I’m shocked that the military opted to charge Pfc. Bradley Manning today with the capital offense of “aiding the enemy”.

While the military is down playing the fact, the option to execute Bradley has been placed on the table. It’s beyond ironic that leaked US State Department cables have contributed to revolution and revolt in dictatorships across the Middle East and North Africa, yet an American may be executed, or at best face life in prison, for being the primary whistleblower.

Millions of Americans, and even more internationally, clearly understand the contribution of Pfc. Manning towards not only freedom of information, but literally freedom itself. It’s hard for me to reconcile that with the US Army’s additional criminal charges against Pfc. Manning today. –
Jeff Paterson,
Courage to Resist / Bradley Manning Support Network
www.bradleymanning.org

**A Call for Solidarity - Right here, Right now!
Bradley Manning is presently being tortured and faces execution accused of releasing this footage
 http://www.collateralmurder.com/

Julian Assange is being persecuted for admitting to publishing and circulating this footage

The last place Bradley Manning was before he was in a war zone, and then in chains, was Ireland. Like tens of thousands of young Americans who preceeded him, Manning past through Shannon Airport ( a defacto U.S. military base in neutral Ireland) County Clare, Ireland to his fate. 4,000 of these young Americans returned home in body bags (their corpses wisely shipped through Saudi not Shannon), 10,000 with injuries they will never recover from, they will never walk or talk again they will spend the ret of their lives shitting into their diapers (wisely shipped thorugh Germany not Shannon) another 20,000 with injuries they should partly recover from, hundrends have returned to commit homicide, suicide or actions for which they are now imprisoned, thers are walking time bombs let loose in civil society - and a million Iraqi dead mostly women and children (Lancett Report)

We Irish slapped Bradley Manning, and these hundreds of thousands of young Americans, on the sod him/them duty free and sent him/them to their predictable fate! Under the ancient rules of Irish and global hospitality Bradley Manning is party our responsibility. This young man was our guest in Ireland and we sent him on his way into a danger we were well aware of, without a word of warning.

Political parties in Ireland are content to faciilitate the American wars on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. These parties are happy to serve the largest and most destuctive empire in human history, even in its declining death throes. Irish political parties are content to run this franchise on the west coast of Europe as others are willing to run the franchises of Burger King and McDonalds on the high streets.

The Irish church and the Irish arts community, with a handful of honorobale exceptions, maintain a housebroken complicity with our role in these ongoing U.S. wars and the persecution of those,in Ireland and selsewhere, who nonviolently resist them. The generation that is providing the cannon fodder for this war feels no tension with the generation sending their contempories to do the killing and the dying. The British war machine sends its recruitment propaganda to 26 county shools and the unemployed with no visible opposition.

The Irish "left" and @ scene, like their English cousins, are largley disengaged from this ongoing war.

We have to snap out of it. wake up, smell the coffee, cop on, realise the context and the historical moment. We need to do what we can wherever we are to stop the execution, or life imprisonment in an American gulag, of Bradley Manning. We need to be doing that right now!

Bradley was only 14 when the U.S. troops started to go through Shannon to invade Iraq. For those who are older we had/have a responsibility to him, a duty of care. He was homeless when he followed his father's (who had thrown him out of the house for being gay) footsteps into the U.S. military. For those of us who have never been in a homeless predicament much is expected of us in relation to brothers and sisters in this predicament.

Nonviolent resistance, proactive soidarity with those who step up to the plate inside and outside the militaries prosecuting this war AND truth telling of the kind Manning is accused of and Juian Assange is being persecuted for presently in British courts. The time for moral posturing and opportunism is over. The time is now!
- Ciaron O'Reilly
Pit Stop Ploughshares
Related Link:  http://www.dublincatholicworker.org