"Blood on their hands"
The MSM is at it again: churning out and repeating PR talking points a la Goebbels until these bits drill their way deep into even the thickest American skull.
The latest PR assault is being waged against Wikileaks Editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, and his alleged source of "Collateral Murder," Private Bradley Manning.
The irony and chutzpah of the "we don't do body counts" American military speculating that Assange may have blood on his hands is nothing short of outrageous.
The documents prove that our government knowingly funded the Taliban via Pakistan, providing them the funds to kill and maim our soldiers, and they dare to say Assange is endangering our troops?
Below the fold is an interview Assange had with Andrea Mitchell, in which he explains that he did not publish all 91,000 documents and that he vetted the ones that he did, so it's not true that he released the names of Afghani who collaborated with our military.
Assange passed the documents to the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian, which are all highly respected news journals that he considers his partners in collaborating on vetting this information and keeping the disclosure honest.
At 2:50, Andrea Mitchell asks Julian Assange whether he is concerned that Robert Gates of the Pentagon and Robert Gibbs of the White House speculate that the release of these documents has the potential to harm military personnel, and he answered that they have held back some 15,000 reports that could put Afghan informants at risk of retribution for "more detailed review," and the documents released are over 7 months old and not of "tactical significance."
Julian Assange answers Andrea Mitchell's repetition of the PR canard that the leaked document contain nothing new and could endanger our troops by explaining that you can't have it both ways, either the documents are relevant or they are not. The little known fact that our tax dollars are beign funneled through Pakistan to fund the Taliban who use the money to kill our own troops found in these leaked reports refutes Obama's premise that the leaked documents "don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate in Afghanistan."
However, the truth doesn't get in the way of the PR machine as Lil' Lizzie Cheney, the daughter of the biggest Daddy Warmonger in America, decries Assange for having "blood on his hands." It should be laughable for Halliburton Cheney's offspring to accuse anyone of having even a drop of blood on his pinky, but she knows that many of her viewers aren't capable of independent thought or reason and will swallow this talking point whole and regurgitate it on cue.
Even though our tax dollars are being funneled through Pakistan into the hands of the Taliban, obviously endangering our troops which the documents expose to our soldiers' benefit, Liz Cheney accuses Assange of "aiding and abetting" Al Qaeda. She calls on President Obama to shut down Wikileaks, to prosecute Julian Assange, and certainly not award him a visa to enter the US...gee, I wonder if her war criminal father may have a vested interest in stopping leaks of government abuse and malfeasance...
The Arrest and Vilification of Private Bradley Manning
At 7:52 in the Assange/Mitchell interview, Andrea asks Julian what he can tell us about Bradley Manning, speculating that he leaked these 91,000 secret documents to him as well as the video, "Collateral Murder," which shows American soldiers shooting a Reuters photographer, another Reuters journalist, and between 16 and 24 innocent civilians walking along side them on the streets of Baghdad. Assange answers that Wikileaks is set up so that the identity of the leakers aren't known to them. He goes on to call Private Bradley Manning a political prisoner, who is held off country, possibly in a Guantanomo like facility, denied access to effective legal counsel.
The arrest of Bradley Manning was based on the testimony of
a convicted "former hacker," Adrian Lamo [New York Times hacker Adrian Lamo gets home detention: He was also sentenced to two years' probation and fined more than $64,900]
Adrian Lamo claimed that Private Manning indiscriminately leaked over 260,000 US Embassy e-mails, which spins the alleged whistle blower from being considered a conscientious hero to a security risk, but Assange has stated that he has not received these e-mails.
Lamo claimed that Manning boasted to him that he was leaking secret documents to Wikileaks, because Manning was lonely, which flies in the face of how the whistle blower went to the trouble of using Wikileaks to hide his identity, making it unlikely that someone carefully concealing his identity would broadcast it to a perfect stranger he met on line.
The original story, US Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video [Collateral Murder"] Probe, picked up by the MSM and widely publicized as fact, was first published in Wired and was written by another cyber-criminal, Kevin Poulsen:
Poulsen pleaded guilty to seven counts of mail, wire and computer fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice, and was sentenced to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay $56,000 in restitution. At the time, it was the longest sentence ever given for cracking. He also pleaded guilty to breaking into computers and obtaining information on undercover businesses run by the FBI.
According to Mr. Poulsen:
Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.
It's all too weird and too hokey to believe, which begs the question: will we ever hear Manning's side of the story?
Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has been writing informative investigative blogs about Wikileaks and the Private Manning case. In Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy, he wrote about Forbes Andy Greenberg's report that Chet Uber, who works for a company, Project Vigilant, that data mines the internet for US Government intelligence, threatened Lamo with likely being arrested if Lamo didn't disclose Private Manning's name. Lamo, as it turns out, also worked at Project Vigilant - as a "volunteer analyst," an important factoid the MSM just happend to omit.
The confluence of coincidences and conflicting chronicles concerning the Bradley Manning/Adrian Lamo confession claim is confounding as Glenn Greenwald concurs:
Lamo has repeatedly denied (including in his interview with me) that he ever worked with federal authorities, it turns out that he was a "volunteer analyst" for an entity which collects private Internet data in order to process it and turn it over to the Federal Government. That makes the whole Manning case all the more strange: Manning not only abruptly contacted a disreputable hacker out of the blue and confessed to major crimes over the Interet, but the hacker he arbitrarily chose just happened to be an "analyst" for a group that monitors on a massive scale the private Internet activities of American citizens in order to inform on them to U.S. law enforcement agencies
Glenn Greenwald invited his readers to watch this video of Adrian Lamo on the BBC to see for themselves how credible he is as a source:
The above clip also has a very good interview with Heather Brooke, who points out that the oft repeated claim on the MSM that Wikileaks may have "blood on its hands" is pure speculation, and ignores and diverts our attention away from the identifiable and factual harm that the documents illustrate the Afghanistan War has caused.
Listening to Lamo is like listening to a robo-voice mechanically repeating the military's propaganda hit parade attacking Wikileaks. He covers the very same talking point that Liz Cheney and the Admiral parroted: Wikileaks may have blood on their hands and these documents contain the names of Afghan collaborators.
Again, these propagandists conveniently neglected to report that Mr. Assange didn't release the reports that contained the names of the Afghan informants, but left listeners with the impression that Wikileaks did not vet the documents, which it did.
Clearly the point of the propaganda machine is to shoot the messenger, Wikileaks, and ignore the message, the actual sea of blood spilt by the Afghanistan War splashed all over the pages of the leaked documents.
When the BBC interviewer asked Lamo whether he felt like a hero, he said something of significance. He said he felt sad that he didn't interdict the leaks in the first place.
How would Lamo have been in the position of interdicting document leaks?
Clearly, the whole story is not being told.
Lamo laments that he didn't prevent the leaking of these 91,000 documents in time.
Why?
Lamo's "volunteer analyst" assignment may have been to use his hacking genius to find the leaker and stop the leaks after "Collateral Murder" was released to the public.
The government likely doesn't want us to know that big brother is mining our every key stroke and invading our right to privacy with companies like Project Vigilant, because then we would know that it's time to start our own "Project Vigilant" to protect our civil rights on the internet.