Chelsea Manning Will Be Free!

 

 "So what did Manning leak? Thousands of individual field reports form the Iraq and Afghan Wars, and they give us a mosaic portrait of two flailing pacification campaigns. They’re looking back at incidents that already happened—night raids gone wrong, checkpoint shootings of civilians, outposts built then abandoned—not planning documents for future military actions. These revelations are frequently referred to as “war crimes,” but technically they are mostly atrocities that happen to be permitted by the laws of armed conflict, which are much looser than most people imagine. The real function of the laws of war is to protect soldiers from legal liability, not to protect civilians in occupied countries. What really pushed Manning to leak was the awful things she witnessed as an Army intelligence officer deployed to Iraq. But, in fact, it was official US policy to condone torture and not interfere with it when practiced by local Iraqi authorities, as revealed by Fragmentary Order 242, leaked by Manning.

There are also about 250,000 diplomatic cables, and those are immensely informative about the goings on of US statecraft. We see Washington lobbying to keep the minimum wage down in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas; trying to spread our Big Pharma–friendly intellectual property regime to Europe; suppressing a German criminal investigation into the American kidnapping and rendition for torture of a German national that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. We should know about these things, they aren’t the kind of diplomacy that needs to be done in secret, though I can see why those involved would be ashamed of their actions."

read more by Greg Grandin and Chase Madar

Chelsea Manning Will Be Free! | The Nation