There is a craven disconnect between the eagerness of leading editors to exploit the important news revealed by WikiLeaks and their efforts to distance themselves from both the courageous website and Bradley Manning, the alleged source of documents posted there. Alleged is required when referring to the Army private so as not to repeat the egregious error of a constitutional-law-professor-turned-president who has already presumed Manning guilty of crimes for which he is not even formally charged.

"He broke the law," President Barack Obama said of Manning by way of countering his own supporters at a San Francisco fundraiser who dared question the conditions of Manning's imprisonment. Conditions that Human Rights Watch challenged as "extremely restrictive and possibly punitive and degrading." Manning was transferred last week to a Kansas prison from Quantico, Va., where for months he had been subjected to shackling, forced nudity, isolation and other harsh treatment-all of which was justified by the government as necessary to prevent him from committing suicide. Clearly the feds were trying to break the man. 

Why indeed is Manning the one behind bars and not the government officials who kept hidden unpleasant truths about this nation's policies that the public has a right to know? And why do leaders of our constitutionally protected free press now seek to distance themselves from news sources that have performed a great public service? A service documented by the fact, as tallied by The Atlantic magazine, that more than half of the issues of The New York Times this year have carried stories that relied on WikiLeaks' disclosures.

All the WikiLeaks Fit to Print

The Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11.

An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack.

The result was hundreds of innocent men kidnapped and incarcerated without trial - a "legal and moral disaster", according to The New York Times - and President Obama continues shielding torturers in the previous and current administrations. He has pledged to Look Forward and Not Back. The current President has merely extended the Bush administration's indefinite detention regime for so-called terror suspects.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald unleashed necessary fury about this reality:

The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.

Yet this authoritarian impulse to believe untested claims by the US government is exactly what many in the media have been doing for years, repeating without question deliberately leaked intelligence files on the "worst of the worst" prisoners.

One local example is The Australian columnist Chris Kenny, failed Liberal politician and former chief of staff to former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During a Twitter conversation on Wednesday with Paul Barrett, a former Secretary of Australian Departments of Defence and Primary Industries & Energy, Kenny wrote, "You're arguing to set free people who have murdered thousands" when Barrett asked why the US refused to conduct fair and open trials for individuals who had never faced justice.

In Kenny's worldview, the American military has smeared hundreds of Muslims as terrorists and that's good enough for him. The fact that the Wikileaks file shows the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees had no connection to September 11 or terrorism can be ignored.

This has been the default position of the vast bulk of the corporate press since 9/11. In Australia, especially the Murdoch press has smeared former Guantanamo Bay inmates David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. This continued with Downer who called both men "terrible, terrible people", perhaps because he fears what an independent investigation may find in regards to his own government's alleged complicity in their long incarceration.

Australian journalist Sally Neighbour published an analysis a few days ago that inadvertently undermined her own paper's years of misleading reporting:

The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture.

What Neighbour conveniently omitted from her report were the journalists and editors who have dined for years on rehashing US government released propaganda against Hicks and Habib, including The Australian, and smearing them constantly. Clearly media accountability was not on the agenda for a decade of establishment stenography. Today's Australian editorial begrudgingly acknowledges the torture suffered by Habib and Hicks but issues no apology for spending years accusing them both of terrorism.

Thankfully this week's Sydney Morning Herald editorially called the treatment of Hicks and Habib by its rightful name, torture.

It took one of the world's more diligent and un-embedded journalists on Guantanamo Bay inmates, Andy Worthington, to unpack the Wikileaks revelations and highlight the decade of ignoring legal precedent for the Cuban and American black hole down which countless men were tortured and housed.

Reading Worthington's copious work over the years makes a reader wonder why more mainstream reporters didn't investigate the prison camp with a very critical eye. Is it because, as a former Bush official said, too many US journalists wanted to be seen as "patriotic" and protect America's "interests". Truth came a distant third. Guantanamo Bay was a place where psychological experiments and torture was common-place.

But what of the latest Wikileaks revelations themselves which, for the record, should be seen as merely US official opinion rather than actual factual reporting? We learn that the US allowed a number of repressive country's intelligence services access to Guantanamo Bay detainees, including officials from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

This highly prejudicial process was also committed by Australia during the Howard government when it emerged in 2005 that Chinese officials were allowed to interrogate Chinese asylum seekers in Sydney's Villawood detention centre.

In the years after 9/11 (and also before), America was kidnapping terror suspects and sending them through extraordinary rendition to authoritarian states where these prisoners would be tortured for information. The latest Guantanamo Bay files confirm that Washington was also asking repressive regimes to assist them in identifying people as well as probably threatening their families back home.

The Wikileaks files detail America's treatment of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj who languished without charge for six years in Guantanamo Bay. It can now be confirmed that he was only held in the prison camp because the Bush administration hated the Qatar-based news network and wanted to gain more information about its alleged connection to terrorism. It is a chilling warning to media companies the world over.

The response of the Obama administration to the latest document dump was typically Orwellian. The lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay were told, even after the mainstream press had widely disseminated the Wikileaks documents, that the files remained legally classified. The New York Times perfectly highlighted the issue:

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site. "Everyone else can talk about it," Mr. Margulies said. "I can't talk about it."

Although Wikileaks itself was not a major focus of this release (only briefly, anyway), it again proved the power of the whistle-blowing website. Western news organisations were forced to collaborate with an organisation with a relatively small staff and budget. The obvious question remains; why didn't The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Guardian receive the scoop with their own investigations?

If former US army soldier Bradley Manning was the leaker of this information - President Obama has already said Manning is guilty, undoubtedly affecting any potential trial - he has given the world an invaluable insight into a superpower's tyranny; he is a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

Antony Loewenstein

The Pentagon press secretary, a smooth-talking former TV hack named Geoffrey S. Morell, wanted the world to know he'd had a bad few days.

"Thanks to Wikileaks we spent Easter weekend dealing w/NYT and other news orgs publishing leaked classified GTMO docs," he tweeted from Washington on Monday.

Tough, Geoff. Although I dare say not as tough as spending five or six years banged away as a prisoner of JTF-GTMO, the US military's Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The latest truckload of leaks has revealed what any sensible person has long known, that physical and psychological abuse was routinely employed at Gitmo as a deliberate policy of the administration of George W. Bush.

"We do not torture," Bush told a news conference back in 2005, thereby cementing his reputation as a bare-faced liar. If any cement was needed, that is. But if the folks at the CIA were ever squeamish about doing the dirty work they could always get by with a little help from such friends as Hosni Mubarak.

The Australian Mamdouh Habib was one of dozens of supposed terrorists illegally abducted by the CIA and packed off to Egyptian prisons under the so-called rendition program. His file reveals that in 2001 "he spent six months with Egyptian interrogators before being transferred to US custody''.

Not being tortured, of course, but "under extreme duress", in the delicate wording of Brigadier-General Jay W. Hood, the Gitmo commander. John Howard, Alexander Downer & Co have never admitted they knew all about this and condoned it.

The truly startling revelation was not the illegality or the cruelty of the system but its sheer incompetence. Among those being held as "the worst of the worst" was an 89-year-old man with senile dementia, and an Afghan village boy of 14 who had been found carrying a gun.

A 30-year-old goatherd named Sharbat was imprisoned for six years as an "enemy combatant", even though his Gitmo file reported that "this detainee's knowledge of herding animals, which he readily talks about, and his inability to discuss simple military and political concepts, tend to support the detainee's contention that he indeed is just a simple shepherd''.

Well duh.

Time again for another glittering award sarah-moany to acknowledge the talent and dedication of Australia's greatest whingers.

As always, the judges have faced an almost impossible task in choosing from an outstanding field of candidates. First, let's hear it for the tobacco industry whingeing about the new plain packaging laws.

Applause, too, for Mitch Hooke, chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia. Not long ago Mitch was howling about Kevin Rudd's resources rent tax, which would surely send investment overseas and kill off the mining industry. But now there's so much investment the miners are moaning about a labour shortage.

Hooray, too, for the Business Council of Australia and the Coal Industry Association, which warn that Julia Gillard's carbon tax will be the death of all we hold dear.

But this week's winner - music, maestro please - just has to be Gerry Harvey, of furniture, bedding and appliances fame.

Back at Christmas, Gerry was bellyaching that internet shopping was ruining him. He wanted us to pay more tax by sticking the GST on our online buys from overseas. But he's not nearly so keen on the carbon tax.

"It's a good example to the rest of the world, oh, but then I go broke in the meantime,'' he grizzled this week.

The poor man will probably have to sell some racehorses to get by.

Mike Carlton

Questions on whether senior Howard government officials misled Parliament about their knowledge of the torture of the Australian Mamdouh Habib will be asked when Parliament resumes this month.

Greens senator Scott Ludlam told The Sun-Herald he would raise the issue in budget estimates and ask if the government wanted to ''clarify what it has previously put on the record'' in light of the WikiLeaks revelations last week backing Mr Habib's complaint that he was tortured in Egypt.

Among those to question the government's denials that it knew Mr Habib had been taken to Egypt is Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official who set up the so-called rendition program, who has said it was unlikely Australia would not have been informed.

Mr Habib was taken to Egypt for six months, then in May 2002 sent to Guantanamo Bay, where Australian Federal Police and ASIO officers interviewed him.

But on February 14, 2005, the then AFP commissioner, Mick Keelty, told a Senate estimates hearing that he did not know if Mr Habib had ever been in Egypt.

The then head of ASIO, Dennis Richardson, now the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs, was asked the next day what he knew about the US practice of sending prisoners to other countries such as Egypt for interrogation. He said: ''We have no information as of fact about that.''

In 2007 the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee decided against a hearing on inconsistencies of evidence given to Parliament.

The Senate privileges committee cleared Mr Keelty and the then secretary of the Attorney-General's Department, Robert Cornall, of giving false or misleading evidence, but they were criticised for not being more frank and for the AFP's tardiness in answering questions on notice.

It was not until early 2008 that Mr Keelty admitted one of his officers had discussed Mr Habib's ''rendition'' with US officials.

Within months Mr Richardson's successor, Paul O'Sullivan, admitted the US government had spoken to Mr Richardson about wanting to have Mr Habib sent to Egypt.

Questions on Habib torture