The War Against Bradley Manning

The War Against Bradley Manning—A War Against All Who Speak Out Against Injustice



“The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.”—Chris Hedges, author and journalist<blockquote>
“I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and
Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people
who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what
we call asymmetric warfare.”—Bradley Manning

</blockquote>
Time and again, throughout America’s history, individuals with a
passion for truth and a commitment to justice have opted to defy the
unjust laws and practices of the American government in order to speak
up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. Even when
their personal safety and freedom were on the line, these individuals
spoke up, knowing they would be chastised, ridiculed, arrested, branded
traitors and even killed.

Indeed, while brave men and women such as Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman are lauded as
American heroes today, they were once considered enemies of the state.

Thanks to the U.S. government’s growing intolerance for dissidents who
insist on transparency and accountability, oppose its endless wars and
targeted killings of innocent civilians and terrorists alike, and demand
that government officials abide by the rule of law, that list of
so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.

One such “enemy of the state” is Bradley Manning, an intelligence
analyst who has been targeted by the Obama administration for holding up
a mirror to the bloated face of American empire. Manning is being
prosecuted for leaking classified government documents which, like the
Pentagon Papers a generation ago, expose systemic corruption within
America’s military and diplomatic apparatus. The embarrassment caused by
showing that the emperor has no clothes, as it were, has made Bradley
Manning public enemy number one in the eyes of the federal government.

As Chris Hedges explains:

<blockquote>
“Manning provided to the public the most important window into the
inner workings of imperial power since the release of the Pentagon
Papers. The routine use of torture, the detention of Iraqis who were
innocent, the inhuman conditions within our secret detention facilities,
the use of State Department officials as spies in the United Nations,
the collusion with corporations to keep wages low in developing
countries such as Haiti, and specific war crimes such as the missile
strike on a house that killed seven children in Afghanistan would have
remained hidden without Manning.”

</blockquote>
Despite not being convicted of any crime, Manning has been put through a
horror trip since the first day of his incarceration in the military
brig at Quantico. He has spent 1,000 days in jail without trial, a large
portion of which was passed in solitary confinement, imprisoned in a
windowless 6 x 12 foot cell containing a bed, a drinking fountain and a
toilet. Manning was kept under Suicide and/or Prevention of Injury (POI)
watch during his incarceration, largely against the advice of two
forensic psychiatrists. Under suicide watch, Manning was confined to his
tiny cell for 24 hours a day and stripped of all clothing with the
exception of his underwear. His prescription eyeglasses were taken away,
leaving him in essential blindness except for those limited times when
he was permitted to read or watch television. In a thinly veiled attempt
to harass him, guards would check on Manning every five minutes, asking
if he was ok.

Once he was finally brought before a military court, Manning pled
guilty to ten of the twenty-two charges brought against him, admitting
that he leaked the documents because he believed that the public has a
right to know about the government’s misdeeds. Manning’s admission
guarantees that he will be put into prison for up to twenty years.
However, instead of proceeding to sentencing, government prosecutors are
insisting on pressing the most serious charges against him, including
“aiding the enemy,” in an attempt to imprison him for life.

The government’s aim is clear: to make an example of Manning (what Yale
professor Eugene Fidell describes as an attempt to “scare the daylights
out of other people”), thereby discouraging anyone else from defying
the regime or daring to lay bare the inner workings of a corrupt
government.

Indeed, despite promising unprecedented levels of transparency when he
ascended to the presidency in 2009, Obama has invoked the WWI-era
Espionage Act more times than all his predecessors combined as a means
of silencing all internal dissent and criticism. Obama’s administration
has also launched an all-out campaign to roust out, prosecute, and
imprison government whistleblowers for exposing government corruption,
incompetence, and greed. Obama’s other targets include John Kiriakou, a
CIA agent who was prosecuted and imprisoned for blowing the whistle on
government-sponsored torture, and Peter Van Buren, who exposed the
government’s incompetence and failures during the occupation of Iraq.

Thus, Bradley Manning is merely the latest whistleblower to be singled
out for punishment. So determined is the government to crucify Manning
that government prosecutors plan to make the case that Manning
essentially aided and abetted Osama bin Laden. Manning’s trial, which
promises to be a government spectacle of manufactured “shock and awe,”
will feature testimony from an anonymous Navy Seal who took part in the
raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. This Seal will reportedly
testify that he recovered computer discs in Osama bin Laden’s personal
effects containing government material that originated from Manning’s
leak.

What the government is attempting to suggest is that if an individual
or news organization publishes information that is accessed by
terrorists over the internet, for example, then those individuals or
news organizations are essentially guilty of collusion.

Stacking the odds in their favor, government prosecutors have refused
to allow Manning’s defense team to interview government witnesses or to
introduce evidence showing that Manning’s leak of government information
did little, if any, harm to U.S. interests other than showing that the
Obama administration is no different from its predecessors. In fact,
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the publication of the Iraq War
Logs and the Afghan War Diary had “not revealed any sensitive
intelligence sources or methods.” As for the leak of some 250,000 State
Department documents, a report by Reuters indicates that the damage
caused was “limited,” and was for the most part simply an embarrassment
to the Obama administration.

Manning reacted as one would hope any honorable American would react
when they witness their government acting in a manner that is corrupt,
incompetent, inhumane, immoral and, it must be said, downright evil.
Manning was particularly affected by the so-called “Collateral Murder”
video in which American Apache helicopter pilots can be see firing on
civilians in Iraq, including children and a Reuters journalist. “The
people in the van were not a threat but merely ‘good Samaritans,’”
observed Manning. “The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however,
was the seemly delightful bloodlust [the American troops] appeared to
have.”

To his credit, Manning refused to remain silent. He spoke out, first to
his superiors, who turned a deaf ear to his concerns, then to the New York Times and Washington Post.
When he still could find no one willing to alert the American people to
what their government was really doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere, he turned to Wikileaks.

The rest, as they say, is history.
Source:-
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_war_against_bradley_manninga_war_against_all_who_speak_out_against