By David Walsh 23 August 2013
US Army Private Bradley Manning, who helped bring to light innumerable crimes of the American government and armed forces, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison Wednesday, a sentence without precedent for the “crime” of whistle-blowing.
At a press conference the same day, Manning’s attorney, David Coombes, read aloud an open letter from the 25-year-old army private to President Barack Obama. The statement will be included in a request to the Secretary of the Army asking Obama to pardon Manning or commute his sentence to time already served.
The letter is an honest, powerful document, which outlines Manning’s motives for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents. It is unlike the stage-managed “confession” that Manning was obliged to give before his military tribunal in Ft. Meade, Maryland on August 14, during which he apologized for his actions.
In his letter to Obama, Manning first explains that the decision to release the incriminating material was “made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in.” He adds that he agreed at first with the methods adopted by US authorities following 9/11. Not until Manning was deployed to Iraq and began “reading secret military reports on a daily basis” did he start “to question the morality of what we were doing.”
[pullquote] On August 20, Obama Department of Justice officials filed court papers in response to Saleh’s lawsuit, arguing that Bush, Cheney and the others should be granted immunity on the grounds that they “were each acting within the scope of their federal office or employment at the time of the incidents” out of which the counts in the complaint arose. [/pullquote]
The Army private notes that the US military “consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan.” When American forces killed “innocent civilians … instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.”
Manning lists other crimes: “We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.”
[pullquote] Official America long ago betrayed and repudiated those principles, and presides over a nation where the rich own or steal everything they can get their hands on and the US military goes to war everywhere to protect the interests of that tiny elite. [/pullquote]
The young whistleblower compares the “morally questionable acts” committed in Iraq and Afghanistan to other “dark moments” in US history: “the Trail of Tears [the forced relocation of Native Americans in the 1830s], the Dred Scott [pro-slavery] decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps—to mention a few.” He adds that he is confident “that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.”
Manning cites the comment of the late Howard Zinn, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
He concludes his letter to Obama by noting that if his request for a pardon is denied, “I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”
The US government, the Pentagon and the American media have done everything in their power to stigmatize Manning, to smear and degrade him in the eyes of the public. It must be said, however, that in the directness with which he approaches the issues, in his disgust for the crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan and in his courage, Manning bears a far, far greater resemblance to the overwhelming majority of the American people than do the officials who rule in its name.
Manning, in fact, advances views and sentiments held by countless millions in the US, including a sincere devotion to the principles enunciated by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address [“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”]
Official America long ago betrayed and repudiated those principles, and presides over a nation where the rich own or steal everything they can get their hands on and the US military goes to war everywhere to protect the interests of that tiny elite.
In official Washington, Manning’s letter will fall on deaf and, indeed, hostile ears. Barack Obama, elected in 2008 as the candidate of “change” and the political beneficiary of the accumulated hatred of masses of people for the Bush-Cheney administration, has shown himself to be the implacable defender of American capitalist interests and the implacable foe of the working class and its elementary democratic rights.
As Obama’s angry response to the actions of former NSA employee Edward Snowden has revealed, hardly anything outrages the intelligence-bureaucrat in the White House more than the exposure of the American state’s “national security” secrets.
With typical brutality and indifference, the White House, according to the Associated Press, indicated Manning’s request would be considered “like any other application.” The AP continues, “However, a pardon seems unlikely. Manning’s case was part of an unprecedented string of prosecutions brought by the U.S. government in a crackdown on security breaches. The Obama administration has charged seven people with leaking to the media; only three people were prosecuted under all previous presidents combined.”
Underscoring the degree to which the illegal wars and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are the consensus policy of the US ruling elite, Obama’s Department of Justice went to federal court in San Francisco the day before Manning’s sentencing in defense of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others who are being sued by an Iraqi woman for violating international law.
Sundus Shaker Saleh, a single mother of three now living in Jordan, is the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit targeting six key members of the previous administration: Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz.
The lawsuit alleges that the Bush administration officials “broke the law in conspiring and committing the crime of aggression against the people of Iraq.” It further charges that the defendants “planned the war against Iraq as early as 1998; manipulated the United States public to support the war by scaring them with images of ‘mushroom clouds’ and conflating the Hussein regime with al-Qaeda; and broke international law by commencing the invasion without proper legal authorization.”
Furthermore, Saleh’s lawsuit notes, “More than sixty years ago, American prosecutors in Nuremberg, Germany convicted Nazi leaders of the crimes of conspiring and waging wars of aggression. They found the Nazis guilty of planning and waging wars that had no basis in law and which killed millions of innocents.”
The plaintiff “was an innocent civilian victim and of the Iraq War. She seeks justice under the Nuremberg principles and United States law for the damages she and others like her suffered because of Defendants’ premeditated plan to invade Iraq.”
Saleh’s complaint makes a critical point the WSWS has often referred to, that the chief crime prosecuted against the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials “was the crime of aggression: engaging in a premeditated war without lawful reason.” [Emphasis in the original.] It cites the comment of chief counsel for the United States at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson: “Any resort to war—to any kind of a war— is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property.” [Again, emphasis in the original.]
The complaint goes on to explain, quite correctly, how (a) “Once in power, the defendants use 9/11 as cover to plan their aggressive war against Iraq,” (b) “Defendants execute a plan to scare the American public so that they can invade Iraq” and, finally, (c) “Defendants commit the crime of aggression against Iraq.”
The legal document creates a class of “Iraq Civilian Victims,” noting that “it is likely that hundreds of thousands or even millions of Iraqis may have been subject to damages as a result of Defendants’ actions.”
The lawsuit, which accurately and articulately sums up the aggressive, criminal character of the US intervention in Iraq has no hope of succeeding in an American court, where the legal system, in every previous challenge to the Iraq war policy, has exonerated US officials.
On August 20, Obama Department of Justice officials filed court papers in response to Saleh’s lawsuit, arguing that Bush, Cheney and the others should be granted immunity on the grounds that they “were each acting within the scope of their federal office or employment at the time of the incidents” out of which the counts in the complaint arose.
In other words, in the true spirit of the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, they were simply ‘doing their jobs.’ In fact, of course, they were—they were performing as the obedient servants of the American corporate-financial elite.
On August 20, the Obama administration went to court to shield the perpetrators of war crimes in Iraq. On August 21, American authorities handed down a savage sentence to an individual who helped expose certain of those crimes. Things could hardly be clearer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
‘Limited But Persuasive’ Evidence – Syria, Sarin, Libya, Lies
By David Edwards, Media Lens
ComRes poll supported by Media Lens interviewed 2,021 British adults, asking:
- Iraqi dead child. Just put it on Mr. Bush’s tab, a major war criminal the American media and the Democrats are busily rehabilitating.
An astonishing 44% of respondents estimated that less than 5,000 Iraqis had died since 2003. 59% believed that fewer than 10,000 had died. Just 2% put the toll in excess of one million, the likely correct estimate. In October 2006, just three years into the war, the Lancet medical journal reported ‘about 655,000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2.5% of the population in the study area’. In 2007, an Associated Press poll also asked the US public to estimate the Iraqi civilian death toll from the war. 52% of respondents believed that fewer than 10,000 Iraqis had died.Noam Chomsky commented on the latest findings:‘Pretty shocking. I’m sure you’ve seen Sut Jhally’s study of estimates of Vietnam war deaths at the elite university where he teaches. Median 100,000, about 5% of the official figure, probably 2% of the actual figure. Astonishing – unless one bears in mind that for the US at least, many people don’t even have a clue where France is. Noam’ (Email to Media Lens, June 1, 2013. See: Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis, & Michael Morgan, The Gulf War: A Study of the Media, Public Opinion, & Public Knowledge, Department of Communications, U. Mass. Amherst, 1991)[pullquote] ‘It may be that most British people do not care what results arise from the actions of their leaders and the work of their tax money. Alternatively, it also could be that the British and US Governments have actively and aggressively worked to discredit sources and confuse death toll estimates in hopes of keeping the public from unifying and galvanizing around a common narrative.’ —Les Roberts, Lead Author, The Lancet Report [/pullquote]
Alex Thomson, chief correspondent at Channel 4 News, has so far provided the only corporate media discussion of the poll. He perceived ‘questions for us on the media that after so much time, effort and money, the public perception of bloodshed remains stubbornly, wildly, wrong’.In fact the poll was simply ignored by both print and broadcast media. Our search of the Lexis media database found no mention in any UK newspaper, despite the fact that ComRes polls are deemed highly credible and frequently reported in the press.Although we gave Thomson the chance to scoop the poll, he chose to publish it on his blog viewed by a small number of people on the Channel 4 website. Findings which Thomson found ‘so staggeringly, mind-blowingly at odds with reality’ that they left him ‘speechless’ apparently did not merit a TV audience.
Les Roberts, lead author of the 2004 Lancet study and co-author of the 2006 study, also responded:
‘This March, a review of death toll estimates by Burkle and Garfield was published in the Lancet in an issue commemorating the 10th anniversary of the invasion. They reviewed 11 studies of data sources ranging from passive tallies of government and newspaper reports to careful randomized household surveys, and concluded that something in the ballpark of half a million Iraqi civilians have died. The various sources include a wide variation of current estimates, from one-hundred thousand plus to a million.’
Roberts said of the latest poll:
‘It may be that most British people do not care what results arise from the actions of their leaders and the work of their tax money. Alternatively, it also could be that the British and US Governments have actively and aggressively worked to discredit sources and confuse death toll estimates in hopes of keeping the public from unifying and galvanizing around a common narrative.’ (Email to Media Lens, June 12, 2013. You can see Roberts’ comments in full here)
Indeed, the public’s ignorance of the cost paid by the people of Iraq is no accident. Despite privately considering the 2006 Lancet study ‘close to best practice’ and ‘robust’ the British government immediately set about destroying the credibility of the findings of both the 2004 and 2006 Lancet studies. Professor Brian Rappert of the University of Exeter reported that government ‘deliberations were geared in a particular direction – towards finding grounds for rejecting the [2004] Lancet study without any evidence of countervailing efforts by government officials to produce or endorse alternative other studies or data’.
Unsurprisingly, the same political executives who had fabricated the case for war on Iraq sought to fabricate reasons for ignoring peer-reviewed science exposing the costs of their great crime. More surprising, one might think, is the long-standing media enthusiasm for these fabrications. The corporate media were happy to swallow the UK government’s alleged ‘grounds for rejecting’ the Lancet studies to the extent that a recent Guardian news piece claimed that the invasion had led to the deaths of ‘tens of thousands of Iraqis’.
Syria – Dropping Del Ponte
A natural counterpart to the burying of evidence of ‘our’ embarrassing crimes is the hyping of the crimes of official enemies.
Thus, the media would have us believe that as many, or more, people have died in Syria during two years of war than have died in ten years of mass killing in Iraq (the favoured media figure is around 100,000 Iraqis killed). The Times reports ‘as many as 94,000 deaths’ in Syria. (Anthony Loyd, ‘War in Syria has plumbed new depths of barbarity, says UN,’ The Times, June 5, 2013)
Reuters reports:
‘The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights [SOHR], an opposition group, said on Tuesday that at least 94,000 people have been killed but the death toll is likely to be as high as 120,000.’
Figures supplied by SOHR, an organisation openly biased in favour of the Syrian ‘rebels’ and Western intervention is presented as sober fact by one of the world’s leading news agencies. No concerns here about methodology, sample sizes, ‘main street bias’ and other alleged concerns thrown at the Lancet studies by critics. According to Reuters itself, SOHR consists of a single individual, Rami Abdulrahman, the owner of a clothes shop, who works from his ‘two bedroom terraced home in Coventry’.
As we noted last month, clearly inspired by the example of Iraq, Western governments and media have bombarded the public with claims of Syrian government use of chemical weapons. In April, the Independent’s Robert Fisk judged the claims ‘a load of old cobblers’.
The state-media propaganda campaign was rudely interrupted on May 6 by former Swiss attorney-general Carla Del Ponte, speaking for the United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria. Del Ponte said, ‘there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated. This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities’.
She added:
‘We have no, no indication at all that the Syrian government have used chemical weapons.’
Lexis finds 15 national UK newspaper articles mentioning Del Ponte’s claims since May 6. There has been one mention since the initial coverage (May 6-8) on May 11, more than one month ago. In other words, this is a good example of the way an unwelcome event is covered by the media but not retained as an integral part of the story.
On May 30, local Turkish media and RT News also reported that Syrian ‘rebels’ had been caught in a sarin gas bomb plot:
‘Turkish security forces found a 2kg cylinder with sarin gas after searching the homes of Syrian militants from the Al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front who were previously detained, Turkish media reports. The gas was reportedly going to be used in a bomb.’
This was another badly ‘off-message’ story that was again given minimal coverage, not pursued and instantly buried. Lexis records no UK newspaper mentions. A senior journalist told us privately that he and his colleagues felt the story was ‘right’ but that the ‘Turks are closing [it] down.’ (Email to Media Lens, June 7, 2013)
Last week, yet more unsubstantiated claims of possible Syrian government use of sarin generated a front page BBC report with the remarkable headline:
‘World “must act” Over Syria Weapons’
And yet a BBC article indicated the lack of certainty:
‘There is no doubt Syria’s government has used sarin during the country’s crisis, says France’s foreign minister… But he did not specify where or when the agent had been deployed; the White House has said more proof was needed.’
A UK government statement observed merely: ‘There is a growing body of limited but persuasive information showing that the regime used – and continues to use – chemical weapons.’
Readers will recall that intelligence indicating the existence of Iraqi WMD was also said to have been ‘limited but persuasive’.
As Peter Hitchens notes in the Daily Mail, UK government policy is being ‘disgracefully egged on by a BBC that has lost all sense of impartiality’.
The Guardian quoted ‘a senior British official’:
‘Are we confident in our means of collection, and are we confident that it points to the regime’s use of sarin? Yes.’
Is the case closed, then? The official added: ‘Can we prove it with 100% certainty? Probably not.’
The Guardian also quoted ‘A senior UK official’ who said it ‘appeared possible that Syrian army commanders had been given the green light by the regime to use sarin in small quantities’. ‘Possible’, maybe, but the Guardian failed to explain why anyone would trust ‘a senior UK official’ to comment honestly on Syria, or why anyone would trust an anonymous UK official after Iraq.
Adding to the confusion, the Guardian quoted Paulo Pinheiro, who chairs a UN commission on human rights abuses in Syria. According to Pinheiro it had ‘not been possible, on the evidence available, to determine the precise chemical agents used, their delivery systems or the perpetrator’.
Jonathan Marcus, BBC diplomatic correspondent, wrote:
‘This is potentially a game changer: The French government now believes not only that the nerve agent sarin has been used in Syria, but that it was deployed by “the regime and its accomplices”.’
In a recent interview, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald commented:
‘I approach my journalism as a litigator. People say things, you assume they are lying, and dig for documents to prove it.’
Perhaps the BBC’s Marcus could take a leaf from Greenwald’s book of journalism and dig for evidence to show that the French government is lying when it says it ‘believes’ that sarin has been used by the Syrian enemy. After all, the US, UK and French governments also ‘believed‘ Iraq was a ‘serious and current’ threat to the world.
Far less gung-ho than the relentlessly warmongering BBC, a Telegraph headline read: ‘US unmoved by French evidence of sarin use in Syria.’
Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, said: ‘I have not seen that evidence that they said that they had and I have not talked to any of our intelligence people about it.’
The US officials’ comments ‘appeared to expose a growing a widening gap between the US and France over how to respond to Syria’s two-year civil war,’ the Telegraph noted.
Libya – Slouching Towards Truth
If the record of government and media lying on Iraq fails to inspire scepticism in regard to claims made about Syria, then we might also consider the example of the Western war on Libya from March-October, 2011.
In his excellent book, Slouching Towards Sirte, Maximilian Forte of Concordia University, Montreal, recalls President Obama’s March 28, 2011 justification for Nato’s military intervention in Libya that had begun on March 19:
‘If we waited one more day, Benghazi… could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’ (Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte – NATO’s War on Libya and Africa, Baraka Books, digital version, 2012, p.661)
But when French jets bombed Libyan government forces retreating from Benghazi, they attacked a column of 14 tanks, 20 armoured personnel carriers, some trucks and ambulances. Forte comments:
‘That column clearly could have neither destroyed nor occupied Benghazi, a city of nearly 700,000 people… To date no evidence has been furnished that shows Benghazi would have witnessed the loss of “tens of thousands of lives”.’ (Forte, pp.662-663)
Professor Alan J. Kuperman, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, observed:
‘The best evidence that Khadafy did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured either fully or partially — including Zawiya, Misurata, and Ajdabiya, which together have a population greater than Benghazi.
‘Libyan forces did kill hundreds as they regained control of cities. Collateral damage is inevitable in counter-insurgency. And strict laws of war may have been exceeded.
‘But Khadafy’s acts were a far cry from Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Bosnia, and other killing fields. Libya’s air force, prior to imposition of a UN-authorized no-fly zone, targeted rebel positions, not civilian concentrations. Despite ubiquitous cellphones equipped with cameras and video, there is no graphic evidence of deliberate massacre. Images abound of victims killed or wounded in crossfire — each one a tragedy — but that is urban warfare, not genocide.
‘Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The “no mercy” warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those “who throw their weapons away.” Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight “to the bitter end.”‘
On February 23, 2011, just days into the Libyan uprising, Amnesty International sparked a media frenzy when it began condemning Libyan government actions, noting ‘persistent reports of mercenaries being brought in from African countries by the Libyan leader to violently suppress the protests against him’.
A few days later, Human Rights Watch reported that they had ‘seen no evidence of mercenaries being used in eastern Libya. This contradicts widespread earlier reports in the international media that African soldiers had been flown in to fight rebels in the region as Muammar Gaddafi sought to keep control’.
Genevieve Garrigos, president of Amnesty International France, later commented:
‘Today we have to admit that we have no evidence that Gaddafi employed mercenary forces… we have no sign nor evidence to corroborate these rumours.’ (Forte, p.685)
Garrigos repeated that Amnesty’s investigators never found any ‘mercenaries,’ agreeing that their existence was a ‘legend’ spread by the mass media.
Forte describes ‘the revolving door between Amnesty International-USA and the US State department’. In November 2011, Amnesty International-USA appointed Suzanne Nossel as its executive director. From August 2009 to November 2011, Nossel had been the US State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of International Organisation Affairs.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, caused more outrage when he told the world’s media that there was ‘evidence’ that Gaddafi had distributed Viagra to his troops in order ‘to enhance the possibility to rape’ and that Gaddafi had ordered mass rape. Moreno-Ocampo insisted:
‘We are getting information that Qaddafi himself decided to rape’ and that ‘we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government’.
US Ambassador Susan Rice also asserted that Gaddafi was supplying his troops with Viagra to encourage mass rape. No evidence was supplied.
Forte notes that US military and intelligence sources quickly contradicted Rice, telling NBC News that ‘there is no evidence that Libyan military forces are being given Viagra and engaging in systematic rape against women in rebel areas’.
Cherif Bassiouni, who led a UN human rights inquiry into the situation in Libya, suggested that the Viagra and mass rape claim was the product of ‘massive hysteria’. Bassiouni’s team ‘uncovered only four alleged cases’ of rape and sexual abuse.
As Forte writes with bitter irony, the propaganda surrounding the Libyan war demands ‘vigilance and scepticism in the face of the heady claims of our own inherent goodness which can only find its highest expression in the form of aerial bombardment’. (Forte, pp.69-70)
Alas, vigilance and scepticism are in short supply within the corporate media. |
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‘Limited But Persuasive’ Evidence – Syria, Sarin, Libya, Lies
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The second Media Lens book, ‘NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press. John Pilger writes of the book:
“Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth.” Find it in the Media Lens Bookshop
In September 2012, Zero Books published ‘Why Are We The Good Guys?’ by David Cromwell. Mark Curtis, author of ‘Web of Deceit’ and ‘Unpeople’, says:
‘This book is truly essential reading, focusing on one of the key issues, if not THE issue, of our age: how to recognise the deep, everyday brainwashing to which we are subjected, and how to escape from it. This book brilliantly exposes the extent of media disinformation, and does so in a compelling and engaging way.’