WHO ARE JULIAN ASSANGE AND CHELSEA MANNING?
Manning was a former army private who exposed the deliberate killing of civilians in Iraq by the U.S. army. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, an online journal that lets the public know what the government is really doing, like spying on U.S. residents or committing horrific war crimes. They were both recently arrested when they should be given medals for telling the truth.
While Manning and Assange are being persecuted, the Trump administration is issuing orders to cover up CIA drone killings of civilians and shutting down investigations into U.S. war crimes by threatening the judges of the International Criminal Court with arrest.
NUREMBERG TRIALS ASKED WHY NAZIS OBEYED ORDERS
Manning took the incredibly brave step to expose U.S. war crimes while in the army. After the Nazis were defeated and put on trial at Nuremberg the message was clear “You have the right to resist an illegal, inhuman order.” This is what she did.
PENTAGON PAPERS AND WIKILEAKS EXPOSED PENTAGON CRIMES
Daniel Ellsberg is a former state department official who released hundreds of pages of internal memos showing the horrors of the Vietnam War. These were called the Pentagon Papers. He was arrested but later exonerated. He is considered a hero. Assange simply released the same type of information digitally.
WHAT DID WIKILEAKS REVEAL?
In April of 2010, Wikileaks published the infamous ”Collateral Murder” video which showed the horrific 2007 U.S. Army massacre of more than a dozen people in Baghdad including civilians, journalists, and children.
Later in 2010, Wikileaks published the “Iraq War Logs” covering the period from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2009. Manning helped to reveal that in that time 109,032 men, women, and children had been directly killed by the U.S.-led coalition. 66,081 of those people-—nearly two-thirds—were civilians. Wikileaks documents revealed 15,000 deaths that had previously gone uncounted.
The war logs also revealed widespread torture and rape by coalition forces as well as routine civilian killings by U.S. mercenary forces such as Blackwater.
In 2011, after being denied legal immunity for their crimes, U.S. forces were forced to withdraw from Iraq. Had it been earlier that the people of the world—and particularly those in the U.S.— learned the truth about this terrible war, many thousands of lives might have been saved.
Manning and Assange also helped bring to light U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, revealing more than 92,000 documents related to the war over the same period as the “Iraq War Logs”. The previously covered-up Granai massacre stands as one of the most brutal crimes of this war: nearly 100 people—overwhelmingly women and children—lost their lives in a U.S. airstrike on May 4, 2009. Over 100,000 Afghans have been killed in this longest running U.S. war.
Wikileaks also brought the Guantanamo prison to the attention of the public, exposing the systematic and routine torture of over 800 prisoners. Among the prisoners were an 89-year-old Afghan villager with dementia and a 14-year-old boy who had been kidnapped from his family. More than 150 of these people were detained for years without charge.
ASSANGE AND MANNING ARE THE REAL PUBLIC SERVANTS. TRUMP, OBAMA, AND BUSH ARE THE CRIMINALS.
We deserve the right to know the cost of imperialist wars—especially since it’s our working class brothers and sisters that are under the gun. Because so many lives are on the line, we have a duty to counter the lies that U.S. wars are fought for “freedom” or for “democracy” or for any other noble sounding ideas. To counter these lies, we must arm ourselves with the truth. Wikileaks revealed the business dealings of the war profiteers and it revealed the devastating human toll of the arms that made these billionaires so rich. Wikileaks revealed the truth and for that, Assange and Manning deserve our support.