Bradley Manning's Post Sentence Statement

' It is dangerous to be right in matters in  which the established autorities are wrong'
- Voltaire

After 3 years, 12 weeks and 4 days , Bradley has escaped the death penalty, it is still too long for someone who in my opinion has done no wrong, jailed for being a conscientious human, for speaking the truth, jailed because his voice cared, and because being  brave  refused to succumb to silence.

 Bradley Manning's  has been sentenced  to 35 years in military prison, Manning's civilian defense attorney read a statement from Manning, which will be included in a filing requesting a pardon from President Obama.

 In this deeply moving testimony Coombs also describes what Manning was like after the sentence was announced. He recounted how he and his other defense attorneys had been crying. Manning looked at him and said, " It's okay, it's alright. I know you did your best. I'm going to be okay. I'm going to get through this."

Mannings's remarks to Coombs once again give an indication of the resolve and strong character that Manning  has as a  a human being.

Please sign this petition and stand together with Bradley Manning.
We owe him our thanks and gratitude for all the service he has done for humanity.
I will continue to support any further transition, until freedom is gained.

/http://www.standwithbrad.org/

Bradley Manning's statement appears below:

'The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of the concern for my country, and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We have been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on a trasitional battlefield. Due to this fact, we've  had to alter our methods of combatting the risk posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help fefend our country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we are doing. It wwas at this time that I realsed that our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we had forgotten our humanity.
We consciously elected to devalue life both in Irag and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we percieved were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent children, instead of accepting resposibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached  countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionabble acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually an American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-concieved mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtue of democracy - the Trial of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism and the Japanese-American Internment camps - to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, there is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

I understand that my actions violated the law. I regret thsat my actions hurt anyone or harmed the Unite States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified  information, I did out of a love for my country and my sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for pardon, I will serve my request knowing that some time you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceieved in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.'