My eyes are on the riveting Assange, but I noticed that the smearing of his presumed source, Private Bradley Manning, has begun. Just read this report by Mike Taibbi out of his hometown of Crescent, Oklahoma, for NBC the other night. My house filled with hoarse profane cries of outrage as I watched the targeted character assassination… You will see that Manning did it because he was closeted and gay, or he had suffered abuse, or was ignored, he was undersized and used big words no one understood in Crescent, he has some kind of personality disorder.
And here is an aside from the story: Adrian Lama, a hacker who says he turned Manning in to the gov’t, said Manning “became the WikiLeaks source because serving in Iraq he was ‘actively involved’ in something he was completely against.'”
I suggest that is all you need to know. He saw the incredible destruction this country had wrought, he saw the hundred thousand killed, the millions displaced, the thousands of Americans maimed and killed, the instability across the Middle East, and he said, I will do what is in my power to change this f’d-up policy.
To me, Bradley Manning is a great man in the footsteps of Ellsberg who stood over a xerox machine at Rand for nights on end. I imagine he has taken even greater conscious risk than Ellsberg did. 52 years he could face, says Taibbi, who also quotes an Oklahoman who want him executed. Manning surely knew that this was potentially in the cards. He is a very smart guy, he was an intelligence analyst, at some level he was willing to pay the price.
Let the left embrace Manning’s spirit, let all independents embrace him. Our country is off the rails, and this young man tried to do something about it. I’m sure Ellsberg was smeared then too, and people had to disavow him. Today there are documentaries on public tv about what he did; and time will also show Manning’s rebellion for what it is, heroic.
