MB Civic

Greenwald takes a hard look at the “bizarre aspects” of the Manning Wikileaks case …

Why would a 22-year-old Private [Manning] in Iraq have unfettered access to 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables so sensitive that they “could do serious damage to national security?” Why would he contact a total stranger [Lamo] .. in order to “quickly” confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole life? And why would he choose to confess over the Internet, in an unsecured, international AOL IM chat? … This Manning detention is being used to depict WikiLeaks as a serious national security threat and associations with it as dangerous and subversive … There’s no reason to believe that’s true, but given the powers the U.S. Government claims — lawless detentions, renditions, assassinations even of American citizens — that’s the climate of intimidation that has been created. This latest incident is clearly being used to impede WikiLeaks’ vital function of checking powerful factions and imposing transparency, and for that reason alone, this is an extremely serious case that merits substantial scrutiny, along with genuine skepticism to understand what happened.

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