The helicopter film tendentiously edited by WikiLeaks and dubbed "Collateral Murder".
I went to Ed Pilkerton's live chat today at the Guardian. I don't know if that link stays valid.
I asked:
Comment From Catherine Fitzpatrick
Why do you think Assange didn't want to publish the report about the Iraqi printing press that Manning said formed the turning point for his decision to "become a whistleblower" i.e. in fact commit treason? After all, there was an eye witness and participate in the events -- Manning himself! what more specific did he need form these docs?
He replied:
It is intriguing - that Assange, assuming it was Assange, actually declined to post an offering from Manning that related to US collaboration with the Iraqi government to cover up corruption in the same-said Iraqi government. You would have thought that that would have been bang down the middle of WikiLeaks wanted to expose. But Assange, according to Manning's statement, said he'd need more information "to confirm the event" in order for it to be published. That's puzzling, because Assange didn't think that the rest of the hundreds of thousands of documents WikiLeaks disclosed from Manning needed confirming. Manning also adds that Assange wanted to know more in order for the event "to gain interest in the international media" and I think that's probably the reason - he didn't think it was sexy enough to attract media attention.
Ed makes a very good point here -- why did he insist on *that* event being confirmed but not hundreds of thousands of others?
It may be that Assange "didn't think it was sexy enough" or who knows, he may have shrewdly decided that it would be easier for the US military to discount this incident and produce proof that these people were in fact militants and not just corruption critics. Obviously, Assange had a good eye for what he could turn into agitprop -- like the "Collateral Murder" video -- this exchange at TechCrunch shows the typical dupes that show up completely brainwaished by this disinformation approach -- or perhaps knowingly taking part in the propaganda exercise themselves.
Assange might have known, although he's no international law expert, that in war, armies can justify attacks on the media if they can show they are part of the enemy's war-fighting capacity. CPJ used to argue that if NATO bombed Serbia's state TV station during the war, that was a blow against press freedom. Some people might argue the opposite. This subject is endlessly argued, i.e. in the effort by Human Rights Watch recently to turn Palestinians into journalists who shouldn't have been targeted.
"Just because Israel says a journalist was a fighter or a TV station was a command center does not make it so," says Human Rights Watch -- but just because Human Rights Watch says they aren't doesn't make it so, either. That's just it -- Assange may have decided, and possibly instinctively, on the fly, that this wouldn't make good propaganda.
It might have made a good human rights case, however, and had Manning bought it to people who cared about human rights more than they cared about the revolution or bringing down states, like CPJ or HRW, with all their biases, the case may have actually been worked up to be an exemplary one about what was wrong with the way the US prosecuted the war in Iraq.
I'm reading Manning's long personal statement now (or rather, the transcription of his remarks made by Alexa O'Brien) as an official record of it is not being released. I would have been happy to revise my opinion of young Bradass if I could find more evidence that he really cared about Iraqis as a matter of conscience and worked to reveal matters he believe to illustrate the injustice of the American war. It was almost there but...it is overridden not only by his focus on himself and his technology; any of the conscience aspect of it was undone by how badly he mangled the texts to turn them into propaganda -- like an kid in an IRC channel or on Reddit.
I'm struck once again by the narcissistic obsession with self; with the technology; with one's self gloriously manipulating the technology that is the hallmark of our Internet-raised kids.
To be sure, Manning is shown here at least to be serious about documenting this incident with the printing press, which is more than I would have said for him before reading this -- I thought he just didn't care, because he never leaked that particular document. It seemed to me that he didn't try to get it -- thereby removing this "conscience" alibi for his act of anarchic destruction.
But he did get the file and did try to work it up -- and then Assange wouldn't take it. Why?
I have never seen that Iraqi printing press story in WikiLeaks and can't find it. Of course, it's a lot of stuff, and maybe I'm not searching correctly...
Interesting how Manning mentions his interest in WLO, as he called WikiLeaks, USG or military-style, with an acronym, like PLO, began with the 9/11 SMS. Hey, I never saw the Guardian or any other newspaper ever get upset about the hackers getting those materials the way they got upset about the Murdoch paper's journos getting the dead girl's phone messages and other materials. That was always a clear double standard on their part.
Say, it would be good to get some of those missed words about the IRC chats. WikiLeaks makes it seems like all Bradley did was chat on their open channel. But if he was like most hackers, at some point he would have been given a more secret and less accessible or at least less visible channel to have a more private chat on, and that was the moment you could track Assange's recruitment and therefore implicate him or his comrades:
I normally engaged in multiple IRC conversations simultaneously –mostly publicly, but often privately. The XChat client enabled me to manage these multiple conversations across different channels and servers. The screen for XChat was often busy, but its screens enabled me to see when something was interesting. I would then select the conversation and either observe or participate.
I really enjoyed the IRC conversations pertaining to and involving the WLO, however, at some point in late February or early March of 2010, the WLO IRC channel was no longer accessible. Instead, regular participants of this channel switched to using the Jabber server. Jabber is another internet communication [missed word] similar but more sophisticated than IRC.
The IRC and Jabber conversations, allowed me to feel connected to others even when alone. They helped pass the time and keep motivated throughout the deployment.
So, IRC-as-therapy and self-medication -- and not for the first time...
Does anyone else find this section of Bradley's self-imposed confession really confusing? He seems both to want to exonerate his boyfriend Tyler from any involvement in WikiLeaks so as not to ruin his life, but he also then credits him with going from being "confused" about Bradley's revelations to "asking too many questions"?
What happened at MIT? Did he meet Aaron Swartz? We know he met with and discussed topics intently with other MIT hackers. Did Swartz later help him or WikiLeaks? Manning writes:
I was excited to see Tyler and planned on talking to Tyler about where our relationship was going and about my time in Iraq. However, when I arrived in the Boston area Tyler and I seemed to become distant. He did not seem very excited about my return from Iraq. I tried talking to him about our relationship but he refused to make any plans.
I also tried to raising the topic of releasing the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables to the public. I asked Tyler hypothetical questions about what he would do if he had documents that he thought the public needed access to. Tyler really didn't have a specific answer for me. He tried to answer the questions and be supportive, but seemed confused by the question in this context.
I then tried to be more specific, but he asked too many questions. Rather than try to explain my dilemma, I decided to just drop the conversation. After a few days in Waltham, I began to feel really bad. I was over staying my welcome, and I returned to Maryland. I spent the remainder of my time on leave in the Washington, DC area.
So then we get geopolitical musings and woo-woo like this:
I felt that we were risking so much for people that seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and anger on both sides. I began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year. The SigActs documented this in great detail and provide a context of what we were seeing on the ground.
or this:
The cable published on 13 January 2010 was just over two pages in length. I read the cable and quickly concluded that Iceland was essentially being bullied diplomatically by two larger European powers. It appeared to me that Iceland was out viable options and was coming to the US for assistance. Despite the quiet request for assistance, it did not appear that we were going to do anything
Anyone a little bit more mature or experienced than Bradley would say, "Hey, thanks for your geopolitical insights, Pfc Manning, now go do your job." Or they might have begun proceedings to court-martial him.
Lots and lots of other people in the world came to these same materials without WikiLeaks and wound up with more sophisticated conclusions. Say, one of them was President Barack Obama, who withdrew the troops from Iraq.
Manning writes -- of course, after three years to think about it, so we don't know how much he is now interpolating into his own earlier state of mind -- that he was upset at the helicopter shooting because of its "bloodlust" and because he matched materials about Reuters' FOIA request that was not honoured by CENTCOM:
They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote "dead bastards" unquote and congratulating each other on the 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 seems 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 that the bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew – as soon as 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.
Well, as Bradley surely knew, there was no way to see there were children in the van. He mentions the "discovery of injured children at the scene" and *then* mentions the request "granted they engage the vehicle at least six times" -- but he knows full well as we all do that *first* there was the request to engage AFTER the vehicle (with the kids not visible in it) drove up to pick up the wounded man so quickly THEN came the discovery of the children later (not in the film).
That's one obvious manipulative moment in this statement of Bradley's.
And you realize something about Bradley Manning: he was an intelligence analyst who doesn't seem to have seen combat and who doesn't seem to use dispassionate intelligence to analyze material. He is shocked by how men at war talk about other men at war. It distresses him, as if he has never seen or heard it -- by being a man at war with other men at war.
Yes, you'd like Americans -- who shouldn't have been there in the first place -- to be more polite and considerate as they wage war with people whom they think they are gunmen who just shot at them earlier in the day. They aren't. It's not a war crime.
And it *is* the fault of the father for deciding to get involved as a "good samaritan" in a shooting zone with his kids in the car. That's not cruelty to say so; it's good parenting to say so.
The interpolation of later sentimentalizing and agitprop misuse of this film makes me want to check the upload date to Google docs and the publication dates for David Finkel's book and the Washpo articles about it...so I did.
And I see the excerpt from the Washington Post book review about David Finkel's book does not turn up mention of the helicopter incident. It's not in there. So Manning is being misleading here. Then -- who knows exactly how -- Manning goes to Google books, supposedly. Someone, Manning found the necessary page -- but I do wonder if the "finding on Google books" is a prop.
He writes, first about the Washpo article which does NOT mention the helicopter incident:
The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the parents. Later in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team verbalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body – or one of the bodies. As I continued my research, I found an article discussing the book, The Good Soldiers, written by Washington Post writer David Finkel.
Well, it's misleading, to say the least -- he didn't learn about the helicopter incident from that excerpt.
Then Manning writes:
In Mr. Finkel book, he writes about the aerial weapons team attack. As, I read an online excerpt in Google Books, I followed Mr. Finkel's account of the event belonging to the video. I quickly realize that Mr. Finkel was quoting, I feel in verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew.
It is clear to me that Mr. Finkel obtained access and a copy of the video during his tenue as an embedded journalist. I was aghast at Mr. Finkel's portrayal of the incident. Reading his account, one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as "payback" for an earlier attack that lead to the death of a soldier. Mr. Finkel ends his account by discussing how a soldier finds an individual still alive from the attack. He writes that the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together, a common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture extending his middle finger.
The story of the forefingers comes later incident, at least as turned up by search on Google books.
P. 102 of the book in Google Books search (they care less about copyright concerns than Amazon does) does recount the helicopter incident and the picking up of the wounded children, but it makes it clear that the US soldier finds it imperative to get help because their own medic can't deal with the severe wounded, and the context is made clear of a perceived battle with militants after another battle with militants:
"I've got eleven Iraqi KIAs, one small child wounded. Over."
"Ah, damn," one of them said."
"We need to evac this child," Bravo Seven continued. "She's got a wound to the belly. Doc can't do anything here. She needs to get evac'd. Over."
"Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle," a crew member said.
"That's right," the other said, and for a few more minutes they continue to circle and watch.
This doesn't sound like blood-thirsty monsters, but grown-ups in the deadly business of battle.
Finkel makes this clear in his next passages:
There, in the courtyard of a house, hidden from street view, they found two more injured Iraqis, one on top of the other. As March looked closer at the two, who might have been the two who had been lifting Chmagh into the van, who as far as March knew had spent the morning trying to kill American soldiers, he realized that the one on the bottom was dead. But the one on top was still alive, and as March locked eyes with him, the man raised his hands and rubbed his two forefingers together, which March had learned was what Iraqis did when they wanted to signal the word friends.
So March look at the man and rubbed his two forefingers together, too.
And then dropped his left hand and extended the middle finger of his right hand.
And then said to the other soldier, "Craig's probably just sitting up there drinking beer, going 'Hah!' That's all I needed.'"
Who is Craig? His dead buddy, blown to smithereens earlier.
Here's what Finkel wrote -- again, like a good journalist, and a grown-up -- about the review of the incident.
They had gotten the video and audio recordings form the Apaches and had reviewed them several times.
They had looked at photographs taken by soldiers that showed AK-47s and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher next to the dad Iraqis.
They had reviewed everything they could about what had prefaced the killings in east Al-Amin, in other words -- that soldiers were being shot at, that they didn't know journalists were there, that the journalists were in a group of men carrying weapons, that the Apache crew had followed the rules of engagement when it fired at the men with weapons, at the journalists, and at the van with the children inside -- and had concluded that everyone had acted appropriately.
Had the journalists?
That would be for others to decide.
Right.
But what I've already begun wondering is whether Bradley really saw all these materials while serving in the army in Iraq, or whether they were put together for him by others in his legal defense team or supporter groups or even WikiLeaks.
Well, and I wonder if Bradley Manning can exactly read sequential passages in a book for comprehension.
I wonder because either Bradley Manning is as tendentious a reader and selective an editor as Julian Assange, or maybe just very young and naive and willing to see some things jump out from a page and not read past the little Google slice of a book that he found on a key-word search -- so typical of the Internet-bred generation.
David Finkel saw the video, interviewed the people, wrote the book. But he didn't say the men in the Apache were war criminals because he was a journalist, not a propagandist.
Bradass finds it hard to envision -- in a war! in a combat zone! -- that soldiers could feel any sense of vindication for shooting at other armed men after their own buddy was killed.
If this video really did what Bradley -- and all the more, Assange -- said it was supposed to do -- awaken us to conscience about how immoral our army is -- it didn't work. Because it exposes the shambles of their own agitprop more than it exposes the tawdry and grisly business of war-fighting. Finkel has the self-presence to ask if the journalists -- his own comrades-at-arms, so to speak -- were doing the right thing having an armed escort. This is a debate among journalists!
But neither Manning nor Assange or any of the legion of brainwashed kids whiplashed by their manipulation ask that question, let along concede the benefit of the doubt and good will to the US soldiers, even if they behaved crassly taking glee in a kill or showing a middle finger.
I began reading Manning's personal statement with the willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even seeing that his more careful documentation of the Iraqi printing press story, better than I thought, and his dismay about Assange not publishing it, which we hadn't any way of knowing about before, indicative of perhaps a more complex character than he appeared.
Yet seeing how he handled a series of passages from a newspapers and a book, and seeing his thinking processes so typical of the tendentious haters of the IRC or Internet forums, I leave with the conviction that not only is Manning a bad soldier, he's no freedom fighter, but a propagandist, like Assange.
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