Bradley Manning is guilty, per his military proceeding. That’s the way it’s going to be. The government did not manage to pin the “aiding the enemy” charge on him, but because we live in the era of massive prosecutorial over-charging, he was convicted on about 20 other counts. It’s likely that, on top of abusive pre-trial detention amounting to at least psychological torture (and probably physical torture as well – exposure to extreme temperature, sleep deprivation, etc.) Manning will be treated to decades in prison for the crime he committed; that dastardly crime for which there can be no excuses given, no quarter offered. “Justice” has been served.
What was the crime again? Oh, yes. Exposing the sprawling criminality of our foreign policy, namely the Iraq war and the Afghan war, plus releasing a raft of diplomatic cables relating to prosecution of the global war on tactics … I mean, terror. Heinous indeed. Perhaps someone needs to remind me again why the man who informed us of the war’s true impact is going to jail while the men who started the war are living a comfortable – and loudly opinionated – retirement. Rank has its privileges, to be sure.
One thing Manning reminded us of was the fact that, to the federal government – the permanent national security state that persists through administrations of both parties – we are the enemy. Manning was accused of aiding the enemy, and that’s what he did. He gave us the information we need to fully understand the global war being fought in our names. Armed with that knowledge, we could compell our government to stop the killing, the torturing, the endless detentions, etc., because we live in a formal democracy. That makes us a threat to the persistence of the national security state. That makes us the “enemy”.
I know a medical professional whose son is in the military. He had four tours in Iraq, was knocked around by IED explosions. He lives in pain. He’s had his neck operated on, the doctors fusing his vertebrae together. He’s losing his sight. Worse yet, he can’t work but he can’t get decent disability benefits unless he stays in the Army for another 150 days. He’s a very young man with two young children, and his life is ruined. I hear about him, the many thousands like him, the many, many more thousands killed, and I see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of them, and their comfortable retirements.
That’s justice? Not quite.
luv u,
jp
surprised by this? Iraq is a majority Shi’a country, like Iran. There are longstanding cultural, religious, and political ties between these two neighboring states, and many Iraqi political figures took exile in Iran during the Saddam years. Speaking of which, Iran was attacked by a U.S.-supported Iraq in the 1980s, in an eight-year conflict that cost them probably a million lives. If I were them, I would be deeply interested in what happens in Iraq…. especially since we’re still the power behind the throne.
Think about it for half a second. When we open leasing on all that real estate again, no matter when that happens, will we have any trouble finding someone to drill, drill, drill? Of course not. What the hell, do they only have one rig? Is Hanna and the PI suggesting they can only drill in one place at a time? Pathetically ludicrous. 
will pay a heavy price. Admiral Mullens went so far as to say that Wikileaks may already have blood on their hands. Mullens and his colleagues would know something about that, of course, as the documents apparently demonstrate. I suspect, in cases such as these, that most if not all of what is secret is merely a secret from us (i.e. the American people); that military operations of the kind deployed in Afghanistan are very porous in the sense of who is working for whom. Sure, it would be better not to put people needlessly in harm’s way. But that’s what the Afghan war is all about, from what I can see.