Today, the sentencing phase of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning’s court-martial begins: Manning faces up to a maximum 136 years in prison. The sentencing follows Manning’s conviction yesterday by a military court (justice is to military court as generosity is to selfishness) on nineteen of twenty counts.
"Whistle Blower" by Ben Sanders. Credit: Ben Sanders/National Accountant Magazine, Australia.
Yet what Manning did was to reveal information that should have been available to all Americans in order for us to know the illegal acts of our government, including in one instance the videotape of American military personnel laughing as they shot down innocent civilians who were coming to take away the bodies of others that these same military men had just killed. Instead of prosecuting the military murderers, the Obama administration is prosecuting the courageous hero who at huge personal risk revealed this information to the rest of us.
This past Sunday the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun purchased a small ad in the New York Times calling upon President Obama to stop prosecuting whistle-blowers. It was paid for by donors to the ad. Now that Manning is facing sentencing, you might want to add your name, donate so we can send an even larger ad to other media, or at least just read the ad. You can do so at: tikkun.org/STOP
Edward Snowden was similarly courageous in revealing information that proved that the NSA is spying on millions of Americans, and that the denial by the head of the NSA about this under oath to a Congressional Committee was perjury. There is no plausible reading of the U.S. Constitution that would empower the U.S. government to spy on its citizens or kill innocent civilians abroad – so both Manning and Snowden are true American heroes, while the Obama administration and its supporters are destroying American life and liberty supposedly in order to save it (bringing to mind the general directing the war in Vietnam, who said of a suspected Viet Cong hideout in a village, “we destroyed the village in order to save it”).
Too many Americans have bought into the “national security” excuse that the Bush and now the Obama administration use to cover one illegal and civil/human rights-destroying act after another. Many of us who have never done anything to subvert our government may find ourselves being similarly accused, jailed, assaulted, or our passports withdrawn (as happened to Snowden without any judicial process) as future governments accelerate this war against the American people that Obama has (probably unintentionally, but nevertheless morally culpably) started. If you wish to preserve American freedom, you need to stand with our Network of Spiritual Progressives, not only by signing and donating to the ad, but also by joining our network.
Among the charges, Manning was found guilty of the theft of more than 700 U.S. Southern Command records, the possession of records pertaining to Afghanistan; the theft of State Department cables and the possession of classified Army documents.
Wikileaks called the conviction of Manning “a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism.”
“It is a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and must be reversed,” the group said in a statement released Tuesday. “It can never be that conveying true information to the public is ‘espionage.'”
We don’t agree with Wiki Leaks on this point. Leaking information on how to make atomic weapons or other weapons of mass destruction and the names of secret intelligence operatives should not be allowed and might reasonably be punished. But punishing someone who has revealed secrets about how our government is telling lies to the American people, or acting unconstitutionally, or engaging in acts of murder, is unacceptable. These whistle-blowers must be protected, honored, and rewarded!
Instead, by going after Snowden and Manning, the Obama administration is sending a message to all whistle-blowers: don’t tell the public what the government is doing wrong, lest you risk being severely punished, accused of being a traitor, and finding yourself hunted, jailed, and hurt in many ways. Don’t think that because you trust Obama, things will never get out of hand. The precedents now being set by the Obama administration will be used by future and potentially more fascistic presidential administrations and military commanders. We need to tell the administration that we unequivocally oppose its approach to these issues. So please sign the ad: tikkun.org/STOP
Code Pink has pointed out that Major General Buchanan still has the ability to reduce Manning’s sentence. Email him and/or call him (202-685-2900) now to say Manning should only be sentenced to time served.
But ultimately, it is President Obama who – as Commander in Chief of the Army (in the case of Manning) and president with the power to pardon (in the case of Snowden) – has the power to stop all this. That’s why it makes sense for you to sign the letter to Obama and to donate to get it put on other media in full form (it was very small in the New York Times). At least read the full letter, developed by Rabbi Arthur Green and me, and signed so far by several hundred people from around the world. It’s at tikkun.org/STOP. Stop this craziness!
When someone reveals a crime, they are a whistleblower deserving praise. They are not criminals to be prosecuted and persecuted and maligned…as our government, to my shame, is doing again and again. What is the “crime” and what should our attitude be to those who truly commit that crime as opposed to those who speak for transparency.
There are way to whistle blow crimes without doing it in the way Manning did. You seek legal assistance and protection fist and then go about revealing alleged crimes. Manning took a bunch of documents on the laps of a hacker.Manning a 3 year, going no where PFC was looking for his 5 minutes of fame
I know Lerner has never worn a uniform but even he can see that private soldiers can’t be allowed to make these decisions.
Sadly, this echoes the excuses all-level-and-ranks of Nazi soldiers later gave for their compliance in committing WWII atrocities……………and so many military crimes before that and since………how sad for us all……..everywhere…..
So what your saying Shira is that the American army is worse then the German army in WW2. How can you stand to live among us in this fascist state. . Perhaps you should hit the road
I was waiting for comparison to the Nazi Germany.It really did not take long to read it here. That is plain sad and….ignorant. if the US government were lie Nazi Germany, you would have been hauled off and gassed in a death camp. I have n fear of arrest for expressing myself here in the US. In fact there is no fear from anyone when making both right wing and left wing statements, We are not a country of storm troopers of Gestapo. There are western democracies tat have far more extensive surveillance programs than the NSA and I have never heard them labeled Nazis.The US has many many faults, but it is a free country.
Now I suggest you open a book about Nazi Germany, read it and come back here. Like many Jews of the post war generation, I have family that was lost in the Holocaust. Shame on you.
I have two points to make, one with regard to the analogy with Nazi Germany that has arisen in some of the comments, the other about the Lerner statement in his article about trusting President Obama.
On the analogy with Nazi Germany: In the twentieth century, the countries that became fascist (there were several, not just Germany — Spain and Italy come to mind) all did so as the result of some sort of relatively sudden change of direction, whether this was as the result of a civil war, as in Spain, an election, as in Germany, or a “March on Rome,” as in Italy.
But this is not the only way for fascism to achieve power. Fascism could also be the outcome of incremental changes. In other words, fascism can be the end result of a process. That, it seems to me, might be what is happening in the United States now.
It seems that we have not arrived at the end of whatever process we are now undergoing. But the trend does seem ominous. We still have rights, including that of free speech. Otherwise we could not be having this discussion. Nevertheless, free speech has been restricted. Thus, for example, demonstrators have been often placed by the police in so-called “free speech zones,” often at quite a distance from where they would have preferred to be demonstrating. Another tendency in this direction, about which many have made reference to, is self-censorship. If people are afraid to speak or write and therefore forgo the chance to do so, the effect is the same: their freedom of speech has been curtailed.
Other freedoms, such as the right to vote, or the rights of women, in an increasing number of states, have also been inhibited. In a similar vein, education for critical thinking has been eroded by the now-common practice of “teaching to the test.” There are other manifestations of this tendency, but I think I’ve made my point.
While we cannot necessarily predict with certainty whether the process we are now witnessing will continue until all our freedoms have been whittled away, the tendencies, as I said before, are ominous.
This brings me to my second point. Rabbi Lerner says, in his heart-felt article, that we shouldn’t “think that because you trust Obama, things will never get out of hand.” I think he is here referring to the future of an ongoing process such as what I have been discussing here. But about the president himself, I suggest that there is good reason to be skeptical about his veracity. There have been several articles recently, including in Tikkun itself, which have pointed out the many ways in which President Obama has contradicted candidate Obama.
While I know that campaign promises often seem made to be broken, the quantity and quality of these broken promises and the policies substituted for them (which, in many ways, are continuations of the Bush/Cheney policies or, even worse, authoritarian extensions of these same policies) make me wonder whether we ought now to trust what President Obama says at all.
I know that for many of us it is hard to give up the expectations that Mr. Obama brought with him when he assumed the presidency. But I think it would be well for us to reevaluate how we see Mr. Obama now in the light of these continued and continuous attacks on whistle-blowers, the use of drones to kill people without trial and the secrecy that the current administration has been practicing. Never mind future presidents; these manifestations do not bode well even for the current administration.
If we view things as in process, our continuing evaluation of the President must be contingent on how we see the process unfolding under his watch.
The comparison with Nazi Germany is juts wrong. What Gene leaves out is actual condistions that brought about the shift to Fascism. The US hardly fits the bill, but bith te extreme right an extreme left love to scream fascism and call everyone Nazis