How come the members of the lynch mob are all wearing U.S. Army uniforms?
The trial of whistleblower Bradley Manning started on Monday June 3rd. 2013. Until Edward Snowden showed up, Manning was easily the most famous and most controversial whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg and yet we find almost no mention of him or the trail in any of the corporate media. This, of course brings up the question of why we made such a big deal about the DOJ’s, AP e-mail grab when the mainstream media doesn’t cover anything that the government or its corporate masters don’t want covered anyway.
The trial itself is developing into exactly the same kind of phony show trial exemplified in the 1960s and 1970s in the Soviet Union and South American dictatorships.
The government’s secrecy is ludicrous and self-incriminating. 75% of media credentials were rejected. Transcripts of the trial will not be released to the press. Where are we, North Korea? The excuse is just as ludicrous as the accusations themselves. Manning leaked “Classified” materials that could be dangerous to the country and could put members of the intelligence community and the military in harms way. Let’s start by agreeing that military intelligence, like military justice is an oxymoron. Neither actually exists.
Everyone who has had any truck with the military or the intelligence community knows that they slap a classified label on everything that goes into their computers, including among other inconsequential commodities, toilet paper shipments.
Any intelligent observer will tell you, regarding any situation in the world, that any time you call everything by a single name it indicates that, said name denotes nothing. That is precisely the case here.
The government has yet to be able to pinpoint one thing that Manning released that endangered anyone. They will tell you that this is because they cannot discuss the material because it is classified. If you don’t recognize this as pure bullshit, you don’t belong in the discussion. The entire trial is a blatant attempt by the military and the government to save face because of the incredibly embarrassing behavior that Manning exposed in posting the files to WikiLeaks. The horrendous video of our airborne troops murdering women, children and two Reuters reporters and gloating over it was sickening. Have you heard anything about the perpetrators of that disgusting act or their commanders being called to task? I haven’t.
Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of emails. Most of which were about nothing, but some percentage of them were about stuff that should never have been transmitted on the Internet in the first place.
If this stuff was so important, important enough to be classified, then why were our intelligence people transmitting it over such insecure media? The people who allowed this breach of intelligence are the ones who should be on trial here, if, in fact the material was really that important.
WikiLeaks offered all the material to Army Intelligence to be vetted before they published it. Army intelligence turned them down. Why, maybe because they knew at the time that there was nothing in the material that was truly classified, maybe because they are just incompetent. The reason doesn’t matter. What matters is that they failed in their responsibility to protect the material, whatever its importance. Now all the generals who failed in their duty want to blame a private who followed his conscience for the leak
All governments work in secret. All governments create clouds of mumbo-jumbo to hide what they are doing wrong and even sometimes right, but that is never good for democracy. Basically what happened here, was the government and the military were too lazy or too incompetent to segregate what was really important from what was just junk-mail, and to make sure that what was important, what was injurious to the reputation of the United States, be kept out of the hands of a anyone with any moral integrity. They didn’t do that. Now they’re embarrassed, and their reaction is to look for a scapegoat. That’s what losers always do.
Who can I blame is their universal cry. Bradley Manning, a guy with a conscience is the scapegoat. He did what he thought was right. He saw unabated atrocities and he tried to do something about them. He reacted in what we like to think is the American way but now, the guys who acted like Nazis are trying to get him, and to accomplish their goals they are trying to keep all details of what really happened from the American public.
It will only work if you let it work. Don’t sit on your universal asses. Call, write or accost your congressman and your local papers. Bradley Manning has already paid too high a price for doing the right thing. It’s time for the military to take responsibility for their own bad decisions. THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.
Free Bradley Manning.