Iraq War veteran and whistle-blower Bradley Manning apologized on Wednesday. Free Speech Radio News reported on this way:
Private First Class Bradley Manning addressed the court
yesterday, during the sentencing phase of his military trial. Despite
his acquittal on the most serious of the charges against him, aiding the
enemy, Private Manning faces as much as 90 years in prison for
releasing classified military information to the public. Manning spent
more than three years in pretrial detention, much of which he served in
solitary confinement. Throughout the trial, he fought the charges
against him. Yesterday, he shifted gears and apologized for his actions.
David Swanson is Campaign
Coordinator at RootsAction.org and blogs at warisacrime.org. Swanson was
in the courtroom when Manning made his statement, and described
Manning's statement as “an apology for having acted without being able
to think clearly.”
“That's not what Bradley Manning
did. If you look back at the chat logs, he was thinking very, very
clearly and he had clear and honorable intentions. There is a reason he
is viewed as a hero around the world, why he is a four time Nobel Peace
Prize nominee. And it just wasn't discussed by him or by the therapists
or by his sister or his aunts, in all of yesterdays testimony.”
Alexa O'Brien has spent days rewriting what went down. It is not helpful.
You can blame Bradley for the apology or not. I don't blame him. From Wednesday:
Bradley's defense failed him and betrayed him throughout. Was that
intentional? Some think so. I just think David Coombs is inept.
[. . .]
Let's deal with the other damage today. Brad's statements. An attorney
can't stop a client from speaking. Brad may have wanted to speak and
may have wanted to speak those words. Guess what? You scream and yell
and try to get across to him not to.
Bradley stated today he was wrong, he should have tried military channels, he was sorry for the damage he had done.
What the f**k was that?
Is
that statement supposed to help when the defense appeals? Is that
statement supposed to lead tons of people to gather with signs that "WE
SUPPORT BRAD! HE WAS WRONG!"
Brad's been found guilty in the
military proceedings. Those statements should have been made before
that ruling. Are they sincere? Who knows but if he was wrong and he
did damage, why did the defense argue that damage was not proven?
As
a defense attorney, your job is to save your client. And you can say
almost anything to do that and I will more than understand. We went
over that before Bradley admitted to being the leaker. For three years,
we pointed out he might maintain he was innocent or any number of
things and that he had a right to do that or whatever was needed to save
him.
The statement today will not save him and may just cost him
legitimacy. Coombs should have made that clear to him. He should have
said that the admission of guilt and being wrong should have been made
during arguments of guilt or innocence. Barring that, when the
court-martial moved into the sentencing phase, if the statement had to
be made, it should have been made at the start of defense arguments, not
as they were concluding.
Colonel Denise Lind concluded Brad was
guilty. She and only she will determine the length of his sentence.
The statement will likely have little impact in decreasing the years she
sentences Brad to. They may make her sentence him to a longer
sentence. Why? He's acknowledged guilt, he's bought into the
prosecution's argument that he did great damage. So if he feels that
way, why does she need to consider that the prosecution was wrong or
over zealous? She doesn't. Equally true, coming when it did, the
statement can come off craven and Lind could see it as an attempt to
manipulate her.
It was a huge mistake.
David Coombs is an
awful attorney. He's refused to address whatever Bradley's orientation
is while arguing 'sickness' and now the client is stating his
whistle-blowing was wrong and did damage? If you're not getting how
badly Coombs handled serious issues grasp that the e-mail noted in
yesterday's hearing, which had a photo of Brad in a wig? The military,
which sits on the court transcripts, managed to release the photo of Brad in the wig today. Coombs took serious issues, refused to address them and now the whole thing's basically a freak show.
Bradley has to do what right's for him. I feel he was betrayed by his attorney. People can be upset and angry or feel whatever they want.
What people can't do is lie. Alexa O'Brien's lying. It's not helping anyone.
Rebecca Solnit is another worthless piece of nonsense. The Progressive's latest issue has her saying, "Hope is largely about how you tell the story."
What a load of s**t.
You sort of picture Rebecca Solnit flitting back and forth between Auschwitz and Belzec, serving up that crap.
Hope has its place. But hope is not lying. Truth matters and people like Solnit lie and lie to distort and, most of all, to manipulate. When they don't get their way, you see flashes of truth. It was less than a year ago that Rebecca Solnit had her online tantrum insulting Greens and others on the left who would not vote for Barack. (That critique covers nearly everything except Solnit ripping off a character written by Whit Stillman.)
That's the real Rebecca Solnit -- a controlling thug. And she will try to pretty up those efforts by masking them in 'hope.' It's not hope. It's lies. And these lies are supposed to manipulate you.
People don't need more lies or more 'hope.' They need the truth, now more than ever.
Election night 2004, the results were demoralizing. We were stuck with four more years of Bully Boy Bush. And I watched one speaker after another get up and try to pretty up what had just taken place, try to peddle 'hope' and distort reality. I didn't do that.
I opened with, "Your media has failed you." And the sky didn't shatter. People didn't slit their wrists. We knew what needed to be done, the kind of battle we were up against.
Alexa O'Brien deceives. Maybe she can't help it. Maybe she can't face reality about what happened because it's too painful for her. Or maybe we're discovering she's a serial liar like 'hope' peddler Rebecca Solnit?
People should be outraged and angry by what's going on today. We don't need to tie a pretty bow around fantasies. Honesty and outrage do more to fuel change than anything else.
People like Rebecca Solnit don't want change. They want to control.
So they lie.
We need truth, even when it's ugly. The government's 'best' excuses for lying to the people involve 'hope.' Why, on the left, we would ever emulate that is beyond me.
Bradley apologized. There's no reason to lie about that. The whistle-blower defense was dropping in the sentencing phase of the military procedure against Bradley. There's no reason to lie about that. Americans are not children and they're not by tricksters and liars.
Plato's noble lie was never about delivering freedom or imparting information. It was about control. Why anyone on the left would want to practice that is beyond me.
The truth is the basic building block for any change or any progress. That point is established over and over, whether it's in Jimi Hendrix's "Castles Made of Sand" or a song many Christian children are taught:
The wise man built his house upon the rock
The wise man built his house upon the rock
The wise man built his house upon the rock
And the rain came tumbling down
Oh, the rain came down
And the floods came up
The rain came down
And the floods came up
The rain came down
And the floods came up
And the wise man's house stood firm.
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
The foolish man built his house upon the sand
And the rain came tumbling down
False hopes fall away, facts remain facts.
Bradley Manning was betrayed by his attorney, my opinion. He was imprisoned for over three years and then he was put on trial. That these events could do him harm is not a surprise. That some people want to pretend otherwise to peddle 'hope' is rather sad.
An informed citizenry is a powerful one.
Thursday on KPFA's Flashpoints, guest host Kevin Pina and Kevin Gosztola offered realities. Excerpt.
Kevin
Pina: Well you know the problem of course with taking that position is
should they give him the 90 years anyway, then, of course, we will
probably hear the truth again which is on behalf of the American people
which many people applaud him for. There's now a movement to award him
the Nobel Peace Prize. We've had Norman Solomon on this program telling
us about that, that there's a grassroots movement to get him named
Nobel Peace Prize for having done this on behalf of the American
people. But if he gets the 90 years anyway, having apologized for what
he did, it's going to make it really difficult for people. The
right-wing is going to have a hey-day attacking his credibility with his
second statement, aren't they?
Kevin Gosztola:
Sure. I place the blame on the defense team for this one. I don't
blame Bradley Manning for doing what his defense team says is
appropriate at this stage. So clearly, David Coombs could have
maintained a whistle-blower defense but decided that that was a risk
that he was not willing to take. He's not playing this like Bradley
Manning is a political prisoner which, I think, there's a lot to
indicate he is a political prisoner. And, in fact, I would suggest to
you that if he does get sentenced to whatever amount of time -- and I
kind of think that the judge is probably going to sentence him to 30 or
40 years in prison -- and I say that a lot of people are going to be
very upset and they're going to get down and they're going to think how
horrid this is but I also say that there are a lot of supporters
around the world and because he is a political prisoner in many
respects, it could be 15 to 20 years and we will see his sentence
commuted because of all of the activism around him and all of the
support for his actions. I just don't see him getting punished for that
long period of time, being kept in prison.
Those truths, that honest conversation, do more to help Bradley and to help whistle-blowers than any weak sop whimsey from the would be self-help gurus of the left.
It's over, I'm done writing songs about love
There's a war going on
So I'm holding my gun with a strap and a glove
And I'm writing a song about war
And it goes
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Oh oh oh oh
-- "I Hate The War" (written by Greg Goldberg, on The Ballet's Mattachine!)
The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4488.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
iraq
i hate the war
the ballet
