Dear Secretary of State, “It is Laudable to Expose Wrongdoings and Misdeeds”
Dear Secretary of State, “It is Laudable to Expose Wrongdoings and Misdeeds”
By Kevin Stoda, an American with more international experience than Ms. Clinton
Some 9 years ago—just weeks after the September 11, 2001 hijackings and bombings—I took and passed the written portion of the Foreign Service exam for the USA. Luckily, at that time, I was not permitted to pass the final stages of the foreign service selection process the following Spring 2002.
I say “Luckily” because I would probably have been arrested for being a good and patriotic American, like Bradley Manning.
“Bradley Manning is[was] a 23-year-old U.S. Army private who was working in Iraq as an army intelligence analyst when he was arrested in May this year. He was enlisted in the US Army in 2007. Half-British and half-American, he was born in a small town in Oklahoma. His parents divorced in 2001 and he went back to the UK with his mother where he attended secondary school in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/86525/20101129/us-wikileaks-bradley-manning-factfile-who-is.htm
Bradley Manning, “was arrested in May on suspicion of leaking footages of a US helicopter attack which killed two Reuters cameramen among others. Spotlight turned on him after WikiLeaks released the Afghan war documents in July. The Pentagon has also declared him as a "person of interest" in its hunt for the sources of the leaks.”
CHARGES
“Manning has been charged with ‘transferring classified data’ and ‘delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source.’ He is now awaiting court martial and could be awarded a maximum sentence of 52 years in jail if he is convicted of the charges. He is suspected of leaking more than 90,000 secret military documents to the whistle-blower website.”
Manning, “[w]as an army intelligence analyst…. he was flitting through classified military documents at the U.S. Forward Operating Base Hammer, near Baghdad….[where]” reports “say Manning was glued to his system 14 hours of the day, reading up secret military and diplomatic documents that made him disillusioned by his country's foreign policy.”
Manning “had access to the Secret internet Protocol Router Network used by US military personnel, civilian employees and private contractors. Investigators are unsure if he had help from inside or outside the military.”
PROCEDURE and DEFENSE OF MANNING in the USA
According to officials and others-in-the-know, “Manning had said he ‘used blank CDs to download classified information while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga."
He got in touch with well-known U.S. computer hacker Adrian Lamo, hoping the latter would assist him in publishing the secret files that he saw. He told Lomo that had found ‘incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC’. However, Lomo tipped him off to the U.S. authorities and surrendered their online exchanges to investigators.”
According to the International Business Times, “In July [2010], WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his organization has "committed funds" to legally defend Manning, though he refused to say whether Manning was the source of the leaked documents. Assange said WikiLeaks would offer his military-appointed legal team money if it wanted to go for civilian counsel. His family in the UK thinks he did the right thing. Among others, U.S. linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky has joined the campaign to support Manning. According to a post in www.bradleymanning.org, Chomsky wrote: ‘It is a privilege to join the campaign to support Bradley Manning for his courage and integrity in serving his country by helping make the government accountable to its citizens, and to inform the world of what its people should know.’”
Chomsky was one of the people that kept and then helped release the so-called Pentagon Papers collected and copied by Daniel Ellsberg back in the 1960s. I would say that the fact that Chomsky and Ellsberg’s support for Manning is proof enough for this American patriot that Manning’s decision to release the documents over the past half decade is a righteous one.
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
DOING WHAT IS RIGHT FOR AMERICA TODAY
Manning’s profound decision to oppose the lack of commitment to truth & justice and to oppose the missing commitment to AMERICAN DEMOCRACY in the middle and upper levels of the USA government (and in America’s foreign practices) is an important step in America today—where middle level and higher level officials have not had the honor of many of their Vietnam counterparts to finally once-and-for-all stop the VIETNAM PARTS 2 AND 3 (i.e. Afghanistan and Iraq) by leaking the truth to the masses and media.
According to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, “Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been imprisoned since May when he was arrested on charges of leaking the classified material. In her first public comments since the cables’ publication, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, denounced WikiLeaks, calling the latest release an attack on the international community.”
(With any-common-sense understanding of what-kind-of-shake-up is needed in Washington in 2010-2012,) Americans like me are upset by the violent government backlash towards whistle blowing led by people, such as our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who stated this very week, “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems. This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community. The alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity. I am confident that the partnerships that the Obama Administration has worked so hard to build, will withstand this challenge. The president and I have made these partnerships a priority and we are proud of the progress that they have helped achieve and they will remain at the center of our efforts. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people. And there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends. There have been examples in history in which official conduct has been made public in the name of exposing wrongdoings or misdeeds. This is not one of those cases.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/30/we_have_not_seen_anything_yet
Now, “Attorney General Eric Holder has revealed the U.S. Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, which this week began publishing moer than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables.”
Eric Holder has stated, "Along with other members of the administration, I condemn the action that WikiLeaks has taken. It puts at risk our national security, but in a more concrete way, it puts at risk individuals who are serving this country in a variety of capacities, either as diplomats, as intelligence assets, puts at risks the relationships we have with important allies around the world. We have an active, ongoing criminal investigation with regard to this matter. We are not in a position yet to announce the result of that investigation, but the investigation is ongoing."
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/30/we_have_not_seen_anything_yet
Meanwhile, the “Washington Post reports federal authorities are investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. Meanwhile Assange says he plans to continue to publishing secret documents. Assange told Forbes Magazine that Wikileaks is preparing a massive leak of documents from a big US bank early next year.”
GET SERIOUS Ms. CLINTON & Mr. HOLDER
Let’s get serious, please!
Antagonism to the USA Government is at an all-time high. They hate both Republicans and they hate Americans. They want better domestic and foreign policies and practices. Giving us the same-old-same-old is not good enough anymore. We Americans cannot take much more.
In summary, most Americans agree with Daniel Ellsberg now-in-late-2010 than they do with Ms. Clinton or Mr. Holder.
Ellsberg said of Manning and what he had undertaken over the past few years was “[w]hat is available to him is probably available to five or six hundred thousand people- available to SIPRNet- and notice that the thing that first struck him was his realization that he was involved in the arrest process of people who he later discovered were doing nothing other than writing what he calls, ‘scholarly critiques of the current administration’ for which they were being tortured by the Iraqis to whom we were turning them over with the knowledge of Americans. All of this being blatantly illegal, both for the Iraqis and for the Americans who turned them over to torture. When he [Manning] reported this to his superior, his superior told him to forget it and get back to work arresting people. The effect that had on Bradley Manning was that he was being asked to participate in a blatantly illegal process and he chose to say no to it, to expose it, to resist it, to do what he actually should have done.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/us_facing_global_diplomatic_crisis_following
THOUSANDS BEING TORTURED!?
Up till now, it appears that only “[o]ne person out of hundreds of thousands …. did that [the right thing] The material that he [Manning] revealed in the Iraq Logs, which were just revealed recently- some 400,000 logs- revealed hundreds if not thousands of cases of Americans who reported that they understood they were turning people over to be tortured, clearly against U.S. and international law, and they were then being ordered not to pursue the investigation further or take any measure to stop this illegal process.
Obviously, as Ellsberg continued stating unequivocally on a recent Democracy Now interview, “Now that order [to ignore the persecution and torture of innocent peoples & get back to work] was blatantly illegal so it will be interesting to take a look at those thousands of cases and just see which one led to a refusal to carry out that blatantly illegal order as the USMJ requires them to do. Bradley Manning seems to have been the one who did that, the one who lived up to his oath of office and the one who acted patriotically here to stop this illegal process. For that he will pay very heavily. And yet, he may yet inspire some other people to do the same – to save lives, stop processes of torture and to reveal, by the way, the absolute lack of progress that is revealed throughout all of these documents.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/us_facing_global_diplomatic_crisis_following
I agree with Ellsberg. I have lived and worked in 10 countries. I have traveled in a hundred. In none of them have I felt that my traveling or working abroad as an American was made safer by the last 4 or 5 presidential administrations--and their foreign policies or practices
Yours,
Kevin Anthony Stoda
By Kevin Stoda, an American with more international experience than Ms. Clinton
Some 9 years ago—just weeks after the September 11, 2001 hijackings and bombings—I took and passed the written portion of the Foreign Service exam for the USA. Luckily, at that time, I was not permitted to pass the final stages of the foreign service selection process the following Spring 2002.
I say “Luckily” because I would probably have been arrested for being a good and patriotic American, like Bradley Manning.
“Bradley Manning is[was] a 23-year-old U.S. Army private who was working in Iraq as an army intelligence analyst when he was arrested in May this year. He was enlisted in the US Army in 2007. Half-British and half-American, he was born in a small town in Oklahoma. His parents divorced in 2001 and he went back to the UK with his mother where he attended secondary school in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/86525/20101129/us-wikileaks-bradley-manning-factfile-who-is.htm
Bradley Manning, “was arrested in May on suspicion of leaking footages of a US helicopter attack which killed two Reuters cameramen among others. Spotlight turned on him after WikiLeaks released the Afghan war documents in July. The Pentagon has also declared him as a "person of interest" in its hunt for the sources of the leaks.”
CHARGES
“Manning has been charged with ‘transferring classified data’ and ‘delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source.’ He is now awaiting court martial and could be awarded a maximum sentence of 52 years in jail if he is convicted of the charges. He is suspected of leaking more than 90,000 secret military documents to the whistle-blower website.”
Manning, “[w]as an army intelligence analyst…. he was flitting through classified military documents at the U.S. Forward Operating Base Hammer, near Baghdad….[where]” reports “say Manning was glued to his system 14 hours of the day, reading up secret military and diplomatic documents that made him disillusioned by his country's foreign policy.”
Manning “had access to the Secret internet Protocol Router Network used by US military personnel, civilian employees and private contractors. Investigators are unsure if he had help from inside or outside the military.”
PROCEDURE and DEFENSE OF MANNING in the USA
According to officials and others-in-the-know, “Manning had said he ‘used blank CDs to download classified information while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga."
He got in touch with well-known U.S. computer hacker Adrian Lamo, hoping the latter would assist him in publishing the secret files that he saw. He told Lomo that had found ‘incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC’. However, Lomo tipped him off to the U.S. authorities and surrendered their online exchanges to investigators.”
According to the International Business Times, “In July [2010], WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his organization has "committed funds" to legally defend Manning, though he refused to say whether Manning was the source of the leaked documents. Assange said WikiLeaks would offer his military-appointed legal team money if it wanted to go for civilian counsel. His family in the UK thinks he did the right thing. Among others, U.S. linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky has joined the campaign to support Manning. According to a post in www.bradleymanning.org, Chomsky wrote: ‘It is a privilege to join the campaign to support Bradley Manning for his courage and integrity in serving his country by helping make the government accountable to its citizens, and to inform the world of what its people should know.’”
Chomsky was one of the people that kept and then helped release the so-called Pentagon Papers collected and copied by Daniel Ellsberg back in the 1960s. I would say that the fact that Chomsky and Ellsberg’s support for Manning is proof enough for this American patriot that Manning’s decision to release the documents over the past half decade is a righteous one.
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
DOING WHAT IS RIGHT FOR AMERICA TODAY
Manning’s profound decision to oppose the lack of commitment to truth & justice and to oppose the missing commitment to AMERICAN DEMOCRACY in the middle and upper levels of the USA government (and in America’s foreign practices) is an important step in America today—where middle level and higher level officials have not had the honor of many of their Vietnam counterparts to finally once-and-for-all stop the VIETNAM PARTS 2 AND 3 (i.e. Afghanistan and Iraq) by leaking the truth to the masses and media.
According to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, “Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, has been imprisoned since May when he was arrested on charges of leaking the classified material. In her first public comments since the cables’ publication, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, denounced WikiLeaks, calling the latest release an attack on the international community.”
(With any-common-sense understanding of what-kind-of-shake-up is needed in Washington in 2010-2012,) Americans like me are upset by the violent government backlash towards whistle blowing led by people, such as our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who stated this very week, “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information. It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems. This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community. The alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity. I am confident that the partnerships that the Obama Administration has worked so hard to build, will withstand this challenge. The president and I have made these partnerships a priority and we are proud of the progress that they have helped achieve and they will remain at the center of our efforts. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people. And there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends. There have been examples in history in which official conduct has been made public in the name of exposing wrongdoings or misdeeds. This is not one of those cases.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/30/we_have_not_seen_anything_yet
Now, “Attorney General Eric Holder has revealed the U.S. Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, which this week began publishing moer than 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables.”
Eric Holder has stated, "Along with other members of the administration, I condemn the action that WikiLeaks has taken. It puts at risk our national security, but in a more concrete way, it puts at risk individuals who are serving this country in a variety of capacities, either as diplomats, as intelligence assets, puts at risks the relationships we have with important allies around the world. We have an active, ongoing criminal investigation with regard to this matter. We are not in a position yet to announce the result of that investigation, but the investigation is ongoing."
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/30/we_have_not_seen_anything_yet
Meanwhile, the “Washington Post reports federal authorities are investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. Meanwhile Assange says he plans to continue to publishing secret documents. Assange told Forbes Magazine that Wikileaks is preparing a massive leak of documents from a big US bank early next year.”
GET SERIOUS Ms. CLINTON & Mr. HOLDER
Let’s get serious, please!
Antagonism to the USA Government is at an all-time high. They hate both Republicans and they hate Americans. They want better domestic and foreign policies and practices. Giving us the same-old-same-old is not good enough anymore. We Americans cannot take much more.
In summary, most Americans agree with Daniel Ellsberg now-in-late-2010 than they do with Ms. Clinton or Mr. Holder.
Ellsberg said of Manning and what he had undertaken over the past few years was “[w]hat is available to him is probably available to five or six hundred thousand people- available to SIPRNet- and notice that the thing that first struck him was his realization that he was involved in the arrest process of people who he later discovered were doing nothing other than writing what he calls, ‘scholarly critiques of the current administration’ for which they were being tortured by the Iraqis to whom we were turning them over with the knowledge of Americans. All of this being blatantly illegal, both for the Iraqis and for the Americans who turned them over to torture. When he [Manning] reported this to his superior, his superior told him to forget it and get back to work arresting people. The effect that had on Bradley Manning was that he was being asked to participate in a blatantly illegal process and he chose to say no to it, to expose it, to resist it, to do what he actually should have done.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/us_facing_global_diplomatic_crisis_following
THOUSANDS BEING TORTURED!?
Up till now, it appears that only “[o]ne person out of hundreds of thousands …. did that [the right thing] The material that he [Manning] revealed in the Iraq Logs, which were just revealed recently- some 400,000 logs- revealed hundreds if not thousands of cases of Americans who reported that they understood they were turning people over to be tortured, clearly against U.S. and international law, and they were then being ordered not to pursue the investigation further or take any measure to stop this illegal process.
Obviously, as Ellsberg continued stating unequivocally on a recent Democracy Now interview, “Now that order [to ignore the persecution and torture of innocent peoples & get back to work] was blatantly illegal so it will be interesting to take a look at those thousands of cases and just see which one led to a refusal to carry out that blatantly illegal order as the USMJ requires them to do. Bradley Manning seems to have been the one who did that, the one who lived up to his oath of office and the one who acted patriotically here to stop this illegal process. For that he will pay very heavily. And yet, he may yet inspire some other people to do the same – to save lives, stop processes of torture and to reveal, by the way, the absolute lack of progress that is revealed throughout all of these documents.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/29/us_facing_global_diplomatic_crisis_following
I agree with Ellsberg. I have lived and worked in 10 countries. I have traveled in a hundred. In none of them have I felt that my traveling or working abroad as an American was made safer by the last 4 or 5 presidential administrations--and their foreign policies or practices
Yours,
Kevin Anthony Stoda
Labels: bradley manning daniel ellsberg noam chomsky hillary clinton wikileaks
posted by Kevin Anthony Stoda at 10:40 AM
1 Comments:
Dear Kevin,
Every year, the Department of Defense hires thousands of mercenaries to work in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet those mercenaries and the contractors who operate them don't undergo the same vigorous oversight our armed forces receive. Preventing these guns-for-hire from running wild and abusing their power at taxpayer expense should be a top priority for Congress. Unfortunately, a proposal to reign them in may become a causality when the House and the Senate reconcile their competing versions of the Defense Authorization next month.
Recognizing the potentially grave implications of maintaining an unregulated private army, Rep. John Conyers (D MI-14) and a few of his progressive allies in Congress are fighting to make sure that doesn't happen.
Tell your members of Congress to join the letter demanding regulation of private armies in Iraq & Afghanistan.
Currently, language requiring regulation of the mercenary industry is only present in the House draft. It increasingly looks like the two chambers of Congress will decide to leave out that oversight language from the final version of the FY2011 NDAA.
Not regulating this private army in places like Afghanistan and Iraq has disaster written all over it. Without Congressional action, these soldiers of fortune will continue to perpetrate fraud, waste, and abuse of power, all in our name, repeatedly tarnishing our reputation.
Act now and tell your members of Congress we cannot afford to go any longer without mandatory oversight of these private armies.
We need your voice in this fight.
Thank you for working for peace,
Daniel & the Win Without War team
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