be held to account.
I criticise all dictatorships and oppressive governments and any criminal activity by governments and that happens to include Israel, the United States and the UK.
President Bashar Assad became the first Syrian leader to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace, accompanied by his wife. He made the Palace courtesy call during his official visit to Britain for talks with Tony Blair.
Are you going to critisise the Queen and Tony Blair?
@Arbed
“Oh dear. You’re a bit late. Andrew Brown has already been outed earlier in this thread as the original source of a rather nasty smear against one of the Swedish witnesses for Assange”
Well having looked through the whole thread (what a depressing exeperience) – I can pretty conclusively say that he wasn’t – though I have taken this tread as not including all the sites to which there may be a link. But of course this sort of half truth and lying is pretty much par for the course for the ends justify the means crowd – if you need proof just have a look at the high priest John Pilger’s home of the whopper column in this week’s New Statesman where he deliver the following choice morsels:
“Unlike China, the US and its allies are prepared to use a degree of violence, as demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Palestine”
Perhaps he should tell that to the Tibetans, or those in Tiannemen Sq or Uighur!
” The Tuaregs whose Berber fighters Ghadaffi had protected”
Well the small Tuareg population in Libya (the numbers in Niger and Mali have always been much more significant) may well have supported Ghadaffi and received protection from him in the end when he was being kicked out – but before that I think “protection” would be something of an exaggeration.
http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?page=search&docid=3df4be5fc&skip=0&query=tuaregs libya
” In effect the mujaheddin of al-Qaeda anb the Taliban were created by the CIA, its Pakistani equivalent, Inter-Services Intelligence and Britain’s MI6″
Although not to deny that those bodies had some role in sustaining the islamofascists – perhaps even they would think that received support from a few local sources to say nothing about religous fundamentalism.
Again and again we see a simplistic view of the world being used to justify lies and half truths. By all means if you just want to speak to people who agree with you carry on – but if you actually want to change things then please realise that a different approach is required.
@Fred “But the Thames freezing is not evidence of long term changes in climate on a global scale.”
There was a Little Ice Age. Its scale was one of centuries. There have been other changes on larger and smaller scales, both locally and globally.
“Water still freezes in winter and the fact the Thames doesn’t freeze now could just as easily be ascribed to changes in the Thames as changes in climate.”
Are you trolling?
“I criticise all dictatorships and oppressive governments and any criminal activity by governments and that happens to include Israel, the United States and the UK.”
Good – very much my viewpoint. The sadness of Syria is that in the absence of the international community as a whole doing something about Assad (and I’m afraid I see each of his murders as a violation of the UN Charter)e.g. the Russians and Chinese could have done a lot more to bring about his demise – then it plays into the hands of others to do the same. One of the biggest tragedies of recent years is that we haven’t done anything to strengthen the multilateral bodies that are meant to stop abuses of the UN Charter.
And yes the UK Government should be more careful whom it wines and dines – but I’m afraid maintaining a dialogue with dictators is still a necessary evil – and isn’t in the same league as arming them or hindering those who are trying to bring about their downfall.
Resident Dissident, 5.46pm
No 17, am I right?
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation: The Gentleperson’s Guide To Forum Spies
If people really want to look at the scientific evidence for man made climate change rather than its natural counterpart might I suggest that they look here
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htme
at least they could then come back and we could have an informed argument above the level of my dad is bigger than yours!
Who left the window open? There seems to be a few flying turds in the room (blog).
N_;
I see your point. But how do we know what period of time encompasses a ‘cycle’.. Weather statistical models are a recent phenomenon.
Wheels within wheels in the Ecosystem makes mathematical computations a difficult operation. Otherwise, why is there so much controversy? The complexity makes it a lot easier for those who see no need for human action, to debunk any attempts to do so.
As to Supervolcanoes, they don’t operate on a human timetable, but they do flare up. It’s only a question of time.
http://www.smashinglists.com/10-most-dangerous-active-volcanoes-on-earth/
Arbed
Yep your original post in response to me was definitely No 17 – very revealing to see your instruction manual. Not that I could ever convince you short of revealing my personal identity – but I’m not here to spy or monitor anyone, but more to see how views are or are not developing in this part of the political spectrum. Once i get bored I’ll return to the Tories/LibDems/religous nutters or other group that takes my preference – I’m just a natural contrarian who prefers to largely develop my own views by those with whom I disagree.
Resident Dissident, 6.22pm
No 5, if I’m not mistaken.
Tell me, what is it exactly that’s your beef with me sharing with readers of Craig’s blog my knowledge about the Swedish investigation and the Guardian’s long-running campaign to smear Assange concerning it? Because I haven’t deviated from that topic at all. I picked up on your post because you directly referred to the Guardian’s Sweden-based religious correspondent, Andrew Brown, whom I happened to know played a very large part in the transfer of the Swedish MSM smear campaign across into the English-language press via that newspaper. Any particular reason you’re determined to knock down all the links and evidence I’ve supplied here on the matter?
resident dissident, 3 Feb, 6:09 pm; I think you meant this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm
N_, I really suggest you read my Monbiot link. Look, climate science is a huge topic, it’s bound to submerge any discussion about Assange and the Guardian’s obvious smear campaign against him. And if you’re really so enthralled about letting Mother Nature have her way, why on Earth are you using the Internet? Surely, shouting distance is all we’re allowed. No, don’t answer that…
N_
3 Feb, 2013 – 12:14 pm
“They are already telling lies with statistics as usual, by calculating an ‘average’ temperature in a deliberately misleading way so as to pretend that the recent rising trend is completely unprecedented in its scale from anything that has happened before.”
N… It is precisely because ‘they’ use average temperatures that the trend upwards becomes noticeable. This is about science not bullshit.
Also you say:
“Statement 2 is that the change in the climate is caused by human activity. That is a completely different statement. It is being purveyed using enormous propaganda, with the message that ‘we’ve all got to tighten our belts’, enabling huge cost-cutting by the boss class.”
This is idiotic!
It is the “boss class”, the bankers the corporations etc. that are the main climate change deniers; they are not pushing for climate change action they are pushing, through propaganda, climate change denial so they can continue to reap profits at the expense of the planet and the poor.
Most of the dictators in the world have been created and sustained by the West. That’s the whole point.
Whenever the people of a country managed to get a decent leader the West intervened and organised a coup putting back in place a dictator. The West simply found its interests better served by a corrupt dictator than someone who had an interest in their country. The resources of the country were easier to plunder and exploit, by bribing the corrupt dictator.
So, there’s little point anyone criticising dictators without criticising the West that puts them into and sustains them in power.
The other trick the West is pulling these days is destabilising countries, breaking them into their component tribal groups and undermining their power to act as a stable unit.
Clark, that wasn’t even an answer. You didn’t read the link?
I’ve been studying this problem for over thirty years. The sun is externally, electrically powered. The galaxy is externally, electrically powered. All galaxies are connected to the universal circuit. We have no idea where the power originates, or where it goes.
Why do the outermost planets have the most dynamic atmospheres, when they receive minute amounts of solar energy? Why is Mars warming?
The truth is out there. But you won’t find it in ‘climate science’, whatever that is.
resident dissident
3 Feb, 2013 – 6:00 pm
You say:
“The sadness of Syria is that in the absence of the international community as a whole doing something about Assad (and I’m afraid I see each of his murders as a violation of the UN Charter)…”
What about the sadness of the international community (who they?) for not doing anything about Israeli violations of the UN Charter; or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or many other states?
You say:
“And yes the UK Government should be more careful whom it wines and dines – but I’m afraid maintaining a dialogue with dictators is still a necessary evil – and isn’t in the same league as arming them or hindering those who are trying to bring about their downfall.”
You think that dictators having tea with the queen “…isn’t in the same league as arming them..”
We do arm them as I’m sure you really know.
Dialogue with dictators may be a necessary evil in the world of politics but that should be through diplomatic channels not bun fights at Buckingham Palace.
“There was a Little Ice Age. Its scale was one of centuries. There have been other changes on larger and smaller scales, both locally and globally.”
The Little Ice Age wasn’t an ice age, not even a little one. There was a period of time when average temperatures were a bit cooler than they are now. It was relatively warm at the start of the first millennium then temperatures gradually fell till the last hundred years or so when they rose sharply. At no time were there glaciers covering Britain, winters were a bit more severe, that’s all.
“Are you trolling?”
Oh dear, cogitative dissonance kicking in, the facts don’t match your beliefs so you try to find a way to explain it.
Look in those days the Thames was very wide, very shallow and slow moving. They built embankments and dredged it, rebuilt London Bridge, it is a lot deeper and faster now than it was in the days it froze.
Donald MacDonald, my 4:44 pm comment was an answer to your 4:27 pm assertion that “we’ll never control climate”; if humanity continue to increase our energy production at 2.9% per year, we’ll be manipulating energy on a galactic scale in less than 2500 years, so controlling a planetary climate would be child’s play. Personally, I think that is unlikely, due to political rather than physical problems.
I have scan-read your link and sampled the site, and found that it contains an entirely “alternative” cosmology and total denial of mainstream science, though strangely, I found no mathematically developed theory! Discussing it here would be entirely off-topic, as is climate change. You could e-mail me or direct me to a place where it would be on-topic, but you’ll need something really convincing to get me to take it with any seriousness, as I’m reasonably familiar with the way that mainstream theory fits together.
“Dictators having tea with the queen” – I seem to remember the King of Saudi Arabia visiting the Queen of England shortly after Phony Blair stopped the fraud investigation into British Aerospace corruption in supplying arms to his regime. And brutal King Saud said, in the finest tradition of extortion-racketeers, how wise Her Majesty’s Government’s decision had been, as the UK really didn’t need any more terrorist attacks.
This from the king of the country which exports more Islamist terrorism than anywhere else…
“I’d just call them changes, unpredictable except perhaps, sometimes, in terms of current trend. ‘Cycles’ implies regularity. I’m opposing the idea that you’ve got this regular pattern and then along comes recent human activity pushing things out of the previous regularity. That’s just not how it’s been.”
What about the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation or the solar activity cycle? Both quite short but there will be years when their effect can be combined and others where they cancel each other out which leads to a longer and more complex cycle. Then factor in all the other cycles that affect our climate, like the 40.000 year wobble in the tilt of the earth’s axis.
Of course there are cycles, summer and winter are cycles.
“What about the sadness of the international community (who they?) for not doing anything about Israeli violations of the UN Charter; or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or many other states?”
Absolutely – perhaps one condition of the UN being able to deal effectively with breaches of its Charter is consistency with how it deals with those breaches. Lets not pretend that the US/Israel/UK are the only offenders.
“We do arm them as I’m sure you really know.” Yes but with Syria – the main supplier of arms is Russia.
“Dialogue with dictators may be a necessary evil in the world of politics but that should be through diplomatic channels not bun fights at Buckingham Palace.”
I agree and I thought that was what I said.
Clark @ 8:11
That’s even worse than Thatcher greeting and entertaining Pinochet.