Sickening Injustice
The pretrial Article 32 hearing for Bradley Manning ended. He’ll most certainly receive a court marshal. I think it’s fair to say he’ll most likely receive life in prison. He could technically get the death penalty. There’s still a large question remaining, however: how exactly did his alleged leak of hundreds of thousands of secret documents, logs and at least one video, all passed to WikiLeaks, directly harm United States national security?
What’s amazing about the cables that were leaked is the kind of picture they paint of our foreign policy. Nothing is left out. You see the good as well as the bad. You’ll see members of our government conducting themselves well in their relations with foreign governments and individuals. You’ll see members of our government truly doing their job. You’ll see some bad calls and bad decisions, ones that probably weren’t the best choice to make. You’ll also see the ugly as well as the illegal.
Yes, illegal. But who is conducting illegal operations? Surely not high-ranking members of our government, right? Certainly no one like Hillary Clinton:
Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.
A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.
It called for detailed biometric information ”on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders” as well as intelligence on Ban’s “management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat”. A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi said biometric data included DNA, fingerprints and iris scans.
Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures and “biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives”.
The secret “national human intelligence collection directive” was sent to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow.
The operation targeted at the UN appears to have involved all of Washington’s main intelligence agencies. The CIA’s clandestine service, the US Secret Service and the FBI were included in the “reporting and collection needs” cable alongside the state department under the heading “collection requirements and tasking”.
Yes, Hillary Clinton signed off on that. Oh, and by the way, everything there is illegal. Here’s the cable so you can see for yourself. I think I don’t have to mention that if there’s one cable that implicates Hillary Clinton on illegal deeds there’s certainly more cables implicating additional members of our government on illegal deeds as well.
So Bradley Manning allegedly leaks cables that show the truth behind our government’s foreign policy, in all of it’s glory, the good with the bad and the ugly with the illegal. In allegedly doing that, he’s apparently a criminal who deserves death, if not life in prison. But the people implicated in the cables? The people that the cables show were conducting illegal activity? The people like Hillary Clinton? Nothing. Nothing has happened. Nothing will happen.
I hope we wake up here as a people. If this happens, if Bradley Manning goes to jail or gets killed and nothing happens to our government officials who committed crimes, and we essentially just yawn at the whole thing, I can’t even imagine what the future holds for us as a nation and as a people. Wake up, everyone. This is really happening.
Free Bradley.
