“God damn it, Kyle. All right, ha-ha-ha,
I hit ‘em…”
Today a military judge convicted
Bradley Manning of espionage while acquitting him of the “more serious” charge
of aiding the enemy. Manning, a twenty-five year old army private, had earlier released
documents that expose U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including video
footage of American soldiers gunning down Iraqi children. While these
incriminating documents were being published by Wikileaks, the military
retaliated by confining Manning to an eight-by-eight foot cage. This punishment
was meted out even before formal charges were filed against him, and would set
the tone of the Manning odyssey. Deprived of the legal right to a speedy trial,
he would wait three years before seeing his day in court. During this period of
Kafkaesque torment, he was assumed guilty before proven innocent, subjected to
treatment which both the dictates of international law and commonsense call
torture. This included eleven months of solitary confinement in a small, windowless
cell, as well as subjection to sleep-deprivation regimens and what CIA torture
handbooks call “self-inflicted punishment” – that is, being forced into
debilitating stress-positions for extended periods of time.
Having witnessed the great evil that lies
within America’s heart of darkness, Manning had decided to follow the demands
of his conscience, letting the world know what was really going on in Iraq and
Afghanistan under the new American mandarins. Graphic video-footage,
photographs and mountains of documents irrefutably proved what groups like
Human Rights Watch had long been saying, but what the government had long denied:
countless innocent people were being senselessly and, in many cases, gratuitously
murdered by American forces overseas. Having unmasked these crimes, Manning was
immediately subjected to them himself, becoming a victim of U.S. terrorism.
Like 10,000s of Iraqis imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prison, Camp Bucca and elsewhere,
he was subjected to psychological and corporeal torture, all under a sordid
veil of secrecy and (illegal) executive prerogative.
“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.”
Another soldier: “Nice.”
If it had been long understood that the
wars were justified with lies – the alleged presence of WMD and Saddam Hussein’s
supposed connection to al-Qaeda – the Wikileaks revelations made it crystal
clear that the actual prosecution of the wars was patently criminal. Again, the
illegality of the wars had long been confirmed. The concept of “preemptive war,”
i.e., the “Bush Doctrine” which the Iraq war was based on, is in practice
identical to a “war of aggression,” the main crime that the Nazi regime was
convicted of at the Nuremburg Trials. So again, the illegality of the war was
never in doubt. If George Bush leaves the country, for instance, he will have
to be careful since if apprehended by a foreign power he may be tried for war
crimes and/or crimes against humanity on the basis of international law. What
Manning did do, though, was provide unimpeachable evidence showing that the
content of these already illegal wars is itself criminal.
It is difficult to stress enough the
Kafkaesque character of Manning’s experience. Indeed, if Kafka had written a
story with as many legal mishaps, loopholes and aberrations of justice as
plague the handling of the Manning case, his story would have been ridiculed as
a boorish melodrama. After unveiling the truth, Manning was brutalized with
punitions that are outlawed under the Geneva Conventions, U.S. military law and
the U.N. Convention on Torture. Then he was told that the criminal organization
whose dirty deeds he had exposed – and which had subsequently tortured him – would
decide his “guilt” or “innocence.” That is to say, the criminals would decide
his guilt or innocence in exposing their own crimes. After exposing the crimes
of the military, he was to be judged
by a military tribunal. There was to
be no jury, no public scrutiny and no chance of appeal. Heck, he was not even
allowed to bring the documents to court that he had released – you know, the
reason he was being prosecuted in the first place. Their content, he was told,
was “irrelevant.” Despite their being “irrelevant,” they must have been
important; after all, he was eventually convicted of “espionage” because of
their “irrelevant” content.
A van comes to pick up the bodies of the
deceased and wounded. Overhead, a soldier looks at the computer screen before
requesting permission to “engage.” “Come on, let us shoot!”
What makes the charge of “espionage” so
interesting, however, is the fact that the law cited as the basis of this
charge is the Espionage Act of 1917. This law was passed by the Wilson administration
during WWI to quell any and all dissent against the war. Whether someone actually
committed a crime because of their opposition to the war was irrelevant; one
only had to express opposition to the war to be found guilty. Obviously, this
law tore the First Amendment to shreds. Under it, people were jailed simply for
sending letters to newspapers which criticized the war. Intellectuals and
activists like Eugene V. Debs, for example, were thrown into the slammer solely
for delivering speeches which were critical of the conflict – one which
virtually all historians now agree was a senseless, futile and willful orgy of
human carnage. One movie producer, Robert Goldstein, was even sued because he
promoted the movie The Spirit of ‘76
on the American Revolution. The government was afraid that the film’s patriotic
rendering of the conflict would stir up anti-British sentiment, now America’s
ally in arms. Rather tellingly, the court case was titled the United States vs.
The Spirit of ’76. There are some
things you just can’t make up. Today most historians and legal scholars view
the Espionage Act as a piece of legal sophistry, that is, a law based of
political expedience rather than sound jurisprudence. In any case, it is totally
unconstitutional.
That the charge of “espionage” is entirely
based on the Espionage Act of 1917 is, consequently, illuminating. The use of
this law is a startling admission of Manning’s innocence: he is guilty of
nothing other than his opposition to America’s illegal wars; and there are no other
grounds for convicting him of a crime other than this principled opposition. None
of the people who were charged of “espionage” during WWI were secretly disclosing
secrets to the enemy – you know, what “espionage” actually means. Instead, “espionage”
meant that they opposed the war and had the audacity to voice this conviction. This
peculiar interpretation of the word espionage is the same used in the
prosecution of Manning. In other words, he is guilty of nothing other than
opposing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the very law used to convict him
admits this explicitly.
“Oh yeah, look at that. Right through
the windshield! Ha-ha!”
And the trial of Bradley Manning stands
in stunning contrast to the absence of any trial against those who instigated
or prosecuted these two wars; those who committed the ultimate war crime of starting
two “aggressive wars.” If a policeman, for instance, kills someone whom he
suspects is armed and aiming to attack him, but this proves to be untrue, the
policeman is guilty of homicide. Bush and Cheney said that Saddam Hussein had
WMD and supported al-Qaeda, two allegations which turned out to be false. Yet
in acting on these allegations – ones which the government had drawn out of
whole cloth – over one-million Iraqis died and the country was plunged into unimaginable
chaos. If a public official like a policeman is to be held accountable for the
death of one person based on false grounds, then surely Bush and his cronies
should be held accountable for the deaths of over one-million people on grounds
that they cooked up – in other words, that they lied (or should we say perjured)
about.
A tank arrives at the scene. “I think
they just drove over a body.” Another solider asks, “Really?” Chuckling, he
replies, “Yeah!”
So if we were to write a synopsis of
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it might appear as follows. Both wars were
illegal from the start and justified by lies devised by people who had spent
the greater part lives studying the law and how to get around it. Those who
fabricated the lies came out of the conflicts scot free; one even built a
library for himself. The Iraq war ended after the illegality of the war had finally
been seared into the public consciousness and the truth had been unveiled by a
quiet, unassuming private who had not studied the law, but who instead followed
the demands of his conscience and simple human decency. For following the law
of his conscience and disclosing the truth he was tortured, savaged and
maligned by the same government and press which had sold the public the lies
that had started the war. The death of over one-million Iraqis and only God
knows how many Afghans were “irrelevant” they said. For he was guilty of a
greater crime, that of “espionage” – in other words, telling the truth. But
this was to be expected. After all, how were a government, press and citizenry
which had built their lives around lies to understand the value of truth? The
value of one-million human lives?
Two wounded children are found lying in
the van, now riddled with bullets, its decrepit chassis lying on the side of
the road.
His accusers took him to court after
beating him brutally, jailing him and cursing his name. A sad, almost wistful
smile appeared on his face as he heard the sentence read. He had come into
their world to bring peace where there was conflict, truth where there was
great darkness. Yet, he had been rejected, even by those whom he had come to
save. So they crucified him for speaking the truth, not for anything else. He
had committed “espionage.” Above his head, the judge wrote that his crime had
been speaking the truth. No, his accusers said, do not say that he spoke the
truth but only that he claimed to speak the truth. The judge faced them. What has been done is done, he said. And so they ran his name
through the mud, traded scoops and watched with unrestrained glee as he bore
his fate. He was suffering for their lies, their crimes, their sins, a burden which
he took on without complaint.
“Well it’s their fault for bringing
their kids into a battle.” “That’s right.”
Note:
The italicized portions of the text are lines taken from a video that was
released by Manning to Wikileaks. It can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0.
Note: This is the first part of a series on "undesirable" citizens and their importance to human society.
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