English: Bradley Manning (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For Immediate Release: August 21, 2013
For Information:
Andy Thayer, Gay Liberation Network, LGBTliberation@aol.com, 773.209.1187
Bradley Manning Supporters Respond to Military Judge’s 35 Year Sentence
CHICAGO, 8/21/13 – Free speech advocates are reacting angrily to the 35 year sentence that a military judge handed down on wikileaker PFC Bradley Manning in Ft. Meade, MD at today.
Actions around the country and internationally are planned in response to the sentencing, with the Chicago event to take place at 6 PM at “The Bean” in Millennium Park, near Michigan Avenue and Washington Boulevard.
Manning’s advocates are particularly upset at what they see as the hypocrisy of the Obama administration’s relentless prosecution of a person who exposed rampant government wrong-doing. It’s an especially hard pill to swallow since Obama ran for office on a platform of transparency, and yet has proven to be one of the most secretive and anti-civil liberties presidents in U.S. history.
While Manning’s revelations embarrassed the Obama and Bush administrations, the whistleblower’s advocates see these diplomatic embarrassments as well deserved payback for policies that have proven time and again inimical to the values of human rights and democracy. To wit:
*** Manning’s exposure of the Tunisian oligarchy’s corruption helped kick off the “Arab Spring,” according to Foreign Affairs journal, toppling and imperiling a string of U.S.-supported dictators around the region.
Yet until the very end of the regime, President Obama was shipping arms and tear-gas to Egypt’s Mubarek dictatorship. Until days ago, it supported the military coup against the Morsi government with arms shipments, which no doubt are being replaced by arms from close U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia.
*** Manning brought to light unconstitutional indefinite imprisonment without charges, let alone trials, of scores of people at Guantanamo. “The more I became educated on the topic,” Manningsaid in court, “it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low-level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would’ve been released if they were held in theater.”
And with these unconstitutional imprisonments, President Obama continues to break the first promise of his first presidential term to close Guantanamo. And rather than prosecute former Bush administration officials for the felonies of authorizing and/or conducting torture, Obama rewarded one of the key torture regime architects, James Comey, with an appointment to head the FBI.
*** Mannings’s exposure of the Iraq and Afghanistan war diaries and the explosive “Collateral Murder” video showed the ugly truth of the U.S. occupations of those countries, and helped turn American public opinion against the wars. The documents leaked by Manning exposed the rampant criminality in American foreign policy, such as the wanton massacres of journalists and other civilians in Iraq [2] [3][4]
Rather than embracing the truths exposed in the Manning’s revelations, the Obama administration secretly attempted to prolong U.S. troop presence in Iraq, until public embarrassment over Manning / wikileak’s revelations about the administration’s demands for extraterritoriality privileges for law-breaking U.S. troops forced the Maliki government to keep Obama to his public promises about exiting Iraq.
*** Manning’s leaks of diplomatic cables showed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration broke international treaties by supporting the 2009 military coup in Honduras [2]which overthrew that country’s democratically elected government and paved the way for a wave of violence which made it the murder capital of the world.
The Obama administration then proceeded to break the law by arming the coup regime, and Clinton played a pivotal role in breaking the coup regime’s international diplomatic isolation.
From Russia to North Africa, the Middle East to Honduras, Bradley Manning’s revelations show that the Obama and Bush administrations have consistently treated human rights issues as little more than means of scoring propaganda points against opposing governments. Adding insult to injury, Obama has taken Bush’s expansion of the national security state to truly frightening proportions, prosecuting more whistleblowers like Manning than every previous administration combined.
The protest in Chicago is sponsored by the Gay Liberation Network. For more information email LGBTliberation@aol.comor call 773.209.1187. For more information about protests around the world, go to www.BradleyManning.org
# # #
Daily Queer News 