Tag Archives: bradley manning

August 21, 2013 · 10:53 pm

35 Years Too Long

So, 35 years.  After being held in solitary confinement for a year and denied a trial for almost 3, Bradley Manning still has 35 years to go.  Maybe as low as 8, with good behavior, before he’s eligible for parole.

Could have been worse.  I expected worse.

But the bad thing is that I have been conditioned to accept the intolerable merely on the grounds that it could have been worse, which is totally the result of false negative expectation inflation.  They threaten him with  a million years in prison, we say no, let him go, and when the judge only  gives him 35 years we breathe a sigh of relief.

Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning

It’s like in the shops, when they have a big sale of 50% off, it’s off a price that’s more than twice an acceptable price in the first place.  My wife goes for it, every time.  I’m sure millions of others do, too, because they keep doing it.

But in the case of Bradley Manning, it’s not right.  He reported the guys shooting journalists from helicopters and laughing about it.  For that, he deserves a medal, maybe even a statue.  Not 35 years in jail.  Not even  one year in jail.  They owe Bradley Manning an apology, but they’re digging in.

Oh, sure, lots of other documents were released, too, but in the end, nobody got killed.  That’s the thing.  It’s possible to release 700,000 documents, and all that happens if a couple of ambassadors, who were dumb enough to make disparaging comments about their host countries over the internet, got recalled.

It’s proof positive, in case anybody ever doubted it, that the people who are running the world are incompetent as fuck and classifying everything because they don’t know the difference.

We owe Bradley Manning for that knowledge.  I hope he gets out soon, and eventually gets a full apology.

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July 31, 2011 · 7:12 pm

The Debt Ceiling Crisis and Wag the Dog

Everybody remembers Wag the Dog, right?  1997, Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman.  A fictional president gets caught touching up a very underage girl and his public relations team swings into action to create a fake war and divert the public’s attention until after the election.  In the book,

Kirsten Dunst as a Fleeing Albanian

the President was Bush 41 and it was all about the war in Iraq, but films take liberties.  Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a bad thing.

Anyway, pretty much nobody denies that the press is used to distract the public from certain issues that powerful people might find embarrassing.  I wrote a couple of days ago about how the Huffington Post, for no apparent reason, removed the words “we’re going to hurt some people” from a story about a group of Republicans talking about the debt ceiling debate.  If those words were involved in the debate, it could be bad for Republicans.  Another example is from 2004, how the New York Times knew about the warrantless wiretapping in October, but delayed the story until after November because (they actually said this) it might have “negatively impacted” the election.  That is, Kerry might have won.

I suspect something like that is going on with this Debt Ceiling Crisis.  Newspaper headlines have been about nothing else for the last two weeks, with a slight break when Amy Winehouse died because, whatever else is happening in the world, celebrities die and the news media loves it when they do.  The massacre in Norway was kind of hard to avoid, too.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had any detailed updates on what’s happening in Syria, Yemen or even Libya.  Haven’t heard much about Bradley Manning or Julian Assange for awhile, either.  Of course, there’s no change in the Bradley Manning case (still hasn’t had a trial) and Assange is also going through some legal maneuvers which can make for a dry news story, but still.  I don’t know that what they are trying to hide has to do with any of those stories, or whether there is some other big financial or sexual scandal they are trying to hide, but I strongly suspect they are hiding something.

It’s just too much ink on one issue for too long for it to be otherwise.

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June 3, 2011 · 9:20 pm

11 Words

The so called Pentagon Papers (officially called “United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense) was the Wikileaks of 1971.  Daniel Ellsberg was Bradley Manning, with the difference that he did get a trial, and was never kept in solitary

The 2nd Most Evil President From Texas Ever

confinement without visitors and forced to stand naked in front of the prison guards.

He got off on a technicality, which is a nice way of ending these things.  Parts of the study were printed in the New York Times in 1971, back when the New York Times was a reputable newspaper, and not just the print section of the propaganda department of the military industrial complex.

The papers proved that LBJ, among others, was lying his ass off about the war and had been for a very long time.  They also proved that JFK, Eisenhower and Truman had been less than honest about what was going on over there but, really, Johnson’s the one who picked up the ball and ran with it.

Now, the Pentagon Papers have been officially declassified, with the exception of just 11 words.  This leaves me with a few questions.  Firstly, what’s the point?  They’ve already been published.  It is like putting on a condom after you’ve just finished having sex.

Secondly, from 1971 to 2011 is 40 years.  Why does it take 40 years to get information out?  McNamara (who commissioned the report) is dead, may he rot in hell, Lyndon Johnson is dead, may he rot in hell, Henry Kissinger is old and irrelevant.  It might be nice to see him face war crimes trials, but I’m not holding my breath.  We have a whole new generation of war criminals we aren’t prosecuting, so why worry about him?

What will we learn in 40 years about the invasion of Iraq, about the election of 2000, about 9/11?  By that time, nobody will care any more.  For all the cries of “Never forget!”, most folks have already pretty much forgotten.

But my 3rd question, and by far the most fun to speculate on, is what are those 11 words which are so super sensitive they are still being kept secret?  Perhaps:

We’re the government.  We can do whatever the fuck we want.

Sure, we killed Jack Kennedy.  You gonna do something about it?

We don’t  care if we win.  Permanent war is the object.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.  Doesn’t everybody?

I hope nobody ever reads this, or our asses are toast.

The possibilities are endless.

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May 27, 2011 · 9:50 pm

A Year in Hell

Bradley Manning has been in jail for a full year, as of yesterday.  He has not had a trial.  He is accused of leaking a bunch of secret U.S. government documents.  The only

Five foot two and 105, perhaps the bravest man alive

witness against him is a hacker type guy who was once hospitalized for mental issues, named Adrian Lamo (I swear I am not making that up – the guy’s name is actually Lamo), who says that Manning told him he sent the docs to Wikileaks.

Now, to be fair, the mental illness in question was Asperger’s, which basically means the guy is a supergeek.  Also, Wikileaks did receive a whole bunch of documents from somebody, and Manning did have access to the documents he is accused of making public.  So, yeah, there’s a chance that Manning’s guilty, but…he has been in jail for a year, and he hasn’t had a trial.

This thing of keeping somebody in jail forever without due process is bullshit.  It doesn’t just violate the U.S. constitution,  it  violates the Magna Carta and all unwritten laws of human decency, fair play and common sense.

It casts doubt on the government’s case.  If they could prove he did what they say he did, they’d have charged him by now.   There’s no new evidence that’s going to come to light.  There’s no ongoing investigation, no matter what they say.

I think it’s entirely possible that Manning may have copied the files and sent them off to Wikileaks – apparently he’s really good with computers.  No matter.  For the government to prove that he aided an enemy, they’ve got to name that enemy and prove that he aided them.  Since congress gave up on ever declaring war on anybody after WWII, just abdicating to the president the right to bomb the fuck out of anybody any time he feels like it, we don’t “officially” have an enemy.  Also, they haven’t actually proved that anybody has been harmed by release of the documents – in fact, there’s quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, that they’ve done a lot of good.  O.K., maybe a few diplomats have been embarrassed, but if ever there was a class of people that deserved a heaping helping of embarrassment, it’s career diplomats.  Sycophantic paper pushers, by definition.  Also, you could say that those people who have been killed in the “Arab Spring” uprisings might still be alive if not for Wikileaks, but then again, dictator’s might still be in power in Tunisia and Egypt, and the people there are real happy that they are gone, so, a net plus.

There was a line in one of Robert Heinlein’s books, I forget which one because I haven’t read Heinlein since I was a kid, and I might be getting the phrasing wrong, but the idea was “the difference between a traitor and a hero is a generation.”

There is no doubt in my mind that 50 years from now, Bradley Manning will be viewed as a hero.  He should be released immediately.

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