Snowden Lays an Egg, a Statue Grows in Brooklyn and Manning Wins a Round
When a military court handed Manning a 35-year sentence on August 21 of the same year, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda were in their third day of wailing and chest-beating over Miranda’s 11-hour “psychological torture” at the hands of British officials on the previous Sunday. That same week, the Guardian disclosed that, on government orders it had destroyed computers containing Snowden documents, a story it had sat on for months. The Guardian also announced a sharing agreement with The New York Times.
The following February, the Oxford Union gave Manning the Sam Adams Award for Integrity and Intelligence. Since Manning was sequestered in Leavenworth, Snowden acted in her place, via a video in which he scrupulously avoided any details of what she had leaked, to talk about “over-classification” of government documents. This segued into Snowden’s familiar lecture on the necessity to democracy of informed consent and a free press. At the end, he offered Manning the Oxford Union’s, and his, “moral sanction.”
Exactly two months after the Oxford Union award, an Army general upheld Manning’s 35-year sentence, the longest ever given by a U.S. court for leaking secrets to the media. The same day, The Washington Post and The Guardian won a Pulitzer Prize for their Snowden stories.
As I have laboriously documented, throughout all of this scene-stealing, Snowden and his colleagues relentlessly recapitulated mainstream media smears against Manning while insisting on Snowden’s vastly superior methods with sometimes laughable hyperbole. A central feature of this mythology is the notion that he read and analyzed every document in his trove before he handed it over to his most beloved journalists. Almost none of this fit the ever-changing facts at all — Snowden and co were as mendacious about Snowden as they were about Manning — and no one cared, not even Snowden’s ostensible detractors.
https://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/snowden-lays-an-egg-a-statue-grows-in-brooklyn-and-manning-wins-a-round/
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