Chelsea Manning is a patriot. She will go down in history as one of the great Americans of our time. If you have not already, please read her statement. No, not the statement she issued about her decision to transition from a lifetime as Bradley to a future as Chelsea. While that statement is also bold, powerful, and inspiring, it was Manning’s plea for a pardon from President Barack Obama that gave me chills. Chills because of the bravery of this young woman in the face of 35 years of incarceration. Chills because she so deftly puts words to everything that is wrong about how the war on terror has been waged. Chills because she invokes the mistakes of our past so that we may stop repeating them. Chills because she is so willing to give up her freedom so that we can live in a “country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”

Below is CommonDreams.org’s rush transcript of Manning’s statement, which was read by her attorney, David Coombs, after she was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

‘Sometimes You Have to Pay a Heavy Price to Live in a Free Society’

“The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war.  We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country.  It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing.  It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity.  We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan.  When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians.  Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture.  We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government.  And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power.  When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few.  I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States.  It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people.  When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.  I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”

I found Manning’s case to be extremely troubling, not just for the unjust, harsh sentence imposed upon one who leaked classified documents with the purest of intentions, but also because of the implications the case has for free speech and freedom of press in our society. Like journalist Aura Bogado, I too, feel more than a pang of remorse for not paying enough attention to Chelsea’s case, for not speaking out against what I perceive as gross injustice, for not doing enough to support this brave fellow American. Godspeed, Chelsea. May the caged phase of your life be short, and may freedom come swiftly. I will write you.

For those interested in sending letters to Chelsea, the address is below:

Bradley E. Manning 89289 1300 N. Warehouse Road Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304

The post Chelsea Manning is a patriot appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Every July 4th, I think about Howard Zinn’s insightful essay on nationalism and its overused, over-hyped symbols. Like most everything written by Zinn, it’s compelling, poignant and virtually timeless. Although Zinn wrote it in 2006, during the height of the Iraq War, as a reflection on the faux patriotism of our national birthday and of the actions of the George W. Bush administration, I am always struck by its relevance to current events, so I’m republishing it–again. And I’m wondering, if he were here today, WWZS [What Would Zinn Say] ?

Put Away the Flags, by Howard Zinn

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

© 2010 The Progressive

[Editor’s note: Howard Zinn (1922-2010) authored many books, including “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” Please read Matthew Rothschild’s “Thank you, Howard Zinn,” for more about his legacy. This article  was distributed by the Progressive Media Project in 2006.]

The post Put away the flags, by Howard Zinn appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I was perusing an old photo book recently and came across Stanley Forman’s 1977 Pulitzer Prize winning photo of an anti-busing protestor using a flag as a lance to attack a black attorney in Boston. It was a photograph that shook the nation into the realization that segregation was not just a Southern issue.

In his 2008 book, The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America, Louis P. Masur describes the impact of the photograph:

The image served as a harsh reminder that the triumphs of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had turned tragic. Progress had been made, but alongside it stood backlash and failure. Americans cherished stories of wrongs righted, of darkness yielding to light, but Forman’s picture provided a poisonous counter-narrative. The brotherhood of man was a worthy ideal, and it even seemed at times that a strong foundation had been laid for its realization. But in a claustrophobic courtyard, a white man turned the American flag against a black man, and the ideal crumbled.

The perception of Boston as a racist city persisted for years. Ironically, it was in Boston in 2004 that Barack Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention with a speech that helped launch him into national attention.

The flag can be a potent weapon of emotional and even irrational behavior. It can also be a quiet reminder of more positive meaning.

This Flag Day, let’s keep things in perspective.

The post Photographer’s notebook: Flag Day perspectives appeared first on Occasional Planet.