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Behaving as media should.

Whistle-blowers usually take great risks to get out information to the public.  I suspect that it was not WikiLeaks fault that this individual has been arrested, but rather a reverse engineering by the US military of who had access to what and where.

“The army intelligence specialist charged with leaking U.S. military secrets to the WikiLeaks website has been moved from Kuwait to a military jail in Virginia.

In a statement issued Friday, the U.S. army said Pte. Bradley Manning was flown Thursday to Quantico Marine Base, where he will be held while awaiting trial for leaking top-secret military intelligence to WikiLeaks, a site devoted to publishing leaked government and other sensitive documents.”

Mr. Manning, allegedly, has been a very naughty and very busy bee, apparently he is also responsible for the video from the gun cameras of attack helicopters shooting up civilians in Iraq along with the thousands of documents made available on WikiLeaks.

“White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the leak of tens of thousands of secret military documents already has jeopardized the lives of Afghans working with the U.S. and its war allies.”

If our media had actually been doing its job and reporting about what was happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, we would not have had the need for this particular leak.   Instead through our journalistic mandarins continue to go meekly through their routines of obedience toward elite power.  Journalism is not performing its original function any more, that is bringing the news to the people.  Battered by calls for “objectivity” and “balance” what we get is a tendentious smear of propaganda; this vile pap masquarading as “news” for consumption by the public.

A side note, Mr.Manning will probably be publicly drawn and quartered for his heroic actions Al Jazeera opines in their article about the WikiLeaks source:

“In a statement, the defence department said Manning was transfered to the US “due to a potentially lengthy pre-trail confinement because of the complexity of the charges and an ongoing investigation.”

Our correspondent said that the US military wants to use Manning to send a message to future whistleblowers.

“If you violate the trust of security clearance, you will be prosecuted,” she said.”

A rational decision by the US military, but I do not think it will really help their security situation much in the long run.  Too much malfeasance, for too long involving so many individuals, one will always have the temerity to challenge the system.  This may not have happened if our media was less complacent when it came to analyzing and presenting facts about the current military imbroglios.    There is some hope though.

The media is being slowly replaced, people can see the inherent bias in the system and now are cross checking and consulting many sources for a better view of what is happening in the world.  So when I hear the newspapers bleating about their costs going up and advertisers leaving them I have no sympathy.  If they did their job, people would buy their product.  As is, who needs to see elite opinion reiterated for the nth time only in a different medium?