Photo by Save Bradley. Bradleymanning.org rented a billboard in the Washington, DC area . The problem is that there aren't any actual war crimes exposed.
So the Guardian readers "voted" for Bradley Manning to become the person of the year.
Naturally, what really happened is a lot of script kiddies sicced on the site by WikiLeaks, with its many followers on Twitter and Facebook, told John Perry Barlow's footsoldiers in the cyberwars to go out there and vote -- and script kiddies being what they are, they were able to vote regularly and often on proxies. Technically, the Guardian may even be able to show unique IP addresses for every vote -- oh, proxies, there's lots and lots of them out there. And you don't even have to figure out how to use proxies. You could sit in the courtyard of, say, our plaza, or any big city courtyard, with something like 4,000 people in 1,000 apartments, and just methodically go through all the open wireless connections and log on with them and vote.
Whatever. It was done in such a way that it would seem "impossible" to call out.
And yet the Guardian pointed out this:
It was very much a game of two halves. The overwhelming majority of early votes in the three-day poll went to Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban for defending girls' right to education. Malala, who is still recovering from injuries sustained in October, had 70 percent of votes at the halfway stage with many readers predicting a foregone conclusion. [...]
But in the latter stages, following a series of tweets from the @Wikileaks twitter handle telling followers to vote Manning, thousands of voters flocked to his cause. Manning secured 70 percent of the vote, the vast majority of them coming after a series of @Wikileaks tweets. Project editor Mark Rice-Oxley said: "It was an interesting exercise that told us a lot about our readers, our heroes and the reasons that people vote."
So basically, as a Guardian columnist put it much more tartly:
Emma Kennedy @EmmaK67Good to see Julian Assange now trying to rubbish a 14 year old girl shot in the head because she wanted to be educated. Way to go Julian
One of the things that the little script kiddies who follow Manning and Assange and WikiLeaks claims is that Manning was a "whistleblower" who exposed "torture and murders" and that all he did was "share" data and not "steal" it.
The latter comes from that ethics-free legal nihilism for which open-source and copylefist cultists are known -- the idea that if a copy (the original) is left with an owner of documents or digital content, and you take a copy of it, you "haven't stolen" because they "still have their property". Snort. Of course, part of ownership is a) privacy and b) the ability to monetarize, and both of these things *are* stolen and can't be gotten back when the little darlings strike. The sad thing is that there are highly-paid lawyers spouting this griefers' word salad these days -- despicable.
But what about this "whistleblower" stuff? Well, nothing in those quarter of a million cables -- and I read lots and lots of them and studied some regions really intensively and wrote about them -- was ever about any US responsibility for torture and murder. Linky links plox? Seriously, the Cablegate was a bust in that regard, if that was the point (and it wasn't -- Assange's point was to make the liberal US clutch up and stop informing itself by de-siloing its cables, and therefore become antithetical to itself and collapse -- a Leninist "worse the better" anarchic strategy -- I am grateful for Aaron Bady, himself a supporter of all these destructive cyborgs, for laying all that out in his explication of Assange's writings).
Oh, but what about "Collateral Murder"? Isn't that murder and isn't that whistleblowing? Well, no. First of all, the tragedy itself was known about and protested vigorously by journalists' groups and of course Reuters' itself -- it was their journalist who was killed. When the video was released it didn't add any real proof of the allegations -- if anything, it exonerated the helicopter gunners because it was very clear -- and Assange admitted this to the New Yorker -- that the soldiers thought they were seeing a man with an RPG, when in fact it was a journalist with a tripod. Why he was walking around with armed men casually was an open question, of course. "Murder" means intention; there was no intention to kill a journalist, and certainly not wound children -- who couldn't even be seen in the van that pulls up suddenly to the scene to pick up the wounded -- Jacob Appelbaum outright lies about that.
So "Collateral Murder" utterly fails as "whistle-blowing" exercise, truly. To be sure, there are lots of other files leaked about combat operations, and lots of cables, and maybe somewhere in these someone can make the case for excessive use of force or something. But I'm not seeing it. The reality of all these cables and documents is that they describe how hard it is to fight the world's totalitarian's and terrorists -- and they are so far worse in their torturing and mass murder of people that you continually have to ask why these, um, "whistle-blowers" aren't willing to turn their, er, talents on those tyrants.
And for me, there's always this: Bradley Manning, in telling his contorted story, said that what prompted him to turn disloyal to the US military was the fact that he was sent out on a mission to raid the printing press of some Iraqis who were publishing pamphlets, that these were supposedly not the incendiary things claimed and this was a terrible travesty of freedom of expression and the Iraqis shouldn't have been detained or lost their printing press.
Well, so where is the file on that incident, Bradley?
If that's what you cared about -- as a newly-baked human rights activist -- why didn't you leak that file first? Or even among the 250,000? Or, well, anytime, ever?
That you didn't speaks volumes to me about what you're really about. Not whistle-blowing to uncover a wrong and obtain justice. But just sheer vandalism, mayhem, sticking-it-to-the-man just out of spite.
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