"How Scapegoating Bradley Manning Avoids the Truth About the American Military" (by Chase Madar, 1 / 19 / 12):
http://www.alternet.org/world/153817/ho ... _military/
the article's author denounces the vilification of whistleblower bradley manning, who is facing a courtmarshal for leaking "classified" data to wikileaks, and also the hypocrisy and culpability of our military and political class over the last decade.
Washington elites squabble over some things, but as for foreigners killed by our wars, our Beltway crew adheres to a sullen code of omertà. Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties — but only if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning. Pfc. Manning, you will remember, is the young soldier who is soon to be court-martialed for passing some 750,000 military and diplomatic documents, a large chunk of them classified, to the website WikiLeaks. Among those leaks, there was indeed some serious stuff about how Americans dealt with civilians in invaded countries.
... the documents revealed that the U.S. military did little or nothing to prevent Iraqi authorities from torturing prisoners in a variety of gruesome ways, sometimes to death. Then there was that gun-sight video — unclassified but buried in classified material — of an American Apache helicopter opening fire on a crowd on a Baghdad street, gunning down a dozen men, including two Reuters employees, and injuring more, including children. There were also those field reports about how jumpy American soldiers repeatedly shot down civilians at roadsidecheckpoints; about night raids gone wrong both in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a count of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a tally whose existence the U.S. military had previously denied possessing.
“WikiLeaks might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the release of the Afghan War Logs in July 2010--- the same Admiral Mullen who had endorsed a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan, which would lead to a tremendous “surge” in casualties among civilians and soldiers alike. Who, then, has blood on his hands, Pfc. Manning — or Admiral Mullen? Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also spoke sternly of Manning’s leaks, accusing him of “moral culpability.” The same Robert Gates who pushed for escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 and, in March 2011, flew to the Kingdom of Bahrain to offer his personal “reassurance of support” to a ruling monarchy already busy shooting and torturing nonviolent civilian protesters.
Politicians too. As a senator, Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq in flagrant contravention of the U.N. Charter, and she was a leading hawk on escalating and expanding the Afghan War, and is now responsible for disbursing an annual $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt’s ruling junta whose forces have repeatedly opened fire on nonviolent civilian protesters. . . . . And among the “secrets” contained in various documents are the facts that the Strait of Gibraltar is a vital shipping lane and that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is rich in minerals. Have we become so infantilized that factoids of basic geography must be considered state secrets? . . . . the “threat” of this document’s release has since been roundly debunked by various military intellectuals.
in the author's opinion, manning essentially did the right thing-- much of the information leaked needed to come to light. and he compares manning with other whistleblowers such as infantryman ron ridenhour, (my lai massacre, vietnam) and the sailors and marines who, in 1777, reported the torture of British captives by their politically connected commanding officer, all of whom were vilified in their time.Liza Goitein, a lawyer at the liberal Brennan Center at NYU Law School, accused Manning of “criminal recklessness” for putting civilians named in the Afghan War logs in peril. Until she made this charge, not a single report or press release issued by the Brennan Center has ever so much as uttered a mention of civilian casualties caused by the U.S. military.. This program’s 2011 report “Rethinking Radicalization,” which explored ways to prevent American Muslims from turning terrorist, makes not a single reference to the tens of thousands of documented civilian casualties caused by the American military in the Muslim world. The report does not even contain the words “Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “drone strike,” “Pakistan” or “civilian casualties"-- incredible, since terrorists have confessed that what motivated their acts of violence has been the damage done by foreign military occupation back home or in the Muslim world. Asked why he tried to blow up Times Square with a car bomb in May 2010, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad said he was motivated by the civilian carnage the U.S. had caused in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
any thoughts on this?
I linked the article as a reference about the twisted dialectics of war... and about labels I guess Gelman would label himself more as a "antisionista" than an "antisemitic" but I don´t know, I´m just not Gelman!. Plus I don´t know if he wants to label himself! ... 
