Assange Smear 23: “He endangered the lives of gay Saudis.”

No he didn’t. The Saudi Cables were KSA government documents, i.e. information the government already had, so there was no danger of legal retaliation based on Saudi Arabia’s laws against homosexuality. There is no evidence that anyone was ever endangered by the Saudi cables.

This smear was sparked by the aforementioned Raphael Satter at AP, whose executives WikiLeaks sent a formal complaint breaking down Satter’s journalistic misconduct and requesting the publication of its response.

The WikiLeaks website explains:

“The material in the Saudi cables was released in June 2015 and comprises leaked government information — that is data the Saudi government already had, including evidence of Saudi government persecution. The release revealed extensive Saudi bribing of the media, weapons amassed by the Saudi government, its brutal attacks on citizens and on Yemen, and the deals cut with the US and UK to get Saudi Arabia into a key position of the UN Human Rights Council. After WikiLeaks publication of DNC leaks in 2016, over a year after the materal was published, an AP journalist made claims about the 2015 publication but refused to provide evidence when asked to do so. WikiLeaks has still not found evidence for the claims.”

“Mr. Satter’s article has itself highlighted specific private information which can be searched for on the internet, and which is available independently of the Wikileaks site (as Mr. Satter should know, the content of the Saudi Cables was published online before Wikileaks collated it as the ‘Saudi Cables’),” the WikiLeaks complaint to AP noted.

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This is an excerpt from the mega-article “Debunking All The Assange Smears”.