America's Crimes in Iraq as Exposed in Court by the Soldier Bradley Manning

There are many crimes of the American occupation in Iraq. Many of these crimes rise to the level of crimes against humanity. But if the government and its deputies are the willing tool of the occupation or are the ones benefiting from it, then who is monitoring these crimes and defending the rights of their victims? Historical memory must remain a living witness. The soldiers of the occupation have shed innocent blood, including that of a number of my relatives. In one example, there was a taxi containing a father, a school principal and his ten-year-old daughter, who was sick and whom he was taking to the hospital. Suddenly, even though they had done no wrong, a heavy machine-gunner in a Humvee opened fire on the taxi. The occupants were both hit and killed, the daughter in her father’s embrace. They were struck down in cold blood at the hands of an evil mercenary who had come from far away — a distance of thousands of kilometers — to give the Iraqi people a kind of democracy and freedom that benefits the mob that he brought along with him, to which he gave power, and the American cowboy, who is an expert in killing with or without reason.

The important thing is that there is no accountability for the occupation forces’ many crimes against the Iraqi people, and against humanity, due to the control the U.S. and its allies have over the world media and the silence of the puppet government it created in Iraq, which is the occupation’s partner in crime. However, divine justice insisted on exposing these crimes through the hand of an honorable American soldier named Bradley Manning (if only our blessed soldiers were like him).

This Bradley Manning was working in an analytical cell of the intelligence services in the office of the American leadership in Baghdad from 2006 to 2011. He was responsible for sending thousands of the occupation authorities’ intelligence reports and diplomatic correspondences from Baghdad to Washington. Thus, he discovered the massive amount of fabrications and falsifications being used to cover up the American forces’ crimes, as well as the vile methods that the occupation authorities used to manage the country, and the fact that they cooperated with local collaborators to destroy it — local collaborators that included the prime minister, other ministers, deputies and military leaders.

Similarly, he was appalled by the disdain and disregard that private security companies, such as Blackwater and others, showed toward the lives of Iraqis. Their mercenaries had a hobby of shooting at Iraqi cars on the freeways just for fun due to their feeling of a lack of accountability and their tendency to treat the local inhabitants as though they are inferior, which stems from the fact that no one defends the rights of the Iraqis — not a national government nor a free media. These incidents would be recorded as self-defense, the soldier would be excused and no measures would be taken against him. Can you imagine? Even the soldier who raped the young girl Abeer Janabi in Mahudiyyah before killing her and burning her body and the bodies of her family was acquitted by a civilian court in the U.S. on the basis that he was under the influence of the shock of battle, even though the U.S. Army had convicted him for his crime.* And not a single one of the despicable men in the [Iraqi] parliament or government batted an eyelid or moved to oppose the decision — perhaps because the victim was not a protected Alawi.

But the most powerful incident that moved Bradley’s conscience was the attack launched by an Apache helicopter in May 2007 on Iraqi civilians, in the al-Amin district in Baghdad, killing eleven.** After an investigation into the matter, the Pentagon released a report that justified the helicopter crew’s behavior on the basis that they thought the photography equipment that some of the people in the crowd were carrying was weapons. The crew was acquitted. But inside the court that is trying him on 22 charges, including leaking information that endangers American lives or dealing with the enemy — which could bring a punishment ranging from 20 years, at the lowest estimate, to life imprisonment — Bradley stated that “after I repeated the recording a number of times, I found that the helicopter crew was closing in on the gathering and the image of the cameras that two of the civilians were carrying is clear.”*** The most disturbing issue for him was the fact that the crew knew that it was a civilian gathering, but they needed to let off some steam. This explains the crew’s delight, their deliberate desire to shed blood and their pursuit of the civilians who had already been wounded and had been able to distance themselves a little bit from the theater — but the pilots were betting on killing them as if it were a computer game. Bradley concluded that “visibility was very clear and the behavior of the soldiers indicates that they were just entertaining themselves with a real game of killing. Their behavior was similar to that of a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.”***

Regarding the State Department cables, in court Bradley pointed to the fact that they document secret deals and criminal activities that do not reflect America’s image as the “leader of the free world”: It is immersed in deals and alliances with militias and criminal elements and it buys off officials in government, officials in political parties and religious leaders.

Bradley explained that after he gave up on alerting the American public — through the American press — to the transgressions happening in Iraq, he resorted to distributing them on the Wikileaks website (“the encyclopedia of leaks”), which imposed no conditions upon him. He explained that what he did was “aimed at allowing the American public to reach correct information, so that they know the truth about American politics overseas, and at inciting a serious discussion about the role of the army,” meaning the military establishment along with foreign policy in general.*** Furthermore, he explained that what is happening in the name of democracy and freedom instead conceals many of the crimes and transgressions against the two principles. He explained that the U.S. deals only with criminals and those who possess shady histories in order to install them as guards over democracy in the countries that it attacks.

It is worth mentioning that the Wikileaks documents that Bradley leaked expose the hypocritical face of many Iraqi politicians, the two-faced nature of their dealings and their silence on American transgressions despite their knowledge thereof. They have been silent because, put simply, they do not care about the things that Iraqis are suffering from under the occupation authorities. That is because many of them do not feel Iraqi themselves: They have foreign nationalities or they are American by nationality and thus sympathize with the executioner at the expense of the victim, even though they claim to be Iraqi in order to obtain positions from which they can steal and devour every possible thing.

Finally, we must say that the American solider Bradley Manning remains — with his living conscience and his refusal to stay silent about his government’s crimes against a people foreign to him, for which he will be sentenced to many years of imprisonment — a thousand times more honorable than all our politicians of all colors and sects who lap up the blood of the people and fight amongst themselves over gains and offices. Not a single hair on their heads was disturbed by the suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of the occupation because, put simply, they are the partners in crime of that occupation.***

* Translator’s Note: It is unclear which perpetrator the author is referring to, since all five were convicted for their role in the attack.

** Translator’s Note: The incident the author is referring to occurred in July, not May.

*** Editor’s Note: The quotes attributed to Bradley Manning throughout this article, though accurately translated, cannot be verified and do not match his actual statements in court.