Cottonheaded Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is fond of adopting odd positions. Sometimes, he takes the position of the people he's supposed to be policing. Sometimes, he adopts the position of rapists. And sometimes, he adopts no position at all. Now, for your pleasure, Richard Cohen is rolling out a new type of position: the ??? position.
Barack Obama's critics on the left and right are beginning to coalesce around the idea that the White House should be punished for selectively leaking flattering details about covert operations while at the same time zealously prosecuting whistleblowers who reveal less flattering secrets. This is stupid. Every leak is a good leak.
OK, it's not quite The Da Vinci Code or even The Godfather: Part III, but a scandal rocking the Vatican is aways better than no scandal rocking the Vatican.
Twitter Inc.'s been spinning quite a turnaround story in the press lately. The microblogging service "has finally turned a corner," declares the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. "It's a juggernaut," a company executive tells the magazine. But the hard numbers we've been provided paint a very different story.
Catholic scold Rick Santorum thinks Julian Assange is a "terrorist"—and ought to be prosecuted as such—for his role in releasing thousands of pages of classified documents on the internet. He ought to know: In 2006, Sen. Rick Santorum literally forced the U.S. government to dump thousands of pages of classified records concerning Iraq onto the web, including detailed plans for building a nuclear weapon, so that right-wing bloggers could search them for evidence of Saddam Hussein's phantom WMD.
Mark your calendars! Alleged Wikileaker Bradley Manning has his first court date, 1 1/2 years after being imprisoned. A pre-trial hearing is scheduled for December 16th, where his defense team will "evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the government's case" against him, according to a blog post by his lawyer, David E. Coombs.
Many observers have understandably raised concerns for the safety of confidential informants whose identities are revealed in the full, unredacted copy of Wikileaks' State Department cables that was made public this week in a Keystone Kops farce. But the biggest victim of the latest disclosure is Julian Assange, who no longer has a reason to demand your attention.
Thanks to a comical series of blunders by Julian Assange, Wikileaks' entire cache of unredacted State Department cables is now on the internet for anyone to download. (You can do so at the whistleblowing site Cryptome) But that's not stopping Wikileaks from holding a fake Twitter "vote" on whether it should release them.
People inadvertently put things on the internet they don't want revealed all the time. But you'd think Julian Assange would avoid such an amateur mistake. Not so: He accidentally uploaded all of his precious State Department cables, unredacted, to the internet.
Unlike Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Oprah, you weren't invited to Julian Assange's 40th birthday bash yesterday in Norfolk, England. Neither were we. But we've snagged an invite anyway. Here's a copy of the email sent to a few dozen of "The Most Dangerous Man in the World's" friends before the party.
Months before he was accused of leaking thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning had a series of instant message conversations with transgendered videoblogger Zinnia Jones. In newly-published logs of their conversation, Bradley Manning talks about his past struggles in the army, current relationship troubles and high hopes for the future.
Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning has been accused of leaking thousands of classified documents obtained during his tour in Iraq. But according to an officer, and a confidential military report, Manning was so psychologically unstable he should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place.
An empty house in Marblehead, Mass. seems to have called 911 on its own after months of enduring a leaky pipe that covered the walls with toxic mold. And you thought that dog that called the police was smart.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's reputation as a fighter for transparency and destroyer of secrets ought to be thoroughly demolished by today's spectacle of the New York Times literally forcing him to give up the Guantanamo Bay files he'd been hoarding for months.
