No link between Manning and Assange
The Guardian reports that an NBC correspondent is reporting that sources in the Pentagon are admitting that there’s no provable link between Bradley Manning and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange;
Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News’s chief Pentagon correspondent, reported sources inside the US military as saying they could detect no contact between Manning and Assange.
According to NBC News:
The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.
If accurate, then US authorities have no realistic chance of successfully prosecuting or extraditing Assange for the leak of thousands of classified documents.
Do they realize how absolutely stupid that sounds? Of course there’s no direct link between Manning and Assange…well, other than the classified documents that Manning passed on and Wikileaks published.
Ya know, a year and a half ago, Army CID tracked down a leak of Nidal Hasan’s ORB, a single page of paper, transmitted across the internet, and now they can’t discover who it was that received hundreds of thousands of pages?
Category: General Whackos
They know. They just don’t want to say who the middle man is.
Middle man ID is irrelevant. Manning knowingly passed on classified docs to people not authorized. That’s a crime by the books. They can prosecute for that can they not. I don’t get the last sentence of the block quote. It’s just flat out false. Right?
It’s not like a line-of-sight car chase. The tie between the two comes from who started out with the documents and who ended up with them. What happened in the middle is just details.
I don’t give a fat rat monkey’s ass if he stuck them in a barrel around a St. Bernard’s neck and said “Give these to the 3rd gayest man alive, Beethoven!”, Manning downloaded them illegally and with nefarious intent, Assange got them post haste, end of story.
What’s unclear about that?
Come on folks. The LSM has decided that Assmange is a “journolist”, or journalist, whatever. He did nothing wrong, ergo, he can’t be prosecuted. He’s one of them, he has to be protected.
Why, if he is successfully prosecuted, that may, and it’s a doubtful “may”, signal that the NYT is equally guilty of publishing secrets that they have no right to publish. And all that that idea may entail..
Just for grins, I can’t believe I managed to work the word “ergo” into a sentence…..:)
Of course they know. Adrian Lamo is said to be the one who gave the accused soldier’s chat logs to authorities.
Of course Assange is going to have one or more layers separating him from whomever is criminal enough to steal information/betray his or her country. The rape charges and his behaviour is pretty telling that the world revolves around him. The Russians, Chinese, and Swiss take spying very seriously and their unwanted attention would definitely stop Assange’s personal party.
Recall that one member of Wikileaks is a member of Iceland’s legislature. My guess is there are a number of such folks placed in a way that getting them into custody is difficult if not impossible. So following the chain from Manning to Assange is easy from an investigative standpoint, but given the competence of our DOJ and DOS, impossible to bring to justice.
UpNorth: “Journolist” was a listserv, or association of paid journalists, academics, Democratic Party employees, and unpaid bloggers who coordinated media themes, notable of which was the attack on Governor Palin’s son Trig, in which they claimed her daughter Bristol was actually the mother of Trig. Journolist has since been disbanded, but given the amazing similarity in stories following the Tuscon massacre, Journolist has been reborn under another name.
“Ya know, a year and a half ago, Army CID tracked down a leak of Nidal Hasan’s ORB, a single page of paper, transmitted across the internet, and now they can’t discover who it was that received hundreds of thousands of pages?”
Eh, Jonn….Army CID tracking down one piece of paper was a piece of cake, but thousands? Tossing in the possibly of a diplomat of a foreign country? That’s a whole different horse. And so, back to Bradley Manning! The poor,poor *critter*…bet it really sucks to be him…NOT!