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In an “explosive article by Australian Journalist Mark Davis he shares the fact that both the Guardian and the New York Times set up Wikileaks and Assange to take the fallout from the Afghan files. Watch the video here on CNLive.

On Friday, the World Socialist Web Site reported what should have been front page news across the globe: revelations that Assange was “set up” by his erstwhile “media partners” at the New York Times and Guardian over publication of the Afghan War Logs in 2010.

The source of these revelations is award-winning Australian journalist Mark Davis.

Davis was with Assange at the Guardian’s “bunker” in the lead-up to publication of the Afghan War Logs in July 2010. Last week he spoke in Australia at an event hosted by Politics in the Pub.

Davis’s eyewitness account includes the following:

The New York Times and Guardian claimed to be “media partners” with Assange, promising simultaneous publication, but later pressured him to publish the Afghan War Logs first, effectively “pushing Julian out to walk the plank”.

WikiLeaks was unable to publish first, due to technical issues, but the New York Times deliberately lied in its coverage, saying that WikiLeaks had already published. This duplicitous claim was made to shield themselves from any legal fallout. WikiLeaks did not publish until two days later.

The Guardian provided a technical team to transform the raw data from the Afghan War Logs into a searchable database on the WikiLeaks website. In other words, they were the primary publishers, along with the New York Times.

The Guardian and New York Times later smeared Assange as a “hacker”, but in 2010 “they were in awe of him” and “treated him as an equal”.

Senior Guardian journalist Nick Davies later described Assange’s “cavalier attitude to life”. But Davis recalled the unserious attitude of senior Guardian journalists in the “bunker”, concluding, “They had disdain for the impact of this material.”

In their rush for a scoop (and not wishing to disrupt their own weekend plans), the Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel refused to redact names from the Afghan War Logs. Assange singlehandedly redacted 10,000 names prior to publication. This blows out of the water the relentless smears that he “endangered lives”.

Davis’s testimony confirms the unprecedented scope of the media and state vendetta against Assange. He faces US extradition under the Espionage Act for exposing war crimes, mass surveillance and US diplomatic intrigue across the globe.