By Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis
Bradley Manning is accused of humiliating the political establishment by revealing the complicity of top U.S. officials in carrying out and covering up war crimes. In return for his act of conscience, the U.S. government is holding him in abusive solitary confinement, humiliating him and trying to keep him behind bars for life.
The lesson is clear, and soldiers take note: You're better off committing a war crime than exposing one.
An Army intelligence officer stationed in Kuwait, the 23-year-old Manning -- outraged at what he saw -- allegedly leaked tens of thousands of State Department cables to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. These cables show U.S. officials covering up everything from U.S. tax dollars funding child rape in Afghanistan to illegal, unauthorized bombings in Yemen. Manning is also accused of leaking video evidence of U.S. pilots gunning down more than a dozen Iraqis in Baghdad, including two journalists for Reuters, and then killing a father of two who stopped to help them. The father's two young children were also severely wounded.
"Well, it's their fault for bringing kids into a battle," a not-terribly-remorseful U.S. pilot can be heard remarking in the July 2007 "Collateral Murder" video.
None of the soldiers who carried out that war crime have been punished, nor have any of the high-ranking officials who authorized it. Indeed, committing war crimes is more likely to get a solider a medal than a prison term. And authorizing them? Well, that'll get you a book deal and a six-digit speaking fee. Just ask George W. Bush. Or Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice. Or the inexplicably "respectable" Colin Powell.
In fact, the record indicates Manning would be far better off today -- possibly on the lecture circuit rather than in solitary confinement -- if he'd killed those men in Baghdad himself.
Hyperbole? Consider what happened to the U.S. soldiers who, over a period of hours -- not minutes -- went house to house in the Iraqi town of Haditha and executed 24 men, women and children in retaliation for a roadside bombing.
"I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head," said one of the two surviving eyewitnesses to the massacre, nine-year-old Eman Waleed. "Then they killed my granny." Almost five years later, not one of the men involved in the incident is behind bars. And despite an Army investigation revealing that statements made by the chain of command "suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives," with the murder of brown-skinned innocents considered "just the cost of doing business," none of their superiors are behind bars either.
Now consider the treatment of Bradley Manning. On March 1, the military charged Manning with 22 additional offenses -- on top of the original charges of improperly leaking classified information, disobeying an order and general misconduct. One of the new charges, "aiding the enemy," is punishable by death. That means Manning faces the prospect of being executed or spending his life in prison for exposing the ugly truth about the U.S. empire.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has decided to make Manning's pre-trial existence as torturous as possible, holding him in solitary confinement 23 hours a day since his arrest 10 months ago -- treatment that the group Psychologists for Social Responsibility notes is, "at the very least, a form of cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment in violation of U.S. law."
In addition to the horror of long-term solitary confinement, Manning is barred from exercising in his cell and is denied bed sheets and a pillow. And every five minutes, he must respond in the affirmative when asked by a guard if he's "okay."
Presumably he lies.
And it gets worse. On his blog, Manning's military lawyer, Lt. Col. David Coombs, reveals that his client is now being stripped of his clothing at night, left naked under careful surveillance for seven hours. When the 5:00 am wake-up call comes, he's then "forced to stand naked at the front of the cell."
If you point out that the emperor has no clothes, it seems the empire will make sure you have none either.
Officials at the Quantico Marine Base where Manning is being held claim the move is "not punitive" but rather a "precautionary measure" intended to prevent him from harming himself. Do they really think Manning is going to strangle himself with his underwear - and that he could do so while under 24-hour surveillance?
"Is this Quantico or Abu Ghraib?" asked Rep. Dennis Kucinich in a press release. Good question, congressman. Like the men imprisoned in former President Bush's Iraqi torture chamber, Manning is being abused and humiliated despite having not so much as been tried in a military tribunal, much less convicted of an actual crime.
So much for the constitutional lawyer who ran as the candidate of hope and change.
Remember back when Obama campaigned against such Bush-league torture tactics? Recall when candidate Obama said "government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal"? It appears his opposition to torture and support for whistleblowers was only so much rhetoric. And then he took office.
Indeed, despite the grand promises and soaring rhetoric, Obama's treatment of Manning is starkly reminiscent of none other than Richard Nixon. Like Obama -- who has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any president in history -- Nixon had no sympathy for "snitches," and no interest in the American public learning the truth about their government. And he likewise argued that Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, had given "aid and comfort to the enemy" for revealing the facts about the war in Vietnam.
But there's a difference: Richard Nixon never had the heroic whistleblower of his day thrown in solitary confinement and tortured. If only the same could be said for Barack Obama.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. Charles Davis is an independent journalist. On March 20 CODEPINK and others will be traveling to the Quantico Marine Base to rally in support of Bradley Manning. You can sign our petition here asking President Obama to pardon Bradley Manning.
Follow Medea Benjamin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/medeabenjamin
There is but one (1) answer to such madness:
America's "Patriots" MUST act on their lawful right and duty to refuse to aid, abet, fund or otherwise support, in any fashion whatsoever, a society that would be party to mass murder.
Thank you.
Daniel J. Lavigne
"The Tax Refusal"
Therefore America is not a free country or Manning is innocent.
Your choice.
In France, the defendant is presumed guilty.
In France, article 9 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, of constitutional value, says "Everyone is supposed innocent until having been declared guilty." and the preliminary article of the code of criminal procedure says "any suspected or prosecuted person is presumed to be innocent until their guilt has been established". The jurors' oath reiterates this assertion.
Joe Nye, well-known academic, writer and asst. sec'y of defense under Clinton, writes Financial Times op-ed asking US not to prosecute Assange. By “trying to prosecute Mr Assange we only do damage to ourselves, both in terms of our own constitutional precedents, but also to the principle of openness on the internet that America must try to establish. The move is a blunder because it glorifies Mr Assange, and also because it confuses a cause with a symptom. If we are to understand power in an internet age, we must realise that if Mr Assange had never been born, something like this would have happened anyway.”
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/wikileaks-cables-are-americas-worst-security-breach-says-john-mccain/story-e6frfku0-1226018239105
http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979123191
We ask "Why is Obama letting this go on?" That's like asking, "Why does he let the Banksters destroy us?" Is it because he doesn't know? Doesn't understand? Doesn't care? Is he complicit? Is he being blackmailed, threatened personally, threatened with riots and national collapse? What sort of pressure is being put upon him by a crazed military and sociopathic Banksters?
We watch in horror as people are murdered by our nation's military, both here and abroad. We can do nothing. Our letters, demonstrations, outpourings of outrage, can do nothing. There are 320 million of us in this country who are not super-rich, but none of us matter.
This country is in the deathgrip of the most powerful criminals the world has ever seen. Once they have finished extracting every last penny from the populace, they will leave us to perish in squalor while they use our huge military might to attack and rob other nations.
We could have stopped them in 2009, but we were too timid. Obama could have stopped them. But it is obvious he will not. We have all been abandoned. Unless we, the people, rise up in a non-violent revolution, this nation is doomed.
Thanks for trying, though.
If the prize means anything, Obamas name should be removed from it.
This story should get front page coverage EVERYDAY, and Obama should have to read reports on Bradley Mannings descent into humiliation and insanity EVERYDAY.
A question I have is: So does Obama get to plead ignorance of torture like Bush, Rumsfeld, et al did ?
Obama will never be called upon to explain anything. This will be swept away in the carnival of electoral politics. It won't get any coverage in the future, either. because America is in the process of being hacked apart for the final feast of the Plutocrats. So many lives will be lost that Manning will be a footnote, if noted at all.
We have descended into Hell. It's rather fitting considering how much Hell we've created in other countries. Hopefully it won't end like Rwanda.
Whether a war crime is committed or not depends on if a military objective is in play or not under the Geneva Convention.
Examples:
1) In Vietnam, the Vietcong would line up innocent villagers, including women, in a standing position, then lay on the ground behind them and fire at our troops.
It was not a war crime to fire back.
2) Civilian housing surrounds a military target like an arms depot.
Bombing the arms depot is not a war crime even though civilians would also be killed.
Bombing civilian housing would be a war crime if there were no military targets in the area.
Hope that clears things up.
Our military goes to grate lengths to avoid civilian deaths, sometimes ever to the point of putting our own troops in greater danger. There is much debate about that in the Afgan conflict.
If it is right or wrong is a matter of opinion. But under the Geneva Conventions the only war crime in the examples I gave would that committed by the use of Human Shields in the Vietnam example.
"Collateral damage" is also defined by the Geneva Conventions as I used it in my comment.
I think in any far analysis, history will record that the US military in this time period has gone to greater lengths that any other to avoid civilian deaths. Part of that is the ability to hit targets accurately. In WWII bombs were very inaccurate, and a whole town around a "arms depot" could be destroyed and the "arms depot" could be left untouched. As much as you my not want to admit it, things even in war are much better than they used to be.
Saying something is a war crime and saying something is wrong are two completely different things. One could argue that all war is wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjwE2KC0zPQ&feature=player_embedded
I like how, even though Manning's guilt hasn't even been established, the author knows EXACTLY the motivation for his "actions." I couldn't take this article seriously after that one.
So it's OK if the torture and sexually deviant practices happened at Abu Ghraib - just not the done thing at Quantico?
Who is really prepared to stand up at the highest level and say "this is wrong - no matter who does it - no matter where it is done"?
What Manning's treatment is showing to *all* of us is that we have *no rights* once we are picked up by the military. We will be tortured and destroyed. This treatment is as bad as any torture inflicted in any gulag or tiger cage or Chinese jail cell at any point in the past 50 years.
We have become the very evil we claimed to be fighting.
A pox on him for this treatment of Bradley Manning and his war in Afghanistan.
Three exclamation marks won't change the facts.
A war crime is the intentional targeting of civilians when no military target is in the area.