Manning disclosed the video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack, which shows two Reuters journalists being gunned down in Baghdad. He disclosed military incident reports from Afghanistan revealing an assassination squad, Task Force 373, was being operated by the United States. He disclosed similar reports from Iraq that showed an order, Frago 242, had been adopted by the US and UK as a way of excusing the countries from having to take responsibility for torture or ill-treatment of Iraqis by Iraqi military or security forces. He disclosed over 250,000 diplomatic cables that showed: US diplomats spying on United Nations leadership, the Yemen president agreed to secretly allow US cruise missile attacks that he would say were launched by his government, Iceland’s banking crisis had partly been a result of bullying by European countries, US and China joined together to obstruct a major agreement on climate change by European countries, US government was well aware of rampant corruption in the Tunisian ruling family of President Ben Ali, the FBI trained torturers in Egypt’s state security service, both the administrations of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama pressured Spain and Germany not to investigate torture authorized by Bush administration officials, and foreign contractors managed by DynCorp hired Afghan boys to dress up as girls and dance for them. Manning also disclosed more than 700 detainee assessment reports on prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay that showed children and elderly men were imprisoned, information from a “small number of detainees” who were tortured was relied upon by US authorities and al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj had been sent to the prison “to provide information” on the “al Jazeera news network’s training program, telecommunications equipment and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview” of bin Laden. As Brown of Amnesty International also said, “The government’s priorities are upside down. The US government has refused to investigate credible allegations of torture and other crimes under international law despite overwhelming evidence. Yet they decided to prosecute Manning who it seems was trying to do the right thing – reveal credible evidence of unlawful behavior by the government.”
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 22:27:27 +0000
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