PFC. BRADLEY Manning has been kept in solitary confinement for most of 2010, allowed only one hour a day out of his cell even though he hasn’t yet been tried and convicted of a crime. Is Manning a patsy, a convenient excuse to criminalize investigative journalism and a clampdown on the Internet? See Glenn Greenwald’s column on the treatment of Bradley Manning at Salon.com.
Also: the UN mulls Internet regulation; a rush of 13s; and Adventures in Synthetic Biology.
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Bradley Manning reminds of the Alfred E Neuman character in Mad Magazine.
http://www.leconcombre.com/concpost/us/postcard4/alfred_e_neuman.jpg
“What, me worry?”
First of all, while I like a good Salon article, I think Greenwald might be embellishing.
I’ve learned a lot about the Intelligence Community over the years from people who have participated in that world, beginning with my Constitutional law instructor, a judge in the Clark County area who went to work for the CIA in Vietnam during his time in the Marine Corp.
Something I learned from him and others that followed is that intelligence operations are compartmentalized so that none of the participants fully understand the nature of the operation or their role in it. So while I wouldn’t go as far as to call Manning a “patsy,” I would say that he might be considered an “acceptable casualty” in the whole thing.
That being said, Manning is no martyr and he is exactly where he belongs: prison. Understand, what he did was treason. He took an oath that he wouldn’t do such things. He broke that oath. In order for the law to mean anything, he needs to be punished.
The Wikileaks story is one with many dimensions and layers; that’s how it is in the world of intelligence. That being said, I don’t feel sorry for Manning and nor anyone else.
You know, I keep getting emails from Nigeria saying that I had inherited a large sum of money and that I should send my banking information. I always just ignored them and deleted. It seems that Dick Cheney took them seriously.
Jack
Seriously though, I just wanted to say Merry Christmas and I love your continuing tete a tete.
God Bless.
Paul: You might be right. It may also be that Greenwald’s sources have an agenda.
I carry no water for Manning; it’s just that it seems odd treatment fo a guy who’s been apparently been accused solely on the basis of an edited transcript (Wired hasn’t released the whole thing yet) of an Internet chat between Manning and Adrian Lamo, a hacker for a defense contractor who’d just been released from an involuntary stay with the California mental health system.
Given that the UN is using WikiLeaks to justify its calls for global control over the web, it’s reasonable to speculate whether Bradley Manning, had he not existed, might have had to have been invented.
Adventures in Synthetic Biology–tune in next time when we will hear a strange crunching sound. . .
Derek~ you/Sharon ‘nailed’ Wikileaks right out of the chute (shoot?!)… More here than meets the eye..and who looks worst? The US gov’t looks incredibly inept! …2nd biggest ‘victim’: HRC; she’s aged 15 years in about as many days…whereas POTUS is getting his golf swing warmed up for Hawaii.
Jack: RE “Nigeria” ~ I know a local pastor who has lead his church ‘out of Laodicea’ from a liberal, socially progressive denominational church that promotes agendas of the same… This mainline church is losing hundreds of thousands (people AND $$$$). The vitriol being unleashed on churches who want to leave the Chicago-based church is stunning.
Last summer I got an emergency e mail from this pastor that they’d been called out of town on family emergency and were stranded…bladda bladda..”HELP”…(read that, ‘send money’ ~ with information of how/where) turned out the pastor’s email account had been hacked and the appeal had gone out to all church members/friends….he and his family home and unaware.
Spiritual AND cyber warfare ~
Google recently posted a tech talk on the use of MRI to image and characterize vascular aspects of MS. They now have ways of imaging veins using MRI in an attempt to continue work first done by Tracey Putnam in 1935 on the venuous obstruction hypothesis of MS. . .
Breakthroughs in Imaging Neurovascular Diseases on GoogleTechTalks