Support Bradley Manning Demonstration in Monterey

Free Bradley Manning

Demonstration Monday June 10th, 6:00 PM, Monterey Conference Center (outside)

This is the evening of the last Leon Panetta 2013 Lecture Series event at 6:30 pm, and so the demonstration will be visible to the people attending the lecture as they arrive at the Conference Center. The topic is “Middle East Turmoil: Chaos or Reform?” with Secretary Panetta as moderator. Guests for the final event are Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister and former Minister of Defense; Joe Lieberman, former United States Senator from Connecticut; and Richard Lugar, former United States Senator from Indiana and former chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Please read the article at the site below:

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/17814-focus-as-bradley-manning-trial-begins-press-predictably-misses-the-point

Here is an excerpt from the article:

If I was working for the Pentagon’s PR department, … I would beat it into the head of every hack on this beat that the court-martial is about a troubled young man with gender identity problems, that the key issue of law here rests inside the mind of young PFC Manning, that the only important issue of fact for both a jury and the American people to decide is exactly the question in [the current] headlines.
Is Manning a hero, or a traitor? Did he give thousands of files to WikiLeaks out of a sense of justice and moral horror, or did he do it because he had interpersonal problems, because he couldn’t keep his job, because he was a woman trapped in a man’s body, because he was a fame-seeker, because he was lonely?

You get the press and the rest of America following that bouncing ball, and the game’s over. Almost no matter what the outcome of the trial is, if you can convince the American people that this case is about mental state of a single troubled kid from Crescent, Oklahoma, then the propaganda war has been won already.

Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the “classified” materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.

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What the WikiLeaks articles revealed:

http://www.bradleymanning.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/WhatWLRevealed.pdf