Glenn Greenwald: The intellectual cowardice of Bradley Manning’s critics

[ljm2002]

9. Many have made the argument...

...that Manning's purported leak is bigger and broader, i.e. "less focused" than Ellsberg's was. If you have not seen that argument made then you have not been paying attention. As for the phrase "an elegantly lazy writer", it is both ad hominem and inaccurate and hardly lends weight to your own arguments.

Next you try and change the terms of debate, and make the claim that a non-military person can leak Top Secret documents in service of a greater good, but a soldier cannot leak Secret documents in the same cause -- and that the Secret vs. Top Secret status of the released documents is an irrelevant detail. It is an absurd argument. The only place where Ellsberg's and Manning's civilian vs. soldier status is relevant is in discussions of what legal proceedings will occur. It has nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to do with the inherent rightness or wrongness of the acts themselves.

So to recap: first you state that "no one" has made an argument about the relative focus of the leaks, which is untrue; then you try and change the argument to one you are more comfortable with, namely that Manning was a soldier and therefore forfeited any ability to act on his conscience. Finally you claim that Secret vs. Top Secret is irrelevant (I have no doubt that, were the Secret / Top Secret classifications reversed, you would be shouting from the rooftops that Manning released Top Secret documents!!!). In other words, you are the perfect illustration of Greenwald's main thesis, namely, that many of Manning's critics are intellectually inconsistent.