Please Sign and SHARE Our Letter to the Guardian – Why Did The Guardian Fail to Cover the Extradition Proceedings of Julian Assange in September Despite Profiting From Wikileaks Scoops?
For 4 weeks extradition proceedings against Julian Assange were heard in front of biased Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assange was barely able to hear or talk with his lawyers. He is incarcerated in Belmarsh, Britain’s Guantanamo for the ‘crime’ of having revealed some of the war crimes of the United States in Iraq and elsewhere.
To this day the Guardian is profiting from Julian Assange and Wikileaks revelations.
Yet despite this reporters viciously attacked someone unable to defend himself. In 2010 it ran a series of front page scoops based on Wikileaks yet it failed to give any support to Julian Assange when the United States conspired, via Swedish, to secure Assange’s extradition.
Suzannah Moore applied all her wit and charm in a tweet (since deleted!) which called him a ‘flattened guinea pig’ (presumably she had sat on it first!) and followed this up by calling him a ‘massive turd’
Moore is not the only one. Luke Harding and David Leigh profited with Wikileaks, a book based on Assange's revelations. They also disclosed a password given in confidence, thus endangering informants. Something which Assange is now being accused of. Harding and Leigh not only have given him no support David Leigh has lied when accusing Assange of not caring less if his revelations led to people being hurt.
Perhaps the foulest of the Guardian stable is James Ball who declared that ‘The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride’. Ball assured his readers that ‘The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US.’
Even the more 'radical' Guardian Columnists such as Owen Jones & George Monbiot have kept silent.
That is why together with other supporters I am circulating a letter to the Guardian. If they refuse to print it, as is likely, we will publish it as an Open Letter.
I am asking you not only to sign it here but to share it on social media, with your friends and colleagues. Assange has already spent more than a year in solitary confinement. It isn’t asking a lot for you to sign the letter and distribute it. We want to get 1,000 signatures before sending it off. Please help us.
If you can’t navigate your way to the letter, then please send me an email at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com with your name, email address and phone number. The reason for the latter is that the Guardian, in an effort to discourage letters like this stipulates that all signatories to mass letters must given their phone numbers.
See my blog for the full story plus Jonathan Cook’s article The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Assange for life. Why is the paper so silent?
Many thanks,
Tony Greenstein