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Sorry, but you've got that the wrong way round. Assange was the one who wanted careful redaction and it was his media partners at the Guardian and Der Spiegel w
by k1m 5y ago
Sorry, but you've got that the wrong way round. Assange was the one who wanted careful redaction and it was his media partners at the Guardian and Der Spiegel who were impatient and wanted to publish early. In the end, it was the recklessness (perhaps malice) of the Guardian journalists which resulted in the unredacted cables being released. They published the password to decrypt the unredacted archives in their book (unbelievable, but true). Jonathan Cook (ex-Guardian) has written about this:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-26/guardian-assange-denial-deceptions/ https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-26/guardian-assan...
> The Guardian book let the cat out of the bag. Once it gave away Assange's password, the Old Bailey hearings have heard, there was no going back.
> Any security service in the world could now unlock the file containing the cables. And as they homed in on where the file was hidden at the end of the summer, Assange was forced into a desperate damage limitation operation. In September 2011 he published the unredacted cables so that anyone named in them would have advance warning and could go into hiding – before any hostile security services came looking for them.
> Yes, Assange published the cables unredacted but he did so – was forced to do so – by the unforgivable actions of Leigh and the Guardian.
Here's another Jonathan Cook article citing people intimately involved with the redaction process which contradicts your version of events:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-22/guardian-silent-assange-trial/ https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2020-09-22/guardian-silen...
> ...Goetz [Der Spiegel], as well as Nicky Hager, an investigative journalist from New Zealand, and Professor John Sloboda, of Iraq Body Count, all of whom worked with Wikileaks to redact names at different times, have testified that Assange was meticulous about the redaction process. Goetz admitted that he had been personally exasperated by the delays imposed by Assange to carry out redactions:
>> At that time, I remember being very, very irritated by the constant, unending reminders by Assange that we needed to be secure, that we needed to encrypt things, that we needed to use encrypted chats. … The amount of precautions around the safety of the material were enormous. I thought it was paranoid and crazy but it later became standard journalistic practice.
> Prof Sloboda noted that, as Goetz had implied in his testimony, the pressure to cut corners on redaction came not from Assange but from Wikileaks' "media partners", who were desperate to get on with publication. One of the most prominent of those partners, of course, was the Guardian. According to the account of proceedings at the Old Bailey by former UK ambassador Craig Murray:
>> Goetz [of Der Spiegel] recalled an email from David Leigh of The Guardian stating that publication of some stories was delayed because of the amount of time WikiLeaks were devoting to the redaction process to get rid of the "bad stuff."
> When confronted by US counsel with Leigh's [Guardian] claim in the book about the restaurant conversation, Hager observed witheringly: "I would not regard that [Leigh and Harding's book] as a reliable source." Under oath, he ascribed Leigh's account of the events of that time to "animosity".
But how many people have heard this version of events from the NYT, The Washington Post, the Guardian or all the other corporate media outlets that have been all to happy to pour scorn on Assange?
- jackthezipper 5y ago>Sorry, but you've got that the wrong way round. Assange was the one who wanted careful redaction and it was his media partners at the Guardian and Der Spiegel who were impatient and wanted to publish early. In the end, it was the recklessness (perhaps malice) of the Guardian journalists which resulted in the unredacted cables being released. They published the password to decrypt the unredacted archives in their book (unbelievable, but true). Thanks for correcting this. It's frustrating how many people get this, and many other so called facts in his case, wrong.
- pessimizer 5y agoIt's not their fault, the US and UK media gloss over the facts whenever they directly report on him, and references to him in editorials or stories about other events refer to the "beliefs" of authority figures and agencies, and the charges, but never directly to specific allegations, facts, or timelines. People have no hope of having an accurate picture of events unless they invest a significant amount of time into something that will not benefit them. Journalists at major outlets are more concerned about the Assange case than their papers, but still have zero chance of getting accurate stories published about it.