[Peace-discuss] "America exported its homicidal neuroses and called it war"

Sat Aug 10 16:08:37 UTC 2013

Roger--

I think you're right about Manning's being a "manipulator of public opinion" - just the way the White Rose wished to manipulate public opinion in wartime Germany.

And I think the Obama administration appreciates that - and fears it: that's why they have so egregiously violated US law to silence him, now by staging a trial that would have embarrassed the Nazi government. (See the 2005 film "Sophie Scholl.")  

I'm also happy to hear that you think Daniel Ellsberg is a hero; he of course says that Manning is, too.

In years to come (if there are any) we'll look back on Manning, Assange, and Snowden as heroes like Ellsberg - and Obama, Clinton, and Holder as criminals; if there's any justice in this world, the latter will be finishing up long terms in prison...

Regards, CGE

On Aug 10, 2013, at 2:57 AM, Roger Helbig <rwhelbig at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bradley Manning is a very skillful manipulator of public opinion by
> fools who just want to believe.  He is no whistleblower.  He never was
> a whistleblower until he or his handlers decided that it was the guise
> he needed to take to get the most support from the far left.  Real
> whistleblowers agonize over the decision to go public.  They do not
> just steal massive amounts of information and then brag about having
> gotten away with doing it.  Carl, I am a real whistlelbower and I have
> no respect for phony whistleblowers like Manning.  When all of the
> facts come out, you will find out that Manning is just a punk who felt
> wronged by the Army and decided to get even.  He then got "religion"
> when he found that the hacker that he had bragged to about his
> exploits had turned him in.  Stay tuned for the truth as opposed to
> the lies that Manning and his handlers have easily conned you into
> believing.   If Manning were courageous, he would have put his name on
> the public offering.  I don't think that Daniel Ellsberg tried hiding
> his involvement in the release of the Pentagon Papers.  If Manning
> were courageous, he would not be lying to the world.  He is no hero;
> he is a coward and a thief and he probably gravely harmed the
> interests of the United States.  Hopefully, that will come out in the
> sentencing phase of the court martial proceeding.
> 
> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 6:14 PM, C. G. Estabrook
> <carl at newsfromneptune.com> wrote:
>> Truth in the Crosshairs: Will Bradley Manning's Courage Inspire Other
>> Whistleblowers?
>> by JOHN PILGER
>> AUGUST 08, 2013
>> 
>> 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*.
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 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?
>> 
>> “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.”
>> 
>> 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”.
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> 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.”
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> *Read Bradley Manning’s statement here.
>> 
>> John Pilger’s film on Australia, Utopia, will be released in the UK in the
>> autumn.
>> 
>> http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/08/truth-in-the-crosshairs/
>> 
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