http://www.independent.co.uk/...
Brad Manning
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Bernie Sanders
Saudi Women
The Naavi
According to this Brad Manning was protesting Torture in Iraq.
And he's being tortured in America now.
Here's what really happened. Manning signed up when he was just 18, believing he would be protecting and defending his country and the cause of freedom. He soon found himself sent to Iraq, where he was ordered to round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America's new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.
The only "crime" committed by many of these people was to write "scholarly critiques" of the occupation or the new people in charge. He knew torture was a crime under US, Iraqi and international law, so he went to his military supervisor and explained what was going on. He was told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.
Manning had to choose between being complicit in these atrocities, or not. At the age of 21, he made a brave choice: to put human rights before his own interests. He found the classified military documents revealing that the US was covering up the deaths of 15,000 Iraqis and had a de facto policy of allowing the Iraqis they had installed in power to carry out torture – and he decided he had a moral obligation to show them to the American people.
and how is he being handled?
http://www.salon.com/...
From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.
Or Another Hero of 2010?
Bernie Sanders
The Socialist Senator of Vermont.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...
Senator Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, describes the United States economy as "socialism for the rich."
Earlier in the year, he allied with Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, to win support for new legislation requiring an unprecedented level of disclosure of the Federal Reserve’s specific emergency lending activities.
With that process of disclosure now under way, Senator Sanders can offer details from the Fed’s "bailout files" to substantiate his claim that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program was pocket change compared with the trillions of dollars in low-interest loans the central bank provided both to American corporations and foreign agencies.
No such assistance was offered to small businesses in need of capital or homeowners going through foreclosures.
Senator Sanders’s criticisms of the Fed go well beyond the observation that it bailed out only institutions it considered too big to fail. In a recent public letter to the Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, he points to major conflicts of interest: Senior executives of General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Banco Popular, Sun Trust and Fifth Third Bank served as directors of regional Federal Reserve Banks even as they doled out funds to their firms.
The new information lends support to the concept of a financial oligarchy detailed by my fellow Economix blogger Simon Johnson and his co-author, James Kwak, in "13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown."
and what has Sanders been able to do on the ground?
He won over even very conservative parts of his state to a self-described socialist agenda by telling them: "Conservative Republicans don't have healthcare. Conservative Republicans can't afford to send their kids to college. Conservative Republicans are being thrown out of their jobs as our good-paying jobs move to China. You need somebody to stand up to protect your economic well-being. Look, we're not going to agree on every issue, that's for sure. But don't vote against your own interest. I don't mind really if millionaires vote against me. They probably should. But for working people, we've got to come together."
In the place of the fake populism of the Tea Party, he offered real populism. In office, he kept his word. He has been demanding a real healthcare deal, trying to end the country's disastrous jihadi-creating wars, and captured America's imagination by standing for nine hours in the Senate trying to filibuster Obama's sell-out of his principles and his people. This is what democracy looks like.
Why can't we have a bernie sanders speaking in every state.