On December 17, in a prison cell in Quantico Virginia, Bradley Manning will be celebrating his 23rd birthday, alone. Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and ex-Pentagon official KT McFarland are calling for Manning’s execution, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is vowing “aggressive steps” will be taken against those responsible for the leaks. As WikiLeaks scrounges to find a way to keep their site alive after being shut out by PayPal, Amazon and EveryDNS, Manning is held in prison, unable to meet with his family and prevented from getting the vast majority of his mail.

US Army specialist Ethan McCord was amongst the first dismounted soldiers to arrive on the scene of fresh carnage after the July 2007 Apache helicopter attack in East Bhagdad, Iraq – now infamous as the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” video. He has successfully met the greatest challenge of our time: the reclaiming of our humanity.

o call Collateral Murder, or The Afghan War Diary, a leak is an immediate invective of language. The government, the mass media, they call these things leaks, as though they are the slow, steady trickle of information tumbling without direction onto the American landscape. They would have us believe that leaks are the meaningless detritus sloughed off by a well oiled war machine. Evidence of murder doesn’t drip calmly from the battlefield. It has to be spirited away from enemy lines, gripped hard and hurled in the air, let to burn over the heads of the misinformed. In the fight for this countries conscience Collateral Murder is a flash grenade. It’s a bright, hot blast that for an instant breaks the darkness of war. It shakes us. It frightens us. But it gives us vision.

by Marjorie Cohn, Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking military secrets to the public. This week, his supporters are holding rallies in 21 cities, seeking Manning’s release from military custody. Manning is in the brig for allegedly disclosing a classified video depicting U.S. troops shooting civilians from an Apache helicopter in Iraq in July 2007. The video, available at www.collateralmurder.com, was published by WikiLeaks on April 5, 2010. Manning faces 52 years in prison. No charges have been filed against the soldiers in the video.

In fact, the actions depicted in “Collateral Murder” contain evidence of three violations of the laws of war set forth in the Geneva Conventions, which amount to war crimes.

As Israel and the US ready themselves to attack Iran — endangering the world with an insane escalation of hostilities in the Persian Gulf — the relevance of the issues for which Bradley Manning has become an icon are acutely intensified. Soldiers who try to raise issues of war crimes in the field with their superiors are systematically and sometimes brutally silenced, while those who cannot remain silent by the nature of their conscience are persecuted severely if discovered.

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A democracy cannot thrive in secret. The American people and the politicians who represent us have a right to know what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet if the military succeeds, the Manning court martial will remain a military secret. Americans will not see the evidence because watching unarmed civilians gunned down in cold blood could bring, in the words of the official charge sheet “discredit upon the armed forces” – a threat so horrifying to the U.S. Army that it is repeated eight times in the official indictment.

In its defense, the military has a good point. Seeing unarmed people murdered at close range seems unfair. Some of us, including this blogger, find it mildly disturbing to see our tax dollars being used to shoot non-combatants in the back with 30mm cannon fire.

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عفوا، هذه المدخلة موجودة فقط في English.