According to the Times, Lamo elaborated on his moral dilemma in a Twitter message. "I outed Brad Manning as an alleged leaker out of duty," Lamo said. "I would never (and have never) outed an Ordinary Decent Criminal. There's a difference."
In other words, the Times and the Post - two heroes of the Ellsberg case - seemed more interested in making the case against Manning (and sticking up for his betrayer) than in taking the side of a whistleblower who had put his future and his freedom on the line to inform the American people how the Iraq (and Afghan) wars are being fought.
There has been little suggestion by either the Post or the Times that Manning had done a patriotic service by helping to expose wartime wrongdoing.
The FCM also has shown little interest in the U.S. government's apparent attempts to hunt down Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of Wikileaks.org which decrypted the video of the Iraq helicopter attack and posted it on the Internet under the title, "Collateral Murder."
The Pentagon (undoubtedly with the help of the CIA and the National Security Agency) is reportedly conducting a manhunt for Assange, who is known to travel around the globe staying at the homes of friends and doing what he can to evade government notice.
The U.S. military has argued that videos like the Baghdad helicopter attack and photographs of American troops mistreating Iraqi and Afghan detainees must be kept secret to avoid enflaming local populations and putting U.S. soldiers in greater danger. President Barack Obama adopted that argument last year in overturning a court-ordered release of a new batch of photos showing U.S. soldiers committing abuses.
However, there is nothing classically classifiable about the helicopter videos or the other photographic evidence that has leaked out, such as the sordid pictures of naked Iraqi men being humiliated at Abu Ghraib prison. Under U.S. law, the government's classification powers are not to be used to conceal evidence of crimes.
'Most Dangerous Man'
Yet, except for the changed role of the big newspapers, history does appear to be repeating itself, with the emergence of another "Most Dangerous Man," the appellation that Nixon's aide Henry Kissinger gave to Ellsberg during the Pentagon Papers case.
If you haven't, you need to quickly watch the Academy Award-nominated documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, to brush up on your history. You'll quickly understand how Manning's recent arrest and the Pentagon's hunt to neutralize Assange jibe with the story of the copying and publishing of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
It should also be kept in mind that Ellsberg wasn't the only "dangerous man" who helped undo the culture of secrecy surrounding the Nixon presidency. When Nixon responded to the Ellsberg case by organizing a special "plumbers" unit, which then spied on the Democrats at their Watergate headquarters, other whistleblowers, like "Deep Throat" (FBI official Mark Felt), helped journalists expose the wrongdoing.
Poor Nixon, in his vain attempt to keep control and power, he just had to keep expanding his "enemy list."
A very similar crisis of conscience exists now. Power politics, and especially the politics of war, corrupt policymakers who deal with intelligence and security issues - and that leads to secrecy expanding exponentially to cover up bloody mistakes and shocking crimes.
For eight years, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran a highly politicized administration that took these inherent problems to new heights. And Obama, for many reasons, has thus far chosen to "look forward, not backward," and has thus fallen way short of his singular campaign promise of CHANGE.
Despite his assurances of greater government openness, Obama has surely not given support to government whistleblowers. Quite the opposite, Obama has expanded on Bush's methods, such as claims of the "state secrets" defense to block court challenges to government actions.
The Obama Administration has even instituted criminal prosecution of government employees who blew the whistle on prior unlawful actions of the Bush regime by daring to reveal, for instance, that Bush's NSA was warrantlessly monitoring American citizens.
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