By: Geoffrey Yonil

The syndicated German television program Panorama recently came out with the story of how a group of civilians, some of which were reporters, were shot down by an American Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 for being suspected of carrying weapons—which couldn’t be seen entirely because the helicopter was so far away. What the reporters were carrying was film equipment, though. When another group of civilians in a van, a guy trying to take his kids to school, tried to help the wounded moments after the initial shots, the soldiers in the van took it upon themselves to start shooting again to make sure the father of two couldn’t help. At first the soldiers did not realize they were shooting children, according to Panorama, but when they did the soldiers merely shrugged it off with the comment, “It’s their [the parent’s] fault for bringing their kids to a battle.” Was there a battle? No. This travesty should have never happened. But what’s worse is that after it occurred and the video had been examined by military officials, the story was covered up and the soldiers were never charged. The Pentagon went on to say in their report that the attack was necessary.

So, if the official report and the video footage (which you can check out at the link at the bottom of the page), then how did Panorama get a hold of the footage? Simple. Wikileaks. It’s the transparency that just keeps on giving. But after some of the information in the Wikileaks went viral you might imagine the people responsible might be brought to some form of justice, right? Unfortunately not. If anything, Wikileaks has confirmed that the U.S. is not afraid to use a scapegoat in order to deflect its own faults. And while Julian Assange is outside of the States reach, there’s a perfectly good patsy. One of their own: Bradley Manning, the American soldier who leaked a good amount of information—some classified, some not—to Wikileaks, including the above story.

Many commentators, I’ve noticed, have been calling Manning a terrorist, traitor, despicable, and on and on. While these commentators come up with these terms and catchy phrases, they seem to completely neglect why Manning leaked the information. Tom Dyer, one of Manning’s best friends from school, claimed that, “He [Manning] has a great moral compass. He knew in himself what was wrong and what was right. And he didn’t like the thought of people abusing their status and making other people feel small.” So, what’s happened to Bradley Manning since the very public shutdown of Wikileaks?

According to CNN, Manning has been held in Quantico for the past nine months. His conditions: He’s kept in solitary confinement with a room that has no windows, has to sleep naked, no pillows, and no sheets. He spends 23 hours in there, given only an hour to exercise, which consists of walking, if it can be called that, around another small room while his legs are chained. The first thing I asked, though, was why does he have to sleep naked? That’s such an odd requirement for a prisoner. Apparently it’s to prevent the risk of suicide. Manning’s attorney reported that there was no risk, and that the only reason the military would be doing so is because there have been reports by mental health experts stating that prolonged solitary confinement has a high risk of suicide. He’s at risk for suicide, but that’s not considered torture?

Obviously, the picture that Dyer and other friends of Manning paint compared to that of the military and American pundits of Manning are two entirely different creatures. But here are some explicit reasons as to why it’s completely wrong what they’re doing to Manning.

For one, it’s been nine months. Due process, Manning’s 8th Amendment right to a speeding trial, has been violated. Within such a transgression of the Bill of Rights, the military then decided to go a step further by ignoring several UN violations on torture—which has caused the UN to investigate such reports.

It truly makes absolutely no sense, and there is a certain absurdity to the whole scenario. A soldier who just wanted to do the right thing gets condemned by the media and his country for trying to expose some of its military’s faults. When Wikileaks first came out in 2006, Assange wrote an essay that stated, “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.” What Wikileaks, Assange, and Manning wanted was transparency that would give back the power to the people and, to steal an idea from V for Vendetta, make the government fear the people rather than the other way around. The idea of transparency of information is an interesting ideal to strive for. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the information being leaked was ever intended to be used maliciously, as some have said. But rather the information was merely a tool in exposing and amending the transgressions of these regimes—including, but not exclusively, America.

And while the idea was innovative, it isn’t unique to Assange, or Wikileaks in general. In fact, to go back about sixty years ago, Hannah Arendt, political theorist, wrote a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism. In it, while commenting and defining what made a government totalitarian as compared to a despotism or fascist state, she also stated that a regime’s “real power began where secrecy began.” Thus, secrecy within a government and totalitarianism became interchangeable. For a government on another McCarthyism-like hunt for a scapegoat that proclaims night-and-day that it’s democratic (power to the people), you would think America would try to strive for transparency. Hell, we’re usually the big opponents to totalitarian regimes, like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and recently North Korea. But has the States been competing with these totalitarian systems in an effort to rid opponents to its own totalitarian goals? In this hunt for retribution in regards to Wikileaks, America has proven itself hypocritical in what it says compared to what it actually does. If that’s the case, then it would make sense that the government would try and post a criminal tag on an innocent man and call him a traitor.

So, has Bradley Manning committed any sort of crime? I don’t believe so. It can/should be argued. But I do believe that he’s been given an unfair shake. If anything, Manning embodies everything that both a soldier and citizen should do when they know about injustice being committed by the government or military. And, for those of you interested, no charges have been drawn up against the soldier’s that committed murder—for in no way was it justified—back in 2007 and the Pentagon seems to indicate that it doesn’t intend to do so. Rather, they’re completely content with hanging a man who used the information to expose their defects.

We should all be so lucky to have a tenth of the courage that Bradley Manning had in standing up to what he saw as wrong.