No Chelsea morning for hypocritical world leaders in Paris

[Ken Burch]

http://rabble.ca/columnists/2015/01/no-chelsea-morning-hypocritical-world-leaders-paris

When a former U.S. army private awoke in her jail cell just over a week ago -- some 17 months into a 35-year jail sentence -- she could have been forgiven for thinking, in the immediate aftermath of the terrible Paris magazine attacks, that the commutation of her punitive sentence for exercising freedom of speech and conscience was about to be placed on President Obama's desk. Obama, like many world leaders, had just issued stunning, passionate statements about freedom of the press, human dignity, and all the great things that make countries like Canada and the U.S. just so undeniably terrific.

For the now 26-year-old Chelsea (previously known as Bradley) Manning, though, it was not to be. She had had the audacity to challenge terrorism by exposing it, not in a manner that humiliated or denigrated her targets, but simply to inform the public, generate discussion, bolster democracy and hold accountable those who had committed atrocities. "If you had free reign over classified networks…and you saw incredible things, awful things...things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC...what would you do?" she had asked in an online chat room.
Her answer was simple: copy those documents and videos on a flash drive and share them with the world through Wikileaks. What she revealed threatened no one's national security, but certainly put the lie to the notion that wars of "freedom and liberation" being led by our great democracies were shams built on massive repression, indiscriminate bombing and torture. Most people outside of the "free world" knew this, usually from first-hand experience, but here were cold hard facts, government cables, and the shocking "collateral damage video" in which two Reuters journalists and nine other civilians are ruthlessly gunned down by laughing American soldiers.

But unlike the global reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Manning's picture (and most of her revelations) rarely appeared front and centre in newspapers around the world in a show of defiance against those brutal authorities that were punishing her for speaking out. Her case was not trumpeted by brave media and mass rallies of global citizens chanting "Je Suis Chelsea"; her revelations were not printed by the millions and funded by government (the French government spent over a million euros to print the post-attack issue of Charlie Hebdo, knowing that the front cover would be flipping the bird to many of its Muslim citizens); the symbol of the flash drive was not held aloft as the real way to defeat terrorism (as pencils were in the Hebdo case); self-righteous publishers and columnists were not saying "if you don't like her revelations, just don't look at them" (most preferred to either ignore them, treat them as isolated instances or make personal attacks against Manning).

Instead, Manning was hustled away for three and a half decades while those whose crimes she exposed (including Bush and Cheney) continued gloating about their decisions, even after the damning U.S. Senate report on torture, one whose revelations were quickly banished to the back pages after the Paris attacks. (Manning herself was subjected to over three years of pre-trial solitary confinement, often refused clothing, in conditions that the UN concluded constituted "cruel and inhumane" treatment.)