Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department had secretly filed criminal charges against Assange.
Heavy surveillance
The problem for the Guardian, which should have been obvious to its editors from the outset, is that any visits by Manafort would be easily verifiable without relying on unnamed "sources."
Glenn Greenwald is far from alone in noting that London is possibly the most surveilled city in the world, with CCTV cameras everywhere. The environs of the Ecuadorian embassy are monitored especially heavily, with continuous filming by the UK and Ecuadorian authorities and most likely by the US and other actors with an interest in Assange's fate.
The idea that Manafort or "Russians" could have wandered into the embassy to meet Assange even once without their trail, entry and meeting being intimately scrutinized and recorded is simply preposterous.
According to Greenwald: "If Paul Manafort ... visited Assange at the Embassy, there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none of that."
Former British ambassador Craig Murray also points out the extensive security checks insisted on by the embassy to which any visitor to Assange must submit. Any visits by Manafort would have been logged.
In fact, the Guardian obtained the embassy's logs in May, and has never made any mention of either Manafort or "Russians" being identified in them. It did not refer to the logs in its latest story.
Murray:
"The problem with this latest fabrication is that [Ecuador's President] Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these 'Russians' are in the visitor logs ... What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore, it is impossible that the intelligence agency -- who were in charge of the security -- would not know the identity of these alleged 'Russians'."
No fact-checking
It is worth noting it should be vitally important for a serious publication like the Guardian to ensure its claims are unassailably true -- both because Assange's personal fate rests on their veracity, and because, even more importantly, a fundamental right, the freedom of the press, is at stake.
Given this, one would have expected the Guardian's editors to have insisted on the most stringent checks imaginable before going to press with Harding's story. At a very minimum, they should have sought out a response from Assange and Manafort before publication. Neither precaution was taken.
I worked for the Guardian for a number of years, and know well the layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.
And yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.
That at the very least hints that the Guardian thought they had "insurance" on this story. And the only people who could have promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence services -- presumably of Britain, the United States and/or Ecuador.
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