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American Journalism, if not Dead Already, May be Murdered in the Military Trial of Bradley Manning.
The most telling of the material released by Manning was what WikiLeaks called “Collateral Murder”, something The Good Guys must not cannot ever indulge in, for ‘we’ play by the Rules of Engagement (but perhaps no longer as America has without our consent, made attempts to opt out of the Geneva Convention and other “Customary” International Laws).
If ‘attacked’ we are still the ‘Good Guys’, and nevertheless tied to human dignity, the truth, honour, integrity, perhaps even the Might of Right.
But Truth, Justice and the American Way seem to have fallen under the banner of the Bad Guys, who carry murder and subversive lies, treachery and stealth, back shooting, rape and murder onto the battlefieled.
War, since the South Sea Bubble in 1720, has been a series of cold-blooded and profitable mercenary affairs bracketing orchestrated economic depressions, a profit-taking from the middle classes after an economic ‘Bust’ to wean them into another credit-driven ‘Boom’ so those middle classes forget the theft and cannot properly warn their children about the dangers of corporate and government greed tied to stock market manipulation.
Manning is, I believe, one of those children who saw throught the callous, empty souls of the money-lovers who make a profit out of killing – Dylan’s “Masters of War”.
Manning showed us how they do it.
And they couldn’t take it.
That’s why this trial is vitally important – Tom Dennen
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“Bradley Manning released hundreds of thousands of government documents and files to Wikileaks, most famous among them the unclassified video Wikileaks dubbed, “Collateral Murder”, a harrowing gun-sight view of an Apache helicopter slaughtering a couple of armed men and a much larger group of civilians on a Baghdad street in July, 2007.
The court-martial of Pfc. Manning, finally underway over three years after his arrest (and Unconstitutional detention without trial), is likely to cause a great deal of collateral destruction in its own right. In this case the victim will be American journalism.
“If this charge sticks, it will be a serious blow to American journalism, as it puts all kinds of confidential informants at risk of being capital cases. A soldier in Afghanistan who blogs about the lack of armoured vehicles – a common and very public complaint from the ranks in the Iraq War – could be prosecuted for tipping off the Taliban.
“Whoever leaked Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s long cable on the futility of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan could also be conceivably be put away for life, even executed. As Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union has explained, the use of this charge against sources, leakers and whistleblowers – like Bradley Manning – will criminalise a great deal of essential journalism – and not just the kind practiced by Wikileaks and various bloggers…”
