The actions of the Guardian in complying with the demands of the security services to destroy the computers containing Snowden’s revelations were cowardly in the extreme. There was a principle at stake here. The existence of other copies elsewhere is not the point. That does not make the hard drive destruction better, any more than Nazi book-burning was made OK by the existence of other copies of the books.
Freedom of the press has only ever been won by extremely brave journalists willing to be beaten, imprisoned or jailed for it. If editors had always given in to legal threat, there would be no freedom of the press now. That is why the Guardian’s pathetic excuse that it was legally compelled to destroy the hard drives is of the essence. States always have the sanction of law: standing to advance freedom has always meant not being intimidated by law.
I was threatened with the Official Secrets Act if I insisted on exposing the use of intelligence from torture. I considered and decided it was worth going to jail for. I published. Jack Straw backed down. The difference between Alan Rusbridger and I is that one of us is not an abject sniveling coward.*
The Guardian not only destroyed the Snowden hard drives, but spent an entire month hiding the fact from the public. They only came clean and published after the arrest of David Miranda led Glenn Greenwald to refuse to keep it quiet any longer. Remember this is the same newspaper which sent the young and extremely brave whistleblower Sarah Tisdall to prison rather than protect their source.
Now Rusbridger p0ses as though smashing the computers was an act of defiance. I couldn’t resist a comment on this appalling piece of hypocrisy in the Guardian thread below that link.
Then something extraordinary happened. A reply defending the Guardian was posted to my comment, and this reply extremely quickly gathered 232 recommends. Now the next highest number of recommends for any comment on that thread is just 57. That 57 recommend comment is on the main subject of the article – the fall in the UK’s rating for freedom of the press. My comment is tangential to the article, and the reply to it is somewhat banal. The vastly disproportionate “recommends” for that reply are as believable as the 97% vote in the Crimea!
There was a time when the Guardian was something more than just another neo-con mouthpiece. Now its business model depends entirely on racking up internet clicks in the United States and this influences its content. It has run, for example, over two dozen extremely one-sided articles in praise of the vicious American murderess Amanda Knox. It seems increasingly devoted to Israel. I was at the time genuinely shocked by The Guardian’s refusal to publish the true facts of all the meetings between Liam Fox, Matthew Gould and Adam Werritty.
I understand now that Rusbridger is entirely a neo-con tool, and that their efforts with Assange, Snowden and Greenwald were no more than control and channeling, and broke down when that became obvious.
*There are other differences. I don’t wear a wig, and I was not implicated in promoting and defending Tony Blair.
Or perhaps because she is evil.
She lied continually and attempted to frame that black bar owner with the crime. Do you deny that Carlyle?
Evil is more descriptive of States who allow double-jeopardy, Craig.
Italy’s justice system; Patriarchy.
https://wcd.coe.int/com.instranet.InstraServlet?command=com.instranet.CmdBlobGet&InstranetImage=2143096&SecMode=1&DocId=1926434&Usage=2
My story is trivial compared to Snowsen etc…..
But I made a post early this morning on the Guardian’s article about press freedom.
I “criticised” the Guardian coverage of Scottish independence by posting a list of
48 of their OWN recent headlines which were basically pro-union fearmongering.
I’d only just read a post by another CiFer saying that anyone making claims of their pro-YES posts
being removed by the Guardian should take a screenshot before it gets deleted – so I did……..
…the links below are of my post before it was removed –
http://imgur.com/u6q3PEP
http://imgur.com/g253zUq
fandanfan; New thread on that subject.
Craig you clearly have not read the evidence in the Knox case, most people who have are convinced of her innocence although there are many who believe the prosecution case but I would assume they have not studied the evidence in any great detail. Your comment about her many lies is rubbish, she has maintained her version of events throughout and the “framing” of Lumumba was at the suggestion of the prosecution under interrogation. An interrogation that was deemed inadmissable due to it not being recorded and Knox having no legal representation. Despite being inadmissable the interrogation has been the main piece of evidence used against her. I for one am glad that there is a British paper willing to report the truth about this case.
@
Ben-LA PACQUTE LO ES TODO
Sorry,do you mean I should have posted this somewhere else?
The only other thread I noticed was on the BBC and “No Borders”?
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/30/sinn-fein-leader-gerry-adams-arrested-connection-with-ira-murder/xUrADTJZCIhQMZSExLiAlM/story.html
It’s a more active thread. Fan.
Sorry. correct link here…http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/05/bbc-propaganda-hits-new-all-time-low/
@
Ben-LA PACQUTE LO ES TODO
That’s an article on Gerry Adams – I don’t see anything on the Boston Globe page relating to
either the Guardian or to MSM bias is the Scottish independence debate?
“She lied continually and attempted to frame that black bar owner with the crime. Do you deny that Carlyle?”
Craig.
Yes I do deny that.
There are interviews intended to get information and there are abusive and coercive interrogations intended to end in confession. Amanda Knox was subjected to one of the latter type. It is obvious that many police believe that there is a level of pressure that will convince a guilty person to confess but will not result in a false confession. In fact there is no such level, if you apply enough pressure for as long as it takes one will usually get a confession including from innocent persons.
25% of the convictions in the US overturned by reanalysis of DNA evidence after DNA technology improved involved the accused confessing or making incriminating admissions and recently estimates of the rate at which innocents receive the death penalty in the US exceed 4%, that is more than 1 in 25.
I suggest that you read former FBI agent Steve Moore’s analysis of the interrogation. False confessions happen and they happen a lot more frequently than respectable people believe is possible.
It is normal for interrogations of murder suspects in Italy to be videoed and be done in the presence of the suspect’s lawyer, neither was true for this “interview” with Knox. The high court thus ruled that the “confession” that it yielded was not admissible in the murder trial, but there was a loophole that allowed the Perugia police to introduce it anyway. The murder trial was run in parallel with civil defamation case against Knox by Patrick Lumumba and the “confession” was allowed in for that, do you really believe that the judge and jury could exclude the confession from their minds for the murder case?
“She attempted to frame the black bar owner with the crime”.
This I believe is the most quoted piece of “evidence” for Knox’s guilt. Read about the coerced confession and you will see that the confession that the police wanted was one implicating Patrick Lumumba so they could arrest him. The police had come to suspect Lumumba because of their misinterpretation of a text message exchange between Lumumba and Knox on Knox’s phone and because some characteristic African hairs had been found in Meredith Kercher’s room. Lumumba had sent Knox a text message saying that she was not needed at his cafe that night. Knox replied with the English/American phrase “see you later” translated word for word into Italian. In English “see you later” means the same as “goodbye” but in Italian the word for word translation means an agreement to actually meet later. Because of this the police badgered Knox until she recovered the desired memory of being in the house while Patrick Lumumba murdered a screaming Kercher. Once she was out of the intense environment of the interrogation she made several attempts to retract the “confession” all of which were ignored until the police learned that Lumumba had an unbreakable alabi, then the confession to what the police wanted her to confess morphed into the framing of an innocent man.
Initially when Lumumba described his time in police custody he described illegal coercive techniques including beatings. One would therefore think that he should understand that Knox’s “confession” might have been coerced however he soon decided that it was more in his interests to join Perugia authorities in railroading Knox.
“She lied continually”.
“Continually” is a misleading word intended to overemphasize the quantity of lies, the correct expression would be “several times”. This is another result of the coercive questioning. When one intends to elicit a confession regardless of the truth one does not allow the suspect time to think before answering, one instead tries to keep her flustered and confused so that she loses contact with his memory of what happened and ends up contradicting herself.
On your general drift re the Guardian – just check out the free rein given to the semi-racist (anti-Scottish) cartoons of Steve Bell. His last effort, last Tuesday, was mismatched with a front page supposedly fulminating against the racist attitudes of UKIP. The contrast would have been funny – only it wasn’t. It ended my readership of 41 years.
Craig.
What happened to all the comments? A couple of hours ago this post had 202 comments but now when I checked it there were only 42.
You should have your webmaster check whether there is something wrong.
Craig.
Ignore my previous post of 10:30am. I had confused the comment count of this thread with that of the next thread.
It was a good post by Craig except for the reference to Amanda Knox being a vicious murderess. I’ve read and heard about the case and all those accounts appear to be convoluted and incoherent. Early reports of the prosecution presenting a bizarre sex-game-gone-wrong scenario were so ridiculous that I could not take the case against Knox seriously.
I have also seen how dependent the prosecution case is on DNA evidence and the dubious theories on how that DNA was rendered on physical evidence. You don’t need to be an expert on DNA to understand that everything that you touch will directly and *indirectly* leave traces on all sorts of things with absolutely no sinister explanations. And the same can be said for hair samples and fingerprints. Invariably, a scenario is constructed to make the evidence fit and exculpatory evidence ommitted or dismissed. And such a scenario that ties all the evidence together sounds more plausible than a collection of boring, isolated scenarios that individually do not fit in with any larger picture that delivers what people are seeking.
I would appreciate a good link to a resource that provides objective details on the case.
Some good comments from Carlyle Moulton.