[Quote]:

“The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.” – Chris Hedges, author and journalist

“I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are 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.” – Bradley Manning

What the government is attempting to suggest is that if an individual or news organization publishes information that is accessed by terrorists over the internet, for example, then those individuals or news organizations are essentially guilty of collusion.

Stacking the odds in their favor, government prosecutors have refused to allow Manning’s defense team to interview government witnesses or to introduce evidence showing that Manning’s leak of government information did little, if any, harm to U.S. interests other than showing that the Obama administration is no different from its predecessors. In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the publication of the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary had “not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources or methods.” As for the leak of some 250,000 State Department documents, a report by Reuters indicates that the damage caused was “limited,” and was for the most part simply an embarrassment to the Obama administration.

Manning reacted as one would hope any honorable American would react when they witness their government acting in a manner that is corrupt, incompetent, inhumane, immoral and, it must be said, downright evil. Manning was particularly affected by the so-called “Collateral Murder” video in which American Apache helicopter pilots can be see firing on civilians in Iraq, including children and a Reuters journalist. “The people in the van were not a threat but merely ‘good Samaritans,’” observed Manning. “The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust [the American troops] appeared to have.”

To his credit, Manning refused to remain silent. He spoke out, first to his superiors, who turned a deaf ear to his concerns, then to the New York Times and Washington Post. When he still could find no one willing to alert the American people to what their government was really doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, he turned to Wikileaks.

The rest, as they say, is history.