The recipient of a journalism award named after Soviet agent I.F. Stone was on MSNBC on Friday complaining about the treatment of Private Bradley Manning, the alleged traitor now in prison and accused of leaking thousands of classified military documents to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Glenn Greenwald of Salon is depicting Manning as a praiseworthy whistleblower who is being persecuted by the U.S. military.

Among other things, Greenwald says that Manning is not being given a pillow to sleep on.

Greenwald has been on MSNBC before, such as the time he engaged in a heated conversation with Democratic partisan Lawrence O’Donnell, who is a host of his own MSNBC show, over whether President Obama is sufficiently leftist. Greenwald believes Obama, like Bush, has been too tough on the terrorists trying to kill Americans.

The established record shows that Manning is a homosexual who should never have been in the military and was a discipline problem but nevertheless got a security clearance when stationed in Iraq. He apparently used some of his time not to help his fellow soldiers fight the enemy but to listen to Lady Gaga CDs and download classified information, which he then turned over to Assange. A grand jury is reportedly investigating whether Assange was a conspirator with Manning and not just a recipient of his stolen information. A conspiracy cannot be ruled out at this juncture in the investigation.

The record shows that Manning allegedly betrayed the United States because of anger over what he perceived to be the Army’s failure to accommodate his peculiar “sexual orientation,” which he advertised on Facebook. Manning also marched openly in gay rights parades but some observers think Manning was in the process of considering becoming a woman.

Like Manning, Glenn Greenwald is gay.

Using sensational language designed to lure the gullible into believing that Manning is some kind of heroic figure being destroyed by fanatical military types, Greenwald claims that Manning “has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation…” Greenwald speculates that the treatment could be considered torture.

Manning is being held in isolation because of the fear that he could turn over more sensitive information to possible conspirators. This is why his associates are being closely monitored.

Greenwald came to AIM’s attention when he received an award named after I.F. Stone, a leftist journalist exposed as a Soviet agent, from the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College. Greenwald shared the award with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, a radio and TV outfit so far to the left that it ran a special program honoring Castro collaborator Che Guevara.

Rather than disavow the award, after he was informed about Stone’s service to the Soviet Union, Greenwald attacked AIM and Commentary magazine, which had also published evidence of Stone’s work on behalf of the communist dictatorship.

While the Greenwald piece on Manning has been labeled “explosive” and “provocative” by liberals and eagerly gobbled up by “progressive” outlets like MSNBC, the basis for his controversial assertions about Manning is not clear, since Greenwald himself reports that “Manning is barred from communicating with any reporters, even indirectly, so nothing he has said can be quoted here.”

Greenwald quotes a friend of Manning, David House, as claiming various things about Manning’s living conditions and his supposedly deteriorating “appearance,” but the descriptions of prison life, while harsh, do not by any objective measure equate to torture or anything resembling it. Indeed, Greenwald reports that Manning sleeps much of the day, even without a pillow.

House helped establish the Bradley Manning Support Network and has a vested interest in saving his friend from military justice and making the U.S. Army look bad. This seems to be Greenwald’s motive as well.

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