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Clinton, Assange and the war on truth

Australia’s public broadcasting network gave Hillary Clinton an open mike to defame WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange as “a tool of Russian intelligence” without giving him a chance to respond.

by John Pilger

Part 2 - Smear and Omission

The ABC Australia interview with Clinton is an outstanding example of smear and censorship by omission. I would say it is a model.

No one,” the interviewer, Sarah Ferguson, says to Clinton, “could fail to be moved by the pain on your face at that moment [of the inauguration of Trump] … Do you remember how visceral it was for you?

Having established Clinton’s visceral suffering, Ferguson asks about “Russia’s role.”

CLINTON: I think Russia affected the perceptions and views of millions of voters, we now know. I think that their intention coming from the very top with Putin was to hurt me and to help Trump.

FERGUSON: How much of that was a personal vendetta by Vladimir Putin against you?

CLINTON: … I mean he wants to destabilize democracy. He wants to undermine America, he wants to go after the Atlantic Alliance and we consider Australia kind of a … an extension of that …

(The opposite is true. It is a combination of Western armies massing on Russia’s border for the first time since the Russian Revolution 100 years ago.)

FERGUSON: How much damage did [Julian Assange] do personally to you?

CLINTON: Well, I had a lot of history with him because I was Secretary of State when, ah, WikiLeaks published a lot of very sensitive, ah, information from our State Department and our Defense Department.

(What Clinton fails to say – and her interviewer fails to remind her – is that in 2010, WikiLeaks revealed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the United Nations leadership, including the Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon and the permanent Security Council representatives from China, Russia, France and the U.K. A classified directive, signed by Clinton, was issued to U.S. diplomats in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top U.N. officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks. This was known as Cablegate. It was lawless spying.)

CLINTON: He [Assange] is very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence. And, ah, he has done their bidding.

(Clinton offered no evidence to back up this serious accusation, nor did Ferguson challenge her.)

CLINTON: You don’t see damaging negative information coming out about the Kremlin on WikiLeaks. You didn’t see any of that published.

(This was false. WikiLeaks has published a massive number of documents on Russia – more than 800,000, most of them critical, many of them used in books and as evidence in court cases.)

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