As Bradley Manning trial nears the end, journalism itself is on trial

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For the past year and a half, Alexa O’Brien has been covering the largely secret court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who leaked government documents to Wikileaks after being rebuffed by US newspapers he contacted with the same. Alexa produced the only available pre-trial transcripts for much of this time, and produced reporting and analysis regularly… READ THE REST

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I can see why they’d have indicted the NYT in the same way: “wanton publication” is an everyday crime for most news media. (RIMSHOT)

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Why the rimshot? It’s true.

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If you’re not going to use the right pronouns/names, don’t use any at all. Private Manning, Manning, Pfc Manning are all non-gendered, if you must. But please, Private Manning has actually said that she feared her image being plastered the world over “as a boy.” Even if we “can’t verify” what is already pretty apparent in chat logs, that’s no reason for treating Manning as cis to be the default. In fact, treating cis as the default is pretty transphobic.

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The fact that they put aluminum foil over the windows doesn’t equal a “tin foil hat” for the whole prosecution. The reason they would do so is to prevent directional microphones from picking up the vibrations from the windows caused by audible comments. They did this sort of thing back in the 80’s when I was in Germany. Aside from that nonsense, I’ve been following this thing from the beginning and have always wondered at the governments assertion that Manning handed over info directly to our country’s enemies by giving it to wikileaks. That never made any sense as how could you possibly know in advance, at the rank of E-3, what the hell our enemies were reading online?

And aside from that also, I can foresee Manning getting sent to prison for the rest of his life easy. I don’t care how much the defense says (or proves) that the prosecution is wrong. The government has been embarrassed someones head is gonna roll and shit rolls downhill. Truthfully now, has anyone heard anything about Mannings supervisors? You know, the ones who were there to prevent this sort of thing from happening? I sure haven’t. I seriously doubt we ever will.

Just some thoughts.

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