Here are few recent articles by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com you should check out.

Iraq War veteran on Manning, the media and the military

Monday, Jul 11, 2011 07:12 ET

Last week, New York Magazine published a somewhat tabloidy profile of Bradley Manning by Steven Fishman, focusing on the purported personal and psychological aspects of his life as a means of understanding his alleged leaking, and I responded to it the following day.  Now there is another response that I hope as many people as possible read; with permission, I’m publishing it in its entirety below.  It’s by former Army Specialist Ethan McCord, who served in Bravo Company 2-16, the ground troops involved in the “Collateral Murder” video released by Wikileaks in April of last year and allegedly leaked by Manning (McCord can be seen in the video carrying the wounded children from the bullet riddled van).  Just consider what Spc. McCord says about Manning (“a hero of mine”), the media coverage of these leaks, and what all of this reveals about American wars and how we’re propagandized about them:

Serving with my unit 2nd battalion 16th infantry in New Baghdad Iraq, I vividly remember the moment in 2007, when our Battalion Commander walked into the room and announced our new rules of engagement:

“Listen up, new battalion SOP (standing operating procedure) from now on: Anytime your convoy gets hit by an IED, I want 360 degree rotational fire. You kill every [expletive] in the street!”

We weren’t trained extensively to recognize an unlawful order, or how to report one. But many of us could not believe what we had just been told to do.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/11/manning/index.html

Wired publishes the full Manning-Lamo chat logs

Thursday, Jul 14, 2011 06:15 ET

Now that Wired has released the full chats, I just want to highlight a few passages that they concealed, and dispassionately lay out several key facts, so that everyone can decide for themselves if Wired told the truth about their conduct and assess the journalistic propriety of it. Before I first wrote about Manning’s arrest and the conduct of Wired‘s reporting of it, I interviewed Poulsen by email and published the full exchange.  Just look at what he told me about the material Wired was withholding:

GG: Last question: you published what were clearly excerpts of the chats between Lamo and Manning – did he provide you with the whole unedited version and if, so, do you intend to publish it? Or is what you published everything he gave you?

KP: He did, but I don’t think we’ll be publishing more any time soon. The remainder is either Manning discussing personal matters that aren’t clearly related to his arrest, or apparently sensitive government information that I’m not throwing up without vetting first.

So Poulsen claimed that the concealed portions were either (1) personal matters or (2) sensitive government information that needed vetting (Wired made a similar claim when releasing the log excerpts, claiming that what was withheld was either “portions of the chats that discuss deeply personal information about Manning or that reveal apparently sensitive military information”).  As it turns out, while some of what Wired withheld was certainly personal information about Manning of no newsworthy relevance (and nobody, including me, ever objected to that material being withheld), substantial portions of what they withheld do not even arguably fall within those categories, but instead provide vital context and information about what actually happened here.  To say that Poulsen’s claims about what Wired withheld were factually false is to put it generously.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/14/wired/index.html

How the U.S. government uses its media servants to attack real journalism

Friday, Jul 15, 2011 07:16 ET

Earlier this week, the truly intrepid investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill published in The Nation one of the most significant political exposés of the year.  Entitled “the CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia,” the article documented that the CIA uses and effectively controls a secret prison in Mogadishu, where foreign nationals who are rendered off the streets of their countries (at the direction of the U.S.) are taken (along with Somali nationals) to be imprisoned with no due process and interrogated (by U.S. agents).  Although Somali government agents technically operate the facility, that is an obvious ruse: ”US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners” and are “there full-time,” Scahill reported.  On Democracy Now on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it has no knowledge of this secret prison.

Scahill’s discovery of this secret prison in Mogadishu — this black site — calls into serious doubt the Obama administration’s claims to have ended such practices and establishes a serious human rights violation on its own.  As Harper‘s Scott Horton put it, the Nation article underscores how the CIA is “maintaining a series of ‘special relationships’ under which cooperating governments maintain[] proxy prisons for the CIA,” and “raises important questions” about “whether the CIA is using a proxy regime there to skirt Obama’s executive order” banning black sites and torture.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/15/somalia/index.html

Very informative.