Alastair Campbell rounds on WikiLeaks "circus"
Former labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell has waded into the stushie surrounding WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s incarceration at Her majesty’s pleasure in Britain’s largest prison, Wandsworth.
Writing on his blog Campbell said: “Once a newsworthy event becomes a full-blown media frenzy, there comes a point where separating fact from fantasy, comment from conspiracy, and hard information from spin becomes virtually impossible. That is the point we reached with the WikiLeaks circus yesterday.”
Critical of the celebrity endorsement Assange received outside the magistrates court, from no less than John Pilger, Ken Loach and Jemima Khan, Campbell railed that WikiLeaks is as guilty of “spin” as government’s and political parties are.
Campbell noted: “They (WikiLeaks) continue to control the process by which the US cables are leaked, using well-worn spin techniques for maximum impact – nothing wrong with that of course, though if a government or political party controls access to information to suit its own ends, it’s viewed as a mortal sin.”
The former Labour apparatchik also accused Assange’s supporters of blind faith in his innocence, despite not knowing the details of the sexual assault case being brought against him in Sweden.
Ridiculing some of the conspiracy theories circulating on the web Cambell scathed: “We learned that Assange’s legal team felt they were being followed by secret servicemen. The evidence for this was that cars outside their homes had people in them ‘reading newspapers’. I wonder if they might have been journalists trying to establish Mr Assange’s wherabouts and thinking he might pop by to see his lawyer, but no, spies, secret servicemen, obvious innit?”