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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