Bradley Manning is in prison in part because of some chats between him and Wired source Adrian Lamo. As John posted on Monday, Wired has refused to release those logs in full. Last night, Wired responded with two lengthy posts that hinge on this point:
We have already published substantial excerpts from the logs, but critics continue to challenge us to reveal all, ostensibly to fact-check some statements that Lamo has made in the press summarizing portions of the logs from memory (his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy).
Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time.
This makes no sense. If Lamo is summarizing parts of the logs from memory, then those portions of the logs should be released to evaluate his credibility as a source. If there’s personal information in those logs, it can be redacted. This doesn’t seem that hard, and the fact that Wired is making it difficult arouses suspicion rather than confidence.
The other sketchy part of this response is that it spends most of its time bemoaning Glenn Greenwald’s lack of journalistic ethics and touting Wired’s sterling grasp of the canons of the Society of Professional Journalists. Let’s just stipulate assume that Glenn Greenwald is a non-journalist and a complete asshole. Wired has a golden opportunity to make him look like even more of a jackass by releasing the rest of the logs, and they passed it up. That, in itself, is the biggest tell of the whole story.
Mudge
I disagree that Greenwald is a complete asshole (unless you meant posit rather than stipulate). If we had both he and Sully blow into the asshole meter, who’d register the higher value?
Shalimar
Both of those stipulations seem to be true based on an internet-only interpretation. He also does great work on occasion highlighting important civil liberties issues that others are ignoring. Even when I don’t agree with him, I still think he makes points that need to be discussed if we want to be a civilized people.
mistermix
@Mudge: I take your point and changed the post to “assume”.
liberal
OT: Good page on banksters and rents
homerhk
I read the Wired response and the GG original column (along with his other columns about Wired and chat logs). The impression I came out with was that the latest GG piece was the ultimate example of hackery filled with selective “facts”, outrageous personal smears and innuendo – put shortly the sort of piece were it on redstate or The Corner would be ridiculed to the high heavens by all well meaning progressives. The fact that GG is writing so ferociously in apparent defence of Bradley Manning seems to be the only reason why this piece is taken seriously at all. GG may be good at uncovering civil liberties (I say “may” because his columns do quite often rely on selective facts, paraphrasing of linked articles etc in breathtaking intellectual dishonesty) but I think he’s really overstepped the bounds this time.
Shalimar
@mistermix: I actually think stipulate does make the strongest point. Even if you accept all Wired’s assertions as true, they are still wrong. But assume is fine too.
Joe Beese
Most of the people who attack Glenn Greenwald are trying to hide the inadequacy of their position.
Joey Maloney
Whatever the rights and wrongs here – and I confess that both Greenwald and Poulsen get a TL;DR from me – if Poulsen actually thinks this is going to “set the record straight” or put an end to the controversy, he’s dreaming.
Telling Glenn Greenwald that he’s wrong needs to be tagged with the internet equivalent of Mark Twain’s aphorism about not wrestling with a pig.
Punchy
My meta detector just exploded.
Ash Can
The logs may be worded in such a way that redaction would be difficult. We may never know whether this is actually the case, but it’s possible.
As far as the issue with Greenwald goes, that appears to be an entirely separate matter altogether. The Wired guys are butting heads with him on a personal level. BFD.
Shalimar
@homerhk: Overstepped in what specific way? Much of Greenwald’s column is over-argument and speculation, but his basic point is valid and Wired chose not to address it. It is the same point mistermix makes in a more straight-forward manner here. There is a public case building against Manning based on questionable facts that Wired could easily confirm or deny and they choose not to for reasons which aren’t readily apparent. It is terrible journalism, regardless of how they try to defend their integrity.
Alwhite
@Joey Maloney:
You know I have heard that charge here before but I don’t see GG wrong all that much – long-winded, sanctimonious, over heated yes, certainly sometimes. I just have not seen him wrong nearly as often as more celebrated journalists and way less often that many bloggers. Certainly not wrong enough often enough to earn this sort of reputation.
I get that some people here don’t like him but that is a separate issue from the accuracy of his work. This case is a good example. He may be over heated and all those other things but he is also right.
sixers
@Ash Can:
What this guy said. It’s not possible to redact everything personal and leave it still readable all the time. If it does have no bearing on wikileaks than its not a big deal.
“This makes no sense”. And you are basing this on? Actual knowledge or the assumption that those guys at wired are jerks?
burnspbesq
@Shalimar:
“There is a public case building against Manning”
Say what, now? The only case against Manning that matters is the one being built by prosecutors. Everything else, including this manufactured controversy, is noise.
mk3872
Mistermix, most of BJ and Greenwald are continuing to conflate “journalism” with complete data-dump transparency.
Both are noble causes. But what happens some times when someone just drops endlessly ranting conversational material like diplomatic cables? Or, say, emails between climate scientists?
Information is misinterpreted, miscommunicated and context is lost.
That is where “journalism” comes into play.
I think the Journalist email dump is another great example of the problems with complete data-dump “transparency” where “journalism” would be more beneficial.
Perry Como
The Danger Room stops getting juicy Pentagon scoops if Wired clears the record.
catclub
I know that GG is one person who drives Joe Klein batshit insane. (Aimai was another bravo aimai!)
The reason GG drove Joe Klein crazy was that he showed how lazy Joe Klein was regarding facts of the illegal surveillance bill being shoved through Congress (summer 2008?).
That will always get my vote in favor.
And I am agreeing with Alwhite @ 12
Shalimar
@burnspbesq: Of course. Why even have newspapers at all, everything is just noise anyway. The important thing is trusting the prosecutors to always do the right thing.
homerhk
Shalimar, what Burnspbesq said.
It seems to me that GG wants the release of the full logs in the hope that it will somehow embarass Lamo or discredit him; and not really through any genuine journalistic integrity kick. But as Burns says, that’s all a sideshow; what matters is the formal case against Manning that prosecutors are putting together.
Joey Maloney
@Alwhite: I’m specifically not addressing the rights and wrongs, but rather the idea that right or wrong, if Greenwald disagrees with you, there is anything you could possibly say or do that would shut him up.
Although I will say, there is a point where overheated sanctimony will cross the line from just discrediting your point to invalidating it. I’m thinking specifically of the recent incident where he excoriated a very minor blogger – who published a couple of official photos of Obama and attached some mild words of admiration – as producing something worthy of Leni Riefenstahl.
If you have to jump straight to the Nazi equivalences for any event not involving, well, industrialized mass murder, as far as I’m concerned that calls whatever your point is into pretty severe question.
mk3872
Greenwald is pit-bull who attacks whenever there is anything other than 100% purity by everyone around his own ideals and concepts.
One could certainly argue that he is on solid moral and legal grounds with his arguments.
But he is most certainly not a journalist. He’s an advocate.
Mark S.
Maybe I’m stupid, but why exactly does Wired have an obligation to release all of the chat logs? I mean, if they were holding something back that was exonerating to Manning or Assange, that would be a dick move. But as long as Manning’s (and if it comes to that, Assange’s) defense attorneys have access to it, I don’t see what the problem is.
Reading the chats is heartbreaking because Manning actually has a conscience.
Not too many other people in this drama seem to have one.
amk
@Shalimar: Which “public” ? Case of projection ?
Joey Maloney
@mk3872: Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history in the USA. There’s nothing wrong with advocacy journalism, but there’s a difference between being an advocate as a journalist and being an advocate as a lawyer. Sometimes I get the impression Greenwald either doesn’t grasp or deliberately ignores the difference.
As a journalist, no matter what your point of view, you have an obligation to report all the facts as best you can. You can then give your interpretation freely, explain how the facts fit together, and how that supports your position, but you have to start with all the facts. You’re not free to omit or distort facts that don’t support your advocacy position.
A lawyer is under no such obligation. In fact, legal ethics require exactly the reverse: presenting only those facts that support your (client’s) position while omitting, minimizing, or attacking those that don’t. That’s the keystone of our adversarial system.
If Greenwald-as-journalist has one major flaw, it’s that he still thinks like a lawyer. (And sometimes he writes like Bullwer-Lytton, but that’s a question of taste, not of accuracy or integrity.)
Shalimar
@homerhk: If Lamo is lying, he should be embarrassed and discredited. If they have the excerpts he claims exist, Wired should publish them to corroborate his story. If the conversations didn’t happen, then refusing to admit that is basically abetting libel.
Villago Delenda Est
Greenwald wants to get access to the full logs so that he can make the call, for himself, on what is relevant and what is not, and Wired is very obviously afraid that Lamo’s memory won’t be supported by the raw data. Greenwald, justifiably in my view, doesn’t trust these guys. “Trust but verify”, you know.
The “personal information” is a straw man in this case. As has been true for the entire Wikileaks brouhaha, it’s a lame effort to stop the release of “embarrassing information”. No one at the Pentagon or State has been able to support their assertions that people have died due to the revelations.
homerhk
Alwhite, I have seen GG wrong many times. But it is not necessarily the black and white wrong in that he made an error (although he does that too and his defence of errors is especially nauseating – witness the response to the Wired response where he admits an error, for example, but brushes it off as excusable for some bullshit reason or another). My objection to GG is that he has perfected the ‘lawyers argument’ style (natch, since he is one). As a lawyer myself, it is clear to me that you can pick any side of any argument and make a reasonably compelling defence of it or attack on it. You see it all the time when you hear the opposing side’s opening statement and think “actually, they’ve got a point here”; but a lot of it is smoke and mirrors. GG is one of the most outrageous practitioners of this because he appears to back up what he says with multitudes of links and articles. I started off reading him and saying to myself, “No this cannot be” or ” this is awful, right on GG” but then I read the underlying articles and what he does is paraphrase things with a spin, take quotes out of context (or in some cases use quotation marks to suggest a quote where none existed). For someone like GG who has a dedicated following of people who think he does no wrong, I think this is entirely disingenuous because he relies on his reputation for “integrity” and “straight talk” to pull wool over people’s eyes. That is not to say that he doesn’t have good arguments or that he is not writing in a good cause – I happen to agree with some of the civil liberties things he says but it’s impossible to have an adult open and honest conversation about things if, for example, government actions are portrayed always as actions of evil cruel dictators when in fact the nuances are more complicated than that. GG is too intelligent not to know this and yet he tends to boil things down too simply for the sake of his argument. Plus he’s sanctimonious and cannot take any criticism or genuine push back.
burnspbesq
This is much more important than any cat fight between quasi-journalists.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/yes-theyre-frauds/
JG
@Mark S.:
Are you serious? Lamo, upon whom Wired relied for their story, is making all sorts of claims that contradict each other about how Manning ended up contacting him. If the chat logs can verify, falsify, or contextualize those claims then they need to be released. Who gives a fuck about the legal case building about Manning?
This is about journalistic ethics. Journalists should release information that can clarify conflicting public claims – what is so difficult about this concept? I’m always baffled when people have an intense desire for information to be kept from them and others.
Unfortunately this post, as do all that involve the EVIL GG, devolved into ferocious character attacks on him, rebuttals and the like.
burnspbesq
@Shalimar:
Someday, you might want to try responding to what someone you disagree with actually says, rather than playing silly games.
Shalimar
@Villago Delenda Est: I would go further than that. Poulsen has had these logs for more than half a year. He has undoubtedly gone over them many times and knows exactly what is supported and what isn’t. It wouldn’t be the same as releasing excerpts, but the least he could do if the assertions are true is write an article summarizing that Lamo’s memory is confirmed by the chat logs. That article would be major news for Wired and a major source of discussion and page hits.
Instead, he chooses not to address the issue at all. This is why Greenwald and others are suspicious. Poulsen’s actions don’t make any sense unless Lamo is lying and Poulsen is protecting him.
liberal
@mk3872:
As GG has pointed out repeated, Wikileaks has _not_ indiscrimately dumped all the diplomatic cables on the world. It’s currently using it’s MSM partners to release selectively. The fraction of stuff htat’s been released is extremely small.
liberal
@Shalimar:
Heh.
liberal
@burnspbesq:
Except that he/she responded to exactly what you said. Deal with it, smartass.
Shalimar
@burnspbesq: What you said is that only the legal case matters and everything else is noise. Which is silly. Prosecutors and defense attorneys and witnesses influence cases through the public all the time. They wouldn’t if nothing outside of the courtroom mattered. Whether it should matter is a separate issue.
burnspbesq
@Shalimar:
” If Lamo is lying, he should be embarrassed and discredited. ”
You’re continuing to miss the point. If Lamo is embarrassed and discredited in the blogosphere, how exactly does that change Manning’s situation?
Answer: it doesn’t. There is only one group of people whose assessment of Lamo’s credibility matters even a little bit: the court-martial board that will eventually hear his testimony, under oath and subject to cross-examination.
This cat fight between Wired and Greenwald is a complete waste of time and bandwidth, and I am frankly surprised that you don’t get that, because my impression has always been that you are a smart and reasonable person.
Mojotron
and the Poulsen part is pure shit, he claims Greenwald mischaracterizes him, and then describes exactly what Greenwald wrote (Greenwald mischaracterizes my contacts with the companies Lamo hacked. In writing about Lamo’s New York Times hack, Greenwald claims: “When Lamo hacked into the NYT, it was Poulsen who notified the newspaper’s executives on Lamo’s behalf, and then wrote about it afterward.” In truth, I contacted a spokeswoman for the Times, notified her of the intrusion, gave her time to confirm it, and then quoted her in the article.”) on the plus side the comments are 90%+ “this is shit, publish the logs”
burnspbesq
@JG:
“Who gives a fuck about the legal case building about Manning?”
If that’s not snark, then it is stupidity on a scale rarely seen on this blog.
BobS
@burnspbesq: In this instance, most of “noise” bothering you is the narrative that the government wants heard and that’s been accepted by it’s subservient media as the truth of the matter. The subsequent shaping of public opinion is important in that it provides cover for a government that shouldn’t be trusted as acting with the best of intentions as it regards Manning, Assange, and Wikileaks.
It still seems that most of the disagreement with Greenwald here is not with the content of work, but because of his style and a general dislike for Greenwald the person.
homerhk
In case anyone hasn’t read GG’s gems, try the following and imagine they were about a democratic politician or indeed any human being and published at redstate or some such:
and then see this bit where GG intimates clearly that Lamo held himself out as a journalist to Manning:
yet in that bit where there is a link to a BBC article, the following words appear:
What’s the truth? I don’t know. I do know that reading spin disguised as journalistic integrity doesn’t really advance the ball much.
Mojotron
well, my comment above is a hot mess and edit isn’t working. The first two paragraphs were supposed to be blockquoted and were both from the editor of Wired.
I’d also like to know more about (and I can’t believe I’m typing this phrase) the “Uber-Lamo connection”.
liberal
@homerhk:
Given your argument, why should we respect what you have to say anymore than we do Greenwald?
Funny for you to say that given your critique of Greenwald—logical fallacy fail.
Who are these people who think GG does no wrong? (Certainly not me; I think he was dead wrong on the principles behind the arguments about Citizens United.)
Furthermore, why is the existence of such people relevant to GG’s take on the current issue?
Villago Delenda Est
One of the problems we face with “journalism” today is that the “gatekeepers” are not honest brokers.
They are employees of corporations that have a very great interest in shaping the flow of information to their own greedy benefit.
If Poulsen is indeed an honest, ethical journalist, he should have no fear whatever of his source material being examined by a third party, even a non-impartial one like Greenwald. It will stand on its own merits, and Poulsen’s “gatekeeping” will be vindicated.
If not, well, let the chips fall where they may.
burnspbesq
@Shalimar:
” What you said is that only the legal case matters and everything else is noise. Which is silly. Prosecutors and defense attorneys and witnesses influence cases through the public all the time. They wouldn’t if nothing outside of the courtroom mattered. Whether it should matter is a separate issue.”
If Manning were facing a civilian trial, you would have a point. He’s not. He’s facing a court-martial. Do you seriously contend that a bunch of career Army officers are going to be influenced by a blogospheric cat fight? If so, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.
homerhk
liberal, I’m not arguing one side or another. I’m not trying to present a case but just trying to get into a ‘case’ made by someone else. respect me or not, it’s no skin off my nose.
as for those who think GG does no wrong, go look at the comment section under his columns once in a while. granted not all of them think that way (that was hyperbole on my part, conceded) but I get the impression that a lot of people take what he says with the minimal of questioning and critiquing. Personally, I like to question any information that is provided to me whether it be from BJ, the NYT, the Guardian or Glenn.
Shalimar
@burnspbesq: And you miss my points. I care about the journalistic ethics aspect of the story. It isn’t about Manning in particular, this argument could be about any story with similar journalistic decisions. And your argument seems to be that I shouldn’t care because it doesn’t really matter whether journalists have ethics. Which is strange.
Socraticsilence
@mk3872:
Actually, that’s part of Wired’s point- Greenwald has an extraordinary lack of consistency on this issue e.g on the one hand Wired is too close to a source and not disclosing a conflict, on the other hand its completely cool for Glenn to quote as an unbiased expert someone who is a major Wikileaks backer, this isn’t a onetime thing either.
burnspbesq
@homerhk:
There is one thing in your Comment 40 that I find disturbing. If Lamo indeed told Manning that he could protect Manning’s identity under the California shield law, that’s a blatant misrepresentation. Lamo surely knows or should know that there is no Federal shield law.
Whether that has any potential effect on the admissibility of any evidence that Lamo might be called to give at a court-martial of Manning, I can’t say.
Tom Hilton
@Alwhite: ‘Wrong’ may be a YMMV thing, but my beef about Greenwald (apart from the fact that he is a complete asshole) is that he’s habitually dishonest (i.e., he misrepresents the position of whomever he happens to be arguing with; he exaggerates any point that appears to support his argument, and elides any facts that point to the contrary; and he relies heavily on inflammatory, loaded rhetoric).
Edit: And again, YMMV, but I have no use whatsoever for people who are ‘right’ (i.e., who agree with me on a given issue) if they aren’t also intellectually honest.
kindness
@homerhk: Wow….you are certainly leading with your opinion of Glenn there.
OK, you don’t like him, you don’t respect him…we get that.
But Glenn’s basic premise is correct. WIRED has gone out of it’s way to frame this in a particular manner. WIRED is playing the umps (the government & the MSM). WIRED has stated all sorts of bad things about Manning but not backed them up.
In a put up or shut up point for WIRED, they chose to attack the messanger…..That in and of itself tells me WIRED is the asshole here.
geg6
Jeebus. I’m not one of Glenn’s minions (and just hate his sanctimoniousness and inability to admit error), does everything he writes have to be viewed through certain peoples’ visceral and weirdly personal hated of him?
In this case, he’s been on the side of angels. “Wired” and Poulson have any number of ways to confirm that this went down the way it is being claimed. Since only two people were there and one of them is completely helpless to tell his side of the story, it would seem that it is up to the journalists who have the actual written record to hand to settle the issue simply by providing the public with the facts. They have chosen not to. And I, Jane Q. Public, and Glenn Greenwald, John Q. Public, are quite right to ask why and remain suspicious of “Wired” and Poulson’s quite transparent attempt to brush it all under the rug with bullshit excuses and personal attacks.
Tom Hilton
@geg6:
Hatred of Greenwald isn’t the issue. Greenwald’s reliability is an issue, in everything Greenwald writes and in every dispute into which he injects himself.
burnspbesq
@Shalimar:
“And your argument seems to be that I shouldn’t care because it doesn’t really matter whether journalists have ethics.”
That’s not my argument. My view (which is undoubtedly colored by the fact that I am a lawyer) is that the legal process is what matters most, and everything else is a sideshow.
FWIW, my initial reaction was that I didn’t find Greenwald’s argument that Wired is under some sort of duty to dump everything it has to be persuasive. But I haven’t wasted much time thinking about it, because I don’t see that i have a dog in that fight.
homerhk
Burns, yes I agree that’s disturbing if it is true, but I know not. GG says that Lamo told him that but then at the same time links to a BBC site where Lamo says the exact opposite.
Shalimar
@Tom Hilton: What? Seriously? Are you incapable of independently considering the points about Poulsen’s handling of this story because Greenwald raised them in the first place? Making the discussion about him instead of the story is very strange.
Shalimar
@burnspbesq: I don’t find his argument on that one point persuasive either, though that is mostly because I don’t know how much difficulty Wired would have with redaction of truly irrelevant and embarrassing personal information. But I also think it is simplistic and wrong to suggest that dumping everything is the only way they could resolve the issue. To me, Wired is clearly in the wrong and Greenwald’s proposed remedy isn’t the only possible one.
Paul in KY
@homerhk: Please make a compelling argument for barbequeing babies. I’m all ears Mr. Lawyer.
Mojotron
If you don’t like or trust Greenwald, fine- discuss the issues surrounding the Wired/Lamo/Manning/Assange connection without mentioning his name. Just stop shitting in every GG thread about it. No one thinks of GG as “the one”. Wired’s response didn’t address the substance of the accusations.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mojotron:
There you go, separating the issue from the person raising it.
You’ll never get a job in the Village with that attitude, youngster.
geg6
@Tom Hilton:
Well, I never said hatred of Greenwald was YOUR issue. However, I don’t really give a shit about Greenwald here. It’s about “Wired” and Poulson for me. And the fact that you’re making it all about Greenwald and his journalistic integrity and not that of “Wired” and Poulson, who have obfuscated totally here as Glenn correctly points out, makes me think it really is a personal issue. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but that’s how it seems from here.
Joe Raison
Hey, let’s just stipulate that Mistermix is a complete asshole. Why ? Because I said so ! How marvelous to be so true because I say it. what exactly have you EVER written Mistermix, that’s 1/10 as good as Greenwald ? Who the fuck quotes you ?
Chuck
No one seems to be speaking to the issue that Lamo is fucking nuts and was subject to a 72 hour INVOLUNTARY psychiatric hospital stay a mere six months ago.
Tom Hilton
@Shalimar: I wasn’t responding to comments about the substance of this dispute; I was responding to comments about Greenwald. To the extent that I have an opinion at all about the merits of the thing, I find Hansen and Poulsen’s factual recitations more persuasive than Greenwald’s speculation and innuendo, but that’s sort of beside the point.
Joey Maloney
@Paul in KY: Babies are delicious and nutritious, and there are way too many of them. Every day, thousands are born who are doomed to a short life of terrible suffering and then a painful, prolonged death. Wouldn’t it be better if their lives were spent in comfort, with abundant food and water and the finest medical care, and then when the time came they were euthanized painlessly without even realizing what was happening?
Does that answer your request to homerhk?
Roy G
Those who want to make this about Greenwald are in the same league with those who want to make Wikileaks about Julian Assange; they focus on personality by necessity, being unwilling or unable to address the facts of the situation.
Fran Townsend surely agrees with you. Is that who you really want on your side?
Uloborus
@geg6:
Think of this as important because the anti-GG assertion is that you can’t trust anything he says. Anything. Even if it’s factually true, it’s subtly and deviously misrepresented. I didn’t want to get into this one, but I’m commenting because I’m actually quite refreshed to see others making exactly the argument I’ve made before.
Sheik Yerbouti
I could give a flyinfuck at a rolling donut what Greenwald does or thinks, but remove him from the equation and one thing becomes readily obvious:
WIRED is evading, dissembling, stonewalling, obstructing and ass-covering.
Call it a reasoned deduction, but I’m guessing there’s probably a very shameful and embarrassing reason why they are doing all that and trying to deflect it with a personal attack. ‘Cos they might be exposed as bullshite artistes who cannot be trusted.
Greenwald probably is a dick, but that doesn’t excuse WIRED or the impression that the position they have staked out for themselves is incredibly weak and pathetic, lacks integrity and doesn’t pass the smell test.
kindness
@Tom Hilton: Duuude…it isn’t speculation that WIRED is pushing a meme here. It isn’t speculation that WIRED has cherry picked (one quarter of their total) the transcripts they did release.
Glenn is just saying they need to release ALL of them to back up the bullshit they are throwing around with regard to Manning. Glenn is right here. Stop making this about Glenn.
Ash Can
@Roy G #64: But that’s exactly what the people focusing on “journalistic ethics” in this case are doing. They’re the ones making it all about Greenwald, as well as all about Poulsen, Lamo et al. at Wired. As burnspbesq says, it’s all a sideshow to the more important issue of Bradley Manning and justice being served in his case.
Tom Hilton
@geg6: I think Greenwald’s credibility is the unstated assumption underlying the notion that there’s an issue here at all. Take this point, for example:
Think of it this way: if it were Michelle Malkin saying “if Wired has nothing to hide, let them release the whole transcript”, would anyone here take it at all seriously? Of course not. Greenwald’s credibility with some people is precisely the thing that makes them pay attention to his accusations in the first place.
liberty60
@mk3872:
Its nice to have a journalist interpret and frame events, and put things into context.
Except that Wikileaks is not a newpaper or magazine. It is explicitly a “tranparent data dump”.
It would be nice if we had, say, a newspaper or magazine that would take all this data, compare it to interviews and record-sleuthing, to explain and actually “report” on world events.
Maybe GG can invite some of the WaPo reporters down to his house, and ply them with mojitos while they swing on a tire. Its just crazy enough to work.
Uloborus
@Joey Maloney:
That’s not even a good one. Be a real lawyer. The meal being suggested is a traditional food that was given up on entirely due to modern prejudices. It has all of the nutrition and great taste of actual meat, but involves no cruelty to and takes no flesh from any animals either domestic or wild. The only realistic conclusion is that the agricultural industries want to repress this alternative that could greatly expand the vegetarian market and be a serious threat to their financial base.
There. Notice I didn’t use the word ‘baby’ anywhere?
Ronstein
I don’t understand those claiming that Greenwald called for a “document dump” of the logs.
Thats exactly what he did not do.
Read his reply to Wired today, he makes this clear:
I don’t see how anyone can answer that.
R
kindness
@Joey Maloney: Soylet Greenie Babies?
joe from Lowell
You don’t know this. You don’t know if the personal information can be redacted in a manner than leaves it readable.
And if it doesn’t – if it ends up as paged consisting more of blacked-out text than words – that, too, will only “prove” that Wired is hiding something.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@homerhk:
Jesus. All he needed was to call him Lame-o and it wouldn’t have been any different than an Encyclopedia Dramatica article or the Rush Limbaugh show.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Chuck: Character Assassination! Its a game everyone can play!
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@liberty60: Paging Messrs. Weigel, Perlstein, and Neiwert.
Sheik Yerbouti
Tom Hilton:
“Think of it this way: if it were Michelle Malkin” …
Uhh, why? Why need anybody interject Michelle Malkin into anything? It’s a ridiculous irrelevant strawman.
Michelle Greenwald could be the exact same person and claim that mares become impregnated when they face their rear-ends to the north wind, yet it still wouldn’t change or explain any of WIRED’s feeble excuses as being anything other than suspicious.
Paul in KY
@Joey Maloney: Pretty good. :-)
I guess I should have stipulated that they have to be barbequed immediately upon birth (lounging around getting fattened up provoked some sympathy for your point of view).
I will now assume you are a lawyer too.
Joey Maloney
@Uloborus: I bow to your superior lawyering skills, sir or madam.
I guess there’s a good reason why IANAL.
Paul in KY
@Uloborus: Excellent. Also. Too. However, you need to try it and use the word ‘babies’. Little tougher (IMO, the advocacy not the babies) when you can’t use weasel words such as ‘meat’.
Tom Hilton
@kindness:
Actually, there is speculation embedded in the phrase “cherry picked”.
As for innuendo, HomerHK provides a choice example above. Another would be the damning conclusion Greenwald draws from the absence of a reply within 24 hours to an e-mail he sent on Christmas. These are just scratching the surface; there are plenty more examples where they came from.
joe from Lowell
@Roy G:
From Greenwald:
Isn’t it terrible the way people make this story all about personalities?
Uloborus
@Paul in KY:
But in a way, that was my point. The most crucial and important trick of ‘arguing like a lawyer’ – and one very relevant to the debate going on in this thread – is to deliberately leave out that one fact that would make it *absolutely* clear how wrong you are.
Joey Maloney
@Uloborus: That’s the point I was trying to make above, about the difference between advocacy journalism and advocacy lawyering, and how Greenwald sometimes seems to either not understand or ignore that difference.
Silver
@Perry Como:
The Danger Room stops getting juicy Pentagon scoops if Wired clears the record.
This.
Paul in KY
@Uloborus: Yes, I see your point. Well done!
Remind me never to get in an argument with you ;-)
geg6
@Tom Hilton:
What a bullshit argument. Glenn Greenwald = Michelle Malkin? Seriously? Utter crap.
And you, just like “Wired” and Paulsen, are obfuscating. Greenwald never called on them to release all the transcripts. He’s calling on them to release what parts confirm the claims Lamo has been making publically about his relationship with Manning and how it came about, to disclose the close working and personal relationship (documented independently of Glenn), or to make a statement that the transcripts do not back up Lamo’s multiple stories. The fact that they refuse to do any of those things is the story and Glenn is acting as a journalist in the finest of ethical traditions for questioning that refusal. He’s certainly been head and shoulders above all other media in this particular case in doing what real journalists should be doing-asking the pertinent questions and reporting on what answers he does or doesn’t get.
This isn’t about Glenn. If you must make it that, as a completely objective observer, in this case, Glenn is looking like a better ethical journalist than is “Wired” or Poulsen. My mother, an award winning local journalist, would give “Wired” and Paulsen a failing grade and then berate them for the unforgivable pile of red herrings and strawmwn they piled up in their response to him.
Shalimar
@Tom Hilton: What facts am I missing that are persuasive? And persuasive of what? As near as I can read, Wired’s response amounts to, “Lamo has made public statements about the contents of the chat logs which may or may not be true. We have already released transcripts which neither confirm or deny his statements, and we aren’t going to release anything additional that would shed light on his credibility.” You think that is a defensible position for a journalist? Especially one who appears to be a personal friend of the person making the dubious public statements?
Uloborus
@Joey Maloney: and @Paul in KY:
God damn right. The first time I caught Greenwald doing that I was horrified and disenchanted more than I can express.
Mojotron
This first statement is generally correct but needlessly inflammatory and is very smear-y, the second quote is the Glenn we all know and dislike. Both are indefensible for a journalist. But separate from that- does anyone really believe that Lamo was involuntarily committed for 9 days for Aspergers related symptoms?
geg6
@geg6:
Damn typing on the phone.
Just want to make clear that the close working and personal relationship that Paulsen should disclose is his own with Lamo.
Admiral_Komack
@joe from Lowell:
That’s exactly what I was thinking.
I haven’t been keeping up with the ins and outs of this saga, but maybe Wired gets off easy in this slapfest.
They (Wired) haven’t been called O-bots or been linked to Nazis yet.
joe from Lowell
@geg6:
That wasn’t actually his argument.
His argument was that, since Greenwald and Malkin are different people, there are those who treat similar actions by them differently, when they should be treated the same.
burnspbesq
@Paul in KY:
Barbecuing seals in the juices and makes them much more tender and flavorful.
The People rest, Your Honor.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Mojotron: I find it amazing that we’ve gone from leaked diplomatic cables to discussing whether or not Adrian Lamo has Asperger’s.
Or maybe not that amazing given the lack of bombshells in said cables. The 24 hour news / blogger cycle has to feed on something.
joe from Lowell
@Mojotron:
I, for one, am vigorously and passionately determined not to believe anything whatsoever about Lamo’s medical history, or even to consider the matter at all.
Because this shouldn’t be about personalities.
Admiral_Komack
@Joey Maloney:
Soylent Green is babies!
PS
@burnspbesq: I can understand the argument that the legal process “is what matters most” but in fact I disagree. There is a very important political discussion also happening, somewhat in parallel. The two processes impact each other, even though lawyers by convention pretend that this is not the case. The legal discussion is complicated by the military-justice aspect for Manning, in addition to the Assange issues; the political one by the self-interest of the power structure and the fragmented nature of our politics. It’s a mess. I do think, however, that simplifying that mess down to a purely UCMJ approach is a little like saying Lombard Street averages out to a straight line.
Tom Hilton
@joe from Lowell (responding to @geg6): Well, sort of. The larger point, though, is that one’s opinion of whether there is an issue in the first place is inseparable from the credibility of the person raising the issue.
The statement that “Greenwald is not the issue” assumes, to begin with, that there is an issue here. Which perception is, as the example of Malkin illustrates, based on Greenwald’s credibility.
benjoya
@Perry Como:
ding ding ding
someguy
@joe from Lowell:
Well, if anybody is an authority on that, it’s GG. If anything this personal attack establishes GG’s credibility on the issue.
Tim
@Tom Hilton:
It is beyond weird how many commenters here get all vehemently personal and insulting about GG. There is something about his work and/or the way he does it that touches a nerve with them and drives them to distraction, way beyond any reasonable level.
I mean, this is the internet. Why does it bother someone that GG is passionate and aggressive in his arguments anymore than it bothers them that John Cole presents his arguments/insults/snark in an aggressive and passionate, albeit far less well sourced and supported, manner?
The argument seems to amount to “GG is an asshole because he uses lots of words, does lots of research, and is persistent, ergo I hate him even when I agree with him.”
Seems to me GG makes a lot of his haters feel LESS THAN when they compare his tenacity and thoroughness to their own lack of same, so they lash out. It is very revealing.
My favorite insult aimed at GG is that he is “sanctimonious.” I mean, please, what does this even mean? That he thinks he is right and sticks to that argument? That he makes you feel bad about yourself when you read him? What?
Cole posts all the time in ways that are insulting, demeaning, snarky, self righteous, etc., and most of the GG haters lap it up.
The level of GG hate is just weird, and I think based in envy of his intellect and diligence, which haters find lacking in themselves. To make themselves feel better, they have to tear down GG.
Pretty basic psychology, actually.
Mojotron
Having Aspergers and being involuntarily committed for 9 days by court order are two wholly different things.
Joe, you’ve reduced my statement to the most absurd conclusion. Greenwald is sometimes wrong and inflammatory, but I’ve always thought he argued in good faith. Malkin not at all. And in this case the facts are on his side.
Glenn has posted two follow-up posts regarding Wired’s response and they lay out well the multiple inconsistencies in their/Lamo’s account. I ask that all of you please read them before posting again.
Tom Hilton
@Tim: IMO, how you behave toward other people is more important than whether you have the ‘right’ opinions. YMMV.
(And by the way, what you’re addressing here is a parenthetical–not the far more important point in the same comment, about his fundamental dishonesty.)
Uloborus
@Tim:
I’m sorry, but have you read anything in this thread from the people pointing out the flaws in Greenwald’s entire system of argument? The people who aren’t getting caught up in calling him a sanctimonious asshole? Whether or not I like him, he uses facts as a smokescreen for the facts he’s deliberately leaving out, and the other half of his arguments are him declaring that he knows the secret intentions of someone. That isn’t a personal attack. It’s a critique of his journalistic style to support the claim that his articles cannot be trusted.
Stillwater
@Tim: It is beyond weird how many commenters here get all vehemently personal and insulting about GG. There is something about his work and/or the way he does it that touches a nerve with them and drives them to distraction, way beyond any reasonable level.
It’s especially inexplicable when that kind of emotion comes from people who can give rational, measured reasons for their dislike of him. At that point, they’ve already done the hard work to figure out what it is about GG they find offensive, yet despite this, they continue to let themselves be offended by him rather than just dismiss what he has to say, or even dismiss the offensive parts.
It’s like the liberal version of the one percent doctrine: if anyone advocates positions I would normally accept but deviates more than 1% from what I consider acceptable methods, I will reject 100% of what they say.
PS
@Tom Hilton: IMO, how you behave toward other people is more important than whether you have the ‘right’ opinions. Eeeee. Generally, I tend to agree, but in light of the Sully awards stuff, you might want to (I want to) modify this. The question there being why some seem to think it worse to TELL someone to fuck off and die than to CAUSE people to die.
On the substance, I think “dishonest” is harsh, unless you consider it a fundamental part of “legalistic” which I think better describes the Greenwald modus operandi. I’d rather have him defend me when I’m wrong than attack me when I’m right, and I think most lawyers would consider that the supreme compliment. Of course, that’s why the universe invented lawyer jokes.
Tim
@Tom Hilton:
Your major concern in evaluating an Internet blogger is how NICE they are to other people?
I’m sure I’m missing something.
YOU say GG is dishonest. I say you are full of shit. We can disagree.
BUT none of that matters of course; Wired could clear this all up by publishing the logs GG refers to.
There’s some reason you want to focus on the messenger rather than the areas of contention…I don’t know what that reason is, but it’s not helpful.
kindness
@Tom Hilton: What? Really, you think that
‘how you behave toward other people is more important than whether you have the ‘right’ opinions.’
Please forgive me….I thought we have been discussing the merits of the US government locking up and detaining (in solitary confinement) an individual who may or may not have leaked sensitive intragovernmental communications, and has not yet been even brought to trial. One side, a MSM source has implicated this person and not acted in an impartial manner. Glenn has pointed out that the one side (the MSM side) who has been active in lynching the individual in the press has repeatedly not been ‘an honest broker’.
While to you this may revolve around ‘how you behave towards others (needless to say your continued keelhauling of GG isn’t very consistent with your professed values), I myself am more concerned with the constitutionality of our governments actions because if they can do this to this poor sap, they can certainly do this to you or to me.
Glenn is not the point. The point is how our government treats it’s citizens.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Mudge: to my knowledge Sully has never called obama supporters “nazis” and the president “hitler”.
so yes, if you break out the measuring tape, glen is the bigger asshole.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
btw., what’s with the crush on glen? he’s really short, he has no neck, he sweats like nixon on tee vee, he has a bulbous nose and bad skin, and he’s 15 lbs overweight. I mean the only thing that could make it worse is if he had braces.
if ya gonna have a pin-up aim high. Stop with the dumpster diving. Try Anderson Cooper, Olbermann, and O’Donnell, wgi are at least good looking.
I don’t get it. but then again, I don’t get why so many gay men love Oprah.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
why does anyone care about Bradley Manning?
There are literally tens of thousands of people who shouldn’t be in jail or who are serving unfair sentences, yet none of them a blog celebs.
And if you don’t like what Wired is doing, organize a boycott.
If you want to support manning, start contributing to a defense fund.
Be usefull, if you care, not simple glen fanboys.
Silver
@Mike Kay (True Grit):
You weren’t around for Sullivan’s “negros are stupid” and “anyone who doesn’t want to invade Iraq is a traitorous subversive” days, I guess.
joe from Lowell
@Tim: That’s pathetic, Tim.
There have been no end of actual complaints people have made about Greenwald’s methods.
Instead of dealing with them, you’ve decided instead to make up some arguments in their place, and engage in cheap psychoanalysis.
Your refusal to dispute the actual points people have raised about Greenwald is glaring.
joe from Lowell
@Stillwater:
This is silly.
I realized long ago that Bill Kristol argues dishonestly, but I continue to complain about him. You know why?
Because there are still people who take him seriously.
300baud
@burnspbesq:
Yes, how could having the general public be informed about a matter of major international attention be beneficial to society? I see no reason people shouldn’t be allowed, perhaps encouraged, to lie about someone who is central to a major controversy. Even when the that person is being held incommunicado, under conditions that sound like punishment and may be illegal?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Oh, this was supposed to be about Wired’s response? Nice try, but it has predictably devolved into nonsense about Glenn Greenwald’s personality. You’re going to have to do better than this if you expect to sneak it by the Greenwald Derangement Syndrome Brigade.
burnspbesq
@300baud:
Way to answer a different question than the one I posed.
“I see no reason people shouldn’t be allowed, perhaps encouraged, to lie about someone who is central to a major controversy.”
Where did I say that?
You must have missed the several comments in which I characterized the alleged circumstances of Manning’s confinement as “barbaric, arguably criminal, and stupid.”
Andy K
@Mark S.:
So in response to this incident, he (allegedly) downloads and sends to WikiLeaks State Department documents that discuss the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi.
Stillwater
@joe from Lowell: but I continue to complain about him.
I know this, Joe. You’re a complainer. And a bit of a whiner too.
General Stuck
@Stillwater:
Lamest comment on the internet today
Tom Hilton
@PS: I’ll qualify it as follows: for the vast majority of the populace, who have zero influence as individuals, how they treat people is vastly more important than whether they have the ‘right’ opinions.
For people in positions of authority, whose opinions are likely to have consequences, it’s another story. Very few of us are in that position.
@Tim:
Actually, whether they argue in good faith (which Greenwald does not) is a much more important factor. You, not I, seized on a parenthetical remark and are treating it as if it were the most important issue here.
@kindness: This is so muddled and incoherent that I’m not sure how to respond. You defend Greenwald by assuming the entirety of Greenwald’s argument; you conflate the opinions of individuals with the actions of government entities; and you confuse a dispute over sourcing and journalistic practice with some kind of constitutional issue. How can you write something so poorly thought out and expect to be taken seriously?
burnspbesq
@PS:
Actually, the two processes are, at best, tangentially related.
There are important issues about transparency in government, and specifically about classification policy, that have been around for a long time, and if the Manning case causes them to come back onto the front burner that’s a good thing. But it’s going to have zero effect on how Manning’s eventual court-martial, or a potential criminal trial of Assange, will play out. I don’t think “the documents I stole shouldn’t have been classified” is a defense to any charge that Manning is likely to face. And “the public has a legitimate interest in knowing these things” isn’t a defense to any charge that Manning or Assange are likely to face.
stormhit
Yeah great point. And while we’re at it, why doesn’t Obama just release his birth certificate. That he doesn’t tells the biggest story.
burnspbesq
@burnspbesq:
More@PS:
It would be a very good thing, in my view, if an appellate court were to weigh in on the question of whether the First Amendment bars prosecution of a media defendant, that played no role in the acquisition of classified material that rises to the level of a conspiracy or aiding and abetting, under the “receiving” prong of 18 USC 641. We could then determine whether remedial legislation is needed. We’ll have to wait and see whether the facts of this case provide an opportunity for that to happen.
Dollared
@burnspbesq: Agreed – but I would argue that it’s all the same. Somebody up above said succinctly and accurately that Wired is covering up because Danger Room would shut down if the Pentagon (especially DARPA, I will add) doesn’t love them anymore.
Same reason that NYT, WSJ, etc, will not take on the Republicans for being complete, lying sacks of shit, and open, barefaced hypocrites. Because private scoops are the currency of journalism, and nobody wants the stream of silver to stop.
Mojotron
@Tom Hilton:
I was able to follow Kindnesses post without any problem and he/she wasn’t rude to you in any way. For someone who rails about how we behave towards one another you’re acting like a prick.
Tim
@Tom Hilton:
For people in positions of authority, whose opinions are likely to have consequences, it’s another story. Very few of us are in that position.
Do you see GG as someone in a position of authority? If so, how?
Does he have more authority than the bully U.S. military who is torturing Bradley Manning?
Part of what I don’t get about you and others with your perspective is your outrage hierarchy: You seem much more offended by GG’s non-niceness than by that of the U.S. government, military, and those who worked with them to put Manning behind bars.
Your focus on GG, who is after all, a type of outside agitator here, rather than on those who are abusing their humongous amounts of world power, is odd.
kindness
For the record…I was born and am still a practicing male.
I mean no hard feelings for those I agree &/or disagree with here (well, except the occasional troll). Here is what I think.
1) I suspect that Manning was involved in the data that Wikileaks released. I think the US Military has a right to hold him and take him to court. I would hope they weren’t going out of their way to break him as a human being though.
2) Glenn Greenwald knows more about law than I do. GG can be a bit of a prima donna at times but i really appreciate his point of view being expressed as the MSM has become such a corporate whorehouse.
3) If you are gonna run on being a journalistic outfit (even an MSM/almost MSM one) you might want to actually practice journalistic integrity. ie- no lynching, no lying, actually look at both (all) sides of an argument. Now since this disqualifies most the MSM as honorable and principled journalistic outfits (including at times GG), I will simply rest on my calling them whores, even though whores have significantly more integrity and societal value than most the MSM now days.
4) I am so out of this thread. If I mention GG or Manning again today my head is gonna explode.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Silver: your right. in fact I go back to when sully helped sink ClintonCare in 1994 (with conspiracy theorist Betsy McCaughey) and peddled the racist “The Bell Curve” bullshit.
still, today, he’s a big supporter of the black guy in the white house, a supporter of HCR, and he turned against the war in iraq (not sure if he ever apologized).
I don’t read him regularly, so I imagine he’s still an ahole to some degree, but certainly less than someone who smears obama as hitler.
Jeff Fecke
@Tom Hilton:
This.
Look, I think there might be a case for Wired to release these logs. But Greenwald really isn’t making it, and more to the point, Greenwald isn’t the person to make it; someone who’s chatting with Julian Assange off-the-record is no longer a journalist; he’s a player.
FWIW, I do wish Wired would release these to another journalistic organization — say, HuffPo or TPM, or even someone other than Greenwald at Salon — and let them go over them and then write up an article on them using journalistic criteria.
But that’s not what Greenwald wants. He wants everything released so he can seize on something — anything — to prove that Wired is in the wrong. He’s not acting as a journalist. He’s acting as a pure partisan, and I have no problem with Wired telling him to go pound sand.
burnspbesq
@Dollared:
That’s undoubtedly true, and will continue to be so as long as media enterprises have P&Ls.
I was thinking about that in another context yesterday. We love to malign NPR here, but where other media enterprises have pulled back from the world it continues to have a very broad geographic footprint. It’s “business model” is funded primarily by fees from the stations that pick up its content, which pay that out of listener contributions.
The BBC continues to get significant revenue from fees imposed on the purchase of televisions.
If you can come up with a “business model” for journalism that doesn’t require that media enterprises earn profit in order to stay alive, someone will probably erect a statue of you somewhere.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@stormhit:
exactly. this is the exact talking point the wingnuts employed during regarding the patriot act and spying on emails (ie “if you don’t want to disclose, then you’re obviously hiding indica of guilt”)
Mike Kay (True Grit)
if anyone really cared about this issue they’d organize a boycott of Wired and their sponsors.
to just whine about it on a blog is just self aggrandizement (ie look at me, look at me, I’m fightn the man).
lol
“Obama has a golden opportunity to make the GOP look like even more of a jackass by releasing his long-form birth certificate, and he passed it up. That, in itself, is the biggest tell of the whole story.”
Edit: Well fuck. Someone beat me to it.
Mojotron
Mojotron
Can’t edit, formatting fuckup again. I guess you can’t put multiple paragraphs in a single blockquote. The first blockquote is Jeff Fecke’s from above, everything after that is Glenn’s.
Andy K
@Mojotron:
Or, ya know, since Wired is already the third party, maybe a fourth? And if that fourth party doesn’t satisfy Greenwald’s expectations, a fifth or sixth…Until, finally, Glenn gets his shot.
geg6
@Jeff Fecke:
FTR, your statement that GG only wants all the logs and nothing else is either an out and out lie, a hyperbolic distortion, or simply pure ignorance. He has proposed several solutions for Wired to get out of the hole they persist in digging. One of them, in fact, is your suggestion that Wired give the logs to a disinterested organization to determine what is true about what Lamo is saying and what isn’t.
But then these things happen when you’d rather spend your time shooting the messenger rather than read the message. And with that my rather surprising defense of GG is over.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
btw, if anyone really cared about Manning, and not just defending what ever shit glen spouts, they’d be protesting outside the justice department, outside the FBI building, outside the pentagon, outside Quantico.
if anyone really cared about torture in the prison system, they’d be protesting outside Pelican Bay State Prison.
I mean, it’s not that hard, Abby Hoffman was great at organizing large protests, and he didn’t have the internet.
but no. this isn’t about manning or torture or the prison system, it’s about defending the honor of your high-school crush.
lol
@Uloborus:
A prime example of this would be when questioned about his relationship with Hamsher, Greenwald claimed (in the comments here!) that he didn’t receive a dollar from her.
As it turned out, he was receiving thousands of dollars from a PAC run by her.
His statement was technically true on its own but was highly misleading.
And that was after he claimed at Salon that he was working for the PAC for free.
Tom Hilton
@Mojotron: I am very critical of what I see as sloppy thinking. If that makes me a prick, so be it. For my part, I think that’s very different from the sort of smears and ad hominem attacks Greenwald routinely makes against people who have the temerity to disagree with him.
@Tim: You really have an unerring instinct for the trivial and tangential.
geg6
@Andy K:
Damn you for making a liar out of me.
Wired is up to it’s ears as a party in this dispute and is in no fucking way a disinterested third party. Lamo and Poulsen had and still have a close working and personal relationship, documented by not just Glenn but other media sources, going back almost a decade. From way back when Poulsen was a hacker and even before Poulsen was convicted for hacking.
wolf blitzer
glad to see so many supporters of the government here. assange is a terrorist and whatever lamo says about manning must be true. the chat logs will confirm this, i’m sure. so sure that i don’t need to see them.
Admiral_Komack
https://balloon-juice.com/2010/12/29/wireds-response/#comment-2322618
…and you know Professor X will be pissed if that happens!
Andy K
@geg6:
And Glenn Greenwald, libertarian, allied at times with Grover “Let’s shrink government until we can drown it in a bathtub” Norquist, is disinterested? Glenn, who quite quickly glosses over with a smirk (in this chat at bloggingheads.tv) the notion that WikiLeaks might well destroy governments (although Greenwald only talks about the US in that chat, Assange is less specific about which nations he destroys)?
Show me a disinterested party and I’ll tell you it’s a rock.
ETA: Last night I listened to Glenn’s cross-examination of Lamo from this summer past. I’m surprised he never worked as a prosecutor…Or not. He didn’t get what he was looking for.
Mojotron
Unless there’s something I don’t know about, that was Hamsher.
Anne Laurie
@Roy G: __
Seconded. What I’m reading is Poulsen whining about Greenwald bullying poor brain-crippled Lamo, which has nothing to do with Poulsen’s journalistic ethics or lack of them. I believe the magician’s term for this is “misdirection”.
Anne Laurie
@Tom Hilton: __
You’re conflating the idea that Greenwald is mean to Lamo with Poulsen’s refusal to release what he’s been advertising as horrible, terrible, damning evidence against that very bad person Manning. Nice for Poulsen (convicted felon! admitted government snitch! guy who’s made himself a ‘journalism’ career out of sockpuppeting an Aspie for the benefit of his NSA handlers! — nasty enough?) but a little too lawyerly to convince me that Greenwald is the one at fault here.
Why do the government’s defenders all pretend that Poulsen isn’t involved in the argument here?
General Stuck
@Anne Laurie:
Anne Laurie, it seems kind of lame to be whining about people focusing on personalities, with Greenwald, and then in the next breath smear someone with mental illness, and another with past felony convictions. Especially since Assange has the same thing in his past for computer crimes. I expect better from you
Mike Kay (True Grit)
@Anne Laurie:
defending the government of what?
I still can’t figure out how anyone finds any aspect of this episode relevant/interesting. The only thing I can come up with is that bloggers tend to be protective about other bloggers, the same way hackers are protective about at large hacking activities (even ones they wouldn’t employ).
FuzzyWuzzy
Judy Miller. Joe Klein. Operation Mockingbird. Woodward and Bernstein. Remember the Maine.
The government’s various factions, particularly in the intelligence world, manage perception through the use of agents placed in the media which is itself owned and operated by people whose livelihoods depend upon access to the same government factions for the bits of information they use to construct narratives with the assistance of those same government factions. This isn’t new or remarkable. Wired is simply using the same pipeline of government sponsored informants to shape public perception of a news event and GG pointing this out makes some uncomfortable.
The greatest crime is always to be right too soon.