The Light at the End of the Tunnel May Be a Room That's Never Dark

     Barack Obama announced he will commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning, condemned to thirty-five years in prison for giving classified military information to Wikileaks.  At the time, Private Bradley Manning (he had gender reassignment surgery while in custody) followed his conscience, letting out secrets about U.S. war crimes.  Placed in a cell lit twenty-four hours per day (a form of torture), Manning suffered profoundly for revealing some of the shitty behaviors of the U.S. military during the War on Terror.
     Edward Snowden, in exile, sent Obama an open tweet, urging him to commute Manning's sentence.  As of now, Manning will be released in May.  Who knows what legal back and forth bullshit will occur between now and then, but we can hope that Private Manning, who, when he joined the U.S. Army, swore an oath to protect his country from enemies foreign and domestic, will be regarded as someone who stood up to powers unwilling to reveal the magnitude of their crimes.
     The discourse surrounding this commutation reeks of denial.  On MSNBC, Steve Kornacki interviewed former Bush attorney general and war criminal Alberto Gonzales, a man who helped Bush administration legal authorities turn torture into "enhanced interrogation," thus, legalization of criminal activities by military and government employees through alteration of terminology: a pure Orwellian method accepted by the U.S. government and U.S. news media as journalists adopted the term "enhanced interrogation techniques" as if its dry descriptive feel could forgive war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Gonzales, for approving, to describe one "technique," the pouring of gallons of cold water into the lungs of prisoners of war ("enemy combatants").
     I apologize for the length of the above sentence.
     Kornacki's interview of Gonzales, who, of course, isn't approving of Obama feeling compassion (seven years into Manning's abusive captivity for the crime of telling the truth) for Chelsea Manning, failed to mention Gonzales's own questionable past activities while serving as America's chief prosecutor, a job one would think would involve not violating the law.  Gonzales did not, while attorney general, investigate war criminals Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, who fomented war with Iraq and engaged in military activities against that country which killed, maimed, and displaced millions of people, creating additional unrest in the Middle East, felt today in Iraq and Syria; in Jordan too, receiver of a vast exodus from Iraq's civil war that followed the incompetence of America's occupation.
     To speak to Gonzales as if he's not culpable for some of the dark and terrible acts committed by the United States' desire for unrest and dominance in the Middle East, makes Kornacki, a highly respected commentator, look like he doesn't realize he's talking to one of the men who helped make mass murder and torture possible during the first decade of this century.  I don't think Kornacki is blind and deaf to the crimes of Alberto Gonzales and the Bush administration, nor to the crimes of the Obama administration.  He's merely following the conditions of being on the air at MSNBC, a network owned by a corporation that doesn't want to rock the boat.
     Establishments (governmental and corporate) of powerful nations engage in warfare, killing, financing of warfare in other countries, manipulation, espionage, terrorism, drug trafficking, cybercrime, and generally shitty behavior.  All of these establishments lie about what they do.  Their servants, like journalists, especially in the U.S., lie by omitting or side-stepping the nut of the issue.         Kornacki today had on his show one of the nuts who helped Bush and Cheney get away with torture.  Alberto Gonzales commented on Chelsea Manning, who was tortured by the United States military.
     Ask a torture-enabler like Gonzales about someone who was tortured, but don't even bring up Manning's illegal treatment.  This illustrates what Noam Chomsky meant when he said that the degree of cooperation with government by the U.S. news media should be the envy of totalitarian countries.

                                                                                Vic Neptune