"Meanwhile, Dick Cheney and his staff, who tried as hard as they could to out Valerie Plame as a CIA field officer working against Iran’s nuclear program, in which they indirectly succeeded, went mostly unpunished. Plame’s dummy company and everyone ever associated with it were burned. And of course almost none of the US war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan have ever been punished. Unlike Mylai, Americans mostly never heard of Haditha. And while Manning is jailed for letting us read the ambassadors’ email, the NSA is allowed to spy on us and to read ours and to lie to the FISA judges about it with impunity. I of course wish Manning had been more selective in the leaking so that only crimes were revealed. It is also a matter of regret that at some point Wikileaks broke with its media partners and put up the unscrubbed documents, which mention the names of people to whom the US embassies were talking and who provided them with sensitive information. That irresponsible info-dump, however, is on Wikileaks and not on Manning. Manning was tortured for nearly a year, and that should have been sentence enough. Without him, we might not even know about the Panopticon of total suveillance in which we are living. Manning helped spark a new civil rights movement. He deserves Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize in a way the president does not."
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 09:26:44 +0000
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