So, a day or so ago when Wired published the complete chat logs between Adrian Lamo ("The Homeless Hacker") and Bradley Manning I read through them and noticed a few things which irked me greatly...

The first being that it was no longer a mere possibility that Lamo was trying to use Manning for his own ends, and the other being that Wired basically misreprepresented why they were redacting those logs in the first place. Some of the stuff in the logs makes me wonder how the hell Manning got his security clearance at all, and some of it makes me figure that if Lamo's new meds are working, then he's still a self-centered prick but for real this time. They claimed a number of things about why they redacted the logs, but Lamo leading Manning to believe he had some confidentiality certainly wasn't mentioned, nor that Manning appeared to be about six months and a few bad episodes from looking for a way to hang himself.

If I, myself were confronted with someone saying the sort of things about their general outlook on life that Manning was doing with Lamo, I'd have been ringing up ranking officers and not-so-subtly implying that this kid needs a shrink immediately if not sooner. Lamo simply starts pumping him for information. WTF. Some of the other things Lamo has said to the press about Manning are directly contradicted by what's in these logs. Also, bonus dickhead points for using OTR and saving the logs to rat on someone later.

Frankly it wouldn't surprise me to hear that Lamo was "encouraged" to say certain things about Assange to the press, but it does appear that being a tool is a simpler and equally reasonable explanation for the lies and the backstabbing. Anyway, Glenn Greenwald at Salon does a far better job of exploring these things tactfully than I've got time to.

Far more elegant than "Geez, Lamo is a real dick."