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Bradley Manning Makes Statement
Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old U.S. Army soldier who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of internal memos about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been held by the government for two and a half years. On Thursday he pleaded guilty 10 of 22 charges brought against him, and now he has released an official statement. Here's an excerpt:
"On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by special link. ... I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to the Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying ‘It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information– perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day. After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday."
If any good come from this... Has it caused any measurable change in government policy? Or did it just cause tightening of their grip on classified data?
Read this by Harvard Law prof, Yochai Benkler:
The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112554#
Note, the espionage act doesn't apply only to people in the military.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This was a big factor in the Arab Spring. There is a chance of good things resulting from that (it will be years before we know).
Palm trees and 8
The quote about how the US is similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass really sums the situation up for me. As someone in Europe I see the US forcing their way into war after war to justify having a military that has grown out of all control. A country that uses torture as an interrogation technique should not consider itself civilized.
Only capital punishment fits in a case like this because there are two factors so serious that no lesser punishment is appropriate.
The first is that the offender gave greater weight to his conscience than to the power of his state. He disobeyed orders and statute. Any student of 20th century history will tell you that blind obedience is the glue that binds successful societies and engenders success, safety and justice.
The second is that the offender communicated with people so depraved that they openly engage in journalism, a pursuit that has the potential to inform taxpayers and voters such that they eventually become able to make rational choices and decisions, regardless of the wishes of their superiors.
This has to stop now, and any repetition or emulation be discouraged by the least ambiguous means available.
Memorable quotes for
Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/quotes
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
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"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000417/bio
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"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
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"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehous
Nerds shouldn't have groupthink.. that'd be a boring way to solve interesting problems.
I mean besides the obvious ones including Natalie Portman and Han Shot First, etc.
Although I'm sure someone has already written a dissertation somewhere on how Han shooting first is a nice allegory of Star Wars having a libertarian basis to the right to bear arms. In fact the whole story could be seen as the evil government's fight to keep a simple lightsaber out of the hands of the common folk. Of course there were many ways to cause violence - blasters, death stars, AT-AT stomping on people into the ice, AT-STs destroying indigenous species - but the outlawing of a lightsaber was the last straw before the people rebelled against too much authoritarian power.
So it sounds like the contents of blah.zip haven't been published and he can't state what they were without further charges? That sucks. I wonder if Daniel Domscheit Berg deleted that shit.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Then one of the said newspapers hired CmdrTaco. Taco was able to explode the zip file with gzip but then he refused to let others read the documents inside because the documents were not in an open format.
A dictator backed by US gets toppled by his own citizens. Typical response from US government is to support dictator to the last possible moment. If it does not help, US politicians with their mouths full of lies about "democracy and freedom" attempt to reinstall the old regime with another frontman. This scenario played well in Egypt. In Libya, US and EU did much worse things: old dictator has been removed and whole country has been pushed into permanent civil war. We don't hear nor see anything about it because of media blackout instated by fucking corporate media. Some 150 thousands of people died in Libya just in first year of this "bringing democracy" excercise - propably more than Lybia's old dictator killed in his entire career. And we still perceive ourselves as being "good" except that we are no better than nazis were. Just our warmongering elites learned that masquerading killing with crap about "democracy" and "freedom" is better than being explicit and grotesque as Hitler was. This is propably the greatest mass hipocrisy excercise in history...
"The hijackers were not acting on the behalf of the Saudi Government either directly or indirectly. The hijackers were outlaws, terrorists, that wanted not only to attack the United States but to overthrow the Saudi government as well."
You do realize that a big part of the reason for most of the hijackers themselves (ignoring Bin Laden's motives as an organizer) attacked the USA is probably because the hijackers felt the USA supported the Saudi government they thought was oppressive to themselves and had blighted their personal futures? There was an article in the New Yorker (I think) discussing this many years ago. That is why most of those specific people were so suggestible as to go along with it. Still, it's a complex topic, and it is hard to know for sure; a longer list of possibilities:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/whatwerethecausesof911/
See especially:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks
"Research on Suicide Terrorism; Robert Pape identified 315 incidents, all but 14 of which they classified as part of 18 different campaigns. These 18 shared two elements and all but one shared a third:[20] 1) A foreign occupation; 2) by a democracy; 3) of a different religion. Mia Bloom interviewed relatives and acquaintances of suicide terrorists. Her conclusions largely support Pape's, suggesting that it is much more difficult to get people to volunteer for a suicide mission without such a foreign occupation.[21]"
Or: ... what have you found out about why these men did what they did? What motivated them to do it?" The agents looked at each other, apparently not eager to be the one to have to say it. FBI Special Agent Fitzgerald stepped up to the plate and laid out the facts, "I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States." But this testimony was kept out of the 9/11 Commission Report and no recommendation was given to address the main motive for the 9/11 attacks."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/09/09/244452/-What-motivated-the-9-11-hijackers-to-attack-the-US
"The 9-11 Commission held its twelfth and final public hearing June 16-17, 2004, in Washington, DC. On June 16 the Commission heard from several of the federal government's top law enforcement and intelligence experts on al Qaeda and the 9-11 plot. It was at this hearing that the question "What motivated them to do it?" was finally asked. Lee Hamilton, vice chair of the 9/11 Commission said, "I'm interested in the question of motivation of these hijackers, and my question is really directed to the agents.
So, while people often say "they hate us because we are free", but it seems all too often the geopolitical reality is "they hate us because we fund their oppressors".
See also:
"International Terrorism: Image and Reality"
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm
The USA as a whole also does a lot of good in the world too, of course.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.