WHAT'S UNUSUAL ABOUT A GAY TRAITOR?:

Bradley Manning’s Army of One: How a lonely, five-foot-two, gender-questioning soldier became a WikiLeaks hero, a traitor to the U.S., and one of the most unusual revolutionaries in American history. (Steve Fishman, Jul 3, 2011, New York)

On the night of February 21, 2009, a year before Army private Bradley E. Manning allegedly leaked the largest cache of classified information in American history, he sat at a computer in his barracks at Fort Drum in upstate New York. It was a Saturday in midwinter, and the barracks were nearly empty. He pulled a chair up to the computer in his cinder-block room, briefly debated between a pizza and a sandwich from Domino’s, went with the sandwich, and passed over into his “digital existence,” as he thought of it. He logged on to AOL’s instant-messenger service under the handle Bradass87, and off he went to transform himself. On the web, he could be whomever he chose.

It was 8:27 p.m. at Fort Drum when he popped up on the computer screen of ZJ Antolak.

“hi,” he began.

“hi,” ZJ responded.

“You don’t know me, i apologize, i got this [address] from your youtube channel.”

“No problem, there’s a reason I put it on there :P,” wrote ZJ, adding an emoticon to indicate her playful tone—or his, depending on your frame of reference. ZJ was Zachary Antolak, a 19-year-old gay activist and web designer. On YouTube, he went by the name Zinnia Jones. On the Internet, he was a she who called herself Queen of the Atheists, wearing her auburn hair below her shoulders and painting her lips a bold red.

Manning was an atheist himself—“I’m godless,” he told an acquaintance. But even more, he identified with ZJ’s self-­invented life. “I saw your more personal stuff and figured you were on the same page … as me,” Manning wrote. “You ­remind me of … well … me.”

70 years earlier he'd have been typing his messages on Alger Hiss's Woodstock typewriter.

Posted by oj at July 5, 2011 5:31 AM
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