README.txt

by Chelsea Manning

I learned the mantra “Queers, don’t be quiet, Stonewall was a riot.” There was all this history that no one had ever taught me, that didn’t fit neatly into the liberal-establishment version of gay rights.

Cheesy as it sounds, I looked up at the stars and decided that I wanted to see if I could change the world, instead of feeling overwhelmed by the things I found awful about it.

I was troubled by what I saw and read. But the most shocking thing about this video, in which innocent people are killed simply for being in the wrong place, is that everything about it was perfectly legal under the Geneva Conventions and our own rules of engagement.

But when a war is presented to the American public, it looks like a finished product: cleaned and edited, funneled through embedded reporters who have their own complicated relationships with the military to manage. Or it’s flashed briefly across CNN, simplified into the kind of takeaway you can fit across a chyron.

“From my experiences in Iraq, we shouldn’t even be in these countries fighting wars. This is a war of aggression, of occupation. There is nothing justifiable to me about this war,”