Those who have been following the Chelsea Manning story may be familiar with the name Adrian Lamo whom I just learned died last week at the age of 37. The cause of death is as yet unknown. Lamo was a hacker and the person who befriended Chelsea Manning online (when she was Bradley Manning), the whistleblower who had released the appalling video of US troops gleefully gunning down Iraqi civilians from a gunship as well as releasing classified military cables to WikiLeaks. Manning revealed to Lamo that she was the one who had released the video and the cables and he reported her to the authorities and that led to her arrest and subsequent sentencing to 35 years in prison where she suffered terrible abuse before her sentence was commuted by president Obama. Lamo later justified his action in an interview.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Lamo was discovered to be a liar about almost everything -- his legendary road trips, sleeping in ruined houses, etc.; his parents said he’d gone off his meds. He was completely glib because he probably didn’t care about reality, preferring to live in fantasy-land. When word started to leak out that he was a scam, and his hacks were just drudge-work and not genius, the media kept playing him up because they didn’t want to be embarrassed over how easily they were gulled.
Sad he died young; he didn’t amount to much.
Typical Lamo quote from the interview you reference:
you can only label something a proximate cause within so many degrees of separation of what it’s putatively causal of.
What a poseur.
Hey, at least he died infamous, whereas Chelsea lives ambiguously.
As yet unstated, anyway.
From the opening paragraph of Poe’s William Wilson:
The paradox being that Lamo himself had no conscience.