Please Support the International Day of Action for Bradley Manning on Saturday June 1, 2013

On Monday (June 3), three years and one week since he was first arrested in Kuwait, the trial by court-martial begins, at Fort Meade in Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower responsible for making available — to the campaigning organization WikiLeaks — the largest collection of classified documents ever leaked to the public, including the “Collateral Murder” video, featuring US personnel indiscriminately killing civilians and two Reuters reporters in Iraq, 500,000 army reports (the Afghan War logs and the Iraq War logs), 250,000 US diplomatic cables, and the classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, which were released in April 2011, and on which I worked as a media partner (see here for the first 34 parts of my 70-part, million-word series analyzing the Guantánamo files).

To highlight what the Bradley Manning Support Network describes as a trial that “will determine whether a conscience-driven 25-year-old WikiLeaks whistle-blower spends the rest of his life in prison,” an international day of action is taking place on Saturday, June 1. See here for a full list of events worldwide.

At Fort Meade, the day of action will begin at 1pm — see the website here, and sign up on the Facebook page. There will be speakers at 1.30pm, a march at 2pm, and more speakers at 3pm. Speakers “include Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Ethan McCord, the soldier who saved the children attacked in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks; Col. Ann Wright, the most senior State Department official to resign in protest of the Iraq war; Sarah Shourd, hiker imprisoned by Iran turned prisoner rights activist; and Lt. Dan Choi, prominent anti-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell activist featured on the Rachel Maddow show.”

In London, there will be a protest outside the US Embassy, beginning at 2pm, which I will be attending. Speakers include: Ben Griffin, a former SAS soldier, who became a conscientious objector and is now a spokesperson for Veterans for Peace UK; Michael Lyons, an Afghan War resister who served nine months in prison as a conscientious objector for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan after reading Bradley’s WikiLeaks releases; the great singer-songwriter David Rovics (whose song for Bradley is here); former UK ambassador Craig Murray; veteran human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell; and photo-journalist Guy Smallman.

Three weeks ago, I was honoured to be asked to attend an event for Bradley Manning in central London, with Chase Madar, a US attorney, and the author of The Passion of Bradley Manning, and Ben Griffin, at which Julian Assange also spoke, via video link for the Ecuadorian Embassy. I spoke about the importance of the classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, on which I worked as a media partner with WikiLeaks during the release of the documents in April 2011, and I praised Bradley Manning for making them available, and helping to add to the weight of evidence that most of what constitutes the so-called evidence in Guantánamo is profoundly unreliable, produced in statements made by prisoners who were tortured, abused or bribed, and put together by analysts who were incompetent.

However, the description of Bradley Manning that stuck with me the most was Ben Griffin’s description of him as the greatest anti-war activist ever.

As Chris Hedges wrote, describing the significance of Bradley Manning’s actions:

This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power. The lonely individuals who take personal risks so that the public can know the truth — the Daniel Ellsbergs, the Ron Ridenhours, the Deep Throats and the Bradley Mannings — are from now on to be charged with “aiding the enemy.” All those within the system who publicly reveal facts that challenge the official narrative will be imprisoned, as was John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who for exposing the U.S. government’s use of torture began serving a 30-month prison term the day Manning read his statement. There is a word for states that create these kinds of information vacuums: totalitarian.

Below are excerpts from the 70-minute statement that Bradley Manning made in a pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade on February 28, accepting responsibility for the leaks.

On “Collateral Murder,” the 2007 video from Iraq, Bradley was horrified by the callousness and blood lust of the US military personnel involved. As he explained:

The video depicted several individuals being engaged by an aerial weapons team. At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other “war porn”-type videos depicting combat. However, the recording and audio comments by the aerial weapons team and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me. [...]

It was clear to me that the event happened because the aerial weapons team mistakenly identified Reuters employees as a potential threat and that the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely “good Samaritans.” The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemingly delightful blood-lust the Aerial Weapons Team seemed to have.

They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life, and referred to them as, quote unquote, “dead bastards,” and congratulated each other on their ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.

While saddened by the Aerial Weapons Team crew’s lack of concern about human life, I was disturbed by the response of the discovery of injured children at the scene. In the video, you can see a bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew assumes the individuals are a threat. They repeatedly request for authorization to fire on the bongo truck, and once granted, they engage the vehicle at least six times.

Shortly after the second engagement, a mechanized infantry unit arrives at the scene. Within minutes, the aerial weapons team crew learns that children were in the van. Despite the injuries the crew exhibits no remorse. Instead, they downplay the significance of their actions, saying, quote, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

On finding the Guantánamo files (the DABs, or “Detainee Assessment Briefs”), Bradley said:

The DABs were written in standard DoD memorandum format and addressed the commander of US SOUTHCOM. Each memorandum gave basic background information about detainees held at some point by Joint Task Force Guantánamo. I have always been interested in the issue of the moral efficacy of our actions surrounding Joint Task Force Guantánamo. On the one hand, I have always understood the need to detain and interrogate individuals who might wish to harm the United States and our allies, however, the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low-level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would’ve been released if they were held in theater.

I also recall that in early 2009 the then newly elected president, Barack Obama, stated he would close Joint Task Force Guantanamo, and that the facility compromised our standing over all, and diminished our, quote unquote, “moral authority.” After familiarizing myself with the DABs, I agreed.

Reading through the Detainee Assessment Briefs, I noticed they were not analytical products. Instead they contained summaries of [unavailable] versions of interim intelligence reports that were old or unclassified. None of the DABs contained names of sources or quotes from tactical interrogation reports or TIRs. Since the DABs were being sent to the US SOUTHCOM commander, I assessed they were intended to provide general background information on each detainee — not a detailed assessment.

Bradley’s key statement on the Guantánamo files is when he says, “the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low-level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would’ve been released if they were held in theatre.” This is absolutely the case, and I can only take exception to his belief that they were “not a detailed assessment.”

They were indeed only a round-up of the available information from a variety of military sources, but, crucially, they provide the names of the men making the statements about their fellow prisoners, which were not available previously, providing a compelling insight into the full range of unreliable witnesses, to the extent that pages and pages of information that, on the surface, might look acceptable, are revealed under scrutiny to be completely worthless.

My project to analyze all the files stalled about halfway through, when I ran out of funding, and was, to be honest, exhausted, but I fully intend to engage in further research in the near future, as the material will, I believe, be extremely useful for the 80 prisoners at (out of 166 in total) who have not already been cleared for release by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he took office in January 2009.

I believe that the information in the files will help to ascertain that, contrary to what the US government believes, there is very little reliable information that can be used to justify the detention of the 46 prisoners still in Guantánamo who were designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial in an executive order that President Obama issued two years ago.

Nor, for that matter, can the information relied upon by the US government justify, in general, the detention of the 34 other men who were recommended for trial by the inter-agency task force, established by the President, which also made the recommendations about the 46 others in a report in January 2010. Since then, the tattered credibility of the trials at Guantánamo — the military commissions — has been thoroughly undermined by Conservative judges in the court of appeals in Washington D.C., so that, with the exception of the seven men already charged, it is possible that none of the others will be charged, and their detention too will be supposedly justified on the basis of information that is, for the most part, equally unreliable.

As people around the world campaign for Bradley Manning on Saturday, I hope I will not be alone in realizing that his release of the files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners is not just something of historical significance, because the information in the files is still playing a part in the ongoing campaign to close Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.