You can sign an official WhiteHouse.gov petition here (h/t m50bing0 at Kos) asking the administration to pardon Bradley Manning of any and all crimes he may have committed in the course of liberating extremely important facts about the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and subsequently to back Manning's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Before you start giggling, just step back a minute, and think. It's true that Manning is a somewhat comic figure, bewildered where Daniel Ellsberg was dashing, and especially after that third WikiLeaks dump, which was more about amusing gossip than information being held back to deceive the American people. It's partly the fault of the press, because that was the batch of documents that got them really excited. They quickly lost interest in the horrifying Collateral Murder video, showing our troops in Iraq murdering a Reuters employee from a helicopter like Sarah Palin after a wolf, and in the Afghan War Diary, 92,000 documents unveiling the criminality and the hopelessness of our situation in Afghanistan, but it was the quarter of a million US embassy cables that really got their attention, with their stories about high life around the dictators in Baku and Grozny, and news of European politicians saying nasty things about one another.
It is the first two items that really count, and if you think of the risks he knowingly ran, and the skill he brought to the job, and the more-or-less torture he has undergone since his capture, he really is indisputably a hero, and it's not that funny. Again, sign here.
Before you start giggling, just step back a minute, and think. It's true that Manning is a somewhat comic figure, bewildered where Daniel Ellsberg was dashing, and especially after that third WikiLeaks dump, which was more about amusing gossip than information being held back to deceive the American people. It's partly the fault of the press, because that was the batch of documents that got them really excited. They quickly lost interest in the horrifying Collateral Murder video, showing our troops in Iraq murdering a Reuters employee from a helicopter like Sarah Palin after a wolf, and in the Afghan War Diary, 92,000 documents unveiling the criminality and the hopelessness of our situation in Afghanistan, but it was the quarter of a million US embassy cables that really got their attention, with their stories about high life around the dictators in Baku and Grozny, and news of European politicians saying nasty things about one another.
It is the first two items that really count, and if you think of the risks he knowingly ran, and the skill he brought to the job, and the more-or-less torture he has undergone since his capture, he really is indisputably a hero, and it's not that funny. Again, sign here.
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| From The Cult of the Dead Fish. |
Too bad this never took off. A petition requesting a simple pardon was the proper legal vehicle for expressing basic support for what Manning did.
ReplyDeleteThe Left proceeded, as usual, planlessly. Sad limitation on action, produced by moles/shills and the like but understandable.
Instead we're all in the rumpus room trying to game out what Obama should do, aren't we? How pathetic is that? Meantime, thanks for commenting!
ReplyDelete