PayPal Freezes Support Account For Bradley Manning

An anonymous reader writes "The online payment provider PayPal has frozen the account of Courage to Resist, which in collaboration with the Bradley Manning Support Network is currently raising funds in support of US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. 'We've been in discussions with PayPal for weeks, and by their own admission there's no legal obligation for them to close down our account,' noted Loraine Reitman of the Bradley Manning Support Network (Support Network). 'This was an internal policy decision by PayPal. ... They said they would not unrestrict our account unless we authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from our organization's checking account by default. While there may be no legal obligation to provide services, there is an ethical obligation. By shutting out legitimate nonprofit activity, PayPal shows itself to be morally bankrupt.'"

Comments

Re:Two sides to the story?

[jmorris42]

> This would be a great opportunity for some actual journalism..

Yea, that would be a refreshing change. But journalism is dead. Even if a news outlet still had the resources to invest in actual fact gathering vs reprinting press releases or just letting a press flack have a few minutes of airime or a few inches of column space, they are philosophically opposed to truthseeking. Truth is a social construct now.

But consider some notions in this case that the slashdot hivemind will mod me into oblivion for mentioning. Or can you idjits deal with alien notions while constructing your Truth?

We are dealing with a case of someone who has pretty much confessed. At any rate is caught dead to rights, so wailing about innocent until proven guilty in this case is about as much a pro forma thing as saying Jared Laughner is innocent until convicted. The word we are looking for here is TRAITOR. Yes the jury has to go in with an open mind when the case eventually makes its way to a trial, but the rest of us can pretty safely just call a spade a spade and a traitor a traitor. The only defenses I have even seen put forward boil down to basically "But..... BUUUSH! He was GAAAAAY! Death to America!"

So now we have a skeevy group of anarchists and progressive/marxist activists raising money in this traitor's name. Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that this group of misfits might be suspected of, and Paypal might have evidence of, some dubious activity going on with that money? Or that Paypal has simply made a business decision that being associated with a group of misfits defending a traitor isn't what they want to be known for? But no, we have to jump straight to the conspiracy theory version where Paypal is in the grip of dark neocon powers trying to keep the brave rebels down.