During an interview with Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday night, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asserted: “We have the trust of our sources, we have the trust of our readers, having never got it wrong.”
“This is an important point,” Hannity interjected. “Not one evidence [sic] where you’ve been proven wrong.”
“Not even one sustained allegation,” Assange replied. “We have a perfect record in relation to authenticating the material that we publish. That’s a very valuable reputation to have.”
But in 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks released a video that wrongly portayed U.S. soldiers in Iraq as murderers. As Bill Roggio wrote at THE WEEKLY STANDARD at the time: “Wikileaks, the website devoted to publishing classified documents on the Internet, made a splash today with a video claiming to show that the U.S. military ‘murdered’ a Reuters cameraman and other Iraqi ‘civilians’ in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. But a careful watching of the video shows that the U.S. helicopter gun crews that attacked a group of armed men in the then Mahdi Army stronghold of New Baghdad was anything but ‘Collateral Murder,’ as Wikileaks describes the incident.”
The WikiLeaks video focuses on the deaths of two cameramen, whose cameras are mistaken for weapons by U.S. troops, but, as Roggio noted, “several of the men are clearly armed with assault rifles; one appears to have an RPG. Wikileaks purposely chooses not to identify them, but instead focuses on the Reuters cameraman. Why?” The most obvious answer is that the video was a work of dishonest propaganda intended to smear U.S. troops as murderers. Julian Assange is named “producer” and “creative director” in the video’s credits.
So perhaps certain politicians and TV personalities shouldn’t be so credulous of Assange’s claim that Russia or anyone associated with Russia was not the source of hacked DNC and Clinton campaign emails. In 2010, Assange said that “WikiLeaks technology [was] designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never know the identities or names of people submitting us material.” Why is Assange now so confident that Russia had nothing to do with the hacking of U.S. campaign workers’ emails?
