Wired: This is a response to Glen Greenwald's article on Salon.com (link below) entitled "Wired's refusal to release or comment on the Manning chat logs." It concerns Private Manning, Wikileaks, and two journalists from "Wired" story about Private Manning (and their government informant source Lamo) but their refusing to answer pertinent questions about the important minutiae of what Lamo said about his communication with Private Manning. Click on the link below to get the details of Greenwald's article. It is rather lengthy but I think it important.

I responded to it:

I love Glen Greenwald because he is a brilliant attorney and because his life is dedicated to the enforcement of civil libertarian principles which are the underpinning of our democracy or what is left of them after 911. I love him because he possesses the laser-like ability to challenge inconsistencies of truth in what the government is telling a public, what the press is telling that same public and what the powerful may be withholding from the public to ensure their own survival at the expense of the powerless.

I have said I had mixed emotions about Wikileaks BUT I have no mixed emotion where the rights of the state to detain, interrogate and imprison human beings in conditions which amount to torture and which afford the detainee no ability for habeus corpus, presentation of evidence against him or the ability to face his accusers to present a case even within the military justice system.

Most ESPECIALLY I feel strongly about an American citizen being afforded those rights especially if the person is apprehended and imprisoned without hope of trial, illegally tortured by residing in the harshest conditions and is wearing the uniform of the United States which represents all of us who are citizens of these United States.

Glen Greenwald has an attorney's razor sharp analytical mind which sees accusations against a detainee and logically analyzes the veracity of the charges, the method of detention, and the implementation by the state of the due process clauses of our Constitutional republic i.e. the1st , 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th , and 14th Amendments.

He, unlike an extreme right wing nationalist, truly sees the possibility of human rights abuses that the government can perpetrate because they are entrusted by the people with such IMMENSE power. If we give them that power the rule of law we trust will prevail. We trust that the due process Amendments to our Constitution will be enforced even and most especially during the most DIFFICULT circumstances for the state.

Clearly, in my opinion, the terrorists win if we as a nation so cavalierly ignore humanity's hard won rights from King John's Magna Carta of 1215 to our own 1789 Constitutional manifesto. If those rights are abridged it is at our own peril because if WE as individuals ever need those rights to protect us they will not be there. History has, indeed, shown how easy it is for government to ignore those rights and skirt the boundaries of power.

The government does NOT give us those rights. We rather give those in government the right to use that power judiciously adhering to the rule of law. All too often, especially after a national tragedy, abuse of those powers prevails despite an administration heretofore saying it is resoundingly dedicated to the observation of those civil libertarian rights. We were promised this administration would strictly observe those rights and that transparency of government would prevail.

If Bradley Manning, the alleged perpetrator of the transmission of state classified information is guilty then so be it. BUT before we pronounce him as such and he is relegated to imprisonment for the rest of his days, this young Manning SHOULD have his day in court, should be able to face his accusers, see all of the evidence against him and mount a public defense.

Kevin Poulsen and Evan Hansen the editors of “Wired,” Adrian Lamo the alleged government informant confidant of Poulsen and journalists in general are the public’s only safeguards against the tyrannical abuse of power by government. It is the only instrument which the individual in a democracy has at his or her disposal to determine fact from fiction. Poulsen, Hansen, and Lamo owe a truthful response to Glen Greenwald’s pointed questions about Private Manning's dissemination of classified state information with respect to the Wikileaks case.

In the final analysis it is Private Manning's right and, truthfully, it is all of our right to demand to see what the charges government brings and what evidence exists to support those charges. It is the press’s obligation to support those rights and expose its statements to public scrutiny. Without that ability to see and assess the truth clearly we, as the world's most premier democracy, will become something else, indeed, but a democratic republic is not it!

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_1/index.html