The Guardian’s Revealing Zimbabwe/WikiLeaks Admission

Last week I noted the remarkable spectacle of the Guardian publishing an editorial that blamed WikiLeaks for releasing a State Department cable that had, in fact, been initially released by the Guardian itself.  At the time, my evidence of that fact was circumstantial, based on the time-dates provided by the Guardian and WikiLeaks websites.  But no longer — eight days after publishing the editorial, the Guardian quietly appended the following to the editorial (my emphasis):

This article was amended on 11 January 2011 to clarify the fact that the 2009 cable referred to in this article was placed in the public domain by the Guardian, and not as originally implied by WikiLeaks. The photo caption was also amended to reflect this fact.

In other words, the Guardian has now admitted that if Tsvangirai is murdered as a result of the cable — which is unlikely, as I explained in the previous post — the newspaper, not WikiLeaks, will have blood on its hands.

As Glenn Greenwald points out today, the Guardian should have made the correction more apparent (especially in related news stories) and has tried to distance itself from the editorial by claiming — falsely — that it was simply an open forum submission.  But at least the newspaper has admitted that the cable was not initially released by WikiLeaks. That stands in marked and revealing contrast to WikiLeaks’ critics, who continue to promote the zombie lie that the release of the State Department cables has been driven by WikiLeaks, not by its partners in the media.