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The military and the police tend to attract people<br>
with a tendency for blood-sport and sadism. <br>
<br>
It doesnt mean it's good, but if someone is torturing ya <br>
with a magnifying glass, the trend is to find a counterattack<br>
with similar attributes. <br>
<br>
The reaction of the powers-that-be to discredit the source of the leaks<br>
is likewise predictable.<br>
<br>
What seems incredible to me is the lack of a mass reaction<br>
of the people to the fact that have been grossly duped and <br>
lied to by their government, and yet they continue to support<br>
it with their substance.<br>
<br>
<br>
On 08/09/13 9:14, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:7AFD90A6-636B-4CA6-ABAB-49AD7DC98317@newsfromneptune.com"
type="cite">
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<div><b>Truth in the Crosshairs: Will Bradley Manning's Courage
Inspire Other Whistleblowers?<br>
</b>by JOHN PILGER<br>
AUGUST 08, 2013<br>
</div>
<div><i><br>
</i></div>
<div><i>The critical moment in the political trial of the century was
on 28 February when Bradley Manning stood and explained why he had
risked his life to leak tens of thousands of official files. It was a
statement of morality, conscience and truth: the very qualities that
distinguish human beings. This was not deemed mainstream news in
America; and were it not for Alexa O’Brien, an independent freelance
journalist, Manning’s voice would have been silenced. Working through
the night, she transcribed and released his every word. It is a rare,
revealing document*.</i><br>
<br>
Describing the attack by an Apache helicopter crew who filmed
civilians as they murdered and wounded them in Baghdad in 2007,
Manning said: “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the
seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have. They seemed not
to value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and
congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At
one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting
to crawl to safety [who] is seriously wounded … For me, this seems
similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.” He hoped
“the public would be as alarmed as me” about a crime which, as his
subsequent leaks revealed, was not an aberration.<br>
<b><br>
Bradley Manning is a principled whistleblower and truth-teller who has
been vilified and tortured – and Amnesty International needs to explain
to the world why it has not adopted him as a prisoner of conscience; or
is Amnesty, unlike Manning, intimidated by criminal power?</b><br>
<b><br>
“It is a funeral here at Fort Meade,” Alexa O’Brien told me. “The US
government wants to bury Manning alive. He is a genuinely earnest
young man with not an ounce of mendacity. The mainstream media finally
came on the day of the verdict. They showed up for a gladiator match –
to watch the gauntlet go down, thumbs pointed down.”</b><br>
<i><br>
The criminal nature of the American military is beyond dispute. The
decades of lawless bombing, the use of poisonous weapons on civilian
populations, the renditions and the torture at Abu Graib, Guantanamo
and elsewhere, are all documented. As a young war reporter in
Indochina, it dawned on me that America exported its homicidal neuroses
and called it war, even a noble cause. Like the Apache attack, the
infamous 1968 massacre at My Lai was not untypical. In the same
province, Quang Ngai, I gathered evidence of widespread slaughter:
thousands of men, women and children, murdered arbitrarily and
anonymously in “free fire zones”.</i><br>
<br>
In Iraq, I filmed a shepherd whose brother and his entire family had
been cut down by an American plane, in the open. This was sport. In
Afghanistan, I filmed to a woman whose dirt-walled home, and family,
had been obliterated by a 500lb bomb. There was no “enemy”. My film
cans burst with such evidence.<br>
<br>
In 2010, Private Manning did his duty to the rest of humanity and
supplied proof from within the murder machine. This is his triumph; and
his show trial merely expresses corrupt power’s abiding fear of people
learning the truth. It also illuminates the parasitic industry around
truth-tellers. Manning’s character has been dissected and abused
by those who never knew him and claim to support him.<br>
<br>
The hyped film, We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks, mutates a
heroic young soldier into an “alienated …lonely …very needy”
psychiatric case with an “identity crisis” because “he was in the wrong
body and wanted to become a woman”. So spoke Alex Gibney, the director,
whose prurient psycho-babble found willing ears across a media
too compliant or lazy or stupid to challenge the hype and comprehend
that the shadows falling across whistleblowers may reach even them.
>From its dishonest title, Gibney’s film performed a dutiful hatchet job
on Manning, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The message was familiar —
serious dissenters are freaks. Alexa O’Brien’s meticulous record
of Manning’s moral and political courage demolishes this smear.<br>
<br>
In the Gibney film, US politicians and the chairman of the joint chiefs
of staff are lined up to repeat, unchallenged, that, in publishing
Manning’s leaks, WikiLeaks and Assange placed the lives informants at
risk and had “blood on his hands”. On 1 August, the Guardianreported:
“No record of deaths caused by WikiLeaks revelations, court told.”
The Pentagon general who led a 10-month investigation into the
worldwide impact of the leaks reported that not a single death could be
attributed to the disclosures.<br>
<br>
Yet, in the film, the journalist Nick Davies describes a heartless
Assange who had no “harm minimisation plan”. I asked the film-maker
Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis
was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during much of the preparation
of the leaked files for publication in the Guardian and the New York
Times. His footage appears in the Gibney film. He told me, “Assange was
the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people
who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs.”<br>
<br>
While Manning faces life in prison, Gibney is said to be planning a
Hollywood movie. A “biopic” of Assange is on the way, along with a
Hollywood version of David Leigh’s and Luke Harding’s book of
scuttlebutt on the “fall” of WikiLeaks. Profiting from the boldness,
cleverness and suffering of those who refuse to be co-opted and tamed,
they all will end up in history’s waste bin. For the inspiration of
future truth-tellers belongs to Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Edward
Snowden and the remarkable young people of WikiLeaks, whose
achievements are unparalleled. Snowden’s rescue is largely a WikiLeaks
triumph: a thriller too good for Hollywood because its heroes are real.<br>
<br>
*Read Bradley Manning’s statement here. <br>
<br>
John Pilger’s film on Australia, Utopia, will be released in the UK in
the autumn.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/08/truth-in-the-crosshairs/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/08/truth-in-the-crosshairs/</a></div>
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