The Texas Leroy Chronicles    Release  IV

1/26/11-- There has been a new development in the Wiki Leaks story.  Pfc. Bradley Manning has been in solitary confinement at Quantico for almost a year, being allowed one hour of exercise per day, one hour of TV and no newspapers of any kind.  The guards don’t talk to him but they check on him every ten minutes or so, asking if he’s all right.  He is required to answer affirmatively or they keep asking.  His lawyer says this goes on 24 hours a day, making sleep almost impossible.  Manning worked as an office grunt in the intelligence department and is accused of giving several hundred thousand documents which include army reports and diplomatic cables to Julian Assange, one of the founders of Wiki Leaks.  Manning supposedly downloaded all of this stuff while pretending to lip-synch to Lady Gaga videos.  Sorry, that’s how the story goes according to the army.  He has been held without formal charges and has not been allowed any visitors other than his lawyer, who has been getting a hard time from the army every time he makes a request for evidence of for any kind of comfort for his client.  Politicians

have called for everything from a life sentence to defenestration for Manning even though he has not been tried or even officially charged.  His lawyer says that Manning’s treatment is psychological torture and I’m sure it is.  

  Letters to the Editor can be sent to TexasLeroyBK@aol.com 

Yesterday the investigators on the case came out and said that they had not been able to find or establish any connection whatsoever between Manning and Assange.  The two have never met and in fact never spoken verbally or in writing.

Evidently the army still believes that Manning did the downloading because they haven’t let him go, but it’s getting harder for them to make a case against him.

            Julian Assange, the man who made all of these documents public, is under house arrest at the mansion of a friend in London and wearing an ankle monitor, pending possible extradition to Sweden.  He’s wanted for questioning about a sexual abuse case that happened a couple of years ago involving two women, consensual sex and a broken condom.  The matter had been dismissed without charges being filed

and now, Sweden suddenly wants him back again.  The fear is that if Assange is extradited to Sweden for an obviously flimsy case, the Swedes will promptly wrap him up in chains and send him to the United States.

            Politicians on both sides of the aisle in Congress have been bellowing for all kinds of punishment without paying much attention to legal process.  I can’t remember which idiot made which insane suggestion, but Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Joe Biden have been the most notable voices. They’re talking about the death penalty, imprisonment for life or something worse, if they can figure out what that might be. They can’t charge him with lying or slander because all of the documents he released are official and can’t be denied by the U.S. government – most notable was the video of an American helicopter crew machine-gunning a group of Afghan civilians and then wasting the people who came to pick them up from the street.  The charge of treason

has been brought up – sorry, guys.  Assange is an Australian national and can’t be prosecuted for treason against America.  Some are calling on Obama to utilize his right to assassinate anyone he wants to in the name of anti-terrorism, but it’s more bullshit.

Assange has never done anything to hurt anyone and the U.S. won’t be able to get away with it because of the worldwide attention this case has created.  The world is pretty damn sick of us already and this could be the last straw.

            One of the things said after the release of the military documents was that Assange had put the lives of American troops in jeopardy all over the world, but in fact not one life has been lost or even threatened.  The only thing that has happened is that the government has lost face.

The big issue is not that Assange made up a bunch of lies, but rather that the American government would prefer to do their dirty business unobserved and unopposed.  They are unable to deny the contents of any of these documents which outline malfeasance simply because they are all government generated. 

 What the U.S. is angry about is embarrassment, plain and simple.  They’ve been caught with their pants down, screwing the pooch and now anybody with a computer can look it up for himself, and boy, are they pissed.

  There’s no doubt that if Julian Assange is brought to America something bad will happen to him.

            The Wiki Leaks case illustrates a disturbing trend in America.  I can remember a time when whistle blowers were encouraged to speak out and were protected from revenge firings.  Now the government has turned on them and wants to exact vengeance.  Instead of a reward for alertness, honesty and good work, now you get prosecuted.  Corporations have been following this trend for quite a while already.  Talk about things you know and you will definitely lose your job and possibly your life.

            A lot of folks in America seem oddly complacent about the security/police state that has been created since 9/11.  The Bush Administration did a great job of convincing everyone that there was a wild-eyed and relentless Arab behind every tree and lamp-post waiting to blow up everyone in America in a fit of Islamist God-inspired rage.  By now you would think folks would realize that we’ve been bamboozled into giving up every civil liberty this country was built on.  Meanwhile, you have a better chance of being struck by lightning twice than being wasted by a terrorist.

            What surprises me most is that this story isn’t getting more attention.  It seems that mainstream media has mostly “forgotten” the commotion that occurred when the story broke which is too bad because we need to hear more about the sneaky things our government is doing, not less.  The story is still happening – Assange is still fighting extradition, Manning still languishes in solitary at Quantico, and the government is carrying out its foreign policy (including military strikes) in complete secrecy.

            For me the real question is how long can we let a bunch of obviously greedy and deranged dickheads carry out their objectives at the expense of the people?  Every bullet we fire and every bomb we drop is paid for by the American people.  We have a right to know why and we don’t need government telling us not to worry our heads about things too complex for us to understand.

            I should mention that the legwork and research for this article comes from Glenn Greenwald, a Constitutional lawyer who writes a daily column for Salon.com, Al-Jazeera English news, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, who has interviewed Julian Assange by phone on her program at least ten times and WBAI radio in New York, all of whom have worked to keep the story alive.