As expected Greenwald makes the salient response to Wired’s bleating self-defence.
Since Pvt Manning has a high chance of spending a good portion of the rest of his life in solitary confinement, Poulsen and Hansen’s prevarications are especially distasteful. Although Wired has never been a paragon of investigative or even objective reporting, with the blunt claiming it’s a tech-whore magazine relic of the dot com era, the carefully worded non-denial denial of the Wired staff clearly indicates a tip-over to the dark side of political speak, with truth taking a convenient dump once the tech media (usually more lambasted for the relatively harmless terrible/dishonest reviews of consumer/IT products) found itself confronted with handling the first serious mainstream issue of the day.
When we consider that the Fourth Estate in the US is now suffering from a near terminal case of cognitive capture (with broadcast media long since gone over the tipping point into cadaverhood, save for PBS and the occasional Charlie Rose interview), this is just the latest in a long sequence of bad jokes about how utterly broken the socio-political climate in the avowed defender of the free world has become. That the world of the tech journalist, long been the haunting grounds of self-proclaimed geeks that claim to value objectivity and truth over the hypocrisy and venality of Everyone Else(tm), bears no protection from the entrenched fault lines of the wider social strata is darkly humorous.