It’s ironic and a bit sad that Glenn Greenwald, who first gained notoriety out here in 2006 for being exposed as a sock puppet and a liar, would be ranting about Wired’s handling of the story of PFC Bradley Manning’s arrest.
Instapundit has linked my main page on the Greenwald sock-puppet/lying story, but most of the Greenwald stuff isn’t here. Here are the key links in this story:
But this kind of thing does seem to be Greenwald’s shtick in whatever corner of the Internet he occupies, one I generally choose to ignore given his bizarre and disingenuous nature. That he’s ranting about disclosure and transparency is laughable given his dubious history. But I guess that’s what passes as credible in the cesspool otherwise known as Salon.
There’s a fairly concise window into the back and forth here at BoingBoing. I’d also suggest this link and Wired’s response if interested. If Wired made any mistake, I’d suggest it was taking Greenwald seriously. I never have understood that unfortunate phenomenon, though the Left and this or that vanity press did go to some lengths to make him appear credible in 2006. He really never has been that.
For its part, Wired seems to have done a fine bit of journalism. The updated record demonstrates how incapable of such a thing is Greenwald. He generally pontificates and then screeches in an endless plea for attention, so far as I have ever been able to ascertain.
In short, Wired seems to have treated its source, Adrian Lamo, with skepticism and objectivity and disclosed what needed to be disclosed of chat logs between Lamo and Manning to support their story. They don’t appear to have hidden anything pertinent, or to have sensationalized it at Manning’s expense, as they could have. But because they didn’t disclose all of the logs and Lamo has now gone on to make other claims in other media outlets not supported by what they did publish of the logs, Greenwald found a nit to pick in his unique and utterly annoying manner.
Six months ago, Wired.com senior editor Kevin Poulsen came to me with a whiff of a story. A source he’d known for years claimed he was talking to the FBI about an enlisted soldier in Iraq who had bragged to him in an internet chat of passing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks.
It’s probably nothing, Poulsen said. The source in question, an ex-hacker named Adrian Lamo, often sees himself as at the center of important events in need of public attention. But sometimes, Poulsen added, he’s right.
Acknowledging the long shot, Poulsen wanted to drive up to Sacramento, California, to meet Lamo in person and try to get a copy of the alleged chats. I agreed.
Frankly, I don’t see how Greenwald’s non-point impacts Wired at all. They published what they did, handled it appropriately and even well – and moved on. What another outlet may, or may not have published with, or without solid documentation, is on said other media outlet, or outlets. Perhaps Greenwald’s jealous of what appears to have been some excellent, ground breaking reporting by Wired, something he never has managed to accomplish for all his many screeds over the years. More likely, he’s simply keen on Manning, straining to try and defend him – recklessly, I would add, given the apparent nature of the undisclosed logs. Or, perhaps he’s simply link trolling and desperate to make himself relevant, somehow. He has always been notorious for that, as well.
But then, I’ve never been able to figure out the reason for this nitwit Greenwald being taken seriously as a pundit in the first place. I suppose that’s why he’s at Salon. It somewhat qualifies him, when one stops to think on it a bit.
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