Friday, November 02, 2012

Bradley Manning

Douglas Sloan (Oxonian Globalist) observes, "On the same day that President Barack Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, an openly homosexual American solider experienced his 714th  day of incarceration. He had not been convicted of any crime. Bradley Manning, the alleged Wikileaks informer, has been in custody since May 2010, and was in solitary confinement for nine months."  Bradley Manning, like Barack's kill-list, is a topic the faux left doesn't want to address in an election year.  Alexander Reed Kelly (TruthDig) notes of  Gary Dorrien's The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective which is meant to churn out the vote for Barack:


 The chapter titled “Moral Empire and Liberal War,” which serves to justify Obama’s expansion of the American military establishment, is the most telling in terms of its omissions. According to a Google Books search, the name “Bradley Manning” appears nowhere in the section’s 30 pages. Neither do the words “whistle-blower” or “rendition.” “Surveillance” comes up once, and the unmanned drone war, which has claimed dozens of civilian lives in Pakistan since Obama took office, gets a passing mention in a single paragraph.


But though whores might wish Bradley would just disappear, he remains and possibly the hatred being spewing by the faux left has to do with the fact that Bradley is the ghost that haunts them, the truth that mocks them.

Monday April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released US military video of a July 12, 2007 assault in Iraq. 12 people were killed in the assault including two Reuters journalists Namie Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Monday June 7, 2010, the US military announced that they had arrested Bradley Manning and he stood accused of being the leaker of the video. Leila Fadel (Washington Post) reported in August 2010 that Manning had been charged -- "two charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The first encompasses four counts of violating Army regulations by transferring classified information to his personal computer between November and May and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system. The second comprises eight counts of violating federal laws governing the handling of classified information." In March, 2011, David S. Cloud (Los Angeles Times) reported that the military has added 22 additional counts to the charges including one that could be seen as "aiding the enemy" which could result in the death penalty if convicted. The Article 32 hearing took place in December.  At the start of this year, there was an Article 32 hearing and, February 3rd, it was announced that the government would be moving forward with a court-martial.  Bradley has yet to enter a plea and has neither affirmed that he is the leaker nor denied it.  The court-martial was supposed to begin this month has been postponed until after the election . 

Douglas Sloan explains:

Not only have Manning’s reputation and credibility been attacked using his homosexuality, but his defence centres on the assertion that he struggled with gender identity issues. As a result of having to suppress his homosexuality due to the prevailing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, Manning’s defence deems that he was not mentally fit to be given access to classified information, and as such the blame for the leak lies with his superiors. That homosexuality can be considered a defence in such a case seems to undermine both the work done by LGBT rights groups and the progress that the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ represents. To view it as a plea of homosexuality, however, is to misunderstand the issue at hand. Manning’s defence is more one of aggravated mental disturbance than of sexuality, for all this aggravation was a consequence of his sexuality and the military’s reaction to it.
Questions must be asked of an institution that drove a man to such extremes that he would go for a weapons rack during a counselling session, send pictures of himself in women’s dress to his commanding officer and potentially leak thousands of sensitive documents. Whether he was responsible for the leak or not, his situation hardly reflects well on the American military.


Today is Bradley's 894th day imprisoned.  He has still not had a trial.  There are 365 days in a year.  Barack has imprisoned an American citizen for close to three years.  Barack has denied Bradly his Constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial. David E. Coombs and will be speaking December 3rd in DC.  This Day In WikiLeaks notes that and two other events:
  • Bradley Manning's attorney David Coombs will be giving his first ever public presentation on December 3 at the All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington D.C. The presentation will give an overview of pending defence motions in U.S. v. PFC Manning, as well as other facts about the case.
  • A rally will be held at Fort Meade on November 27, the first day of Bradley Manning's hearings related to his unlawful pretrial punishment.
  • An Election Day demonstration will be held at the U.S. Embassy in London on November 6. Anthony Timmons of WISE Up Action will speak about Bradley Manning.


I'm throwing this in here because the Barack spinners do love to lie.  A friend HOST called about a mutual friend PERFORMER.  During an interview, PERFORMER seemed unbalanced.  Uh, yeah.  And that's what happens when you get too far from your roots.  I don't know what planet PERFORMER is living on but that's the crazy.  Among other things, PERFORMER lied about basically always being out.  As I said to HOST on the phone this morning, "Are we all supposed to forget the 1980s law suit" one that PERFORMER lost which was filed solely because there was footage of PERFORMER with same-sex love?

I have no idea.  But PERFORMER was an idiot and shouldn't have talked election politics because all it did was reveal how ignorant PERFORMER is.  PERFORMER is among those who will say to me, "But isn't the Iraq War over?"  If it's not on MSNBC prime time, it's not happening in PERFORMER's world.  So maybe the smart thing would be for a number of artists to stop discussing politics?  If you don't follow, don't speak.  Want to tell who you're going to vote for?  Fine.  But don't start talking issues if you don't know what you're talking about.

Last night a CPB friend called.  Angry over a regional NPR program where a guest flat out lied and the host allowed it.  The program comes from a state that hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.  Yet every day the host has on another guest talking up the Democratic Party's presidential ticket.  How is that public radio?

How does that represent the local interests?

So the guest was a bad fiction writer who is voting for Barack (or apparently wouldn't have been booked on the show) and wanted to talk about why he was voting for Barack.  Apparently not having a reason for voting for Barack, he had to explain how much he hated Mitt Romney and he had to explain how Romney was evil because he _______.  What followed was a string of sentences broadcast over public radio and not one of them was accurate. 

Now maybe that's what the MSNBC liars say happened.  But they're TV hosts, they're not reporters.  The report on that -- a lengthy report in the Washington Post some months ago -- contained details and it wasn't a pretty story about Mitt Romney.

But the bad fiction writer had to 'improve' on the fact a reporter has reported and create additional things that happened.

And the host let him get away with it.  The host went to station identification (the male writer was ranting like a loon) but when the host came back, there was no correction offered.

This is public radio?

We're probably writing about the public radio thing -- Ava and I -- at Third.  I haven't seen the HOST interview of PERFORMER and would prefer not to because not only was there the lawsuit to hide PERFORMER's sexuality, there's also the fact that the PERFORMER was repeatedly called out in the 90s for being in the closet.  So for PERFORMER to claim to always be out of the closet was b.s.  And I'd really rather not have to call out a friend on that lie and several others told in the interview.  Not to mention calling PERFORMER out for lying about Mitch McConnell.


The following community sites -- pluse Pacifica Evening News, Jane Fonda, Tavis Smiley,  Antiwar.com,  The Diane Rehm Show and C-SPAN -- updated last night and this morning:


Cedric's Big Mix
The crazy gets loose
1 hour ago
The Daily Jot
THIS JUST IN! THE WANKERS WANK!
1 hour ago 
 
 
 
 
 
We'll close with this from David Swanson's "Respectable Murderers: An Open Letter to Dan Ellsberg" (War Is A Crime):
 

Dear Dan,
You and I are getting ready to tape a debate on the question of whether to vote for Obama (in "swing states"). It will air on Lila Garrett's "Connect the Dots" show on KPFK next Monday. I'm looking forward to it, if for no other reason, because I think our public discourse lacks much serious debate between people who respect each other's intentions. I have nothing but respect for you and believe you mean nothing but the best in advocating votes for Obama. You honestly believe I was catastrophically wrong to vote for Jill Stein in Virginia, as I've done, and I honestly believe you are horrendously misguided to be expending your valuable energy trying to get others to vote for Obama. And yet we'll be friends through this and regardless of whether one or both of us ever change our minds.
An hour debate will also be a refreshing change from the usual sound byte simplification of the media, and yet not necessarily sufficient. So, let me tell you a couple of stories.
I wandered over to the Obama campaign office here in Charlottesville, Va., on Wednesday when former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was scheduled to visit. She showed up, in fact, and told everyone how terrific Obama is.
[. . .]
In between elections, as we move from having voted for the less evil party toward the inevitable contest four years hence between two parties that are both more evil than the time before, our activism is neutered by a system of unions, PACs, and nonprofit clicktivist and media complexes that seek their funding, power, and sense of importance from one half of the government. It has become routine for grassroots or astroturf activist leaders to head into the veal pen and ask the elected officials of the Good Party or of the "Progressive" wing of the good party what they should ask their members to demand. This is an inversion of representative government. You'll recall groups that favored single-payer healthcare forbidding their members from mentioning it, asking instead for a "public option" because so-called public servants had instructed the public to ask for that. The point is not that legislators should never compromise, but that we should leave it to the legislators, because when we pre-compromise, we end up with even less in the end.
When Obama was in Charlottesville, hundreds of people waited in line for hours for the chance to cheer anything he said. Some of us went to talk to the people waiting in line. We wanted to get a sense of how they felt about all the policies that had produced such outrage under Bush and been expanded under Obama. Under Obama, as you may know, wealth is concentrating faster, the environment is deteriorating faster, the military has spread further and cost more, the warrantless spying has spread and been firmly established as without criminal penalty, rendition and torture have become policy choices rather than crimes, imprisonment without charge or trial has been "legalized" (although Obama is still fighting for that power in court), an assassination program has been created and openly advertised, wars have been launched without the courtesy of lying to Congress, the CIA has been given major war powers, "special" forces are in 70 nations on any given day and raiding a dozen homes to kill on any given night, drones have raised to new heights the percentage of war victims who are civilians and the percentage of the people in certain nations who hate our government, secrecy has mushroomed, and retribution against whistleblowers has exploded. You are aware of all of this. We couldn't find a single person in that crowd who had ever heard of any of it. Major news stories that would have put people into the streets in outrage if the president were a Republican did not exist to this crowd.
Sure, you know the facts. But are you devoting every ounce of energy to spreading the word and building resistance? Of course not. You're investing your time in campaigning for Obama votes (in swing states). You may understand that there's been no step back from Bush's policies, that Obama has advanced them further. Yes, Romney could advance them even further even faster than Obama would in the next four years -- even in the face of the public opposition that would likely materialize for a President Romney. But we need a reversal of course, not a slightly slower death, not even a significantly slower death. The environment is collapsing. Weaponry and hostility are spreading. We're dealing with a need for survival, not a desire for utopia. What we need for survival is a credible independent movement.
When a labor union today says "Reform NAFTA and push for the Employee Free Choice Act, or else," the "or else" is empty and everyone knows it. When Bill McKibben says "The tar sands pipeline is your test," nobody believes that when Obama fails the test McKibben will oppose his reelection. Compare this battered-spouse relationship with that of Latinos who posed a credible threat to desert Obama and thereby won some modest immigration rights.
You know that we had a significant (pitiably weak but significant) peace movement in 2005 and 2006. Why? Because opponents of war and opponents of Republican presidents' wars were teamed up together. That fell apart as Democrats took power in Congress in 2007 and as 2008 turned out to be the year of one of those endlessly recurring "most important elections of our lifetime." The movement was temporarily shut down, never to be restored. We went from Mitch McConnell secretly warning Bush to get out of Iraq to Obama getting credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan even as the troops there were double the number deployed when Obama entered the White House.



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.





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