Op-Ed: Et Tu, The Intercept? Smear Of Assange Murderously Timed

by Elizabeth Vos, Disobedient Media:

Less than 48 hours after a UK judge ruled against Julian Assange’s legal team in their efforts to free him from the Ecuadoran embassy, The Intercept published a disingenuous and sloppy character assassination against the Wikileaks Editor-In-Chief.

The timing of the article’s publication acted to brutally counter growing support for Assange that arose in the wake of a clearly unjust UK ruling. Essentially, the publication of the smear attempted to deflect attention from the revelation of corruption in the ongoing detention of Assange, and to assassinate his character in the process.

The Intercept’s decision to publish the article at such a time unfortunately serves to characterize the outlet as a servant of the same US deep state that The Intercept has gained a reputation for – at least in theory – opposing.

The serious errors contained in The Intercept’s character assassination of the Wikileaks co-founder were quickly dismantled earlier today by independent journalists including Suzie Dawson, Caitlin Johnstone, HA Goodman and others. That Micah Lee, who has engaged in continual attacks against Assange on social media, would be allowed to contribute to an article of this kind represents a fundamental conflict of interest in the work, not to mention the factual inaccuracies and assumptions it makes without so much as pausing to take a breath.

The claims made in The Intercept’s hit piece regarding messages sent privately by Wikileaks’ Twitter account were disingenuous on multiple levels, beginning with the  assumption that Assange was the sole author of the texts. The inference is clearly stated in the article, destroying any shred of journalistic integrity that might be expected from a well-respected news outlet.

Assange addressed the intentional inaccuracy of The Intercept’s coverage of the messages:

- the article changes the context of its quotes even compared to the clearly highly selective claimed excerpts Lee placed on Document Cloud: https://t.co/1p9wmyhYnJ

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) 14 February 2018

Given the premise that The Intercept’s smear aimed at Assange was integrally flawed, the most important aspect of the publication in the mind of this author is that it came just over 24 hours after a critical ruling was made by a UK magistrate that upheld an arrest warrant against Assange. In light of this context, the importance of the Intercept’s smear piece is what it was meant to distract from.

As Disobedient Media previously reported, UK magistrate Baroness Emma Arbuthnot, ruled against Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange when she upheld an arrest warrant against him yesterday. Arbuthnot is intimately linked to the interests of the same military industrial complex whose wrongdoings have been so thoroughly exposed by Wikileaks.

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