Craig Murray: The Power of Lies
The comments on Peter Oborne’s excellent article on Julian Assange in The Guardian on May 20 are a damning indictment of the media’s ability to instill near universal acceptance of “facts” which are easily proven lies. The Guardian chose a comment full of these entirely untrue assertions as its “Guardian pick” to head the section:
If you look through all the comments, they repeat again and again that Wikileaks published un-redacted documents, including names of U.S. agents, which put lives at risk. The entire basis of most of the comments is simply untrue – and none of the readers seems to have any information to contradict them. Julian Assange has never said that governments should have no secrets. That would be a ridiculous position and clearly some information held by government is rightly confidential. He has said that governments should be very much more open to the public, and that most government secrecy is unjustified.
If you look through all the comments, they repeat again and again that Wikileaks published un-redacted documents, including names of U.S. agents, which put lives at risk. The entire basis of most of the comments is simply untrue – and none of the readers seems to have any information to contradict them. Julian Assange has never said that governments should have no secrets. That would be a ridiculous position and clearly some information held by government is rightly confidential. He has said that governments should be very much more open to the public, and that most government secrecy is unjustified.
Nor has Wikileaks ever dumped data unread and unedited onto the internet. The commenter is correct to say that Wikileaks has shared editing responsibilities with organisations including The Guardian and The New York Times. This is precisely because the material needs to be edited to avoid revealing inappropriate material, and to make journalistic decisions on what to write stories about. The notion that Assange was “lazy” because he did not read all the material and do all the editing himself is self-evidently ridiculous.
https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/03/craig-murray-the-power-of-lies/
Alexandre Koyré
The Political Function of the Modern Lie
The Broken Middle
- on the 30th anniversary of 1984
Some information
for Israelis (and the rest of us)
