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.
Assange and Wikileaks are totally in-the-tank for Putin and Russia…:)
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4196367,00.html
http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/92767,Wikileaks-–-Russia-tried-to-prevent-Kaczynski-landing-in-Smolensk
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2028283,00.html
Mary ;
“Habbabkuk has seamlessly transferred mention of Assange’s extradition to the Richard III thread. Will we all be driven as crazy as he seems to be?
ROFL
And he’s been wanting to discuss the monarchy on this thread. What a twat–he really has his knickers in a twist now.
Villager
I wasn’t hiding behind LBB’s post – just offering my self up as evidence to support why people make assumptions and say things that they shouldn’t. Perhaps you should ponder that thought a little yourself.
I didn’t compare Assange to Saville – I specifically said I didn’t know what Assange’s motivations were – which is the honest answer. The reference to Saville was just to make the point that others in the past got it very wrong when they also made assumptions about people’s assumptions.
Now should we now turn to your various insults and aspersions for which apologies are long overdue…………………
resident dissident, I don’t push the line that:
Syria is just another country in the larger game of the superpowers US and Russia. Look at my map again:
http://www.killick1.plus.com/map.jpg
Between them, the US and Russia have the oil fields surrounded. It is simply inconceivable that the superpowers wouldn’t be competing over Syria. Remember the US alliance with Saudi Arabia, and that Saudi Arabia is funding “rebels” in Syria and supplying them with arms, and that NATO are providing intelligence and support from Turkey. Our governments’ hands are not clean.
Of course there’s internal opposition in Syria. If the UK was a war zone, don’t you think that a fair proportion of the UK population would be trying to oppose the current system? All those people without jobs for years and years, people with sick and disabled relatives forced off of benefits? Remember the poll tax riots? Remember “financial fools day”? Throw in a load of AK47s and foreign forces, and what could it look like. We’re lucky, that’s all.
Russia isn’t islamists; I didn’t consider it relevant. You think the Ruskies were trying to subvert your computer? C’mon!
Actually, it’s not so absurd that any given piece of malware is seeded by Russian forces. US forces are also just as likely. Wikileaks came under DDoS attack – Distributed Denial of Service attack. That is where malware infections on random computers all over the world are remotely directed to constantly request pages from one particular server which is the target.
That it was Wikileaks that came under attack strongly suggests that the US was using such a “botnet” on that occasion. The same method is used for blackmail of commercial websites: “Pay us $xx,xxx and we’ll call off our DDoS”. The Ladbrokes gambling website was hit in this way.
Another reason for infecting people’s computers is to make them host paedophile material and “snuff-movies”, anything so illegal that you can’t host it anywhere. It’s kept on infected machines, makes the hard disk work like crazy.
But I’d put £100 on my assertion that your system was not “targeted” because of the comments you posted. No one cares enough to bother. They just want to pwn your machine so they can sell its services for one of the above uses, or something else.
Abandon M$ Window$; get free GPL software. You’ll be glad you did.
Resident Dissident, 11.02pm
“I aws specifically trying to avoid commenting on the particulars of the case for the reasons I gave earlier – you just don’t hold rape trials in public”
… in fact, you don’t hold them at all if the police find out that someone alleging rape has handed in obviously fake evidence. You turn around – well, to be specific the police turn around – and charge that person instead for the crime of making false allegations.
Or are you saying No, that isn’t how it normally works?
resident dissident, my assertion:
Have you ever seen that in the corporate media?
Russia isn’t islamists; I didn’t consider it relevant.
Neither are the Chinese to whom you also referred. But it is true that Assange’s paymasters are not above a little bit of cyber war is it not? Although they haven’t had a go at my computer yet!
Pity you weren’t around in the days when the non aligned movement was much stronger – in which Sweden was a big player btw – you might understand that the march of empires isn’t as inevitable as you make out.
Your comparison of the position of the opposition in the UK and Syria is rather silly and far fetched I’m afraid – Cameron and their ilk may be bad but they are not that bad – and the opposition can make changes without resorting to civil war.
Clark, 11.35pm
Want to know what Wikileaks suffered its biggest DDOS attack ever for? It was this:
GIF Trapwire release archive mirror 9/8/12:
http://wl.wikileaks-press.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-08-09-2.html
Some background:
Public Intelligence, Unravelling Trapwire, 11/8/12:
https://publicintelligence.net/unravelling-trapwire/
Who We Are page removed from Google:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0pAfaMR-AFEJ:www.trapwire.com/management.html+www.trapwire.com/management.html&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
2/8/12 First Infantry Division, Fort Riley – Trapwire antiterrorism “outreach program”:
http://www.fortrileypost.com/newsdetail.asp?article_id=7266
RT 10/8/12: http://rt.com/usa/news/stratfor-trapwire-abraxas-wikileaks-313/
Pastebin of links to Stratfor docs: http://privatepaste.com/942ba3fa3d/asdasdwqe
Storify article 10/8/12: http://storify.com/bendoernberg/test-post
Wired: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/trapwire-strafor-biz/all/
Res Diss: “Now should we now turn to your various insults and aspersions for which apologies are long overdue…………………”
No, clear up your own admission first.
I observe that Mary hasn’t responded to your apology yet.
There’s something of the night about you, rather like your avatar (i suspect you may be playing around with your email id’s). I still find it weird that you would sneak up behind a lady, refer to her age and be familiar about going ‘soft’ when she doesn’t even know you.
But my key assertion is that you are being disingenuous for reasons stated earlier. Do you admit that the cover you were seeking was an intellectual lie? Which specific part of LBB’s original post were you pleading guilty to? I’d like to see the correlation.
Res Diss: “But it is true that Assange’s paymasters ….”
I note while you have, for now, stopped using the word ‘cult’, it is now Assange’s paymasters. Does your country do trade with Russia?
Resident Dissident, 11.02pm
And, just to be clear, the Swedish police received that DNA forensic report – or should I say that ‘no DNA on this “used” condom’ forensic report? – back from the SKA (Swedish National Forensic Laboratory) on 25 OCTOBER 2010.
So, plenty of time to get those charges for making false allegations processed before bothering the international courts with an EAW warrant for a non-existent crime…
Arbed, corporate intelligence. No surprise there, then. Anyone who think that governments still run the world is behind the times. The USSR fell, and is now run by oligarchs. The USA just dissolved, and hardly anyone noticed.
resident dissident, the questions at 11:37 and 11:45 deserve answers.
Arbed
It is your view that the evidence is obviously fake – that is not the same as saying that it is.
Clark
“But I’d put £100 on my assertion that your system was not “targeted” because of the comments you posted. No one cares enough to bother.”
You could put a £100m on it – but I very much doubt it could be proved either way. I just know where the malware came from after I had posted a typically robust comment – and I obviously destroyed it either way. I still would’nt want to give a group that openly supports fatwas details from which they could trace my identity (or BNP supporters when I attack their racist views from time to time – and they are known to use info gleaned from forums/blogs – look at the Searchlight website) – call me old fashioned and paranoid if you wish. They do change hopw they operate from time to time.
I’m aware of the hosting issue – a friend had that problem – in the end it did so much damage that he had to rewrite his hard disk. I hear what you say about MS – but for the eveyday user escaping really isn’t an option, in addition I fear that I am now hardwired into Word and Excel after what feels like a lifetime of use. The think that really annoys me is how most operating systems and now even hardware seem to have built in obsolescence after 3-5 years – incredibly costly for ordinary users and wasteful of resources.
Hi Lastbluebell sorry to take so long in responding to yours of 7.28.
As you say, i was expanding my experience with this specimen here. A lack of basic grace seems to come naturally to people these days. Standards have fallen and what really bothers me is when you see the inflexibility (not inferiority) of people who are obviously older than you, don’t reflect an ounce of wisdom and have apparently stopped growing, with little hope of the expansion and intellectual maturity you refer to. In other words, eyes widely shut, even towards the twilight of their lives.
I’d like to explore this very interesting subject further with you when the brain/mind are fresher in the morning. Hope that’s okay.
Clark
I’m not in corporate media. Your question at 11:45/11:44. Going to bed and got football tomorrow.
Clark, i’ve lost track, but did Res Diss answer your question of whether if he were in JA’s shoes, he would happily walk out of the Embassy and fly to Sweden, without any assurances re onward rendition/extradition to the US?
tell me if i have it wrong or am missing something, please.
No, I meant, have you ever read that malware is used in that way; have you ever readthat in the corporate media?
I’m here using a machine that’s ten years old, 512 MByte RAM, all runs fine. I can get you off M$. If you trust me, you can e-mail me.
Goodnight, resident dissident.
Villager, no, s/he never answered that. But it opened a good discussion.
Resident dissident is not a shill. Shills don’t want any more publicity for the sort of evidence Arbed has been posting; a shill would have dropped out ages ago.
Resident Dissident, 12.05am
“It is your view that the evidence is obviously fake – that is not the same as saying that it is.”
Do you seriously expect me to let you get away with that when I have already given you – yes, in a post specifically addressed to you – a link to an article with the original – yes, the original Swedish-language leaked police protocol? It’s attached as a pdf to the article below, on page 77 of which you will find the exact page of the forensic report confirming there’s no DNA whatsoever, male OR female, on the condom she handed in to the police.
Oh, that’s right, I forgot – you’ve already explained to me how you only read about a third of my posts. Ok, here’s the link again then. I suggest you do read it this time. Not forcing you to, of course – completely up to you – but a failure to do so will likely mean that nothing you have to say about Assange’s extradition will carry any weight at all with Craig’s readers from now on.
http://wlcentral.org/node/2325
Goodnight Villager.
I think I’ll head for bed, too. Goodnight all.
ResDiss:
“Pity you weren’t around in the days when the non aligned movement was much stronger….” and “….got football tomorrow.’
What OAP Sunday football?
Nothing wrong with it of course, just clarifying….
“you’ve already explained to me how you only read about a third of my posts.”
Arbed; It is a mystery to me why you engage. He moves the goalpost, continually; evidence from my experience, that the purveyor is not an honest broker. Yet you persist. Why?
Thanks Clark, sleep well.
Ben/Arbed
Res Diss for me now is DISHONEST. Its quite clear his credibility here is in tatters.
Ben,
I think Villager has just given you the answer to your question on my behalf.
It’s also a good excuse to feed links to the facts about the Assange/Wikileaks Sweden/US extradition to those of Craig’s readers who are interested in finding out more about them 😉
Arbed @ 12:44
I should have known you were wiser than your years….
‘Pratfall’. 😆
http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/08/please-take-assange-to-stockholm-syndrome
Ms Hynde better batten down the hatches, some of the more rabid followers will have the metaphorical pitchforks out on display this morning about this. I look forward to Mary’s character assassination with anticipation.
Is there anyone out there who still has a modicum of respect left for this ghastly man.
The Guardian find another one of their harpies to join in thr attack on Assange which commences with an odd green and black graphic captioned as
Marina Hyde: ‘The increasingly more credible conspiracy: Julian Assange is a creation of the global right, designed to make the left look ridiculous.’ Illustration: Otto
Please-take-Assange-to-Stockholm syndrome. It’s the diplomat’s diseas
The poor Ecuadorian ambassador. After months with Julian Assange, she’ll have had quite enough of insufferable narcissists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/08/please-take-assange-to-stockholm-syndrome#start-of-comments
Wonder which category her latest oeuvre fits into?
Profile
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist. She currently writes three columns a week for the paper: one general comment, one on sport and one on celebrity
Ooo er, she’s posh but then she married an ex Richard Desmond operative!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Hyde
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/media/news/a283000/bbc-hires-channel-5-exec-kieran-clifton.html