7/28/2019 Are You Bradley Manning High-Profile Americans Take to YouTube to Back Nobel Petition

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Are you Bradley Manning? High-profile Americans

take to YouTube to back Nobel petition

The protesters who descended on Fort Meade military base in Maryland to express frustration

with the trial of Bradley Manning have been joined by major American celebrities and

journalists, who are also rallying support for the Army whistle-blower.

Manning, 25, could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted of aiding and abetting the

enemy by leaking military cables to WikiLeaks. US military prosecutors have asserted that

Manning put his own agenda above national security and that by releasing the cables, most

notably the Collateral Murder video depicting an American helicopter opening fire on Iraqi

civilians, he jeopardized Americans in the field of battle.

But his trial at Fort Meade this week has attracted the attention of influential Americans, as well

as international activists who opposed the American wars in the Middle East and beyond.

The I Am Bradley Manning campaign, featuring a video trailer ofA-list celebrities and public

thinkers voicing support for Manning, pushed viewers to consider if they themselves would have

the courage to disclose military video footage in order to stop the carnage.

Actors Russell Brand, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Wallace Shawn join Oliver Stone, Rage Against

the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and journalists Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi and a slew of

7/28/2019 Are You Bradley Manning High-Profile Americans Take to YouTube to Back Nobel Petition

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others who lend Manning their support. Daniel Ellsberg, the former US Defense Department

employee who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, is also featured.

If you saw incredible things, awful things, things that belonged in the public domain and not in

some server stored in a dark room in Washington, each advocate says in the campaign trailer,

What would you do?

The trailer also urges audience members to sign a petition encouraging the Nobel Committee to

award Manning the Nobel Peace Prize. By Tuesday, the second day of Mannings trial, nearly

60,000 people had signed the petition, organized by Roots Action, which describes itself as an

online initiative dedicated to galvanizing Americans who are committed to economic fairness,

equal rights, civil liberties, environmental protectionand defunding endless wars.

Supporters also made themselves known outside the trial at the main gates of Fort Meade.

Michael Thurman, a former member of the US Air Force, told the Daily Beast he flew in from

Oakland, California to personally witness the events.

I think what Bradley Manning did was pretty heroic and selfless, and I want to do everything I

can to support someone who is willing to sacrifice everything so we can all know the truth about

US foreign policy and what this government is doing, he said.

When I was in the military, I was able to see it for what it was. I came to the conclusion during

my enlistment that it wasn't an organization benefiting anyone, it was a business venture that

benefited a few very elite people, Thurman continued. I saw the corporate collusion and found

out about the civilian casualties, the racism, the seizure of resources, and basically the nature of

US policies. I thought it was wrong, and I became opposed to it, and thats why Im supporting

Bradley Manning, who exposed all those things.

European groups have also sided with Manning. The former Army Private first-class admitted in

February that he provided a large number of classified documents to WikiLeaks, but that

confession came after nearly three years of detention, where Manning was monitored as he

stewed in solitary confinement for an entire year.

Joshua Benton, the director of Harvard Universitys Nieman Journalism Lab, explained to the

Associated Press why the American press has been more uniformly unsympathetic than their

European counterparts.

Part of that is the mainstreampress here doesn't cover the same ideological turf that it does in

the UK, or elsewhere, Benton said. But Id suspect most of it is the mundane fact its the

American interests hes accused of threatening, and that people accused of aiding the enemy,

rightly or wrongly, tend not to get the most flattering coverage in their home country.