Most Popular Choices
Share on Facebook 19 Printer Friendly Page More Sharing
General News    H3'ed 6/11/13

Chase Madar: Bradley Manning vs. SEAL Team 6

By       (Page 1 of 3 pages)   1 comment
Follow Me on Twitter     Message Tom Engelhardt
Become a Fan
  (29 fans)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

 

Okay, give them this much: their bloodlust stops just short of the execution chamber door. The military prosecutors of the case against Bradley Manning, assumedly with the support of the Obama administration, have brought the virulent charge of "aiding the enemy" against the Army private who leaked state secrets.  Yet they claim to have magnanimously taken the death penalty off the table.  All they want to do is lock Manning up and throw away the key because, so they claim, he did nothing short of personally lend a hand to archfiend Osama bin Laden.  This echoes the charge repeatedly made by top U.S. officials that he and WikiLeaks have "blood on their hands" for releasing a trove of military and State Department documents.

We're talking about the very officials who planned and oversaw Washington's wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the backlands of the planet and who have searched their own hands in vain for any signs of blood.  (None at all, they don't hesitate to assure us.)  Among them are those, military and civilian, who set up our torture prisons at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan, are ultimately responsible for the perversions of Abu Ghraib, and oversaw kidnappings off the streets of global cities.  These are the folks whose Air Force blew away at least six wedding parties in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose drones have killed hundreds, if not thousands of civilians, and whose special operations forces recently seem to have been involved in the torture, murder, and secret burial of Afghan civilians.  I could go on, but why bother since it was all done "legally," which means they can retire to corporate boards of their choice, rake in money from speeches, and write their memoirs, while Manning, whose motive (to judge by the online conversations he had) was to end the bloodletting, reveal information about American crimes, and to shut down our wars will have no memoir to write, no life to live.   It can't get worse than that, can it?

Given what we now know about the U.S. military's unwillingness to pursue prosecutions of rape in its own ranks, its eagerness to pursue Manning to the edge of the grave should be considered striking.  We're talking about a national security state that -- as recent revelations have made clear -- can imagine just about no boundaries when it comes to surveilling its own population and none whatsoever when it comes to protecting its own actions from the eyes of the public.  In that sense, Manning truly crossed a red line.  Rape?  A mere nothing compared to his crime.  After all, he was aiding the most dangerous enemy of all: not Osama bin Laden, but Americans who want to breach the ever-expanding secrecy of the National Security Complex.

As TomDispatch regular Chase Madar (covering the Manning trial as a blogger for the Nation) suggests today, right now there seem to be few crimes more dangerous than shining a light on the secret workings of the U.S. government and its military.  Admittedly, President Obama entered the Oval Office promising on Day One to let the "sunshine" in on government operations.  Manning fulfilled the president's promise in the only way a 22-year-old who had seen terrible things in Iraq could imagine doing.  Maybe it wasn't elegant by the president's high standards, but it was effective.  He deserves something better than the worst the U.S. military and Washington can throw at him.  He deserves a life, and if that life in the end proves as valuable as it's been so far, a memoir. Tom

How Dystopian Secrecy Contributes to Clueless Wars
Bradley Manning Has Done More for U.S. Security than SEAL Team 6 
By Chase Madar

The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' source inside the U.S. Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden.  The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden's laptop.  That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had internet access like two billion other earthlings, but that Manning has "aided the enemy," a capital offense.

Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch gay man facing 22 charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in U.S. history.

But let's be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for U.S. national security than SEAL Team 6.

The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not operational) leader of al-Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to incarnate not just al-Qaeda but all national security threats.  This was true despite the fact that, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has been able to do remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general.  (The deadliest attack in a Western nation since 9/11, the 2004 Atocha bombing in Madrid, was not committed by bin Laden's organization, though white-shoe foreign policy magazines and think tanks routinely get this wrong, "al-Qaeda" being such a handy/sloppy metonym for all terrorism.)

Al-Qaeda remains a simmering menace, but as an organization hardly the greatest threat to the United States.  In fact, if you measure national security in blood and money, as many of us still do, by far the greatest threat to the United States over the past dozen years has been our own clueless foreign policy.

The Wages of Cluelessness Is Death

Look at the numbers.  The attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 3,000 people, a large-scale atrocity by any definition.  Still, roughly double that number of American military personnel have been killed in Washington's invasion and occupation of Iraq and its no-end-in-sight war in Afghanistan.  Add in private military contractors who have died in both war zones, along with recently discharged veterans who have committed suicide, and the figure triples.  The number of seriously wounded in both wars is cautiously estimated at 50,000.   And if you dare to add in as well the number of Iraqis, Afghans, and foreign coalition personnel killed in both wars, the death toll reaches at least a hundred 9/11s and probably more.

Did these people die to make America safer?  Don't insult our intelligence.  Virtually no one thinks the Iraq War has made the U.S. more secure, though many believe the war created new threats.  After all, the Iraq we liberated is now in danger of collapsing into another bitter, bloody civil war, is a close ally of Iran, and sells the preponderance of its oil to China.  Over the years, the drain on the U.S. treasury for all of this will be at least several trillion dollars.  As for Afghanistan, after the disruption of al-Qaeda camps, accomplished 10 years ago, it is difficult to see how the ongoing pacification campaign there and the CIA drone war across the border in Pakistan's tribal areas have enhanced the security of the U.S. in any significant way.  Both wars of occupation were ghastly strategic choices that have killed hundreds of thousands, wounded many more, sent millions into exile, and destabilized what Washington, in good times, used to call "the arc of instability."

Why have our strategic choices been so disastrous?  In large part because they have been militantly clueless.  Starved of important information, both the media and public opinion were putty in the hands the Bush administration and its neocon followers as they dreamt up and then put into action their geopolitical fantasies.  It has since become fashion for politicians who supported the war to blame the Iraq debacle on "bad intelligence." But as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar reminds us, the carefully cherry-picked "Intel" about Saddam Hussein's WMD program was really never the issue.  After all, the CIA's classified intelligence estimate on Iraq argued that, even if that country's ruler Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction (which he didn't), he would never use them and was therefore not a threat.

Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003, was one of the few people with access to that CIA report who bothered to take the time to read it.  Initially keen on the idea of invading Iraq, he changed his mind and voted against the invasion.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).

Must Read 1   Interesting 1   Valuable 1  
Rate It | View Ratings

Tom Engelhardt Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

Go To Commenting
The views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Writers Guidelines

 
Contact AuthorContact Author Contact EditorContact Editor Author PageView Authors' Articles
Support OpEdNews

OpEdNews depends upon can't survive without your help.

If you value this article and the work of OpEdNews, please either Donate or Purchase a premium membership.

STAY IN THE KNOW
If you've enjoyed this, sign up for our daily or weekly newsletter to get lots of great progressive content.
Daily Weekly     OpEd News Newsletter
Name
Email
   (Opens new browser window)
 

Most Popular Articles by this Author:     (View All Most Popular Articles by this Author)

Tomgram: Nick Turse, Uncovering the Military's Secret Military

Tomgram: Rajan Menon, A War for the Record Books

Noam Chomsky: A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age?

Andy Kroll: Flat-Lining the Middle Class

Christian Parenti: Big Storms Require Big Government

Noam Chomsky, Who Owns the World?

To View Comments or Join the Conversation:

Tell A Friend