I don’t think the world is as simple as good guys vs. bad guys, either, and that’s why I ask questions about this story. I think you have to keep an open mind in assessing this material. The chatlogs published at Wired contain unmistakable indications that Manning was in touch with Assange and even indicate that he could have been under his direction, damning indeed. Yet Assange now claims that they were never in touch and he never talked to him. The chat logs’ authenticity doesn’t seem to be challenged anywhere, not by Wired or Boingboing.net which has had other critiques of it, for what was not included. So that means Assange is lying? Looks like it.

Yes, it sounds very compelling, this incident involving the round-up of seemingly innocent dissident Iraqis who were just printing literature. Sure sounds awful, and sure sounds like something that could be at the center of a historic whistleblowing case, and something any decent human being would care about.

I do have questions, however, because I don’t think transparency gets to only work in one direction, nor do I think there’s something exonerating Assange and Manning as actors even if they expose wrongdoing along the way.

There’s an important statement at 2:35 that can’t be overlooked: “i had an interpreter read it for me…” So the interpreter may have been selective and we’d have to see the material and the context. People become *so* reliant on fixers in situations like this! And it is fair to say that the context is one in which the overwhelming number of civilians killed are killed not by U.S. troops but by terrorists, and that facile statements about how they wouldn’t be doing this killing if we weren’t there can really no longer keep exonerating them when the body count is in the 100,000 level and when many incidents glaringly have nothing to do with the U.S. occupation.

This story of the jailing of innocent Iraqis and the order to round up and harm more is a hugely compelling human rights story we can all be concerned about. You would think, then, it would be at the center of what Manning talked about and what WikiLeaks later did.

Then…why isn’t it? Why do none of the WikiLeaks documents we’ve seen to date contain anything about this story? Why does Manning never speak of it? why didn’t he go to superiors or other soldiers and speak of it at the time?

Why, if that was what bothered him, did he not make that his focus? Why hack a system and take a quarter of a million documents about wildly unrelated stuff and stick it to the entire U.S. government with it?

If this was one of dozens of incidents that made him cynical and there were so many that he then had to commit an act of profound nihilism, then…why doesn’t he talk about those other incidents?

So yeah, “the media” is guilty of explaining things by “pop psychology” except…why do none of the WikiLeaks people ever mention this incident? It should have been at the center of what they were doing, and even if they never found any documents about it, they could have talked about it as a motivator. It should have become a legend, if these people were motivated really by human rights concerns. *It never did*. Manning himself didn’t seem to return to it.

The narrative of the innocent American soldier made cynical by a brutal war in which we collude with our brutal client thugs to nab innocent Iraqi dissidents is so compelling as a narrative, so transformative, so perfect, one has to wonder why only now, months after the chat logs and enormous amounts of analysis of the story, does it come out now on a blog.

Such a transformative moment for Manning, and yet, Assange never mentions it in his interviews. Nobody ever does. (Correct me if I’m wrong, I just haven’t seen it anywhere.)

There was nothing just about the invasion of Iraq and it’s an unjust war I’ve always opposed. Even so, I’ve come to see that the left and the “progressives” just never have a plan for how to deal with terrorism and refuse to look at this. That was the context here, and while it certainly doesn’t condone or excuse anything thuggish soldiers do or our collusion with them, it has to be examined in assessing the claims of the chatlog.

And…being selective about what you will and will not accept as authentic out of the chatlog is something that has to be flagged. The chat log shows Manning knew Assange and indicates he colluded with him — Lamo even challenges him, as if he is under Assange’s will, i.e. why do you answer to him. So are you going to declare all those sections as inauthentic and misunderstood, but the motivational section about the detainees as authentic?

There are many other ways of committing whistleblowing to achieve the job of exposing an incident like this one with the detainees and the dissident literature (if that’s what it was about) and other incidents short of attempting to stick it to the U.S. and bring down its entire diplomatic corps. As we know from Assange’s writings, he was cynical about this, and didn’t believe that that the job was to somehow “open government”; rather, the task was to so hack the U.S. that it would be in fact forced to close itself up and become dumb and ineffective as a result and unable to function.