Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Never forget our true heroes


Thirty-five years. Bradley Manning has been sentenced to thirty-five years in prison for releasing documents showing illegal and immoral actions committed in our country’s name in Afghanistan and Iraq.

No one died because of his revelations. Yet the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ones who covered up the atrocities that Manning’s documents exposed, go free.

Bush and Cheney and their cadre of neocons who lied us into a war with Iraq where thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died get to go on playing golf and hosting parties and painting childish pictures and watching grandchildren grow up while Manning languishes in a federal jail.

If this isn’t a case of shooting the messenger I don’t know what is.

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the whole rogues gallery of neocons from the Bush administration should be tried in an international court for crimes against humanity; for waging war on a country that had nothing to do with international terrorism.

Instead, we send some poor schmuck away to prison for virtually the rest of his life merely as a lesson to others. Don’t reveal our secrets. Don’t let the world see our real face, because that face is not Brad Pitt or John Wayne. It’s a bloated hog’s head, an overweight billionaire licking a bowl of caviar, a grotesque caricature of Uncle Sam stomping his way across the globe, destroying villages in order to save them.

Bradley Manning is a hero. Daniel Ellsberg is a hero. Edward Snowden is a hero. Never forget that.

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