Bradley Manning: a tale of liberty lost in America

[Cidersomerset]

This report is from the Guardian and is worth reading imo.....

What is not inhuman about this treatment in a so called modern enlightened democracy ???


Still, hearing the accused whistleblower's description of this abuse in his own words viscerally conveyed its horror. Reporting from the hearing, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington quoted Manning: "If I needed toilet paper I would stand to attention and shout: 'Detainee Manning requests toilet paper!'" And: "I was authorised to have 20 minutes sunshine, in chains, every 24 hours." Early in his detention, Manning recalled, "I had pretty much given up. I thought I was going to die in this eight by eight animal cage."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bradley Manning: a tale of liberty lost in America

The US does nothing to punish those guilty of war crimes or Wall Street fraud, yet demonises the whistleblower
Share1854 Glenn Greenwald

The Guardian, Friday 30 November 2012 21.15 GMT

Jump to comments (836)


http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2012/11/30/1354293664175/Bradley-Manning-is-escort-010.jpg

'The repressive treatment of Bradley ­Manning is one of the disgraces of Obama’s first term.' Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images


Over the past two and a half years, all of which he has spent in a military prison, much has been said about Bradley Manning, but nothing has been heard from him. That changed on Thursday, when the 23-year-old US army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks testified at his court martial proceeding about the conditions of his detention.

The oppressive, borderline-torturous measures to which he was subjected, including prolonged solitary confinement and forced nudity, have been known for some time. A formal UN investigation denounced those conditions as "cruel and inhuman". President Obama's state department spokesman, retired air force colonel PJ Crowley, resigned after publicly condemning Manning's treatment. A prison psychologist testified this week that Manning's conditions were more damaging than those found on death row, or at Guantánamo Bay.

Still, hearing the accused whistleblower's description of this abuse in his own words viscerally conveyed its horror. Reporting from the hearing, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington quoted Manning: "If I needed toilet paper I would stand to attention and shout: 'Detainee Manning requests toilet paper!'" And: "I was authorised to have 20 minutes sunshine, in chains, every 24 hours." Early in his detention, Manning recalled, "I had pretty much given up. I thought I was going to die in this eight by eight animal cage."

The repressive treatment of Bradley Manning is one of the disgraces of Obama's first term, and highlights many of the dynamics shaping his presidency. The president not only defended Manning's treatment but also, as commander-in-chief of the court martial judges, improperly decreed Manning's guilt when he asserted in an interview that he "broke the law".

Worse, Manning is charged not only with disclosing classified information, but also the capital offence of "aiding the enemy", for which the death penalty can be imposed (military prosecutors are requesting "only" life in prison). The government's radical theory is that, although Manning had no intent to do so, the leaked information could have helped al-Qaida, a theory that essentially equates any disclosure of classified information – by any whistleblower, or a newspaper – with treason.

Whatever one thinks of Manning's alleged acts, he appears the classic whistleblower. This information could have been sold for substantial sums to a foreign government or a terror group. Instead he apparently knowingly risked his liberty to show them to the world because – he said when he believed he was speaking in private – he wanted to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".

Compare this aggressive prosecution of Manning to the Obama administration's vigorous efforts to shield Bush-era war crimes and massive Wall Street fraud from all forms of legal accountability. Not a single perpetrator of those genuine crimes has faced court under Obama, a comparison that reflects the priorities and values of US justice.

Then there's the behaviour of Obama's loyalists. Ever since I first reported the conditions of Manning's detention in December 2010, many of them not only cheered that abuse but grotesquely ridiculed concerns about it. Joy-Ann Reid, a former Obama press aide and now a contributor on the progressive network MSNBC, spouted sadistic mockery in response to the report: "Bradley Manning has no pillow?????" With that, she echoed one of the most extreme rightwing websites, RedState, which identically mocked the report: "Give Bradley Manning his pillow and blankie back."

As usual, the US establishment journalists have enabled the government every step of the way. Despite holding themselves out as adversarial watchdogs, nothing provokes their animosity more than someone who effectively challenges government actions.

Typifying this mentality was a CNN interview on Thursday night with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange conducted by Erin Burnett. It was to focus on newly released documents revealing secret efforts by US officials to pressure financial institutions to block WikiLeaks' funding after the group published classified documents allegedly leaked by Manning, a form of extra-legal punishment that should concern everyone, particularly journalists.

But the CNN host was completely uninterested in the dangerous acts of her own government. Instead she repeatedly tried to get Assange to condemn the press policies of Ecuador, a tiny country that – quite unlike the US – exerts no influence beyond its borders. To the mavens of the US watchdog press, Assange and Manning are enemies to be scorned because they did the job that the US press corps refuses to do: namely, bringing transparency to the bad acts of the US government and its allies around the world.

Bradley Manning has bestowed the world with multiple vital benefits. But as his court martial finally reaches its conclusion, one likely to result in the imposition of a long prison term, it appears his greatest gift is this window into America's political soul.


• This is an op-ed I wrote to appear in the Guardian newspaper

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/30/bradley-manning-liberty-lost-america


====================================================

There are always mistakes, massacres, rape & murder during all wars...

Bradley Manning is being humiliated and punished for humiliating the
Pentagon & Whitehouse for exposing this 'flipant mistake'...!!

The first attack is suspect, a trajady in the heat of the conflict ?

The second attack on the minibus trying to help the wounded is deffinately
a war crime !!

20LkYvEZOZs

[Cidersomerset]

Angelina Jolie: War, rape, and her UN role

This item was on channel 4 news earlier , it is being highlighted
in Syria and the Congo. We are going thru the Jimmy Saville abuse
case in the Uk.But abuse is still going on all over the world...

We need more Bradley Mannings to expose this, so the UN can
act more effectively on these crimes.We are sometimes led
to believe the UN is ineffective and it is some cases.

The UN is only effective if supported by its members.So in
some circumstances the only way millions of victims can
be helped is by UN intervention.Otherwise dictators or
regimes can get away with 'murder'..

The other option is having America/Nato police the world.
Which it has done for the past 60 years or so, this
is not popular or feasible in the longterm, without
recentment from the local populace, which is happening
in the Middle East now.




Angelina Jolie: War, rape, and her UN role

N8qBhCcoXYw

Published on 1 Dec 2012 by Channel4News


Cathy Newman sits down with actress Angelina Jolie and Foreign Secretary William Hague to discuss
how to combat rape in war zones. Ms Jolie also discusses her role with the UN and her future plans.

[Corncrake]

David humiliated Goliath and now must suffer for it.

[Cidersomerset]

This is one of the most iconic anti war pictures of the Vietnam era....
The British during the Falklands war learn't from this and came up
with 'embedding' the journalists , basically monitoring them...

The Americans also used this method which gave them a certain control
of movement and reporting areas.But the use of the internet to get
out this type of public dissaproving material has scared the military
propaganda machine into action !!


http://asiancorrespondent.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/VietnamNapalmGirl-621x379.jpg


Crying children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center, run down Route 1 near Trang Bang, Vietnam after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places. Pic: AP.


She will always be naked after blobs of sticky napalm melted through her clothes and layers of skin like jellied lava.

She will always be a victim without a name.

It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of America’s darkest eras.

But beneath the photo lies a lesser-known story. It’s the tale of a dying child brought together by chance with a young photographer. A moment captured in the chaos of war that would serve as both her savior and her curse on a journey to understand life’s plan for her.

“I really wanted to escape from that little girl,” says Kim Phuc, now 49. “But it seems to me that the picture didn’t let me go.”

____

It was June 8, 1972, when Phuc heard the soldier’s scream: “We have to run out of this place! They will bomb here, and we will be dead!”

Seconds later, she saw the tails of yellow and purple smoke bombs curling around the Cao Dai temple where her family had sheltered for three days, as north and south Vietnamese forces fought for control of their village.

The little girl heard a roar overhead and twisted her neck to look up. As the South Vietnamese Skyraider plane grew fatter and louder, it swooped down toward her, dropping canisters like tumbling eggs flipping end over end.

“Ba-boom! Ba-boom!”

The ground rocked. Then the heat of a hundred furnaces exploded as orange flames spit in all directions.

Fire danced up Phuc’s left arm. The threads of her cotton clothes evaporated on contact. Trees became angry torches. Searing pain bit through skin and muscle.

“I will be ugly, and I’m not normal anymore,” she thought, as her right hand brushed furiously across her blistering arm. “People will see me in a different way.”

In shock, she sprinted down Highway 1 behind her older brother. She didn’t see the foreign journalists gathered as she ran toward them, screaming.

Then, she lost consciousness.

___

Ut, the 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who took the picture, drove Phuc to a small hospital. There, he was told the child was too far gone to help. But he flashed his American press badge, demanded that doctors treat the girl and left assured that she would not be forgotten.

“I cried when I saw her running,” said Ut, whose older brother was killed on assignment with the AP in the southern Mekong Delta. “If I don’t help her — if something happened and she died — I think I’d kill myself after that.”

Back at the office in what was then U.S.-backed Saigon, he developed his film. When the image of the naked little girl emerged, everyone feared it would be rejected because of the news agency’s strict policy against nudity.

But veteran Vietnam photo editor Horst Faas took one look and knew it was a shot made to break the rules. He argued the photo’s news value far outweighed any other concerns, and he won.

A couple of days after the image shocked the world, another journalist found out the little girl had somehow survived the attack. Christopher Wain, a correspondent for the British Independent Television Network who had given Phuc water from his canteen and drizzled it down her burning back at the scene, fought to have her transferred to the American-run Barsky unit. It was the only facility in Saigon equipped to deal with her severe injuries.

“I had no idea where I was or what happened to me,” she said. “I woke up and I was in the hospital with so much pain, and then the nurses were around me. I woke up with a terrible fear.”

Thirty percent of Phuc’s tiny body was scorched raw by third-degree burns, though her face somehow remained untouched. Over time, her melted flesh began to heal.

“Every morning at 8 o’clock, the nurses put me in the burn bath to cut all my dead skin off,” she said. “I just cried and when I could not stand it any longer, I just passed out.”

After multiple skin grafts and surgeries, Phuc was finally allowed to leave, 13 months after the bombing. She had seen Ut’s photo, which by then had won the Pulitzer Prize, but she was still unaware of its reach and power.

She just wanted to go home and be a child again.

___

For a while, life did go somewhat back to normal. The photo was famous, but Phuc largely remained unknown except to those living in her tiny village near the Cambodian border. Ut and a few other journalists sometimes visited her, but that stopped after northern communist forces seized control of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, ending the war.

Life under the new regime became tough. Medical treatment and painkillers were expensive and hard to find for the teenager, who still suffered extreme headaches and pain.

She worked hard and was accepted into medical school to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. But all that ended once the new communist leaders realized the propaganda value of the ‘napalm girl’ in the photo.

She was forced to quit college and return to her home province, where she was trotted out to meet foreign journalists. The visits were monitored and controlled, her words scripted. She smiled and played her role, but the rage inside began to build and consume her.

“I wanted to escape that picture,” she said. “I got burned by napalm, and I became a victim of war … but growing up then, I became another kind of victim.”

She turned to Cao Dai, her Vietnamese religion, for answers. But they didn’t come.

“My heart was exactly like a black coffee cup,” she said. “I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers. I wish I died at that time so I won’t suffer like that anymore … it was so hard for me to carry all that burden with that hatred, with that anger and bitterness.”

One day, while visiting a library, Phuc found a Bible. For the first time, she started believing her life had a plan.

Then suddenly, once again, the photo that had given her unwanted fame brought opportunity.

She traveled to West Germany in 1982 for medical care with the help of a foreign journalist. Later, Vietnam’s prime minister, also touched by her story, made arrangements for her to study in Cuba.

She was finally free from the minders and reporters hounding her at home, but her life was far from normal. Ut, then working at the AP in Los Angeles, traveled to meet her in 1989, but they never had a moment alone. There was no way for him to know she desperately wanted his help again.

“I knew in my dream that one day Uncle Ut could help me to have freedom,” said Phuc, referring to him by an affectionate Vietnamese term. “But I was in Cuba. I was really disappointed because I couldn’t contact with him. I couldn’t do anything.”

___

While at school, Phuc met a young Vietnamese man. She had never believed anyone would ever want her because of the ugly patchwork of scars that banded across her back and pitted her arm, but Bui Huy Toan seemed to love her more because of them.

The two decided to marry in 1992 and honeymoon in Moscow. On the flight back to Cuba, the newlyweds defected during a refueling stop in Canada. She was free.

Phuc contacted Ut to share the news, and he encouraged her to tell her story to the world. But she was done giving interviews and posing for photos.

“I have a husband and a new life and want to be normal like everyone else,” she said.

The media eventually found Phuc living near Toronto, and she decided she needed to take control of her story. A book was written in 1999 and a documentary came out, at last the way she wanted it told. She was asked to become a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador to help victims of war. She and Ut have since reunited many times to tell their story, even traveling to London to meet the Queen.

“Today, I’m so happy I helped Kim,” said Ut, who still works for AP and recently returned to Trang Bang village. “I call her my daughter.”

After four decades, Phuc, now a mother of two sons, can finally look at the picture of herself running naked and understand why it remains so powerful. It had saved her, tested her and ultimately freed her.

“Most of the people, they know my picture but there’s very few that know about my life,” she said. “I’m so thankful that … I can accept the picture as a powerful gift. Then it is my choice. Then I can work with it for peace.”

http://asiancorrespondent.com/83538/napalm-girl-photo-from-vietnam-war-turns-40/

[bram]

The other option is having America/Nato police the world.
Which it has done for the past 60 years or so, this
is not popular or feasible in the longterm, without
recentment from the local populace, which is happening
in the Middle East now.

The only problem with this is that America only seems to be concerned about policing those parts of the world which have oil or other stragetic value items. Hence the USA is very concerned about the plight of society in Iraq and Libya whilst genocide continues unabated in many African countries. Also, the USA doesnt seem to leave these countries in a very good state when it has finished 'liberating''them.




Cathy Newman sits down with actress Angelina Jolie and Foreign Secretary William Hague to discuss
how to combat rape in war zones.

More nonsense about how to make war more acceptable to the middle class conscience. There is no way to separate rape and war, they are the same thing. If you want to stop rape, stop war.

[Cidersomerset]

Posted by Cidersomerset (here)

The other option is having America/Nato police the world.
Which it has done for the past 60 years or so, this
is not popular or feasible in the longterm, without
recentment from the local populace, which is happening
in the Middle East now.
The only problem with this is that America only seems to be concerned about policing those parts of the world which have oil or other stragetic value items. Hence the USA is very concerned about the plight of society in Iraq and Libya whilst genocide continues unabated in many African countries. Also, the USA doesnt seem to leave these countries in a very good state when it has finished 'liberating''them.


Exactly, It is why the UN is the only real arbiter to world intervention in the future , but has to have more resources ( not power).The UN has been undermined by the stronger members
mainly the US , former Soviet Union & China but other states like the UK,Israel etc also have large influance. Of course big/rich countries have more influence in the world as we know
here. The secret solar governments around the world, The Mega rich , Military Ind complex not only of the US but China,Russia,UK ,France & others, giant corporates linked around the
world in Pharma,chemical etc....The richer countries/corporates are still raping the poorer ones for resource, whether thru war, debt involving 'economic hit men' hired by the corporate
'Banksters'......China has now taken over the mantle of helping/exploiting the thirdworld for minerals etc.

[Cidersomerset]

Posted by Cidersomerset (here)

Cathy Newman sits down with actress Angelina Jolie and Foreign Secretary William Hague to discuss
how to combat rape in war zones.
More nonsense about how to make war more acceptable to the middle class conscience. There is no way to separate rape and war, they are the same thing. If you want to stop rape, stop war.


Yes exactly !!! I posted it because it does highlight the problem of rape & murder in war. Which has always happened thru out history .

Slavery is still wide spread around the world wether 'Bonded' or economic.The middle classes are closeted from most of this as are the working classes
who are dumbed down by the x factor culture. The web has made the world a smaller place and we are on the cusp imo of either enlightenment.
The comming together of peoples around the globe to stand up and say to our governments. Why are we killing our brothers & sisters and promote
genuine cooperation . Or we carry on slipping down the slope of a one world corporate/ fascist run sociaty like the 'Hunger games' where those
not culled serve a priviledged elite in an 'Emerald City'.....far away !!

[Cidersomerset]

This is part of a longer interview which is not on U/tube yet
Julian is asked about Bradley Manning.His manner is in responce
to the BBC journalists really 'amateurish/offensive' imo for the
first five minutes questioning. Especially as he was on there to
promote his co authored book!!


The full interview is on this link, and is really annoying on
the part of BBC's Zeinab Badawi ..imo..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20563871


K-97lQW8-6E

Published on 30 Nov 2012 by BBCOfficialNews


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has spoken about the Bradley Manning
case in an interview from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

In a combative interview with the BBC's Zeinab Badawi, Mr Assange
said that Private Manning had been mistreated while in custody "in a
manner that was akin to torture."