Global Hero, Local Criminal, Exposes War Crimes

Here below is a comment about Bradley Manning. I took it in its entirety from the comment stream of a posting on the Democratic Underground blog, here.

To the United States, of course, Bradley Manning is an anathema. He disclosed 250,000 diplomatic cables. He represents the loss of secrecy that is inevitable in this digital age where a person can fit a gigabyte under a fingernail. The message of his existence is that the Emperor wears no clothes. So we are trying to kill him. He is not being brought to trial. His obvious defense is that his responsibility is to the Constitution first, his commanding officers second. His trial would expose our perfidy. So he is getting the "slow torture" method that over a couple of years turned Jose Padilla into a vegetable, unable to stand trial.

There is a market for scuttlebutt. The world loves scandal. By invading Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States, exemplar of the finest ideals known to man, has gone rogue. We have done what Hitler did. Are we going to get away with it?

The world is round. There are many messengers. There are many Bradley Mannings.

PFC Bradley Manning, American Patriot:

Edited on Sun Dec-26-10 01:13 PM by Better Believe It December 22, 2010 Why Manning was Within His Rights to Give Secrets to Wikileaks PFC Bradley Manning, Patriot By SHERWOOD ROSS Under ordinary circumstances, the release of information labeled "secret" violates U.S. law, as intelligence specialist Manning undoubtedly knew. But if the U.S. is an aggressor state, as Germany was when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, doesn't that change everything? America under President George W. Bush attacked two small nations that posed no threat to it. Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told BBC the US-led invasion of Iraq was "illegal." He said it contravened the UN Charter as the attack lacked Security Council approval. MIT Professor Noam Chomsky in his book "Imperial Ambitions," (Metropolitan), called the U.S. invasion of Iraq as "open an act of aggression as there has been in modern history, a major war crime." By ratifying the UN Charter the U.S. agreed to refrain "from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state..." And international law authority Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, Champaign, called the invasion of Afghanistan "an illegal armed aggression that has created a humanitarian catastrophe" for its 22 millions. (Destroying World Order, Clarity Press.) And as these invasions are criminal, why shouldn't pertinent information about them not be brought to light? Whenever has it been wrong to expose a criminal enterprise? Public-spirited citizens go to the police and FBI every day to report crimes. "Under international law," says Boyle, professor of that subject, "citizens have a basic human right to resist the commission of international crimes by their own government, especially aggression..." And this is what PFC Manning did. He resisted aggression by informing Americans of how their government breaks laws. The Associated Press reports Manning told an associate, "I want people to see the truth...because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public." America's Founders believed that, too, and made a free press a cornerstone of the new nation. Ann Medlock, Founder of the Giraffe Heroes Project, says, "In a perfect world, institutions would listen to their staffers when they point out errors, lapses of ethics, and outright chicanery within the organization. Then those holding power would correct those flaws. But...that hasn't been the reality. Again and again authorities just blast away at the truthsayers rather than addressing the problems." Read the full article at: http://www.counterpunch.org/ross12222010.html The writer didn't cover in his article another vital fact in defense of Pfc. Manning releasing government documents, and that is the improper classification of government documents. Most government classifications have absolutely nothing to do with protecting the United States from terrorists or other real "enemies" determined to do us harm. The government routinely classifies millions of documents every year, not because they reveal vital secrets that threaten our security if they are published, but because those documents expose illegal government activities, lies and gross incompetence. These big government "national security secrets" must not see the light of day, so they remain hidden from the people under the false claim of "national security" .... The economic and political security of government officials that is. And many of these "highly sensitive" documents are being rubber stamped "secret" or "confidential" in clear violation of the Freedom of Information Act! So Pfc. Manning has done absolutely nothing that in any way threatens you or me. The idea that he has somehow hurt us and that he is engaged in espionage or some other terrible criminal activity damaging to this nation and its general population is total bull shit. All progressives should understand that by now! Pfc.Manning is an American hero. He's not a spy. He's not a terrorist. He's not trying to overthrow the government violently nor any other way for that matter. He's just a courageous American whistle blower, a soldier trying to get out the truth about government policies to the people. And for that the government will try to punish him for the rest of his life, as a warning to other potential whistle blowers. If anything, Manning deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom for especially meritorious contribution to the national interests of the people of the United States, not solitary confinement! BBI

Licky Weeks

On the tenth of December, the planet Mercury appeared to begin moving backward as seen from the Earth. It does this three times a year in most years, each retrograde period being about three weeks long. During these periods, craziness declines. Obamas get elected. General McChrystals get demoted. Lame duck Congresses turn effective.

Several weeks before the retrograde, President Obama kludged together a bill that contained a couple of things that Republicans really wanted and a couple of things that Democrats really wanted and sent it to Congress for enactment. The Republicans would get tax cuts for the rich extended two years. The Dems would get another year of unemployment compensation for the poor. This bill set up election year 2012 as a time when serious concerns may come to the fore. If unemployment compensation runs out of funds at the end of 2011, then allowing the full expiration of the tax cuts at the end of 2012 will become a reasonable goal.

It was a middle ground, but like an island in an ocean. Neither party wanted to have anything to do with Obama's compromise. Then Mercury Retrograde struck.

On the day the period began, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders spent eight and a half hours filibustering against tax cuts for the rich. Senate business ground to a halt. Following that, the Senate re-grouped and passed bill after bill, including the tax cut bill, making this the most productive Congress since the '60s. The Republican consensus against voting for all good things Democratic was broken, with Senator after Republican Senator joining the Democrats in passing good new laws.

During the same weeks, a stunningly heroic script has been playing itself out over the incarceration of Julian Assange, a founder of WikiLeaks. According to Assange, through back-channels that flowed into back-channels, Wikileaks obtained a massive pile of State Department internal messages. After carefully vetting the find, they have been slowly releasing these messages to a press that waits like puppies for another biscuit. 

There is always more to be shown, much more, so if anything really bad were to happen to Assange or to others on his team, an avalanche of message releases is probable. But something bad has happened -a Swedish prosecutor filed an international arrest warrant, and Assange was arrested and jailed in Britain on charges of being over-assertive during sex in Sweden some time ago.  His arrest was immediately suspect.

Now released under house arrest, Assange is free to explain to the press his hobby, and the need for it to be the hobby of every citizen around the world. And Sweden is free to explain its sudden interest in protecting people from over-assertive sex, and whether it will now apply this new standard generally.

And the world learns...

Meanwhile, the probable leaker of the State Department documents, a file clerk named Bradley Manning, strangely sits in long-term solitary confinement in violation of international rules which call such use of extended solitary "torture", and in violation of U.S. laws that requires individuals to be held without punishment until a trial proves their guilt.

Meanwhile, attention is focusing more and more on Bradley Manning. May prayers be with him.

If he is the leaker, he joins a long list of heroes - Deep Throat, who fed the leaks to Woodward and Bernstein that brought down Nixon. Daniel Ellsburg, who published the Pentagon Papers that showed we had been losing, not winning, the war in Vietnam. It's an American tradition.

We tortured. We need to deal with it, and slow-torturing Bradley Manning is not the way.

For-Profit Prisons Lobby DC

Been reading up on prisoner issues...

The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoner population.
   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html

We should have 5% of the world's prisoner population. We have 25%.  Five times as many as is needed.

Can someone ask why?

I have a sense that the "law and order" crowd of the Reagan era saw punishment as reformative and set some things in motion that grew and grew until they are monsters today.

A person should be able to ask, "What is the cost to the taxpayer of all this incarceration?"  Conservatives should be concerned about the taxes they are paying to keep people in prison. But maybe they made imprisonment pay for itself?

Does income from prison farms and prison industries make the cost of imprisonment irrelevant?  Being able to lock up people without increasing taxes would be quite a nifty prospect for conservatives, but it forgets the moral imperative that we give extra care for the least of those among us.

And now we have for-profit prisons. Do they have prison industries? What legal envelope allows a for-profit prison? How are they expected to keep increasing their profits?  Any company worth investing in needs to keep increasing its profits so its stock will go up. How do we keep the profit motive from driving the prison industry into driving us into prison?

Jesse Ventura, former wrestler and former governor, just released a video on FEMA internment camps. Munchies for the militia crowd.  There may be general interest, this coming election, in prisoner issues.

For-profit prisons lobby for their industry in Washington.  If for-profit prisons are profiting from prison industries... a monster is upon us.