Wired journalists deny cover-up over WikiLeaks boss and accused US soldier

[Turborama]

Source: The Guardian

Pair with access to transcript of comments by Bradley Manning deny they could help prosecution against Julian Assange

Paul Lewis | Thursday December 30 2010 21.18 GMT

Two journalists with access to a secret transcript of comments by Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of leaking confidential material to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, have denied speculation that the material could potentially help a prosecution against Julian Assange.

The pair, from Wired magazine, said there was nothing "newsworthy" in unpublished internet chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who claims to have discussed the leak with the young intelligence officer and later tipped off the FBI.

Wired.com claimed a scoop in June when it obtained a transcript of the chats and published excerpts in which Manning, 23, appeared to confess to being the source of classified material handed to WikiLeaks, which was founded by Assange. However, in recent days the journalists have found themselves at the centre of an increasingly acrimonious spat with critics who accuse them of withholding crucial information about the largest leak of military data in history.

The dispute has centred on the 75% of the transcript Wired has not published, claiming the information would infringe Manning's privacy or compromise sensitive military information.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/30/wikileaks-bradley-manning-julian-assange

[Cherchez la Femme]

1. Lamo is a nasty piece of work

and, it appears he's got his very own pimp at Wired magazine.

They must be so proud!

[girl gone mad]

4. These two media whores couldn't make it in the free market..

guess they had to turn to sugar daddy government to support their habits.

[EFerrari]

7. Wired handled this shoddily. Wikileaks is shining light

in a lot of places.

[Pavulon]

2. aww the media cant redact? or only when assange god ang manning jeebus

are served? come on, it will come out at the trial..

[Luminous Animal]

10. I think your "Assange" auto-script hit a hiccup. You might want to reset for spelling and grammar.

[struggle4progress]

3. The Washington Post also has the logs. So, presumably, does Manning's lawyer

Messages from alleged leaker Bradley Manning portray him as despondent soldier
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 10, 2010

... The logs of messages between Manning and Adrian Lamo, provided to The Washington Post by Lamo, reveal a young man who was at once privy to government material of the highest sensitivity and confronting a personal crisis of the highest order ...

But much of the exchanges focused on Manning's unhappiness.

"Ive been isolated so long . . . i just wanted to figure out ways to survive . . . smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything . . . no-one took any notice of me," he wrote at one point. Another time, he wrote: "im a wreck."

In one particularly poignant message, Manning wrote: "my family is non-supportive . . . im losing my job . . . losing my career options . . . i dont have much more except for this laptop, some books, and a hell of a story." ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/09/AR2010060906170.html

This isn't really news. Greenwald recently decided to vaguely accuse Wired of withholding something or other unspecified. But Wired and the Washington Post got the logs from Lamo in May or June and published different excerpts; presumably Lamo also gave the logs to the military, and presumably Manning and Manning's lawyer also have access to them. So, again, we have more uninformative noise around the case

[EFerrari]

6. Greenwald got one thing clarified, an important one

even if the Wired people did it kicking and screaming.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/29/lamomanning-wikileak.html

[struggle4progress]

9. If that's what you focus on, then your comment may be fair enough. But I'm skeptical

about anybody's version of this story, beginning to end

The total number of pages, which Manning is sometimes alleged to have released, is about 750K. If I understand correctly, these pages are an eclectic mix, spanning decades. Nothing coherent accounts for the mix. If Manning actually did this in any principled way, while also performing a full-time job in a satisfactory manner, I can't see how he could have reviewed, selected, and downloaded more than about a page a minute on average: 750K pages then requires something like 750K minutes = 12500 hours, and if he was there 14 hrs/day every day he only gets to download about 6000 cables a week, which would require 2.5 years of sustained review, selection, and download -- much more, in fact, if he was in the least bit picky about what he released after review. That doesn't make sense, so if Manning did this, he must have been entirely indiscriminate in his downloading -- but then one still needs an explanation for the eclectic mix. Were these simply the files on which permissions had been left set in a manner enabling him to access them -- and if so, by accident or on purpose? Perhaps it was an intended counter-intelligence sting gone completely wrong, files left available for easy picking that were then carefully picked without anyone realizing it? Or maybe the whole intrusion had become known to the military, and everyone was in cover-your-ass mode, and Manning heard about it and managed to "confess" to something he hadn't done, in the hopes of becoming a celebrity? This looks, from officialdom's POV, like a ginormous cluster-fuck -- but the scope of this security breach ought to have implications all along the chain-of-command, and so behind the scenes there must be lots of finger-pointing. Is Manning a disturbed kid who released hundreds of thousands of pages he couldn't possibly have read, a disturbed kid who confessed to something he didn't do, a patsy, or what? Frankly, I won't pretend to know. For all I know, some right-wing black ops boys figured out Manning had downloaded a bit of stuff, got together, and organized the really huge release of cables to wikileaks with the idea that (1) it would discredit Obama's foreign policy and (2) there'd be just enough traces that everybody would blame Manning -- or maybe somebody with other and serious espionage interests helped Manning out a bit, thinking Manning's fallout could provide a useful diversion

I have at present no cause for an opinion on whether Assange has or has not committed a crime under US law: he strikes me as a bit smirky, and I dislike smirkers, but smirking isn't a crime. His noisy paranoia is tiresome -- but of course plenty of people will be working overtime to keep him as paranoid as possible. Greenwald I simply find bizarre

[Luminous Animal]

11. I'm glad you find Greenwald bizarre. He, is delightfully bizarre.

[EFerrari]

17. New York Times correcttion, based on what Greenwald forced out of Wired:

It's at the bottom of the page:

Correction: December 31, 2010

An article on Dec. 16 about the possibility of prosecuting Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, after his Web site disclosed classified government documents referred incorrectly to Wired magazine’s publishing of excerpts of Internet chat logs that may be relevant to the investigation. The excerpts, recording online conversations between the main suspect in the leaks, Pvt. Bradley Manning, and an ex-hacker who turned him in, Adrian Lamo, do in fact contain references to communications between Mr. Assange and Private Manning, and to a server for uploading files to WikiLeaks. It is not the case that Wired’s excerpts omitted mention of such contacts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/world/16wiki.html?_r=2&src=twt&twt=nytimes

[sabrina 1]

13. 'smart enough to know whats going on but helpless to do anything'

He was despondent because he witnessed war crimes and when he tried to report them, he was ignored. Like a lot of people who join the military he thought he was doing something noble, only to find out there was nothing noble about what he was witnessing or about his superiors who didn't want him ratting out war criminals. It seems to be a disease in this country.

But as far as any case against Assange, there never was one and their won't be. He is an editor and a journalist who received information from a source and published it. That is no crime last time I looked.

Wikileaks is an award-winning International News Org. The behavior of the U.S over this has been unbelievable. Russia, also exposed in leaks from Wikileaks, with Putin himself implicated in the poisoning of the Russian spy, behaved entirely diffently. Putin suggested that Assange be awarded a Pulitzer prize. He may not like what has been revealed about himself and Russia but he is mature enough to recognize and appreciate someone who is good at what they do.

As for what Manning is charged with, no one knows what he leaked. Mostly material from the wars it seems. He may not be the leaker of the Embassy Cables.

Anyhow, it looks like the Government's hopes of finding something to implicate Assange have been dashed.

Great reporting by Glenn Greenwald. This is what an investigative journalist looks like.

[Bragi]

14. Yep, that's what investigative journalism looks like

It occurs to me that appreciation of rights has so declned in the US that you could not get the First Amendment passed today if it was not already part of the constitution. I doubt it would even survive a vote at DU.

[sabrina 1]

19. I couldn't agree with you more, sadly.

[earcandle]

5. cough it up you lying fucks.

[Puregonzo1188]

8. I don't understand what's wrong with Lamo.

[Luminous Animal]

12. The allure of fame.

[boppers]

16. Years of sustained drug abuse, combined with an irregular personality.

He's had a few diagnoses over the years, some drug related, some not.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/

[EFerrari]

18. It looks like he has more than one thing going on.

Reports of Asperger's, encounter with the police makes it sound like he had a psychotic episode which would mean a pretty serious mental health situation, too, on Axis II. Then, there's whatever he is when he's put together.

[kgnu_fan]

15. kick