The truth is out there Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald insists if only Wired.com would set it free. An unexpected holiday word storm over transcripts of internet chats between accused Wikileaker PFC Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned Manning in, has produced a pile of column inches from Greenwald who asserts that Wired.com writer Kevin Poulson is withholding primary source material that would allow journalists to know whether the hacker turned informant is telling them them truth.
“Poulsen’s concealment of the chat logs is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do. By allowing the world to see only the fraction of the Manning-Lamo chats that he chose to release, Poulsen has created a situation in which his long-time “source,” Adrian Lamo, is the only source of information for what Manning supposedly said beyond those published exceprts. Journalists thus routinely print Lamo’s assertions about Manning’s statements even though — as a result of Poulsen’s concealment — they are unable to verify whether Lamo is telling the truth. Due to Poulsen, Lamo is now the one driving many of the media stories about Manning and WikiLeaks even though Lamo (a) is a convicted felon, (b) was (as Poulsen strangely reported at the time) involuntarily hospitalized for severe psychiatric distress a mere three weeks before his chats with Manning, and (c) cannot keep his story straight about anything from one minute to the next.”
Read the complete story at: The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired by Glenn Greenwald
Wired.com editor Evan Hansen and Poulson wrote a two-part rebuttal. This is from Hansen’s section:
In his latest screed, “The Worsening Journalistic Disgrace at Wired,” he devotes 12 paragraphs to a misinformed argument centering on a Dec. 15 New York Times story about the possibility that the Justice Department might seek to charge Assange under federal conspiracy law.
The Times story quotes Lamo as saying that Manning described uploading his leaks to Assange via a dedicated file server, and that he communicated with Assange over encrypted chat. The story says those portions of the conversations aren’t included in the excerpts we published.
Based on that, Greenwald claims that Wired’s “concealment” of the chat logs “is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do.” (That’s one sentence. He goes on in that vein for quite a while.) But the Times story is incorrect, as we noted on Wired.com the day after it ran. The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room. Read the whole story at: Putting the record straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs
But, wait! That’s not the last word:
Assange, speaking to The Sunday Times, said the deal would bring in more than $1 million, with $800,000 from Knopf and another 325,000 pounds ($500,000) from U.K. publisher Canongate. But he said he only agreed to it because he was under financial pressure.
“I don’t want to write this book, but I have to,” he said. “I have already spent 200,000 pounds for legal costs and I need to defend myself and to keep WikiLeaks afloat.”
One Comment
Let’s all keep arguing till the cows come home. The question needs to be asked – What is Free Speech inregard to the First Amendment right of a journalist?
Happy New Year to the firstamendmentcoaltion !
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