Is Wired Hiding Key Evidence On Bradley Manning? 381
Hugh Pickens writes "Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon that for more than six months, Wired's Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed but refuses to publish the key evidence in the arrest of US Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks' source. 'In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video which WikiLeaks released throughout this year,' writes Greenwald. Wired has only published about 25% of the logs writes Greenwald and Poulsen's concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding journalists who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do. 'Whether by design or effect, Kevin Poulsen and Wired have played a critical role in concealing the truth from the public about the Manning arrest,' concludes Greenwald. 'This has long ago left the realm of mere journalistic failure and stands as one of the most egregious examples of active truth-hiding by a "journalist" I've ever seen.'"
Re:Whats Greenwald's angle? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:wtf (Score:0, Informative)
And until then, they are free to torture him [salon.com] to their hearts content in an effort to force compliance out out of him?
According to Manning's lawyer [armycourtm...fense.info] he isn't being tortured and the guards at the facility where he is being held are treating him professionally.
Greenwald doesn't really say much about how Manning is being held and gets some of that wrong. Some of the stuff he complains about, like not being allowed to exercise in his cell, are standard rules in military prisons. Sure, I wouldn't want to be put in Manning's position, but Greenwald overstates the isolation Manning is subjected to and selectively quotes a couple of articles dealing with real isolation to prove how this is damaging to Manning.
Re:Ethics lecture from a sock puppet (Score:4, Informative)
Yup I googled what you said to and came up with this:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/response-to-right-wing-personal.html [blogspot.com]
Doesn't exactly confirm your accusations.
Re:Fallout... (Score:5, Informative)
The remaining chat logs can contain details deemed to be national secrets. Releasing them publicly could get them in legal trouble.
The problem is that Lamo has spent the last few months revealing information from the chat logs. Journalists are repeating what he says as fact without being able to check them against the chat logs. Lamo has been making contradictory statements and changing his statements to apparently support the needs of the DOJ - he said that there was no explicit evidence of anyone helping Manning in the logs, the DOJ said it needed evidence of Assange directly helping Manning, and suddenly Lamo claims the logs contain explicit statements that Assange instructed Manning in how to upload files to Wikileaks. Convenient!
Lamo was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital three weeks before Manning's arrest. Now he is talking to the press about these supposed confidential chat logs that they are unwilling to release. They are unwilling to release even the portion of chat statements that would directly confirm or deny Lamo's public statements. There are rumours that Poulsen and Lamo are both informants, and that both are somehow linked to Project Vigilant [salon.com] - a group that tracks internet users and hands the data over to the Federal Government ("what they essentially are is some sort of vigilante group that collects vast amount of private data about the Internet activities of millions of citizens, processes that data into usable form, and then literally turns it over to the U.S. Government, claiming its motive is to help the Government detect Terrorists and other criminals..")
The article has been updated saying that Wired has promised a response, and Greenwald says "What they ought to do, at the absolute minimum, is post the portions of the chat logs about which Lamo had made public statements or make clear that they do not exist." Is that so unreasonable? Or is the world expected to believe verbatim the contradictory statements of a mentally ill man who refuses to show anyone the evidence behind those statements?
Re:wtf (Score:5, Informative)
From your link:
Son, he's been held in that condition for about seven months now and hasn't yet even had a pre-trial hearing. I don't care if you are fucking John Yoo behind that Anonymous mask of yours. There's no way you can effectively argue that isn't psychological torture being performed there.
Re:wtf (Score:3, Informative)
There are a couple of good excuses, actually, both of which are squarely on point to his case. One is the oath of office, the other is the Nuremberg principles.
Re:What the fuck? (Score:5, Informative)
what do you do when your source tells you he is responsible for a criminal act, more importantly what do you do when they tell you they plan to do more criminal acts?... Now consider if the source was a member of some fringe group that thinks freedom of expression extends to blowing up things as a form of protest.
I don't have to imagine this situation - it happened with terrorist groups in Northern Ireland: The moral reason never to tell (British Journalism Review 2005): [bjr.org.uk]
In such scenarios, journalists need first to address the moral dilemma: are they investigative journalists first, or citizens of the State first? They cannot jump between the two. If they decide it is the latter, then they should not be giving confidential sources worthless guarantees that at some point in the future they will abandon. In the issue of collusion, for journalists to identity their confidential sources makes them no better than the agents of the State they are exposing.
Let me state categorically where I stand on the issue of a journalist's confidential sources of information. For me, the fundamental ethical principle of journalism is that we have a moral imperative to give a guarantee of anonymity to genuine confidential sources providing bona fide information. There can be no transparency in the trust that our sources must have in us as professional journalists. If we sacrifice that trust, we betray our credibility as reporters of the truth. Likewise, if there is no trust between the confidential source and the journalist, it destroys the concept of honesty in the verification of the evidence given by that source.
Re:Fallout... (Score:5, Informative)
Your understanding is quite wrong.
You could read it for yourself. But I'll enlighten you a little
Manual for Courts Martial 2008 [navy.mil] (PDF and
p. 461
851. Atr 51. Votings and ruling
(c) Before a vote is taken on the findings, the military judge or the president of a court-martial without a military judge shall, in the presence of the accused and counsel, instruct the members of the court as to the elements of the offense and charge them---
(1) that the accused must be presumed to be innocent until his guilt is established by legal and competent evidence beyond reasonable doubt;
(2) that in the case being considered, if there is reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the accused, the doubt must be resolved in favor of the accused and he must be acquitted;
(IANAML - emphasis mine)