The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks

Glenn Greenwald on the rather obvious peculiarities of the PFC Bradley Manning WikiLeaks case:

This Manning detention — whether it was by design or just exploited opportunistically — is being used to depict WikiLeaks as a serious national security threat and associations with it as dangerous and subversive. Just in the last week alone, several people have expressed to me fears that supporting or otherwise enabling WikiLeaks could subject them to liability or worse. 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.

The case of PFC Bradley Manning just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Not everything is as it seems – smoke and mirrors if you will – which makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction. Did Manning truly have a crisis of conscience, seemingly leading him to confess to a known, convicted hacker?

Or is the more plausible explanation that PFC Manning was somehow setup by the U.S. Government to potentially fulfill their desire to destroy the reputation of Wikileaks?

In other words, exactly what the U.S. Government wanted to happen in order to destroy WikiLeaks has happened here: news reports that a key WikiLeaks source has been identified and arrested, followed by announcements from anonymous government officials that there is now a worldwide “manhunt” for its Editor-in-Chief. Even though WikiLeaks did absolutely nothing (either in this case or ever) to compromise the identity of its source, isn’t it easy to see how these screeching media reports — WikiLeaks source arrested; worldwide manhunt for WikiLeaks; major national security threat — would cause a prospective leaker to WikiLeaks to think twice, at least: exactly as the Pentagon Report sought to achieve? And that Pentagon Report was from 2008, before the Apache Video was released; imagine how intensified is the Pentagon’s desire to destroy WikiLeaks now. Combine that with what both the NYT and Newsweek recently realized is the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistle-blowers, and one can’t overstate the caution that’s merited here before assuming one knows what happened.

No matter what the outcome of this turns out to be, it sure is an intriguing read, especially from an information assurance perspective. There was a huge breakdown of policy implementation where Manning worked, ultimately facilitating his ability to voluminously transfer classified documents from highly classified networks to the internet – something expressly forbidden for obvious reasons.

Greenwald’s write-up for Salon is one of the more exhaustive articles questioning the validity of what Wired has reported on to date. It is well worth reading, especially if you care about national security, government transparency and whistle-blowing.