Of Manning's actions, he had this to say. "If you are a 22-year-old kid from Oklahoma, and you find yourself in a dark room in Iraq, watching grainy videos of possible war crimes and actually sharing your concerns with your supervisors, and they're telling you to look the other way, shut up, your life will become miserable if you keep talking about this stuff, it's easy to see how somebody could actually look at the big picture and think maybe I could, in some small way, change the world for the better."
Jeff Paterson is now director of the Bradley Manning Support Network, and has been raising funds for Manning's defense. So far he has raised $1.25 million dollars in donations from around the world.
The protest was crawling with press from all over the world. Daniel Ellsberg, admired as a true patriot for leaking the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, explained why the treatment of Manning is so important in the eyes of the world.
"Our country", Ellsberg said, " is the country that perpetrated the war crimes that Bradley Manning exposed. Manning went on record and acted on the knowledge that it is wrong for us to be killing foreigners. He was not doing it only for American Citizens, though his actions saved many American lives. Manning was concerned that the people of the world should be informed on how the first world, (we in the west) treats the third world. America has been acting for a long time as if the lives of foreigners mean nothing, not just less than American lives."
In his own words Manning has said, "I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not all of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric Warfare".
"Asymmetric warfare is when one army like ours, hugely overpowers in manpower, weaponry and capability, another army", explains Ellsberg.
The people of Iraq, slaughtered now for years by the US Military, have never been considered a uniformed army by the United States.
Ellsberg asks the question, "How many other videos have you seen like the one Manning leaked, of Americans mowing down unarmed civilians? None. No one would have seen these war crimes except for the actions of Bradley Manning."
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