For
Immediate Release
12/2/2010
For more
information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar
movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent,
international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed.
We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the
end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee
(UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial
accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released
over the past several months. We also call for an
end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and
we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal
activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to
Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military
to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of
international law. His superiors told him to keep
quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity
to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier
shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who
were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the
US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter
while laughing about it. The widespread corruption
among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of
diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these
policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar
conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we
heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the
helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810
). He talked about removing wounded children from a
civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It
affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed
the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians
who were killed.
We ask why this material was
classified in the first place. There were no state
secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity
by the US military, the US government and its allies. To
try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our
right to know the truth about these wars. In this
respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as
heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal
and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and
North Korea.
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