Saving Private Manning
Private First Class Bradley Manning, is the person being held in detention at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, for allegedly releasing 260,000 confidential US government cables to WikiLeaks.
Reports confirm that he is being held in solitary confinement; that he only has one hour outside his cell a day; is on suicide watch and has no access to news.
The problem with any US “investigation” - for which “witch hunt” may be a more accurate description - is the patterns of behaviour to be found in recent American history.
There is a record of secret support for less than salubrious regimes with undeclared involvement for example in the overthrow of Chilean president Allende, secret support for drug running Panamanian president General Noriega, the corrupt Marcos family in the Phillipines, Ngo Dinh Diem, General Thieu and Air Vice Marshall Ky in South Vietnam and more recently Karzai in Afghanistan.
A further quick sampling would highlight the McCarthy witch hunt of “communists” in the 1950s, the Gulf of Tonkin incident staged to justify the war in Vietnam, the invasion of Afghanistan that hinged on blaming the government for 9/11, and assertions about non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the invasion of Iraq.
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