The entire US government is lining up against this courageous young Army Private, including calls for his death, but we’re building a “Stand with Brad” campaign to give voice to the millions who understand what’s really going on here.

“We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad… We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning”, begins our statement at http://standwithbrad.org.

1. Please sign the statement yourself.

2. I’m hoping you can encourage a few friends to also add their name.

3. When talking to folks about this, let them know there is a grassroots support network that has taken responsibility for Bradley’s legal defense expenses… and Bradley could really use their support. http://couragetoresist.org/bradley

For every statement signer, an individual copy is printed and mailed to Army officials on their behalf, regardless of their ability to make a donation.

Thank you.

Peace,
Mike

Click here to view the embedded video.

On the one hand, I am grateful to WikiLeaks for making this available. On the other, I am ashamed, disappointed and frightened that such direct evidence of evil is necessary for people to ascertain its presence and dominion.

“Bushmaster” will never be prosecuted by the system which put him in control. Maybe one or two of the CounterStrike-addled kids who actually did these murders will, and be released after a couple of years, having been “rehabilitated”. The whole goddamned thing will be swept under the rug and forgotten, much like the carpet-bombing and napalming of Vietnamese and Burmese families two generations ago. Much like the firebombing of Dresden. Much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Much like the massacres in the Philippines. Oh, I could go on…

And the machine will grind on. Threatening, extorting, imprisoning, torturing, maiming and murdering, until we put a stop to it. These creatures — I cannot call them “people” — live in your communities. They attend your churches. They dine in your restaurants. They attend PTA meetings at your school. They shop in your grocery store, and, maybe, they occasionally come into contact with your children or grandchildren at the playground. They are monsters, worthy of less than the bottom of a well, and yet they live among you.

And they are forming your culture. They are defining the world we live in. They are honored and revered for their “service” to rival global death machines. And the music swells, the crowd rises, hands go over hearts, and…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDCsp1atehU

Neda Soltani

(YouTube video comment by witness)

shery630

June 20, 2009

Place: Karekar Ave., at the corner crossing Khosravi St. and Salehi st. (Tehran)

A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart. I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim’s chest, and she died in less than 2 minutes.

The protests were going on about 1 kilometers away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gass used among them, towards Salehi St.

The film is shot by my friend who was standing beside me.

Please let the world know.

Neda Soltani

From Facebook:

Neda Soltani (1982 – 20th June 2009; age 26–27) was an young Iranian woman whose killing, allegedly by Basij militia during the 2009 Iranian election protests, was captured on video by bystanders. The graphic videos were posted on the Internet, and her name quickly became a rallying cry for the opposition.

Neda means “voice” or “calling” in Persian, and she has been referred to as the “voice of Iran” and “a symbol” of this revolution taking place right now. Ya Neda, Ya Neda…. Ya Neda.

We had been there a couple of times already during our two weeks or so in the city. Antigua itself is beautiful, up in the high country, filled with classic colonial-period architecture, lots of neat little shops, and plenty for the tourist. Just to the south, Volcán de Agua towers some 12,000 feet above everything. As Guatemala goes, you couldn’t ask for a more serene, lovely place.

Volcán de Agua, Antigua, Guatemala

And the restaurant was lovely too, with an indoor courtyard with tropical trees, a lively bar in the back and a menu worth sampling again and again. Though at the top end of the scale for Guatemala, the prices were quite comfortable for bearers of United States dollars looking for great food in a nice setting. The clientele were generally foreign tourists, with the occasional group of darker-skinned, upper-class guatemaltecos appearing as well.

A couple of people walk in and start making for the back of the restaurant, where there might be some tables available. They approach us, as we’re sitting at a table against a wall along the route to the back. A young man, perhaps 19 years of age, followed by a middle aged man, presumably his father. Both guatemaltecos.

My eye is caught for some reason. Something isn’t right about the youth’s gait. In an instant, I see why: his arm ends in a short stump just below his shoulder. And then I notice his father behind him, with a prosthetic arm slung over his shoulder.

Tragic. What horrible accident must have led to this. I can’t even imagine what life would be like, less than physically complete, not to mention the sensations, the horror, the feelings that must come of losing a limb. The folks who live in the countryside and till the land in Guatemala have hard lives, and accidents must be common.

I turn my attention back to my shrimp cocktail, quickly, as they approach our table.

But something is still not right with the young man’s gait, and I turn as they pass, perhaps impolitely, and look again.

And it is then that I see that the father carries not one, but two prosthetic arms slung over his shoulders. And that his son’s other arm is also mostly missing, ending in a slightly longer stump than the other.

What do you call a young man with no arms?

Victim.

Perhaps I drop my fork as the realization hits me: this young man walking past me, just entering adulthood, was not the victim of an accident.

Silence on the Mountain

Right up until the end of the bloody 46-year Guatemalan “civil” war in 1996, state-sponsored gangs roamed the countryside, striking targets of opportunity and instilling fear into the populace, in hopes of crushing support for the guerrilla resistance groups. A favorite tactic, described in Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala; Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala and elsewhere, was for the terror squads to attack small, rural villages suspected of sheltering or supporting the guerrillas. Everyone in the village was forced out of their homes at gunpoint, assembled, and segregated: men over here, women over there, children here. The villagers watched as soldiers and police raped their mothers, sisters and daughters. Those who resisted were simply shot. Those surviving now watched as some of the children, boys especially, had one or both of their arms or hands hacked off with machetes. And then most of the men were executed. Still more were led away from the villages, bound and at gunpoint, enslaved or slaughtered and never to be seen again: los desaparecidos, the disappeared.

The armless young man who just walked past me, without doubt, was one of those children in the villages in the early- to mid-1990s — mutilated, crippled by the criminal violence of state agents in the service of an inhuman ruling class, and left to live as a reminder to those who would challenge their privilege.

I tried several times, in conversations with guatemaltecos, to ask about the war, and how it had touched their lives. None would speak of it to me — perhaps because I am a white man, but without question because they want to forget.

I have a bit of a different outlook on those troops, as many of you know.

A child's life CHANGED forever, thanks to America's brave soldiers. Bala Baluk district, Farah province, Afghanistan, 5 May 2009. Photo via the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, www.rawa.org

I set out today to put forward a Memorial Day post to remember, a real shocker, if you will.

But I found myself surveying endless sets of photos of the horrors of war. Children missing limbs. Hideously mutated stillborn babies, courtesy of “depleted” uranium munitions. Battlefield trauma surgery. Burn victims. Executions. Murder, mutilation, death.

And my will faltered. I find I don’t have much to say. Or, perhaps I do, but digging deeply enough to put the words together is hurting me, and so I must back away.

So, instead, I leave you with the photo at right, and with simple linkage to my two pieces from around this time last year: Fuck the troops! and A Memorial Day tribute to police state supporters. And also with a few words from fellow anarcho-blogger Cork, in “A memorial day we can all get behind“:

Some anarchists will tell you that the troops died for nothing. But that’s not exactly true.

They died to butcher women and children. They died to make life miserable and unbearable for people all across the globe. They died to strengthen the police state. They died to take away our liberties. They died to enrich the military industrial complex. They died to make the world safe for US-style corporatist capitalism. They died to strengthen dictators and tyrants. They died to ensure US hegemony over the entire world, and to enslave the innocent. They died to destroy and steal from foreign countries. They died to worsen the economy and harm the poor. They died to end habeas corpus and protect torture.

In a nutshell: they died to make the world a far worse, far more despicable, and far more dangerous place. And they did so knowing exactly what they were doing.

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

– Edward Abbey

I thought it was important enough to repost here (with minor edits), for those who aren’t diligently following the nostate.com comment feed.

[W]ith a kill ratio of something upwards of 75:1, members of the U.S. [military] are doing the lion’s share of the killing [in Iraq]. It would not surprise if these criminals are also engaging in their share of rape, kidnapping and theft.  And torture  (Abu Ghraib?)

Many members of the military “are simply doing it to make money” (or college money) as they are too weak-willed and/or stupid to make an honest buck.

Instead they choose to get paid to serve an organization whose primary purpose is to threaten and, “if necessary”, carry out acts of aggressive violence against mostly hapless people caught in the crossfire between the US government and the “enemy” du jour.

Governments are always trying to redefine their crimes out of existence by taking a common criminal act and attaching a new label to it. Thus, armed robbery becomes “taxation” and kidnapping becomes “arrest”, etc.

Thinking people see through these lies. If there are people in the military that are responsible for 4 or more deaths is a single event, those people are in fact mass murderers.

Whether or not their crimes are sanctioned by the same government they are killing for is wholly immaterial. Governments themselves are the largest criminal organizations, so to expect any type of moral behavior out of these organizations is foolish at best.

What if Christmas didn’t come this year?
And no one paid for Christmas cheer?
Who would cry the biggest tear,
The child or the store?

Why do brides wear virgin white?
Most do not deserve that right.
But to choose a color of their delight
Would surely bring on the frowns.

To defy the laws of tradition
Is a crusade only of the brave.

Suppose the taxman, he comes to town,
And you don’t lay your money down.
Yet Mr. Jones he killed Mr. Brown the other day.
Well I wonder… who’s gonna go to hell?

To defy the laws of tradition
Is a crusade only of the brave.

To defy the laws of tradition
Is a crusade only of the brave.

To defy the laws of tradition
Is a crusade only of the brave.

How can you sleep at night?

Merry Christmas, you fucking tool.

Would that such images reflected reality.

For every “revolutionary” decision handed down by Courts Supreme and by Tribunals Most High — which merely reflect and elucidate, rather than alter or discover, the fundamental nature of that which ought be justice — those same bodies deliver a torrent of support and endorsement for the present system and for that pile of unjust historical deadweight called “precedent” but which, in the words of Kevin Carson, might better be called “the subsidy of history”.

These august incarnations of unquestionable, unaccountable power are dressed up in the finest of robes, placed on the highest of perches and set above all other men, so that they may — to the half-blind, numbed, unthinking bulk of humanity — discover truth, lay blame where it belongs and issue a judgment most holy, and one which contributes positively to the betterment of humankind.

In reality these Holiests of Holies sit not in service of truth over falsehood but in service, rather, to whatever they can get away with to appease and gratify those who own and dominate not only the judges themselves but also the entire society which pretends to or actually does submit to their judgment. And they arrogate unto themselves the power to kill, not in the service of law or truth or virtue, but to the service of those who employ them, as tools, and do so as they have for generation after generation, century after century. The power to kill, on a whim. The power to kill, especially, when a litigant’s ideas threaten the very basis of their own unaccountable, comfortable, profitable and entirely traditional, family-values-right-down-to-that-time-my-gangster-uncle-murdered-a-hobo-who-dirtied-his-shoe-and-ain’t-that-just-the-way-it-is-and-by-god-we-gotta-get-together-and-protect-ourselves foundational power ethic, their perception of and re(ta)l(i)ation to reality.

The statist dreams that the judges will be the best of society in that they are selected and trained by the best of society’s methods. But when the judgement over what those methods ought to be and how those (s)elections ought be carried out is left up to a bunch of people who are highly skilled only in becoming elected officials and playing the statist system to the maximum advantage — rather than to those who must all directly pay the costs and suffer the problems of the system but yet remain able to change it quickly and directly since they are part of it — well, what do you expect? They do not serve truth or justice or virtue over all other things. When they serve those concepts at all, they do so only if — and, often, because — our masters have agreed to stop trying to kill us if we disagree.