Chelsea Manning, a private in the US Army who worked as an intelligence specialist, was sentenced on August 21 to 35 years in jail for leaking hundreds of thousands of ecret cables to WikiLeaks.
Formerly known as “Bradley”, Manning announced via her lawyer on August 22 that she would undergo hormone treatment to transition to a woman and was now known as Chelsea.
Australian attorney-general Mark Dreyfus has claimed that Manning, and NSA whisteblower Edward Snowden, should not be considered whistleblowers as they supposedly did not reveal any government wrongdoing.
In fact, the information released by Manning, and published by WikiLeaks, exposed serious crimes by the US military, government cover-ups and lies, and support by the US government for corporate plunder, among other things. The Bradley Manning Support Network compiled a list of some of the most damning revelations, published below.
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There is an official policy to ignore torture in Iraq
The “Iraq War Logs” published by WikiLeaks revealed that thousands of reports of prisoner abuse and torture had been filed against the Iraqi Security Forces.
Medical evidence detailed how prisoners had been whipped with heavy cables across the feet, hung from ceiling hooks, suffered holes being bored into their legs with electric drills, urinated upon, and sexually assaulted.
These logs also revealed the existence of “Frago 242”, an order implemented in 2004 not to investigate allegations of abuse against the Iraqi government. This order is a direct violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the United States in 1994.
The Convention prohibits the armed forces from transferring a detainee to other countries “where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture”.
According to the State Department’s own reports, the US government was already aware that the Iraqi Security Forces engaged in torture.
US officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan
US defence contractors were brought under much tighter supervision after leaked diplomatic cables revealed that they had been complicit in child trafficking activities.
DynCorp — a powerful defence contracting firm that claims almost US$2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars — threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring boys purchased from child traffickers for entertainment. DynCorp had already faced human trafficking charges before this incident.
According to the cables, Afghan interior minister Hanif Atmar urged the assistant US ambassador to “quash” the story. These revelations have been a driving factor behind recent calls for the removal of all US defense contractors from Afghanistan.
Guantanamo prison has held mostly innocent people and low-level operatives
The Guantanamo Files describe how detainees were arrested based on what the New York Times referred to as highly subjective evidence. For example, some poor farmers were captured after they were found wearing a common watch or a jacket that was the same as those also worn by Al Queda operatives.
How quickly innocent prisoners were released was heavily dependent on their country of origin. Because the evidence collected against Guantanamo prisoners is not permissible in US courts, the US State Department has offered millions of dollars to other countries to take and try our prisoners.
According to a US diplomatic cable written on April 17, 2009, the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners requested that the National Court indict six former US officials for creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture against five Spanish prisoners at Guantanamo.
However, “Senator Mel Martinez … met Acting FM [Foreign Minister] Angel Lossada … on April 15. Martinez … underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the U.S. and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship”.
There is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan
Even though the Bush and Obama administrations maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was false.
Between 2004 and 2009, the US government counted a total of 109,000 deaths in Iraq, with 66,081 classified as non-combatants. This means that for every Iraqi death that is classified as a combatant, two innocent men, women or children are also killed.
US military officials withheld information about the indiscriminate killing of Reuters journalists and innocent Iraqi civilians
The Collateral Murder video released by Wikileaks depicted the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two journalists working for Reuters. The Reuters news group was repeatedly denied in its attempts to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act.
The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters photographer and his rescuers. Two young children who were present in the attempted rescue were also seriously wounded.
Ethan McCord, a US army soldier who can be seen in the video carrying wounded children to safety, has said that whoever revealed this video is a “hero”. An internal US military investigation concluded that the incident was consistent with the military’s “Rules of Engagement”.
The State Department backed corporate opposition to a Haitian minimum wage law
Leaked diplomatic cables show that in 2009, the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince pushed then-Haitian president Rene Preval to come out in support of powerful textile manufacturers who sought to block a popular minimum wage rise.
These factory owners, who produce apparel for large brands like Nike and Nautica, had benefitted from recent free trade agreements that had severely lowered wages and working conditions in Haiti.
A series of cables show that the US Embassy closely monitored the movements and activities of student protesters supporting the $5 a day minimum wage bill. The bill’s supporters had argued that the rise was justified in light of rising inflation and food costs that had led to widespread starvation.
According to the leaked cables, the US delegation dismissed the proposed minimum wage rise as nothing more than a populist measure aimed at appeasing “the unemployed and underpaid masses.” Ultimately, the US delegation succeeded in their efforts when President Preval agreed to block the increase.
The US government had long been faking its public support for former Tunisian president Ben Ali
The Tunisian people were already well aware of the corruption plaguing the autocratic ruling family, which for decades had abused their rights. However, the US government had long presented a public image of strong support for the Ben Ali regime.
The US campaign of unwavering public support for Ben Ali led to a widespread belief among the Tunisian people that it would be very difficult to dislodge the autocratic regime from power. This view was shattered when leaked cables exposed the US government’s private assessment: that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising.
While extreme economic hardship and popular discontent with rights abuses had already set the stage for an uprising, this new information played a critical role in transforming the landscape of political possibilities in Tunisia.
The Tunisian people finally realised that, contrary to the US government’s public relations efforts, they weren’t really up against the full force of the world’s superpower.
Within one month, Ben Ali became the first Arab leader to be swept from power in the ongoing democratic movements in the region.
Known Egyptian torturers received training from the FBI in Quantico, Virginia
According to a leaked diplomatic cable from Cairo, the head of Egypt’s notorious State Security Investigative Service (SSIS) thanked FBI Deputy Director John Pistole for the “excellent and strong” cooperation between the two agencies.
In particular, the FBI’s training sessions in Quantico, Virginia, were of “great benefit” to his interrogators. Another cable documented what the US embassy considered “credible” allegations of human rights violations by the SSIS, including torturing prisoners with “electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state’”.
After the autocratic Mubarak regime was driven from power in the recent Egyptian Revolution, protesters stormed the “Amn Dawla” headquarters of the SSIS to uncover further evidence of torture and abuse. They posted these documents on their own site, known as “Amn Dawla Leaks”.
The State Department authorised the theft of the United Nations secretary general's DNA
According to the “National Humint Collection Directive”, a secret document signed by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and published by WikiLeaks, US diplomats were authorised to collect “biometric” and other sensitive information from top UN officials as well as UN representatives from other nations.
The leaked documents show that “biometric data” specifically included samples of the officials’ DNA, among other forms of personally identifying information. They also ordered diplomats to collect credit card information and secure passwords.
These activities contravene the 1946 UN Convention.
The Japanese and US governments had been warned about the seismic threat at Fukushima
A cable from December 2008 showed that officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had warned the government about the danger posed by potential seismic activity in the area. The official stated that Japan’s “safety guides for seismic safety have only been revised three times in the last 35 years”.
He also noted the government had fought against a court order to close down another nuclear facility that was not adequately prepared for an earthquake. After being ignored by the Japanese government, the IAEA official warned the US ambassador to Japan about the looming threat from possible earthquake damage.
These warnings went unheeded. The IAEA has now ranked the Fukushima disaster as severe as Chernobyl.
Mstrong>The Obama Administration allowed Yemen's president to cover up a secret US drone bombing campaign
Since December 2009, US President Barack Obama has authorised a secret drone bombing campaign in Yemen. A year later, WikiLeaks revealed that Yemen’s then-president Ali Abullah Saleh had agreed that his regime would “continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours”.
These drone strikes have killed large numbers of civilians. One of the strikes that occurred shortly before the cable in question was written had killed 55 people, 41 of whom were classified as civilians (21 of these were children) according to a report by Amnesty International. This US military operation in Yemen, which persists to this day, has not been officially acknowledged by the US government.
