Glenn Greenwald writes:
For more than six months, Wired’s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories: the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks’ source. In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs: Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.
Despite that, on June 10, Wired published what it said was only “about 25 percent” of those logs, excerpts that it hand-picked. For the last six months, Poulsen has not only steadfastly refused to release any further excerpts, but worse, has refused to answer questions about what those logs do and do not contain. This is easily one of the worst journalistic disgraces of the year: it is just inconceivable that someone who claims to be a “journalist” — or who wants to be regarded as one — would actively conceal from the public, for months on end, the key evidence in a political story that has generated headlines around the world.
Over the last month, I’ve done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable — identical — are the political figures and the journalists. There’s just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they’ve ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, “Assange = Saddam” script. So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a “high-tech Terrorist,”) that you’re viewed as being from another planet if you don’t spout it. It’s the equivalent of questioning Saddam’s WMD stockpile in early 2003.
I watched the CNN clip, and agree that the present Media types are sprouting the script that the Government provides. Interesting that they believe Assange is guilty without a trial, which just shows that the majority of them are sycophants of the Government. This is why they are becoming irrelevant today. I suppose too, that the people behind the scene’s tell the talking heads what to say & not to say. I also noticed that Ms Townsend didn’t have much to say besides the official mantra. I sometimes wonder just who sets these things up?
As I watched in amazement at this clip of the show from the presence and presentation of the CNN anchor I thought I was watching a Fox News clip.
Indeed, they are on the same page and speak alike. I as usual was impressed with how aggressively and clearly he deals with the media giants.
The full account of Glenn’s comments I would have hoped to appear on Warincontext –I encourage readers to go to today’s posting at salon.com to get the complete message. He also alerts the reader to the anchor’s and (CNN prompted?) response to his article.
“Standing on its own, the response is not unreasonable, but I’ll leave it to others to decide if her claims are consistent with her comments and conduct during the segment…”
December 28, 2010
Jessica Yellin’s response to last night’s Assange discussion