Read Online The Passion of Bradley Manning by Chase Madar - Free Book Online Page B

decision-makers to promulgate foreign policies, diplomatic strategies, and military operating procedures that are hostile to the democratic ideals our country was founded upon. The incident I was part of—shown in the Collateral Murder video—becomes even more horrific when we grasp that it was not exceptional. PFC Manning himself is alleged to describe (in the chat logs) an incident where he was ordered to turn over innocent Iraqi academics to notorious police interrogators, for the offense of publishing a political critique of government corruption titled, “Where did the money go? [5]” These issues deserve “discussion, debates, and reforms”—and attention from journalists.
    Fishman’s article was also ignorant of the realities of military service. Those of us who serve in the military are often lauded as heroes. Civilians need to understand that we may be heroes, but we are not saints. We are young people under a tremendous amount of stress. We face moral dilemmas that many civilians have never even contemplated hypothetically.
    Civil society honors military service partly because of the sacrifice it entails. Lengthy and repeated deployments stress our closest relationships with family and friends. The realities, traumas, and stresses of military life take an emotional toll. This emotional battle is part of the sacrifice that we honor. That any young soldier might wrestle with his or her experiences in the military, or with his or her identity beyond military life, should never be wielded as a weapon against them.
    If PFC Bradley Manning did what he is accused of, he is a hero of mine; not because he’s perfect or because he never struggled with personal or family relationships—most of us do—but because in the midst of it all he had the courage to act on his conscience.

    An unlikely hero? No doubt. In the as-yet unauthenticated chatlogs, Manning recognizes that status as a gay, soon-to-be transgender atheist unsuits him thoroughly to be a poster-child for the cause of transparent government: “[I’]m way way way too easy to marginalize[.]”
    And yet that is just what he has become all over the world: a poster child for the cause of honest dealing, patriotic dissent, and the right to know what one’s government is doing. He is a global icon and source of inspiration. Bradley Manning solidarity groups are all over the world. A Germany radical group has been vandalizing the national railroads, calling for the pullout of German troops from Afghanistan—and for the release of Bradley Manning. (WikiLeaks, by the way, has condemned these acts of sabotage.) Larbi Sadiki, a Tunisian-born sociologist who teaches in the UK, tells me that Manning will surely be remembered as a great man of conscience, a liberator of valuable knowledge. “I don’t want to exaggerate his importance, but the story of the Tunisian revolution really cannot be told without his contribution of those State Department cables.” Tony Jean-Thenor, leader of a Haitian grassroots community group in South Florida, says that “Manning will never die anymore; he’ll be alive for generations for what he did to help not only Haitians but oppressed people all over the world. History will exonerate him.”
    Brig regulations bar anyone who didn’t have some prior relationship with Manning from coming to visit him in person: the scribblers and camera crews have been kept at bay. Manning’s lawyer has apparently advised his client to keep his mouth shut before the court martial, in the interests of strategic prudence. The UN special rapporteur continues to be denied unsupervised access, as required by the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the United States in 1994. Even so, Bradley Manning has never been more connected to the world. According to his lawyer, Manning gets hundreds of letters from all over the world every week, for which the prisoner is most grateful.
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