In an interview with Sputnik, former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa refuted as "lies" media reports claiming he confirmed that Quito was aware of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's attempts to interfere in US elections from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and had prevented him from doing so. He attributed misinterpreting of his quotes to deliberately misleading editing by the journalists.
Don Debar, a political analyst and host of the syndicated daily radio newscast CPR News in the US has commented on CNN's report as Assange is facing possible extradition to the United States, where he will face up to 175 years in US jail for publishing a large number of classified documents exposing US abuses of power and war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sputnik: Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa Tuesday claimed that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange meddled in the 2016 US presidential elections during his stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. What do you make of the timing of this statement?
Don Debar: It's clearly timed to deal with the timeline of the unraveling of the Russiagate narrative and the processing of Assange's case in the UK, to enable a modified narrative of external theft of the election as the case for the original claim dissolves and the prosecution of Assange begins. A conviction of Assange of some elements of Russiagate would counter, politically and legally, the recent judicial order to stop lying about it.
Sputnik: In your view, what actually is behind this “exposé” interview in light of President Correa providing asylum for Assange for so many years?
Don Debar: I suspect it is part of a coordinate PR campaign to rescue the Russiagate narrative and re-weaponise it for the 2020 election.
A caveat - I distrust anything that comes to me through CNN. Simply put, much of their content contains outright lies and/or misrepresentations of fact. So I am unsure of any claimed "facts" that come through that source without viewing the actual raw video or other source material.
However, granting that former President Correa did, in fact, make these statements, there are a number of issues to consider.
First, while he was president of Ecuador, he was willing to extend asylum to Julian Assange, thereby risking the wrath of the United States, something very few others were willing to do. Certainly, Ecuador was under no obligation to also operate as a base of operations for anyone, including Wikileaks, from its embassy.
Nevertheless, the foundational accusation here is that Assange, by disclosing the misdeeds of Hillary Clinton, was under some obligation to also disclose, according to some unknown formula, an equivalent quantity of misdeeds of Donald Trump. Of course, no such obligation exists, which assumes that there even existed somewhere a record of such equivalent misdeeds, or a way of calculating their "equivalency".
But forgetting all of that, one must look simply to CNN for the quantity of air time devoted to the alleged and real misdeeds of Trump that it published during the campaign, as opposed to the actual record of misdeeds by Clinton that it published, and then apply that same standard across the entire narrow-band of the spectrum of US media, from Fox, CNN and MSNBC to NPR, PBS and Democracy Now.
Trump faced a barrage of media attacks unseen in human history for almost a year prior to the election, an attack which, by the way, continues to this moment. Assange's work, seen within the context of the whole of the US media, still leaves a media mixture that was heavily balanced in favor of Clinton, and remains so.
Sputnik: In your view, what goals does CNN want to achieve by quoting such unpublished documents?
Don Debar: Given their record over the past years, I can only assume it is to prove that which cannot be proven with facts alone.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect Sputnik's position.
