thiscantbehappening | While I periodically have written commentaries dissecting and pillorying news articles in the New York Times
to expose their bias, hypocrisy half-truths and lies, I generally
ignore their editorials since these are overtly opinions of the
management, and one expects them to display the elitist and neo-liberal
perspective of the paper’s publisher and senior editors.
That said, the August 17 editorial about Wikileaks founder
Julian Assange, who has spent four harrowing years trapped in the
apartment-sized Ecuadoran embassy thanks to a trumped-up and thoroughly
discredited political rape “investigation” by a politically driven
Swedish prosecutor and a complicit right-wing British government, moves
far beyond even the routine rampant bias and distortion of a Times editorial into misrepresentation and character assassination. As such it cries out for criticism.
Headlined “A Break in the Assange Saga,” the editorial starts off
with the flat-out lie that “Ecuador and Sweden finally agreed last week
that Swedish prosecutors could question Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean
Embassy in London where he has been holed up since 2012.”
The casual reader fed only corporate media stories about this case
might logically assume from that lead that such an interview has been
held up by a disagreement of some kind between Ecuador and Sweden. In
fact, Ecuador and Assange and his attorneys have stated their
willingness to allow Swedish prosecutors to come to London and interview
Assange in the safety of their embassy for several years now. The
prosecutor in Sweden, Marianne Nye, who has been pursuing Assange all
that time like Ahab after his whale, has not only never taken up that
offer, but by her refusal to go to London in all this time, demanding
instead Assange’s enforced presence in Stockholm, has allowed any
possible rape charges, if any were even appropriate, to pass the statute
of limitations. The paper doesn’t mention this. Nor does the editorial
mention that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detention last February found
that Assange is effectively being held in arbitrary detention by the UK
and Swedish governments, and called for his release, and for the lifting
of British government threats to arrest him and extradite him if he
leaves the safety of the embassy.
