The detained US soldier convicted of leaking a trove of secret documents to WikiLeaks made a rare foray into public life Saturday to warn Americans they were being lied to about Iraq once more. Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year prison sentence on espionage charges and other offenses for passing along 700,000 secret documents, including diplomatic cables and military intelligence files, to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks in the largest-scale leak in US history.
"I understand that my actions violated the law. However, the concerns that motivated me have not been resolved,” the soldier formerly known as Bradley Manning wrote in a New York Times editorial.
"As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan."
Also refer to: Obama to take several days to consider how to act on Iraq
President Barack Obama said this week he was "looking at all the options" to halt the offensive that has brought militants within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of Baghdad's city limits, but ruled out any return of US combat troops.
Obama has been under mounting fire from Republican critics over the swift collapse of Iraq's security forces, which Washington spent billions of dollars training and equipping before pulling out its own troops in 2011.
While the US military was upbeat in its public outlook on the 2010 Iraqi parliamentary elections, suggesting it had helped bring stability and democracy to the country, "those of us stationed there were acutaly aware of a more complicated reality," Manning wrote.
"Military and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki. Detainees were often tortured, or even killed."
Manning, a former US Army intelligence analyst, said he was "shocked by our military's complicity in the corruption of that election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American media's radar."
Criticizing the military's practice of embedding journalists, Manning charged that "the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance."
Manning is serving out the prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and had requested a name change after court-martial proceedings revealed the soldier's emotional turmoil over sexual identity, reports AFP.
A US Army general denied clemency to Manning in April, upholding the 35-year sentence.
White House is under heavy criticism due to Iraq policy failure
The US President Barack Obama and his administration are under heavy criticism due to the events in Iraq. The head of the White House is blamed that he "overslept" the extremist threat. There have been calls for the resignation of his key advisors. Press raises questions about "who lost Iraq."
The tone of criticism of the democratic "party of power" comes from the leaders of the Republican opposition, commens on ITAR-TASS. "It is not that we have not seen that in the past five to six months, these terrorists took control of western Iraq. Now they took control of Mosul. They are 100 miles (160.9 km) from Baghdad. And what was our President doing? He was sleeping through all of it!" said at meeting with reporters Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, the third man in the political hierarchy of the country.
Former US presidential candidate Senator John McCain, the famous "hawk", strongly opposed the withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq, urged to dismiss all the current leaders of the US security, starting with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, and Assistant to the President for National Security, Susan Rice.
"We need a new assistant for national security," said McCain, although the President can appoint the Chief of Staff at the National Security Council without the consent of the Senate. "We need a new team that knows what America’s national security interests are, and that is more interested in national security than they are in the nitty-gritty of politics," said the legislator. He urged to return a number of fired by Obama Generals, starting with the former head of the Central Command and the CIA, General David Petraeus.
"If my words are evil, it's because I'm angry," said McCain. Incidentally, he expressed the opinion that now the White House is ready to repeat its mistake with Iraq by withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
American troops left Iraq at the end of 2011. The White House presented it as an important political victory. "Without a doubt, it is a success," said the former deputy head of the National Security Council, Dennis McDonough. Since then, he has received a high promotion and now is the head of the entire apparatus of the White House.
Now, his former victory has been criticized widely in the press. The newspaper "The Hill" reminds us that the Americans lost in Iraq about 4.5 thousand soldiers. The cost of the war was about $ 2 trillion. According to CBS and "USA Today" American veterans are watching in horror as everything that they have fought for, is turning into dust. The Iraqi army that consists of tens of thousands of people is crumbling under the strikes of a few hundred fighters that are behaving with medieval brutality, including against women and children.
The question is "Who lost Iraq?" and this is the title of Fareed Zakaria’s article, a political analyst of "The Washington Post". He blames "the Iraqis" themselves along with the former Republican administration of George W. Bush. But for the past five and a half years a Democrat Obama is in charge and with all the sympathy for him, Zakaria cannot release him from the political responsibility for this failure.
Incidentally, the same newspaper "The Hill", specializing in coverage of the US Congress, said that even political supporters of the President in this case are not in a hurry to rescue him. As an example, the newspaper shows the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who stressed that the extremists in Iraq "must be stopped" because otherwise the country "will regret it," but on the question of liability of the White House she answered that she "is not going to go into details. "The situation is "serious and dangerous", said the member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Democrat Richard Blumenthal. "And I do not see any proposals from the administration which way to go", he added.
Indeed, there are no prepositions for now, although Obama and his key advisors have been publicly commenting the situation on the developments in Iraq for the last couple of days. All of them, as well as legislators, agree only on one thing, there is no opportunity of sending the US troops back to Iraq at the moment.
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