Miss America to gay wikileakerBradley Manning: Drop dead

Seventeen-year-old Teresa Scanlan of Gering, Nebraska (in that state's rural panhandle) became 2011's Miss America last Saturday night in Las Vegas.

The politically-charged question posed to her was asked by SFC Chad Momerak, Bismark, ND: "Everybody's talking about the Wikileaks. How do we balance people's right to know with the right to government security?"

Scanlan answered: "You know when it came to that situation, it was actually based on espionage, and that when it comes to the security of our nation, we have to focus on security first and then people's right to know, because it's so important that everybody within our borders is safe and so we can't let things like that happen and they must be handled properly and I think that was the case."

Accused WikiLeaker Bradley Manning, incarcerated in a military prison, faces the spectre of decades in prison for, among other things, leaking the video of U.S. helicopter pilots killing two Reuters journalists and wounding at least one child when they machine-gunned a group of pedestrians in Iraq.

Said video was not released by the Pentagon despite Freedom of Information Act requests to do so. Manning is also accused of releasing classified war logs in Afghanistan including one recounting

how a convoy of US Marines, hit by an explosives-rigged minivan outside the city of Jalalabad, escaped, then opened fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.

Two hours later Americans returned to the scene of the bombing to conduct an "exploitation of the blast site with pictures/grid cords as well as debriefing ANP leadership on scene". Journalists on the spot gave a more detailed account. They said angry marines tore their cameras from their hands, insisting they delete the pictures they had taken of bullet-pocked vehicles on the roadside. Rahmat Gul, a freelance photographer working for the Associated Press, said two soldiers and a translator came up to him and asked: "Why are you taking pictures? You don't have permission." Then they deleted his photographs.

Later, Gul said, one of the soldiers came up to him and raised his arm, as if to hit him. Taqiullah Taqi, a reporter for the private Tolo TV channel, said the Americans told him through a translator: "Delete them, or we will delete you."