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Some more context for recent spying revelations... this soldier was
subject to cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment according to an
UN rapporteur. Emphasis in bold added.<br>
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<a
href="http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/17814-focus-as-bradley-manning-trial-begins-press-predictably-misses-the-point">As
Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses the Point</a><br>
<p class="txtauthor">By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone</p>
<p class="date">07 June 13</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="cid:part2.01010502.07000901@gmail.com" border="0">ell,
the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the
government couldn't have scripted the headlines any better.</p>
<p class="indent">In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there's a
reporter character named "Sam Miller" played by actor Troy Garity
who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever
storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those
sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you're
doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only
reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting
much opposition from people up on high, then you're probably
eating Chumpbait.</p>
<p class="indent">There's an obvious Chumpbait angle in the Bradley
Manning story, and most of the mainstream press reports went with
it. You can usually tell if you're running a Chumpbait piece if
you find yourself writing the same article as 10,000 other hacks.</p>
<p class="indent">The Trials of Bradley Manning</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-trials-of-bradley-manning-20130314"
target="_blank"><strong>The Trials of Bradley Manning</strong></a></p>
<p class="indent">The <a
href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/02/us/manning-court-martial/index.html"
target="_blank">CNN headline</a> read as follows: "Hero or
Traitor? Bradley Manning's Trial to Start Monday." NBC <a
href="http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/03/18725324-contrasting-portraits-of-bradley-manning-as-court-martial-opens?lite"
target="_blank">went with</a> "Contrasting Portraits of Bradley
Manning as Court-Martial Opens." Time magazine's Denver Nicks <a
href="http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/05/viewpoint-our-real-secrecy-problem/#ixzz2VNWKyjq8"
target="_blank">took this original approach</a> in their "think"
piece on Manning, "Bradley Manning and our Real Secrecy Problem":</p>
<blockquote><em>Is he a traitor or a hero? This is the question
surrounding Bradley Manning, the army private currently being
court-martialed at Fort Meade for aiding the enemy by wrongfully
causing defense information to published on the Internet.</em></blockquote>
<p class="indent">The Nicks thesis turned out to be one chosen by a
lot of editorialists at the Manning trial, who have decided that
the "real story" in the Manning case is what this incident showed
about our lax security procedures, our lack of good due diligence
in vetting the folks we put in charge of our vital information.</p>
<p class="indent">"With so many poorly protected secrets accessible
to so many people, it was only a matter of time," Nicks wrote. "We
can be grateful that Bradley Manning rather than someone less
charitably inclined perpetrated this leak."</p>
<p class="indent">Dr. Tim Johnson of the Telegraph took a similar
approach, only he was even <a
href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100220149/bradley-manning-traitor-whistleblower-victim-of-obamas-bullying-and-a-terrible-gay-icon/"
target="_blank">less generous</a> than Nicks, calling Manning
the "weirdo [who] tried to bring down the government," a man who
was "guilty as hell" and "deserves to do time."</p>
<p class="indent">"Private Manning was a self-absorbed geek who
should never have enjoyed the level of access that he did,"
Johnson wrote. He went on to argue that Manning's obvious
personality defects should have disqualified him for sensitive
duty, and the fact that he was even hired in the first place is
the real scandal of this trial:</p>
<blockquote><em><a
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11874276"
target="_blank">His personality breakdown was there for all to
see</a> – criticising US policy on Facebook, telling friends,
"Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment", and even
entertaining "a very internal private struggle with his gender".
He told hacker Adrian Lamo that he "listened and lip-synced to
Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest
data spillage in American history." You go, girl.</em></blockquote>
<p class="indent">All of this shit is disgraceful. It's Chumpbait.</p>
<p class="indent">If I was working for the Pentagon's PR department
as a hired press Svengali, with my salary eating up some of the
nearly five billion dollars the armed services <a
href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/05/pentagon-spending-billions-pr-sway-world-opinion/"
target="_blank">spends annually</a> on advertising and public
relations, I would be telling my team to pump reporters over and
over again with the same angle.</p>
<p class="indent">I would beat it into the head of every hack on
this beat that the court-martial is about a troubled young man
with gender identity problems, that the key issue of law here
rests inside the mind of young PFC Manning, that the only
important issue of fact for both a jury and the American people to
decide is exactly the question in these headlines.</p>
<p class="indent">Is Manning a hero, or a traitor? Did he give
thousands of files to Wikileaks out of a sense of justice and
moral horror, or did he do it because he had interpersonal
problems, because he couldn't keep his job, because he was a woman
trapped in a man's body, because he was a fame-seeker, because he
was lonely?</p>
<p class="indent">You get the press and the rest of America
following that bouncing ball, and the game's over. Almost no
matter what the outcome of the trial is, if you can convince the
American people that this case is about mental state of a single
troubled kid from Crescent, Oklahoma, then the propaganda war has
been won already.</p>
<p class="indent"><b>Because in reality, this case does not have
anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really,
what his motives were. This case is entirely about the
"classified" materials Manning had access to, and whether or not
they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.</b></p>
<p class="indent"><b>This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down
to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public
a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself
criminal.</b></p>
<p class="indent"><b>Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a
massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and
torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we
should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the
acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.</b></p>
<p class="indent">Slate was one of the few outlets to approach the
Manning trial in a way that made sense. Their story took the
opportunity of the court-martial to remind all of us of the list
of horrors Manning discovered, <a
href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/06/04/bradley_manning_trial_10_revelations_from_wikileaks_documents_on_iraq_afghanistan.html"
target="_blank">including</a> (just to name a very few):</p>
<ul>
<li>During the Iraq War, U.S. authorities <a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks"
target="_blank">failed to investigate</a> hundreds of reports
of abuse, torture, rape, and murder by Iraqi police and
soldiers, according to thousands of field reports…</li>
<br>
<li>There were 109,032 "violent deaths" <a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/true-civilian-body-count-iraq"
target="_blank">recorded</a> in Iraq between 2004 and 2009,
including 66,081 civilians. Leaked records from the Afghan War
separately revealed coalition troops' <a
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7909742/Afghanistan-war-logs-90000-classified-documents-revealed-by-Wikileaks.html"
target="_blank">alleged role</a> in killing at least 195
civilians in unreported incidents, one reportedly involving U.S.
service members machine-gunning a bus, wounding or killing 15
passengers…</li>
<br>
<li>In Baghdad in 2007, a U.S. Army helicopter gunned down a group
of civilians, including two Reuters news staff…</li>
</ul>
<p class="indent">This last incident was the notorious video in
which our helicopter pilots lit up a group of civilians, among
other things wounding two children in a van, to which the pilots
blithely <a
href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/06/us-iraq-usa-journalists-idUSTRE6344FW20100406"
target="_blank">commented</a>, "Well, it's their fault for
bringing their kids into a battle."</p>
<p class="indent">Except that there had been no battle, none of the
people on the street were armed, it was an attack from space for
all these people knew – and oh, by the way, we were in their
country, thanks to a war that history has revealed to have been a
grotesque policy error.</p>
<p class="indent">It's their fault for bringing their kids into a
battle. It's lines like this, truly horrific stuff that's evidence
of a kind of sociopathic breakdown of our society, that this trial
should be about. Not Manning's personal life.</p>
<p class="indent"><b>Unfortunately, the American people would rather
make it about Manning, because they know they were complicit in
those and other murders, because they loudly brayed for war in
Iraq for years, no matter how often and how loudly it was
explained to them that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were
not the same person.</b></p>
<p class="indent">Hacks like Johnson reassure the public that they
have the right to have the results of their own moral decisions
kept well hidden from them. His kind of propaganda soothes people
into believing that Manning was just a freak and a weirdo, a
one-off kink in the machinery, who hopefully will be thrown in the
hole forever or at least for a very long time, so that we don't
have to hear about any of this awful stuff again. At the very
least, according to Johnson, we shouldn't have to listen to anyone
call Manning a hero:</p>
<blockquote><em>At the centre of the storm is a person who one
suspects should never have been in uniform, let along enjoying
access to military intelligence, who has blundered into the
history books by way of a personality crisis. Incredibly, <a
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/27/bradley-manning-sf-gay-pride"
target="_blank">some people actually want to celebrate him as
a gay icon</a>. Who next, the Kray twins?</em></blockquote>
<p class="indent">Wow. We're the ones machine-gunning children, and
yet Manning is the one being compared to the murdering Kray twins?
And Jesus, isn't being charged with the Espionage Act enough? Is
Manning also being accused of not representing gay America
skillfully enough on the dock?</p>
<p class="indent">Here's my question to Johnson: What would be the
correct kind of person to have access to videos of civilian
massacres? Who's the right kind of person to be let in the know
about the fact that we systematically turned academics and other
"suspects" over to the Iraqi military to be tortured? We want
people who will, what, sit on this stuff? Apparently the idea is
to hire the kind of person who will cheerfully help us keep this
sort of thing hidden from ourselves.</p>
<p class="indent">The thing is, when it comes to things like the
infamous "Collateral Murder" video, whether it's Bradley Manning
or anyone else, any decent human being would have had an
obligation to come forward. Presented with that material, you
either become part of a campaign of torture and murder by saying
nothing, or you have to make it public. Morally, there's no
option.</p>
<p class="indent">Yes, Manning went beyond even that. One can
definitely quibble about the volume of the material he released
and the manner in which he released it. And I get that military
secrets should, in a properly functioning society, be kept secret.</p>
<p class="indent">But when military secrets cross the line into
atrocities, the act of keeping these secrets secret ceases to have
much meaning.</p>
<p class="indent">The issues to be debated at this trial are massive
in scope. They're about the character of the society we've all
created, not the state of mind of one troubled Army private. If
anyone tries to tell you anything else, he's selling you
something.</p>
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