Chris Hedges: Democracy itself at stake in the trial of Bradley Manning

Chris Hedges, writing at TruthDig:

This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power. The lonely individuals who take personal risks so that the public can know the truth—the Daniel Ellsbergs, the Ron Ridenhours, the Deep Throats and the Bradley Mannings—are from now on to be charged with “aiding the enemy.” All those within the system who publicly reveal facts that challenge the official narrative will be imprisoned, as was John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who for exposing the U.S. government’s use of torture began serving a 30-month prison term the day Manning read his statement. There is a word for states that create these kinds of information vacuums: totalitarian. The cowardice of The New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde, all of which used masses of the material Manning passed on to WikiLeaks and then callously turned their backs on him, is one of journalism’s greatest shames. These publications made little effort to cover Manning’s pretrial hearings, a failure that shows how bankrupt and anemic the commercial press has become . . . Manning has done what anyone with a conscience should have done. In the courtroom he exhibited—especially given the prolonged abuse he suffered during his thousand days inside the military prison system—poise, intelligence and dignity. He appealed to the best within us. And this is why the government fears him. America still produces heroes, some in uniform. But now we lock them up.
I know a lot of people are uneasy about calling Manning a hero because they consider him a criminal because he apparently broke laws. I wonder whether they would agree that by exposing lawless American warmongering and exposing huge numbers of civilian casualties covered up by the U.S. Manning has saved many lives by shortening, curtailing and discouraging the reckless use of the U.S. military. Can't a thing declared to be criminal be the right thing to do? Was Martin Luther King merely a "criminal," or was he doing the right thing? The case against Bradley Manning is a battle over whether the People of the United States, supposedly the ones running this country, have the right to know what their own government is doing. Or, on the other hand, the U.S. Government has the right to frighten off the relatively few remaining quality journalists out there by threatening a bizarre use of the federal Espionage Act. It's that simple.

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More about butterflies

After viewing the IMAX movie "Flight of the Butterflies," I've had this fascination. This weekend (the second time in two weekends) I traveled to the Insectarium of the St. Louis Zoo to closely observe live butterflies indoors and to attempt to photograph them with a macro lens, this time using flash. Click on any of these photos for high-res versions of the photos below, which I took today. IMG_8178 butterflies March 2013 If someone told you that you need to make a small device, less than .1 ounce (3 grams), and it needed to fly and be capable of making controlled landings, you would likely not know where to start. Then add in that this device would need to seek out it's own fuel sources using its long extendable proboscis--a device that might make you think that the butterfly is a tiny flying elephant. It would need to avoid eating foods that were not appropriate. It would need to IMG_8161 butterflies March 2013recognize conspecifics of the opposite sex. Just Imagine how hard this would be to for a devices this small to be able to recognize others of its same species, especially given that it will use sight and olfactory clues. Just imagine training this device the mechanics of mating and producing viable young. Then imaging training this little device to properly navigate to where it needs to go, sensing out food and mates for its short life span of between 2 weeks and 2 months. Add in the ability to reach flight morphology through a chrysalis stage IMG_8213 butterflies March 2013and you wouldn't have any engineers that would take you seriously. For more details on how butterflies work, see How Stuff Works. That was my mindset as I set out to the Insectarium at the St. Louis Zoo today. Today's bonus is that in the process of struggling to use flash with the macro lens, I learned to drag the flash, capturing some visuals regarding the flight path of several butterflies. Notice the steaks of blur from the wings in the following two photos. IMG_8201 butterflies March 2013 IMG_8195 butterflies March 2013 Many of us are content to watch butterflies from afar, enjoying their beautiful colors. I'm finding them all the more fascinating up close, thinking of them as almost impossible to comprehend in their phenomenal delicate complexity, even as you are studying them up close. IMG_8226 butterflies March 2013

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Sequestration hampers U.S. warmongering

From the Borowitz report . . .

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The spending cuts mandated by the sequester may hamper the United States’s ability to invade countries for absolutely no reason, a Pentagon spokesman warned today. The Pentagon made this gloomy assessment amid widespread fears that the nation’s ability to wage totally optional wars based on bogus pretexts may be in peril.

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