In Early Struggles of Soldier Charged in Leak Case, the New York Times published a portrait of Private Bradley Manning reminiscent of the type of character assassination J.Edgar Hoover planted in newspapers in the hey day of the communist witch hunts. The government agencies routinely planted such misinformation to discredit civil rights activists and others they considered a threat to our national security. Whistleblowers like Private Manning and Daniel Ellsberg before him are considered extremely dangerous and in the words of the then sitting (during the Pentagon Papers incident) president Richard M. Nixon ''need to be taken out'. President Nixon famously said that he did not need to wait and see if the courts would convict Ellsberg because he would destroy him in the court of public opinion. He then ordered the break in to the offices of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Here we are again, four decades later convicting in the court of public opinion Private Bradley Manning.
The NYT article is subtle in its venom but no less deadly. In Manufacturing Consent, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky propose a mass media propaganda model for a modern western liberal democracy such as our own, in which mechanisms for the maintenance of the status quo are less obvious, but no less effective, than in systems such as totalitarian dictatorships. Private Manning and WikiLeaks threw a hand grenade at the status quo and now these mechanisms are working overtime to repair the damage. The fact that the NYT collaborated with WikiLeaks is in keeping with the model of the cultural mechanisms at play.
I have no doubt that Private Manning, a sensitive youth, was struggling to fit into a world that did not accept his sexual orientation, nor that he fell in love with a young man who in the words of the NYT is a "self described drag queen." And to that, I say so what.
The spin of the article is that because he was an outsider, his motivation for divulging the classified information and releasing the documents was to fit in with his new friends, a "politically motivated group of hackers to whom he increasingly turned to for moral support."
The article continues:
And now, some of those friends say they wonder whether his desperation for acceptance -- or delusions of grandeur -- may have led him to disclose the largest trove of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers.
The only named source that paints the portrait of the desperate and delusional Private Manning is the cyber informant Adrian Lamo. I find it extremely disturbing that the NYT chose not to elucidate us in this article about the well known and well documented character and controversy surrounding Adrian Lamo. Adrian Lamo was prosecuted and convicted of hacking into the very NYT and so they more than anyone know about his history of heavy drug abuse and psychological problems.
One glance at his Facebook page (which has no privacy settings so you do not need to friend him to navigate) will confirm that Lamo, if not exhibiting delusions of grandeur, at minimum is prone to self-aggrandizement and self promotion. When asked why hack, by a San Francisco Weekly reporter, he answers: "This is what I do, this is the role I was born to play." He goes on to quote a long passage about how greatness can destroy a man from the Frank Herbert science-fiction epic Dune later made into a David Lynch film, which tells the story of a young man who becomes a messiah.
He is also an avowed drug abuser. Do not take my word for it, but please watch this video from the BBC at about 3 minutes 25 seconds and you will witness the most bizarre behavior you have ever seen on prime time.
The NYT does not find it worthy of mention that the man who turned in Private Manning and the only named source in the article that eludes to Manning's motivation for the release of the documents is a total mess.
He tells a San Francisco weekly reporter that his convulsions are a result of an amphetamine overdose he suffered the year before. He goes on to say about his drug use:
I've resisted including this in news reports because I think it would make me intolerable to the government if I was advocating both intrusion and drug use, but substances that disassociate you from your senses have played a big part in my life.
The dissociatives are amazing... You can look at your face in the mirror and completely not recognize it.
We are to believe that Adrian Lamo just happened to be chatting with the total stranger Private Manning and divulged not only what he would be doing and had done but also his motivation. Adrian Lamo is the oldest trick in the book and has the footprint of the government all over it. A homeless, drug addicted convicted felon with a suspended sentence who still owes the government over $65,000 in fines is not exactly my idea of a credible witness, but rather your typical informant who says and does as he is told.
The named source in the Wired Magazine article quoted in the NYT, Private Manning's boyfriend, Mr. Watkins, states that after WikiLeaks released the video allegedly provided by Manning of the shootings of the AP journalists that "one of his {Private Manning's} major concerns once he'd done this was, was it really going to make a difference?" This concern would lead one to conclude that Private Manning's motivation, as much as one can impute motivation, was to have an impact on public opinion and perhaps on the course of the war, in the tradition of Ellsberg. If Manning wanted to influence the course of the war and deliberately broke the law and knowingly risked prosecution, he follows in the footsteps of the greats: Rosa Parks, Dolores Huerta (arrested 22 times and counting), Dr King and Daniel Ellsberg. There is no credible evidence, only government spin repackaged by the NYT, that this is not the case.
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Unfortunately, no access to "Who the Fuck is Bombing My Dad," is possible. Appreciating your perspectives and wanting to possibly share information, if you receive this, please contact me. I also submit to HP and believe we might want to discuss perspectives. Good work by the way! I enjoy what I've read of your work and appreciate your willingness to be discussant about "sensitive" issues that most would rather eschew.
As for the Times, a resident of Connecticut, I was able to recently witness this sloth passing as journalism in the few articles on state attorney general Richard Blumenthal's false statements about military service in Vietnam. He's been making such statements for most of his term over about 20 years, but the Time's swallowed whole material given to it by Linda McMahon's campaign. McMahon is running against Blumenthal for the senate seat Dodd is giving up.
I saw no independent reporting in the N. Y. Times' articles on Blumenthal fed to it by the McMahon campaign. When the sources for the article became known and became questioned, and both the significance of it (as a front-page, above the fold news story) and some of the facts of it (as in the recent Breitbart hatchet job of Shirley Sherrod composed of maliciously edited video), following articles were mostly N. Y. Times defenses of its amateurish, naive swallowing of material supplied by McMahon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelmEZe8whI
This video features U.S. soldier Ethan McCord speaking about a 2007 civilian massacre in New Baghdad, documented with Apache helicopter footage of the attack allegedly disclosed by PFC Brad Manning via WikiLeaks in April 2010. McCord's story was delivered to attendees of the United National Peace Conference, which took place in Albany NY the weekend of July 23-25, 2010. Produced by the United National Peace Conference Media Project, powered by The Sanctuary for Independent Media and the Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center. For more information:
www.MediaSanctuary.org
www.NationalPeaceConference.org
www.BradleyManning.org
Newsflash; Like it or not, Lamo is NOT the guilty party here. He and his motivations are completely irrelevant. Bradley Manning is the one who illegally accessed, copied and gave away sensitive documents.
No matter how much you bash Lamo, you won't be able to throw the blame from Manning onto him. Manning did what he did; he's an adult, time to man-up and accept responsibility for his actions.
You can applaud him if you choose; but the bottom line remains, he broke the law and he violated the oath he took when he joined the Army; he has put a bigger target on the backs of our soldiers and he's probably put Afghan informants in harm's way. At the very least, it's going to have an impact on the people who might've chosen to help us.
You don't have to like the war; don't have to support it; so stay out of it. Joining up for the sole purpose of sabotage is treason, and he will be dealt with accordingly. He knew this going in, and he has no one to blame but himself.
There are proper channels for these things, and Bradley Manning to the best evidence available so far, ignored or avoided those channels.
Furthermore, if Manning is indeed the source of "collateral murder" it begs the question, why is 30 minutes of footage missing?
http://gawker.com/5513068/the-full-version-of-the-wikileaks-video-is-missing-30-minutes-of-footage
When confronted with this fact, wikileaks Julian Assange claimed that they posted all the footage they received from their source. Which means Bradley Manning deliberately and maliciously edited out 30 minutes of context before passing the video to Assange.
But Manning didn't stop there, Manning is the prime suspect in the leak of Afghan war files.
In so doing he may have cost the lives of an untold number of informants against the Taliban, people who came to us for help because they thought we could be trusted.
Not only will many Afghan informants and their families die and be tortured for this, it will make cooperation between our troops and Afghans that much more difficult by breaking down trust.
I do blame Bradley Manning though, his actions are going to cost a lot of lives.
If the trial proves that Pfc. Manning was the person who disclosed the near 150,000 pages of classified information to Wikileaks, regardless of what the clowns on this site are trying to present, the man truly is a villain, and the New York Times wouldn't need to make that up either.
Regardless of what you think about the actions of the dude, we are a country where free speech is held as a tantamount right, even if you disagree entirely with what someone decides to do or say.
If the allegations hold true, I would think that they'd be grounds for treason, but again, he's entitled to a trial.
Pfc. Manning, allegedly, disclosed information, that is now readily accessible to anyone who wants to see, with the names of folks who, as of the report, were in the active war theatre!
Intentions be danged, this fool, under his own volition, allegedly, decided that, regardless of the potential consequences, he was going to disclose scores and scores of classified information, for all to see, friends and foes alike, to, apparently, try to push his own agenda!
If the charges are proven to be true, with the charges for treason, to the best of my knowledge, being death, Pfc. Manning has rightfully earned his sentence, "consequences be forgotten"
The number of casualties:
Killed in Iraq - 4,413, number of American contractors - 1,457, Journalists - 338 = 6,208
Wounded in Iraq - 31,888
Killed in Afghanistan - 1,216
Wounded in Afghanistan - 6,773
The civilian deaths in well into the 100,000s.
The current republican'ts want the death penalty for an individual that made documents available to Americans, who are paying for these wars in taxes and lives. These documents show how inept the military and intelligent organizations are, and that there is still no purpose for this war.
But they don't hold the individuals responsible for the deaths of 7,424 Americans and the maiming of another 38,661. Not to mention the damage to the psychology and emotional development of 100,000s of Americans. Not to mention the damage to the families of the American soldiers.
I'd like to know why we don't see the true numbers of casualties on the news every day. How many people reading this post knew that 7,424 Americans have died, as of a few days ago, and almost 40,000 have been wounded? The numbers will continue to go up.
But the second idea, that more attention should be paid to the source of the character assassination, is a bit more problematic for this reader anyway, since so much space here is then devoted to a denigration of said source because he is a drug abuser and homeless and a likely informer. Character denigration to decry character denigration, on the basis of morality models that the author, were they not so useful here, would otherwise eschew, isn't pretty either.
It's interesting how you libs want to turn the tables from the person who DID the deed being the guilty one, into the person who TOLD on them.
Manning is the one who committed the crime here. And it is a crime, even if you think he's some kind of hero; he broke the law, he betrayed his oath.
The best part is you people who are defending Manning, and he's certainly not denied doing it. But, in case you didn't know, Lamo would've had to be overseas and have direct connection to those specific computers; they're NOT online and hackable.
Rather than the death sentence or life imprisonment, I would favor something in the 25 to 30 year range.
However, I am sure you have numerous suggestions.
If there was a criminal penalty for stupidity, then you might have a case against the former president.