Wikileaks Whistleblower is Arrested

June 7, 2010

The NYTimes is report­ing that a mil­i­tary ana­lyst who leaked the “Col­lat­er­al Mur­der” videos to Wik­ileaks has been arrested. 

atwar-wikileaks-blogSpanIf you missed the leaks at the time, you can watch them at Col​lat​eral​Mur​der​.com. They are videos tak­en from the gun-sights of US heli­copters, com­plete with the com­men­tary from mil­i­tary per­son­nel fir­ing down into the Iraqi neigh­bor­hoods below them. The videos cap­ture the killing of civil­ians, includ­ing two Reuters jour­nal­ists. They show just how imper­son­al mur­der has become. This is a video game war and there’s no real con­se­quence to shoot­ing the wrong tar­get from thou­sands of feet away.

The arrest­ed sol­dier is Spe­cial­ist Bradley Man­ning, 22, of Potomac, Md. Motives for leak­ing the videos are unre­port­ed at this time, but one would sus­pect they include a moral revul­sion to what the Amer­i­can war has become. The war has large­ly been fought out of sight. Man­ning has helped give us a glimpse of what’s hap­pen­ing. It’s hor­rif­ic in its banal­i­ty but so is the war in Iraq.

Soldier against the war gets mistrial

February 7, 2007

Just over the wires: “Mis­tri­al declared court-martial of war objector”:http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2007 – 02-08T000024Z_01_N05474363_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-IRAQ-OFFICER.xml&WTmodLoc=PolNewsHome_C1_%5BFeed%5D‑3. Details:
bq. A mil­i­tary judge declared a mis­tri­al on Wednes­day in the court-martial of a U.S. Army offi­cer, who pub­licly refused to fight in Iraq and crit­i­cized the war.
It’s great to see that some sol­diers are seri­ous­ly debat­ing the ethics of this war.