
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
August 22, 2013 www.popularresistance.org
August 22, 2013 www.popularresistance.org
The extremely harsh sentencing of Manning brought to mind many ironies and had us looking at other ironies around us this week. Some are maddening, some are sad and some are useful tools for activists, but they all have the effect of pushing our work forward.

What does it say about a country that has tortured, killed civilians, spied on diplomats and spied on its own people when it is the whistleblowers who get prosecuted while those whose crimes are exposed do not even get investigated? While President Obama shows he wants to deter people who blow the whistle in their effort to improve the country, but does nothing to deter people who have dragged the country into illegality.
Another irony that struck us, that we have not seen commented on elsewhere, was that Manning was sentenced in the same week that the CIA finally admitted it organized a coup d’etat in Iran 60 years ago against the democratically-chosen prime minister. The coup was achieved by painting the well-educated Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq as senile, incompetent and untrustworthy, getting the U.S. media to repeat the lies, creating protests against Mosaddeq in Iran and fomenting insurrection in the Iranian military.

The CIA saw this as a tremendous success and went on to duplicate the tactic around the world. But, in fact, this was one of the great blunders of U.S. history. How different would the Middle East be today if Iranian democracy had been allowed to succeed? The brutal Shah of Iran, a U.S. puppet, would not have come to power, other despots might have fallen to democracy and there would have been no Iranian Revolution in 1979. Democracy might have spread in the region rather than Muslim extremism.
The lesson from this is that transparency is needed to prevent reckless decisions. Would the CIA have conducted this mistaken coup if it knew the American and Iranian people would be told? And, isn’t transparency what Manning was seeking to accomplish? How many lives – U.S., Iraqi, Afghan – were lost in two illegal wars conducted in ways that violated international law? Secrets caused deaths while transparency would have saved lives.
Yet, secrecy continues to reign despite its failures, and the Iranian coup is but one example of many. There has been aggressive secrecy around the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a giant agreement that is a major power grab by big business interests working with the Obama administration. Leaks have given us some information, enough to begin to generate the kind of opposition we need to stop the TPP.

One of the strange ironies of the upcoming week is the events around the 50thanniversary of the March on Washington where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. The event has been turned into a Democratic Party pep rally with people like Representatives Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi invited to speak. The irony is, as Cornell West says, “Brother Martin would not be invited to the very march in his name, because he would talk about drones. He’d talk about Wall Street criminality. He would talk about working class being pushed to the margins as profits went up for corporate executives in their compensation.”

Dr. King, who was a victim of government surveillance, certainly would be on the opposite side of President Obama when it came to the NSA spying. This week we learned there are no real checks on NSA spying. The secret surveillance court has been repeatedly misled, Congress has been kept uninformed and the NSA has violated the law thousands of times, 2,746 times in just the last 12 months. Google told us we cannot expect privacywhen we use gmail. And, we saw the abuse of power when reporter Glenn Greenwald’s partner was held for nine hours under a UK terrorism law. His equipment was seized and he suffered abusive interrogation. Also, the Guardian disclosed that British intelligence destroyed its hard drives in an attempt to stop publication of Snowden leaks.
As so often happens in history, the result of these events is a growing wave of anger at the snooping. The irony is that this is resulting in people beginning to work on ways to block government Internet spying, whether creating an alternative Internet or creating a surveillance free Internet. And, it is resulting in those with information, making duplicates in the information cloud to ensure that the information will someday be shared. Thus government action is leading to people working to undermine and unite against the government.

Irony can also be a powerful tool when used by activists in their actions. We love this action against the Keystone XL pipeline. Farmers, ranchers, clean energy and climate activists came together in Nebraska to construct a wind turbine and solar-powered barn immediately in the path of the proposed pipeline. They created a dilemma; if President Obama approves Keystone XL, he’ll then have to tear down clean and locally-produced energy to make way for dirty energy from foreign tar sands.

And, there is a sad ironic situation in the Southwest which has been suffering from drought. Farmers don’t have enough water to grow their crops, so out of desperation they are selling their water, including from the underground aquifers, to hydro-fracking companies. This not only adds to their drought problems and shrinks the aquifer but also creates risk of water, air and land pollution. One town in Texas has run out of water and 30 are at risk. This is a lose, lose, lose irony. People should have resisted rather than sell-out to the dirty energy corporations.
Here’s an irony we enjoyed. There was a lot of attention to Indiana’s former GovernorMitch Daniels’ efforts to remove Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States”from schools. The result has been a big increase in requests for the book. One Indiana library increased its numbers of copies of the book from 1 to 19 and they are all checked out with a waiting list. That is one example of many showing a surge of interest in Zinn’s “People’s History” thanks to Daniels’ censorship effort. Imagine if our nation actually learned its history rather than living in myths.


Let’s finish our summary this week, where we began with Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning. Manning is submitting a request for a pardon which includes a patriotic statement explaining why she leaked the documents. Manning’s acts are put into historical context:
“Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the 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.’”

Manning’s actions were obviously moral and patriotic, but will President Barack Obama do the moral and just thing and pardon Manning? History will pardon Manning, and when it does, what will that do to the reputation of Obama? There is another potential irony of history, the law breaker, convicted felon will be the moral actor in this drama, while the president, a constitutional lawyer, so far, has not.