Tortured on Account of Morality
Soumaya Saleh
Very rarely or never does the presence of morality and US army appear in the same sentence. Having a conscience has its price when you're a part of the United Sates Military, or any other American government faction per se. Providing virtual training for soldiers to familiarize themselves into a setting of high adrenalin rushes, war becomes a conscienceless game, played with only one life.
However if you choose to play this game with a conscience, your war is a battle fought way beyond the front line, with a new enemy. You're fighting a war of treason.
This was the case for US Army Private Bradley Manning, tortured for a period of 11 months, then later charged on 22 counts. He is suspected of leaking a video showing the killing of civilians and journalists by a US helicopter crew, to Wikileaks, alongside some other classified documentation exposing civilian casualties, spying, bribes, and Human rights abuses active in the operations of the US military.
Manning was arrested in 2010 in Iraq, after revealing these unpleasant truths of American war crimes, hypocrisies, torture, deception, and murder, and still awaits his trial. Of the many counts he has been charged with, "aiding the enemy (al-Qaeda) by indirect means" could have the largest repercussions, that is, the death penalty, or life in prison.
Constantly criticizing other governments or what they claim as ‘dictatorships', like China and Syria on their harsh and unforgiving ways of suppressing the views and liberties of their citizens, once again the reputation of the Whitehouse is blackened. Under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" (U.N, 2012).
Evidently, the penalties of exposing war crimes are much more severe than those of committing them in the appreciations of American "democracy".
Source: moqawama.org
Very rarely or never does the presence of morality and US army appear in the same sentence. Having a conscience has its price when you're a part of the United Sates Military, or any other American government faction per se. Providing virtual training for soldiers to familiarize themselves into a setting of high adrenalin rushes, war becomes a conscienceless game, played with only one life.
However if you choose to play this game with a conscience, your war is a battle fought way beyond the front line, with a new enemy. You're fighting a war of treason.
This was the case for US Army Private Bradley Manning, tortured for a period of 11 months, then later charged on 22 counts. He is suspected of leaking a video showing the killing of civilians and journalists by a US helicopter crew, to Wikileaks, alongside some other classified documentation exposing civilian casualties, spying, bribes, and Human rights abuses active in the operations of the US military. Manning was arrested in 2010 in Iraq, after revealing these unpleasant truths of American war crimes, hypocrisies, torture, deception, and murder, and still awaits his trial. Of the many counts he has been charged with, "aiding the enemy (al-Qaeda) by indirect means" could have the largest repercussions, that is, the death penalty, or life in prison.
Constantly criticizing other governments or what they claim as ‘dictatorships', like China and Syria on their harsh and unforgiving ways of suppressing the views and liberties of their citizens, once again the reputation of the Whitehouse is blackened. Under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" (U.N, 2012).
Evidently, the penalties of exposing war crimes are much more severe than those of committing them in the appreciations of American "democracy".
Source: moqawama.org
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