No mention of or tribute to Julian Assange, who was kept out of the spotlight at TIME last year, even though he was readers' choice for Person of the Year.
No mention of Bradley Manning, whose detainment for uncovering important aspects of why people are so outraged, begins a new stage tomorrow.
No mention of the thousands of peaceful Palestinian protesters, who have been protesting Occupation for generations now.
As good as TIME's long article on worldwide protest is - and the article is excellent in what it does cover - it skims over Bahreini protests, prefers to have a sidebar story on an Athenian "protest dog," rather than show any of the mutilated or dead Palestinian protesters, and certainly does not show the hundreds of people outside of Quantico last spring, or the hundreds being arrested outside the White House in the 350.org protests.
How important Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and probable information provided to them through Bradley Manning is to this ongoing, perhaps rapidly growing, global protest and action network are is difficult to assess accurately. But to deny its importance is to not tell the full story of this important year.
Glenn Greenwald, in an op-ed that will appear in tomorrow's UK Guardian, assesses some of the important domestic fallout from Manning's and Wikileaks' uncovering of the truth:
When WikiLeaks was awarded Australia's most prestigious journalism award last month, the awarding foundation described how these disclosures created "more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime".Manning is THE PROTESTER.
By exposing some of the worst atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq, the documents prevented the Iraqi government from agreeing to ongoing legal immunity for US forces, and thus helped bring about the end of the war. Even Bill Keller, the former New York Times executive editor and a harsh WikiLeaks critic, credits the release of the cables with shedding light on the corruption of Tunisia's ruling family and thus helping spark the Arab spring.
In sum, the documentsManning is alleged to have released revealed overwhelming deceit, corruption and illegality by the world's most powerful political actors. And this is why he has been so harshly treated and punished.
Despite pledging to usher in "the most transparent administration in history", President Obama has been obsessed with prosecuting whistleblowers; his justice department has prosecuted more of them for "espionage" than all prior administrations combined.
The oppressive treatment of Manning is designed to create a climate of fear, to send a signal to those who in the future discover serious wrongdoing committed in secret by the US: if you're thinking about exposing what you've learned, look at what we did to Manning and think twice. The real crimes exposed by this episode are those committed by the prosecuting parties, not the accused. For what he is alleged to have given the world, Manning deserves gratitude and a medal, not a life in prison.
Like many in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Bahrein, Yemen, Palestine and Syria, he is paying a steep price in his genuine commitment to justice:
[T]he leaks Manning allegedly engineered have generated enormous benefits: precisely the benefits Manning, if the allegations against him are true, sought to achieve. According to chat logs purportedly between Manning and the informant who turned him in, the private decided to leak these documents after he became disillusioned with the Iraq war. He described how reading classified documents made him, for the first time, aware of the breadth of the corruption and violence committed by his country and allies.Unlike most at TIME Magazine, many of us can be very proud of our open and meaningful support of Manning, and of thousands of others here and around the world, who, as Bradley put it, "want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
He explained that he wanted the world to know what he had learned: "I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." When asked by the informant why he did not sell the documents to a foreign government for profit, Manning replied that he wanted the information to be publicly known in order to trigger "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".
image - The Protester Collage, by Philip Munger
1 comment:
You´re right but it doesn´t really matter anymore since as far as I´m concerned, few people trust he " official media " nowadays. Too bad for the owners of the news and in a way, too bad for us too since we lost our source of trustfull information. Let´s hope Assange will keep up the good work.
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