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."
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 http://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.'"
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.
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