Chelsea Manning Thread

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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Aug 14, 2013 6:33 pm

AP/ August 14, 2013, 4:33 PM
Bradley Manning apologizes for hurting U.S. on witness stand
Image

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., July 30, 2013. / AP Photo

Updated at 4:33 p.m. ET

FORT MEADE, Md. Bradley Manning has taken the stand during his sentencing hearing for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks and has apologized for hurting the United States and others.

Manning gave an unsworn statement Wednesday, which means he cannot be cross-examined by prosecutors. He began with an apology.

He says "I'm sorry that my actions hurt people. I'm sorry that it hurt the United States."

Manning says he understood what he was doing and the decisions he made. However, he says he did not believe at the time that leaking the information would cause harm.

Manning faces up to 90 years in prison for the leaks.

Earlier, an Army psychologist testified that Manning's private struggle with his gender identity in a hostile workplace put incredible pressure on the soldier.

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning poses for a picture wearing a wig and lipstick in this undated picture provided by the U.S. Army. Manning emailed his military therapist the picture with a letter titled, "My problem," in which he described his issues with gender identity and his hope that a military career would "get rid of it."

Image
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning poses for a picture wearing a wig and lipstick in this undated picture provided by the U.S. Army.
/ AP Photo/U.S. Army

Manning eventually came out to Capt. Michael Worsley and emailed the therapist a photo of himself wearing a wig of long, blond hair and lipstick. The photo was attached to a letter titled "My problem," in which Manning describes his issues with gender identity and his hope that a military career would "get rid of it."

Worsley testified at Manning's sentencing hearing at Fort Meade, near Baltimore. He said the soldier had little to no support base.

"You put him in that kind of hyper-masculine environment, if you will, with little support and few coping skills, the pressure would have been difficult to say the least," Worsley said. "It would have been incredible."

Manning faces up 90 years in prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2010. His lawyers contend that Manning showed clear signs of deteriorating mental health that should have prevented commanders from sending him to a warzone to handle classified information.

Manning sat and listened attentively to the psychologist who had treated him, smiling occasionally. But his face tightened when Worsley talked about how guarded and hesitant Manning had been in Iraq to talk about his gender identity.

Worsley's testimony described some military leaders as lax at best and obstructionist at worst when it came to tending to troop mental health.

He said some in Manning's brigade "had difficulty understanding" recommendations the doctor would make regarding the needs of some soldiers.

"I questioned why they would want to leave somebody in a position with the issue they had," Worsley said of troubled soldiers.

Navy Capt. David Moulton, a psychiatrist who spent 21 hours interviewing Manning at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., after his arrest, testified as a defense witness that Manning's gender identity disorder combined with narcissistic personality traits, post-adolescent idealism and his lack of friends in Iraq caused him to reasonably conclude he could change the world by leaking classified information.

"He became very enthralled with this idea that the things that he was finding were injustices that he felt he morally needed to right," Moulton said.

He said Manning was struggling to balance his desire to right wrongs with his sense of duty to complete his Army tasks and his fear of losing his GI benefits and the opportunity attend college.

"His decision-making capacity was influenced by the stress of his situation for sure," Moulton said. "He was under severe emotional stress at the time of the alleged offenses."

His sister and aunt are also on the defense witness list.

At least 46 international journalists and 78 spectators were in attendance. Many spectators wore black "truth" T-shirts.

Most reporters watched a closed-circuit feed of the hearing in a nearby building. Other closed-circuit feeds were available to overflow spectators in a trailer outside the courthouse and another nearby building.

Security was tight. Barricades surrounded the courthouse, and those entering the courtroom or any of the viewing areas were scanned for metal objects and had their belongings meticulously searched.


Did the prosecution ever name one fucking person in the US or anywhere else that he hurt? I understand the position they've put him in, he has to do this, but it doesn't make it any less bullshit.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Aug 14, 2013 7:50 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Aug 14, 2013 5:33 pm wrote:Did the prosecution ever name one fucking person in the US or anywhere else that he hurt? I understand the position they've put him in, he has to do this, but it doesn't make it any less bullshit.


It's a sad truth. The disclosures were important and relevant, but unfortunately have hurt absolutely no one: Not Rumsfeld nor Cheney nor Bush nor Wolfowitz nor Powell nor Rice nor Petraeus & Co. nor any of the other architects of the aggressive war and crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not even the helicopter murderers.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby coffin_dodger » Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:18 am

JackRiddler wrote:The disclosures were important and relevant, but unfortunately have hurt absolutely no one


I disagree. Mannings actions have raised doubts about American soft power (i.e. the US management of the pen vs. sword) - and in particular, the ability to manage and control the message the US transmits - in the minds of millions of people worldwide. One should consider the 'hurt' that loss of credibility can inflict.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Aug 15, 2013 8:07 am

coffin_dodger » Thu Aug 15, 2013 3:18 am wrote:
JackRiddler wrote:The disclosures were important and relevant, but unfortunately have hurt absolutely no one


I disagree. Mannings actions have raised doubts about American soft power (i.e. the US management of the pen vs. sword) - and in particular, the ability to manage and control the message the US transmits - in the minds of millions of people worldwide. One should consider the 'hurt' that loss of credibility can inflict.


True enough!
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Aug 15, 2013 8:32 pm

America’s Upside-Down Morality
August 15, 2013

Exclusive: Pvt. Bradley Manning has prostrated himself before his court-martial judge, apologizing for leaking documents on U.S. government wrongdoing and referencing his psychological problems as reasons for mercy. The sad spectacle underscores how upside-down American morality now is, says Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Having covered the U.S. government for nearly 36 years, I am not so naïve as to expect perfection or even anything close. But there are times when the immoral dimensions of Official Washington stand out in the starkest shades, not in variations of gray but in black and white.

Such was the gut-wrenching moment on Wednesday when Pvt. Bradley Manning, who exposed U.S. government war crimes and other wrongdoing, made a groveling apology for doing the right thing – when there has been next to no accountability for the officials and their media collaborators who did innumerable wrong things.

While no one in power seems to expect even an apology from – let alone punishment of – former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their subordinates who facilitated acts of torture and who deceived the American people into an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, 25-year-old Bradley Manning finds himself having to beg for mercy to avoid what could be a 90-year prison sentence.

At his court-martial sentencing hearing, Manning’s attorneys presented the brave whistleblower as a psychologically confused young man who mistakenly thought he was doing something good when he was really doing something bad. They even released a photo of him dressed as a woman, setting the stage for Manning’s apology.

“I’m sorry that my actions hurt people,” Manning told the court martial judge. “I’m sorry that they hurt the United States. At the time of my decision, as you know, I was dealing with a lot of issues, issues that are ongoing and continue to affect me.”

But there has been no serious evidence that Manning’s disclosure of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government records “hurt people” – and they only “hurt the United States” in the sense that many of Official Washington’s misdeeds and manipulations were exposed for the world to see. Some of Manning’s critics say U.S. diplomats now won’t be so forthcoming in describing these realities out of fear that some future Manning might do more leaking, but there’s no evidence of that either.

In contrast to the lack of evidence regarding harm, there were undeniable benefits to democracy and human rights from what Manning did reveal. Manning’s documents provided the detailed “ground truth” that has enabled Americans to better understand what their government did in Iraq and Afghanistan – and how grotesque many of those crimes were.

For instance, because Manning disclosed a classified videotape, we know that the much-heralded “successful surge” in Iraq in 2007 included the slaughter of innocent Iraqis walking down the streets of Baghdad as well as the slaying of a Good Samaritan who stopped his van, carrying his own children, in a vain attempt to help the wounded. The trigger-happy helicopter gunners killed the man and wounded his kids, too.

Manning’s leaks also revealed the U.S. government’s awareness of gross corruption in “allied” countries, such as Tunisia where the revelations helped spark an uprising that drove out a longtime dictator and gave Tunisians a chance at democracy.

Iran’s Nuclear Program

Another important Manning disclosure, which may have deterred another catastrophic war in the Middle East, was how the U.S. government had manipulated the election of the new director general to the International Atomic Energy Agency. U.S. Embassy cables, exposed by Manning, showed that Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano had been installed in 2009 as something of a U.S.-Israeli puppet.

The significance of this information was that, without it, Amano’s IAEA could have advanced the goal of Israeli leaders and U.S. neoconservatives for war with Iran over its nuclear program by exaggerating the danger. That propaganda strategy was undercut by Manning’s revelation that Amano was not only installed by the U.S. government but was meeting secretly with Israeli officials, ironically with Amano raising no complaints about Israel’s own rogue nuclear arsenal.

When the cables about Amano came out a year after his appointment, Amano’s IAEA was busy feeding the hysteria over Iran’s nuclear program with reports that were trumpeted by major U.S. news outlets. IAEA’s alarm undercut Iran’s denial about building a bomb and a 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate which concluded that Iran had stopped work on a bomb in 2003.

So, I found it useful to examine the detailed documents regarding Amano’s election. What those classified State Department cables showed was that Amano credited his election largely to U.S. government support and then stuck his hand out for more U.S. money. Further, Amano left little doubt that he would side with the United States in its confrontation with Iran.

According to U.S. embassy cables from Vienna, Austria, the site of IAEA’s headquarters, American diplomats in 2009 were cheering the prospect that Amano would advance U.S. interests in ways that outgoing IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei wouldn’t.

In a July 9, 2009, cable, American chargé Geoffrey Pyatt said Amano was thankful for U.S. support of his election. “Amano attributed his election to support from the U.S., Australia and France, and cited U.S. intervention with Argentina as particularly decisive,” the cable said.

The appreciative Amano informed Pyatt that as IAEA director general, he would take a different “approach on Iran from that of ElBaradei” and he “saw his primary role as implementing safeguards and UNSC [United Nations Security Council]/Board resolutions,” i.e. U.S.-driven sanctions and demands against Iran.

Amano also discussed how to restructure the senior ranks of the IAEA, including elimination of one top official and the retention of another. “We wholly agree with Amano’s assessment of these two advisors and see these decisions as positive first signs,” Pyatt commented.

A Hand-Out

In return, Pyatt made clear that Amano could expect strong U.S. financial support, stating that “the United States would do everything possible to support his successful tenure as Director General and, to that end, anticipated that continued U.S. voluntary contributions to the IAEA would be forthcoming. … Amano offered that a ‘reasonable increase’ in the regular budget would be helpful.”

Pyatt learned, too, that Amano had consulted with Israeli Ambassador Israel Michaeli “immediately after his appointment” and that Michaeli “was fully confident of the priority Amano accords verification issues.” Michaeli added that he discounted some of Amano’s public remarks about there being “no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons capability” as just words that Amano felt he had to say “to persuade those who did not support him about his ‘impartiality.’”

In private, Amano agreed to “consultations” with the head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Pyatt reported. (It is ironic indeed that Amano would have secret contacts with Israeli officials about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which has yet to yield a single bomb, when Israel possesses a large and undeclared nuclear arsenal.)

In a subsequent cable dated Oct. 16, 2009, the U.S. mission in Vienna said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded ambassador [Glyn Davies] on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

“More candidly, Amano noted the importance of maintaining a certain ‘constructive ambiguity’ about his plans, at least until he took over for DG ElBaradei in December” 2009.

In other words, Amano was a bureaucrat eager to bend in directions favored by the United States and Israel, especially regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Amano’s behavior surely contrasts with how the more independent-minded ElBaradei resisted some of Bush’s key claims about Iraq’s supposed nuclear weapons program, correctly denouncing some documents as forgeries.

The Amano cables, which Manning supplied to WikiLeaks, were first spotlighted by the U.K. Guardian in 2010. However, because the full cables were posted on the Internet, I was later able to dig through them to find additional details, such as Amano asking for more U.S. money.

Without this level of “ground truth,” Americans would be at the mercy of the major U.S. news media, which seemed as much on board for a war with Iran as it was for war with Iraq. The major U.S. news outlets have ignored the cables about Amano and continue to present him and his IAEA as honest brokers regarding Iran’s nuclear program. But millions of Americans know better because of Pvt. Manning’s selfless disclosures.

Thus, the depth of gratitude for Manning’s actions should run deep. Indeed, it is hard to calculate how many lives his disclosures may have saved and how many mistakes he has helped the United States avoid. In a moral society, he would be hailed as a national hero, rather than face prosecution and be forced to humiliate himself in a desperate bid to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison.

This injustice becomes even starker when you watch the choreographers of George W. Bush’s torture policies and the architects of his Iraq War go free. Or when you see the key “journalists” who facilitated the Bush-Cheney crimes remain in high-paying and high-profile jobs.

After taking office, President Barack Obama let these war criminals and their accomplices evade accountability with his infamous dictum about “looking forward, not backward.” Yet, the ultimate hypocrisy in the case of Bradley Manning is that Obama’s leniency only seems to apply to the war criminals, not to the truth-tellers who expose the war criminals.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Laodicean » Wed Aug 21, 2013 10:27 am

AP News Alert: Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby NeonLX » Wed Aug 21, 2013 10:55 am

Laodicean » Wed Aug 21, 2013 9:27 am wrote:AP News Alert: Manning sentenced to 35 years in prison.


...and thus justice is served.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Aug 21, 2013 2:35 pm

Not even the main headline anywhere. Not even 1/1000000th the buzz and reblogging on facebook the Royal Baby/Trayvon/KONY 2012/= got
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Aug 21, 2013 3:47 pm

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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Laodicean » Wed Aug 21, 2013 5:12 pm

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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 21, 2013 5:18 pm

Bradley Manning to request pardon from Obama over 35-year jail sentence

what are the names of the soldiers that actually committed the war crime?
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Aug 21, 2013 5:23 pm

Guardian poll:

Should President Obama pardon Bradley Manning?

Best response:

"Hermine 333 wrote:Should Bradley Manning pardon President Obama?
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Aug 21, 2013 10:30 pm

I didn't see Manning's letter anywhere here; is it on another thread?

"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”

- Statement by Pfc. B. Manning as read by David Coombs at a press conference after Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Coombs also said this was Manning’s reaction after the sentence was read: “Hey, it’s OK. It’s all right. I know you did everything you could for me. Don’t cry. Be happy. It’s fine. This is just a stage in my life. I am moving forward. I will recover from this.”
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby coffin_dodger » Thu Aug 22, 2013 8:32 am

http://www.today.com/news/i-am-chelsea- ... 6C10974052

On Thursday, Bradley Manning made the announcement in a TODAY exclusive that he would like to live out the rest of his life as a woman. Below is Manning's full statement to the public:
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 22, 2013 9:19 am

Bradley Manning and the Gangster State


Army Pfc. Bradley Manning after a hearing in his court-martial at Fort Meade, Md.

By Chris Hedges

FORT MEADE, Md.—The swift and brutal verdict read out by Army Col. Judge Denise Lind in sentencing Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison means we have become a nation run by gangsters. It signals the inversion of our moral and legal order, the death of an independent media, and the open and flagrant misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes. The passivity of most of the nation’s citizens—the most spied upon, monitored and controlled population in human history—to the judicial lynching of Manning means they will be next. There are no institutional mechanisms left to halt the shredding of our most fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus and due process, or to prevent pre-emptive war, the assassination of U.S. citizens by the government and the complete obliteration of privacy.

Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. It marks the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile. It marks the day when the country dropped all pretense of democracy, obliterated checks and balances under the separation of powers and rejected the rule of law. It marks the removal of the mask of democracy, already a fiction, and its replacement with the ugly, naked visage of corporate totalitarianism. State power is to be, from now on, unchecked, unfettered and unregulated. And those who do not accept unlimited state power, always the road to tyranny, will be ruthlessly persecuted. On Wednesday we became vassals. As I watched the burly guards hustle Manning out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing, as I listened to half a dozen of his supporters shout to him, “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!” I realized that our nation has become a vast penal colony.

If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.

The message that Manning’s sentence, the longest in U.S. history for the leaking of classified information to the press, sends to the rest of the world is disturbing. It says to the mothers and fathers who have lost children in drone strikes and air attacks, to the families grieving over innocent relatives killed by U.S. forces, that their suffering means nothing to us. It says we will continue to murder and to wage imperial wars that consume hundreds of thousands of civilian lives with no accountability. And it says that as a country we despise those within our midst who have the moral courage to make such crimes public.

There are strict rules now in our American penal colony. If we remain supine, if we permit ourselves to be passively stripped of all political power and voice, if we refuse to resist as we are incrementally reduced to poverty and the natural world is senselessly exploited and destroyed by corporate oligarchs, we will have the dubious freedom to wander among the ruins of the empire, to be diverted by tawdry spectacles and to consume the crass products marketed to us. But if we speak up, if we name what is being done to us and done in our name to others, we will become, like Manning, Julian Assange and Snowden, prey for the vast security and surveillance apparatus. And we will, if we effectively resist, go to prison or be forced to flee.

Manning from the start was subjected to a kangaroo trial. His lawyers were never permitted to mount a credible defense. They were left only to beg for mercy. Under the military code of conduct and international law, the soldier had a moral and legal obligation to report the war crimes he witnessed. But this argument was ruled off-limits. The troves of documents that Manning transmitted to WikiLeaks in February 2010—known as the Iraq and Afghanistan “War Logs”—which exposed numerous war crimes and instances of government dishonesty, were barred from being presented. And it was accepted in the courtroom, without any evidence, that Manning’s release of the documents had harmed U.S. security and endangered U.S. citizens. A realistic defense was not possible. It never is in any state show trial

Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, read a brief statement from the 25-year-old after the sentencing:

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown any logically based intentions, it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

We will pay for our criminality. We will pay for our callousness and brutality. The world, especially the Muslim world, knows who we are, even if we remain oblivious. It is not Manning who was condemned Wednesday, but us. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” And that is the real reason Bradley Manning is being locked away. He is a just man.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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