Many on the left believe Glenn Greenwald pwned Jeffrey Toobin in this interview and posted it to Youtube with claims of this nature. But a close study merely shows how distractive and manipulative GG is -- yet again claiming Bob Woodward leaked like Manning leaked, and because he was in the Washington elite, he didn't get punished. Nonsense. Woodward did journalism, you know; Manning did hacking. Learn the difference. As Toobin points out, he released 700,000 cables, "and the people they talked to risk their lives...and the idea that Bradley Manning is justified in releasing this material is just completely wrong". Toobin in fact shines as a moral voice here; Greenwald comes off looking like a creep.
Bradley Manning's apology and alleged expression of remorse is utterly fake.
For a good bird's eye view of how wildly different this same news event and this same apology can be seen by all sorts of media and pundits, see this compendium.
He's just doing this to get a lighter sentence, at the advice of his attorney.
That's all.
I continue to predict, based on what my friend who was formerly in the JAG has told me, and everything I've read, that Bradass67 will get 10-16 years, tops. Not 90. Not 50. Not 25. But 10 -- maybe a few more. This fake remorse enacted, plus that time in solitary, will knock off his sentence -- and the finding that the enemy wasn't really aided will help all this along. With good behaviour, with his case continuing to be raised for presidential pardons, we could see him out even before that 10-15. That's going to be the reality.
Why? Because one of the argumentations the advisors will make inside the government is, "Oh, let's not make these snivelling confused hacker brats into warrior heroes and enemies -- that just spawns more of them and empowers them. Let's not even give them the satisfaction of being believable martyrs. Let's give them light sentences to show how little they and their crimes matter to us."
I actually think that's all total bullshit, but I do know that there are minimizers of terrorism and apologists for hackers inside the government that spin these yarns.
In fact, I don't find that the theory of sentencing hackers to prison as a deterrent to their crimes has ever gone away, or ever lost its edge. Just ask Sabu.
But there is this reasoning and it is what is particularly prominent in the Obama Administration about both hackers and terrorists -- and we're going to see a lighter sentence as a result. But there had to be this eating of shit first -- just to make it look like Bradley knew right from wrong -- which he doesn't.
I marvel at Streetwise Professor taking Bradley's Eddie Haskell act at face value, even praising it as "Manning Up". Of couse, maybe SP is thinking that, like Plato's notion of virtue, if you just pretend to practice the virtue, it might stick, and if we clap our hands and believe in Manning's remorse, it will be true.
I don't, for a minute.
For me, the most telling evidence of how fake it was, was this:
I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was gonna help people, not hurt people. The last few years have been a learning experience. I look back at my decisions and wonder, ‘How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?’
This is deliberately calculated to make every script kiddie from here to breakfast to snort or beat his breast in howling indignation. It is meant as high IRC channel camp. It is faux as the day as long. Proper authority? Really? For reals? Guffaw. ROFL.
No hacker believes in "proper authoritity" -- they wouldn't be hackers if they did. In fact, even coders who don't particularly hack believe in "proper authority" -- except when its their own.
Streetwise admires this statement, but I think he has never sat watching his servers crash over and over again by these people, and then dancing around and pretending it's not them with the physics-enabled self-replicating cubes.
This apology is so fake, it's like some BEAT ME sign stuck on his back enabling "the community" to beat him up -- it's sado-masochism.
The entire premise of the hacker movement is that "lowly juniors" can easily overthrow those with "proper authority" and Manning knows full well that the entire story of WikiLeaks -- and Snowden -- is just that.
It's a spectacle.
And I believe that knowing that it would play out this way, Julian Assange, and his co-conspirators Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum timed this Snowden thing to distract from Bradley Manning's trial -- which could only play out as a pathetic loser's loss before the whole world.
The public sympathy for him just never gelled the way they wished. He just never got adopted by the mainstream liberals as much as they hoped. He just never made a coherent hero because it seemed like he was psychologically troubled, had embraced a radical belief system to find a place for himself and cohorts, and then sullenly ripped out hundreds of thousands of files and exposed them out of spite and nihilism, not out of some conscious plan to leak for reasons of conscience.
The lawyer's effort to show him as "naive" and "misguided" but "sincere" just doesn't cut it for those of us who know this kind of Internet type. Instead, they are narcissistic, arrogant, disdainful, furious, destructive, nihilist. They don't care about other people and what happens to them.
The tell-tale symptom of this for me was -- again -- Manning's failure to publish the story of the Iraqi printing press -- and Assange's dismissal of the story. If that story of alleged injustice was supposed to explain Manning's treason, it should have been pivotol, like certain "Pentagon Papers" were for Ellsberg. But in stead, it was deep-sixed -- maybe because it would have in fact shown that the Iraq War was far less of an anti-American morality tale than Assange wanted to pretend it was.
I think Assange and Greenwald in particular, who had long been pushing the anti-American WikiLeaks cause, wanted to make sure that all the attention of the world went to the evil NSA that supposedly spies on people, and not to this sullen youth who dumped all these files into the wild and it didn't really achieve his supposed goals anyway. BTW, Obama pulled US troops out of Iraq, and each week now, there are car bombs and other terrorist attacks all over -- one week recently it was 69 people killed, another week it was 20 -- as many as on the square in Egypt, without about 1/100th the attention... How can the WL gang explain that? Um, drawing to the theater, are we?
And I think some of the, well, uncooked aspects of this whole Snowden thing -- that graceless, awkward scramble to Russia, those hurriedly published slides that almost made the whole thing collapse over the fake "direct access" issue any newbie tekkie could explain was all wrong -- I think it has to do with the timing of the Manning trial, as well known as it was, coming on June 4th, then starting to spiral differently, with the issue of "aiding the enemy" hanging in the balance.
Why does nobody ever, ever notice that Manning's trial opening on June 3rd and Greenwald's first story about Snowden on June 6th come out just at the same time?!
Hackers have absolutely no solidarity with each other, and like hard little soldiers shed their comrades in a heartbeat when they cease to support the cause or betray it. They are like Stalin's shooters of men retreating from the front in World War II. So, they dumped Manning with nothing but a tear for his victimhood -- they could always come back and milk that later, and pressed on to Snowden.
In fact, if we comb through those first three days, we might see something that triggered Greenwald & co. to speed up their release of the NSA story....
Even if we take at face value the legend Snowden has spun about contacting first Greenwald in November or was it December? -- then Poitras in January -- then both of them in April -- they would have seen the value to their cause of his story and wanted to rush it out in time for Bradley Manning Trial Week.
There's the glaring fact of Snowden claiming not to have gotten this material until late March/early April when he went to work for Booze, Hamilton Allen -- and Jacob Appelbaum and Moxie Marlingspike were celebrating a birthday and holding a hackers' spring break in Hawaii where Snowden was also going on some sort of business trip (to Maui, 100 miles away from where he lived?)
Then Glenn claiming that it took "months" for him to sift through his cache to decide what to run -- but of course, it's more like "one month" or "a few weeks" because Glenn claims they started working with Snowden in earnest in April. He then had only about 30 days before the first article Glenn published. It just doesn't track.
And the servers of lavabit, the encrypting email service Snowden used to communicate with Poitras and Greenwald and where the details of this fable might be better studied, is now closed -- to withhold it from the feds, who demanded it, obviously.
As Toobin put it, ultimately, so well, in praising the hard work and dedication of the American Foreign Service, "I trust their judgement about what is a secret more than I do Bradley Manning."
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