Pfc Bradley Manning, A Warning Writ Large

By Alan Caruba

“All warfare is based on deception. There is no place where espionage is not used. Offer the enemy bait to lure him.” --Sun-Tzu (--400 B.C.)

His cherubic face can be found on the many articles about an audacious assault on the military and diplomatic security of the nation. Liberals have adopted Private First Class Bradley Manning as their hero because he is gay and he despises America, two things about which they care deeply.

In a chat log published in June by Wired News, Manning “bragged to Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned him in, that he was going to unleash ‘worldwide anarchy in CVS (comma separated value) format.’”

For Manning the thrill came from contemplating that “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” adding “Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed.”

Manning’s infamy goes back to a story in the July 27, 2010 Wall Street Journal that reported “Military investigators are checking computers used by Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst charged this month with leaking classified information, to see if he is the source of thousands of military documents published Sunday by WikiLeaks.”

According to Lamo, there is not any doubt as to the source of the data provided to WikiLeaks. Manning bragged about it to him. “No one suspected a thing,” said Manning, adding, “Kind of sad.”

What’s sad is that it will take months, perhaps years, before Manning is brought before a military tribunal and likely sentenced to life imprisonment instead of being put before a firing squad.

We are, after all, talking about one of the most massive acts of espionage against the United States in the modern era. Those defending Manning appear to be completely blind to that and, indeed, are accusing the U.S. of “torturing” Manning by keeping him in solitary confinement while he awaits courts martial.

Manning had been arrested in May on suspicion of leaking a video of a U.S. helicopter attack. Based in Iraq, he rapidly became the main suspect for the WikiLeak data dump.

Openly gay, despite the then-existing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that allowed him to remain in the Army, Manning had experienced rejection by a homosexual lover, declaring on his Facebook page that he was “livid” after being “lectured by ex-boyfriend.”

When you’re twenty-two years old, astonishingly immature, and “frustrated with people and society at large”, does that give you permission to betray your nation?

At about the same age, I was working in G-2 Army intelligence in a minor capacity. It never occurred to me to hand over secret documents to enemies of the nation. How many other young men over the years have been given this level of trust by their nation? A lot!

It took, however, just one Bradley Manning to think the rules of conduct, let alone his oath of service, could and should be set aside as a balm for his hurt feelings because his boyfriend dumped him.

This is why the armed forces resisted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell when it was first foisted on them. From long experience, both military and civilian intelligence personnel knew and understood that homosexuals were particularly vulnerable to blackmail and, even as attitudes changed toward the gay and lesbian population, their emotional stability remained open to question.

It is why today’s frontline Marines in combat do not want to rely on homosexuals in their units, but the military has become so politically correct over the years that even an unstable Muslim Army major was allowed to serve until he killed thirteen servicemen and women at Fort Hood.

Military service is very different from civilian life. It has a different code of honor that dates back to the days of Sun-Tzu.

In a time when the U.S. military is engaged in a war with Islam-fascism and the world is seeking to counter it on every continent, the ancient admonitions about espionage and warfare are still true. There is no one more dangerous to our nation’s survival than a traitor.

Bradley Manning is every warning against permitting gays and lesbians to serve in the military writ large.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → Pfc Bradley Manning, A Warning Writ Large

All the News The Times Wants You to Know

By Alan Caruba

In a long career as a journalist, full time and freelance, I have sometimes said that I knew something was seriously wrong with The New York Times when I began to see my byline show up on stories that appeared briefly.

It’s been decades since I have held The Times in my hands though I have read an article or column on occasion via the Internet because I have long since concluded it cannot be trusted for anything it prints with the possible exception of obituaries.

During the early years when Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union, a Times reporter named Walter Duranty, based in Moscow from 1922 to 1936, would deliberately fail to report outrages such as the starving of the Ukrainians to force their capitulation to Moscow. Duranty would win a Pultizer Prize in 1932 which, to this day, the Times has not repudiated. Duranty, like The Times, harbored a lot of sympathy for Marxism.

My own opinion of The Times was shaped during the Vietnam War when it became apparent that the newspaper was rooting for the Vietcong. This culminated in the revelations of the famed Pentagon Papers, purloined by an anti-war activist. They revealed the many misconceptions that drove the conflict. Neither President Lyndon Johnson nor his advisors come away from that period with honor, but American soldiers fought with honor for what they believed was their nation’s struggle against communism.

I remember thinking that the Times would probably have published the plans for D-Day, the WWII invasion of Europe, if they had gotten their hands on them.

I was not surprised that The Times and some foreign newspapers published the latest WikiLeak’s “dump” of purloined U.S. State Department internal cables; some of which were marked Top Secret while others had lower ratings of secrecy.

Prior to posting and publication of the cables, The Wall Street Journal had been offered the trove and refused it. A previous WikiLeak’s release of data regarding U.S. combat efforts in Afghanistan raised the stakes against troop safety.

The Obama administration gives little indication that it has made any effort to use whatever means at its disposal to find and neutralize the man behind WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. He is an Australian (former?) computer hacker with little to indicate he would emerge as the leading activist attempting to embarrass and alter U.S. policy. He has now become a major threat to the nation’s ability to function in peace or war.

If there are no present laws regarding Assange’s acts, some need to be quickly crafted and passed. A nation needs to protect its secrets and punish those that reveal them.

The alleged source of the Afghanistan data is U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, a sexually confused young man drawn to the Lesbian Bisexual Gay and Transgender movement and yet granted a security status sufficient to have given him access to secret information. He is under arrest and awaiting trial.

Clearly, there are way too many people cleared to read secret and top secret information. This is not a new situation. In the early 1960s even I was cleared to handle secret information by the U.S. Army though I was not much older than Manning. Wars, after all, are fought by young men.

The New York Times published a defense of its actions regarding the previously secret diplomatic documents, aggregating for itself the right to “illuminate aspects of American foreign policy” even if it meant that it would be a very long time before any foreign representative would speak candidly to a U.S. diplomat again.

Is foreign policy replete with duplicitous behavior? Yes. The world is a very dangerous place in the best of times and we are now living in times when Iran, led by a small band of lunatics taking their orders from Allah, is closing in on making nuclear weapons.

The cables revealed that the missiles to threaten the whole of the Middle East and parts of Europe transited from North Korea through China with its blessing. North Korea has been a case study in communist repression and aggression since the 1950s. The U.S. briefly fought a war there and settled for a stalemate. Gen. Douglas MacArthur once famously said there is no substitute for victory and he was right.

One could make a long list of nations that are essentially just waiting around for either the U.S. or Israel to solve the Iranian problem for them.

“For The Times to ignore this material would be to deny its own readers the careful reporting and thoughtful analysis they expect when this kind of information becomes public.” How modest of The Times and how thoroughly hypocritical.

Contrast this with the way The Times danced around the November 20, 2009 revelations when thousands of emails between the main perpetrators of the global warming hoax were posted online for all to see. Since the 1980s The Times has been one of the leading advocates of “global warming” despite the fact it had no basis in climate science or any science.

Its chief environmental hack reporter, Andrew C. Revkin, was very unhappy about what he called “the unauthorized distribution of the climate files.” The fact that those exchanging their plots and schemes were the recipients of British and U.S. governmental funding clearly meant they had an obligation to be transparent. Instead, one of the e-mailers, a Brit, admitted to destroying files to avoid his nation’s Freedom of Information laws, not dissimilar from our own.

Revkin’s description of what came to be called the “Climategate” emails was filled with words like “purloined documents” that were “uploaded surreptitiously” or “acquired illegally”, was intended to cast the revelations in the context of something quite evil. The Times continues to mislead readers about “climate change” in its quest for a one-world government, presumably run from the bowels of the United Nations.

The contrast between its assumption of noble journalistic laurels regarding the WikiLeak criminality and its view that the exposure of the Climategate emails was a corrupt act reveals an essential hypocrisy that belies The Times motto of “All the news that’s fit to print.”

It should be “All the news we want you to know” even if it is severely tainted by bias, inaccuracy, and an anti-American agenda.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

More about → All the News The Times Wants You to Know