Bradley Manning - Truth and Consequences (2011) Greg Mitchell

Greg Mitchell provides a lucid and thorough review of what is known to date about Bradley Manning’s past, the possible motivation for his alleged leak of the Collateral Murder video and hundreds of thousands of State Department cables to Wikileaks, his ongoing torture by the US government, and what it all means about Manning, our government, and President “Hope & Change” Obama. This is what emerges: 1. Bradley Manning knew that he was, as a member of the United States military, a party to wrong: the ongoing torture and murder of innocents. He felt an ethical obligation to reveal the depth and extent of the wrongs in which he had become unwittingly complicit. If the portions of his chat logs with Adrian Lamo that we have been able to read are accurate (the government and WIRED magazine are concealing most of them), his hope was that “worldwide discussions, debates, and reforms” would ensue. 2. Boy have they ever — and what’s being discussed and debated is the corruption of our own government (senseless murder of more than a hundred thousand innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan, spying in the UN at the direction of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the bombing of countries like Yemen with which we’re not at war and displacement of responsibility for same onto their governments, plenty more) and lots of other governments around the world (publications as staid as the Economist have called Tunisia “the first Wikileaks revolution”, and the revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere have been similarly fueled). 3. The government of the United States is intent upon killing the messenger — or, in Manning’s case, torturing him out of his mind. He is charged with a capital crime, “aiding the enemy”, though plainly he had no such intent. Though he has been a model inmate in the brig at Quantico where he has been held nearly a year, Manning — an untried and unconvicted American citizen — is being held under conditions so harsh and bizarre they beggar belief, including enforced nudity, constant isolation, and other measures known to destroy the human psyche. 4. In spite of the fact that Amnesty International, the United Nations, the ACLU, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Social Responsibility have called Manning’s torture “cruel and unusual” and called for its end, President Barack Obama (a man for whom I campaigned and voted, and to whom I donated) has defended his treatment of Manning as “appropriate”. Late in the book, Mitchell likens Manning to Daniel Ellsberg, a man now rightly recognized as an American hero for his leaking of the Pentagon Papers. He quotes Glenn Greenwald, perhaps the best journalist writing on the subject of Manning today: “Nonetheless, the notion that Daniel Ellberg’s leak was noble and justified has become consecrated orthodoxy among most Democrats, progressives and even among the American media — because it’s very easy to cheer on challenges to authority and political power from four decades earlier, when the targets of the whistle-blowing no longer wield power. Yet even though Manning’s actions are so similar to Ellsberg’s both in intent and effect — as Ellsberg himself has repeatedly stated — the reaction to Manning is radically different: both because Manning’s actions challenge the policy of current authorities who actually wield power now and because it’s a Democratic President prosecuting him. That Ellsberg is viewed as a hero while Manning is viewed as a death-deserving villain makes no logical sense.” Obama’s hypocrisy is hardly rare in our culture. The owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos — a man who became a multi-billionaire through the distributive powers of the internet — yanked Wikileaks from the Amazon server cloud last fall, though Wikileaks has plainly acted as a journalist and committed no crimes (nor been accused of any). The owner of Ebay, Pierre Omidyar — another man who became a multi-billionaire through the distributive powers of the internet, and one who travels the globe trumpeting his affection for transparency and accountability — cut off the principal means by which the entire world supported the efforts of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning, which were the Paypal accounts of their defense funds. But plutocrats will do plutocratic things. It is Obama’s hypocrisy that glares the brightest, for it is he — a former professor of Constitutional law — who is torturing one of his own citizens and calling it “appropriate”. Greg Mitchell’s detailed documentation of this contemptible and wholly illegal abuse is admirable. Every American ought to read this book and familiarize him- or herself with what our government is doing to this young man in our names. Bradley Manning took a heroic step, and took it with the understanding that it might cause him to lose either his liberty or his life. That one has been erased while the other hangs in the balance — in the hands of a President who campaigned on a platform of transparency and accountability in government — is a national disgrace.

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