By Norman Solomon

The headquarters of the Nobel Committee is in downtown Oslo on a street named after Henrik Ibsen, whose play “An Enemy of the People” has remained as current as dawn light falling on the Nobel building and then, hours later, on a Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning's trial enters a new stage — defense testimony in the sentencing phase.

Ibsen’s play tells of mendacity and greed in high places: dangerous threats to public health. You might call the protagonist a whistleblower. He's a physician who can't pretend that he hasn't seen evidence; he rejects all the pleas and threats to stay quiet, to keep secret what the public has a right to know. He could be content to take an easy way, to let others suffer and die. But he refuses to just follow orders. He will save lives. There will be some dire consequences for him.

The respectable authorities know when they've had enough. Thought crimes can be trivial but are apt to become intolerable if they lead to active transgressions. In the last act, our hero recounts: “They insulted me and called me an enemy of the people.” Ostracized and condemned, he offers final defiant words before the curtain comes down: “I have made a great discovery. … It is this, let me tell you — that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

Alone Bradley Manning will stand as a military judge proclaims a prison sentence.

As I write these words early Monday, sky is starting to lighten over Oslo. This afternoon I'll carry several thousand pages of a petition — filled with the names of more than 100,000 signers, along with individual comments from tens of thousands of them — to an appointment with the Research Director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The petition urges that Bradley Manning be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Like so many other people, the signers share the belief of Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire who wrote this summer: “I can think of no one more deserving.”

Opening heart and mind to moral responsibility — seeing an opportunity to provide the crucial fuel of information for democracy and compassion — Bradley Manning lifted a shroud and illuminated terrible actions of the USA's warfare state. He chose courage on behalf of humanity. He refused to just follow orders.

“If there’s one thing to learn from the last ten years, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money,” Bradley Manning biographer Chase Madar wrote. “And though information is powerless on its own, it is still a necessary precondition for any democratic state to function.”

Bradley Manning recognized that necessary precondition. He took profound action to nurture its possibilities on behalf of democracy and peace.

No doubt a Nobel Peace Prize for Bradley Manning is a very long longshot. After all, four years ago, the Nobel Committee gave that award to President Obama, while he was escalating the war in Afghanistan, and since then Obama's dedication to perpetual war has become ever more clear.

Now, the Nobel Committee and its Peace Prize are in dire need of rehabilitation. In truth, the Nobel Peace Prize needs Bradley Manning much more than the other way around.

No one can doubt the sincere dedication of Bradley Manning to human rights and peace. But on Henrik Ibsen Street in Oslo, the office of the Nobel Committee is under a war cloud of its own making.

__________________________________

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Published in USA Today  *  July 31, 2013 print edition

By Norman Solomon

Tuesday's verdict from a
military judge does not diminish the huge moral stature of whistle-blower
Bradley Manning. Next month, I will be proud to deliver a petition to the Nobel Committee in Oslo with a
simple message from more than 100,000 signers: "I urge you to award the
Peace Prize to Bradley Manning."

Thanks
to Manning, vast troves of information have become public knowledge, making
possible more informed debate about war and peace. For instance, he leaked the
now-infamous "collateral
murder" video, with a soundtrack of chilling banter as U.S.
servicemen in a pair of gunships fired on civilians in Baghdad.

Other
evidence that Manning brought to light includes a U.S.
diplomatic cable about
a covered-up massacre of at least 10 civilians, including young children, in
the Iraqi town of Ishaqi. That revelation stiffened the resolve of Iraq's
government to seek jurisdiction over American troops for criminal actions.
Washington found the demand unacceptable, thus hastening full U.S. military
withdrawal from the country.

Such
disclosures from Manning "helped end the Iraq War, and may have helped
prevent further conflicts elsewhere," according to Mairead
Corrigan-Maguire, a Nobel Peace laureate. She has formally
nominated Manning for the honor this year, saying "I can think
of no one more deserving."

Consent
of the governed is meaningful only to the extent that it is informed consent. Bradley Manning let
Americans, and many others around the world, know what their governments were
really doing. The disclosures caused problems for leaders in many nations who
much preferred to operate behind an opaque curtain.

Over
time, democracy and peace are closely entwined. Only a knowledgeable citizenry
can come to grips with actual policies that perpetuate war when shielded from
public scrutiny.

It's
easy to insist that Bradley Manning must face the consequences of his actions.
But we badly need whistle-blowers like Manning because U.S. government leaders
do not face the consequences of their actions, including perpetual warfare
abroad and assaults on civil liberties at home.

No
government should have the power to keep waging war while using secrecy to
cloak policies that cannot stand the light of day. Thank goodness for the
courage of Bradley Manning.

__________________________________________

Norman
Solomon is author of War
Made Easy, founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and
co-founder of RootsAction.org.

By Norman Solomon

The sun rose with a moral verdict on Bradley Manning well before the military judge could proclaim his guilt. The human verdict would necessarily clash with the proclamation from the judicial bench.

In lockstep with administrators of the nation’s war services, judgment day arrived on Tuesday to exact official retribution. After unforgiveable actions, the defendant’s culpability weighed heavy.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house,” another defendant, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, wrote about another action that resulted in a federal trial, 45 years earlier, scarcely a dozen miles from the Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning faced prosecution for his own fracture of good order.

“We could not, so help us God, do otherwise,” wrote Berrigan, one of the nine people who, one day in May 1968 while the Vietnam War raged on, removed several hundred files from a U.S. draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with napalm in the parking lot. “For we are sick at heart…”

On the surface, many differences protrude between those nine draft-files-burning radical Catholics and Bradley Manning. But I wonder. Ten souls saw cruelties of war and could no longer just watch.

“I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy,” Manning wrote in an online chat. Minutes later he added: “I think I’ve been traumatized too much by reality, to care about consequences of shattering the fantasy.” And he also wrote: “I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Those words came seven weeks after the world was able to watch the “Collateral Murder” video that Manning had provided to WikiLeaks. And those words came just days before military police arrived to arrest him on May 29, 2010.

Since then, huge numbers of people around the world have come to see Bradley Manning as personification of moral courage. During the last several months I’ve read thousands of moving comments online at ManningNobel.org, posted by signers of the petition urging that he receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The comments are often stunning with heartfelt intensity of wounded idealism, anger and hope.

No verdict handed down by the military judge can change the moral verdict that has emerged from people all over the world, reciprocating what Bradley Manning expressed online a few days before his arrest: “I can’t separate myself from others.” And: “I feel connected to everybody … like they were distant family.”

The problem for the U.S. government was not that Bradley Manning felt that way. The problem came when he acted that way. Caring was one thing. Acting on the caring, with empathy propelling solidarity, was another.

Days ago, in closing argument, the prosecutor at Fort Meade thundered: “He was not a whistleblower, he was a traitor.”

But a “traitor” to what? To the United States … only if the United States is to be a warfare state, where we “cannot make informed decisions as a public.” Only if we obey orders to separate ourselves from the humanity of others. Only if authoritative, numbing myths are to trump empathy and hide painful truth.

_________________________________________

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

By Norman Solomon

It’s now painfully
clear that the president has put out a contract on the Fourth Amendment. And at
the Capitol, the hierarchies of both parties are stuffing it into the trunks of
their limousines, so each provision can be neatly fitted with cement shoes and
delivered to the bottom of the Potomac.

Some other Americans are
on a rescue mission. One of them, Congressman Justin Amash, began a debate on
the House floor Wednesday with a vow to “defend the Fourth Amendment.” That’s
really what his amendment — requiring that surveillance be warranted — was
all about.

No argument for the
Amash amendment was more trenchant than the one offered by South Carolina
Republican Jeff Duncan, who simply read the Fourth Amendment aloud.

To quote those words was
to take a clear side: “The
right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no
Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized.”

Edward Snowden’s heroic
revelations have made it possible for some House members from both parties to
blow away the fog that shrouds so much tap dancing on Capitol Hill. When the
Amash amendment went to the floor, there was no place left to hide.

To their historic shame,
134 Republicans and 83 Democrats voted against Amash’s amendment (while 94
Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for it). That’s how the measure lost,
217-205.

The record of the House vote tells
us a lot. Top Republicans — including Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader
Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy — voted with Obama policies to
keep smothering the Fourth Amendment. So did top Democrats, including Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer.

The stench at the
pinnacle of GOP power hardly surprises most Democrats. But on civil liberties
— as on so many other profound issues — a similar odor is emanating from the
upper reaches of Democratic power on Capitol Hill, where Pelosi and Hoyer are
far from the only Democrats who have become reflexive servants of indefensible
Obama policies.

Consider some of the
other Democratic luminaries in the House who voted against the Amash amendment:
The Democratic National Committee’s chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s former chair Chris Van Hollen.
The DCCC’s current chair, Steve Israel.

(more…)

By Norman Solomon

The part of the First
Amendment that prohibits “abridging the freedom … of the press” is now up
against the wall, as the Obama administration continues to assault the kind of
journalism that can expose government secrets.

Last Friday the administration
got what it wanted – an ice-cold chilling effect — from the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled on the case of New York Times reporter James Risen. The court “delivered a blow to investigative journalism in
America by ruling that reporters have no First Amendment protection that would
safeguard the confidentiality of their sources in the event of a criminal trial,”
the Guardian reported.

The Executive Branch fought
for that ruling — and is now celebrating. “We
agree with the decision,” said a Justice Department spokesman. “We are
examining the next steps in the prosecution of this case.” The Risen case, and
potentially many others, are now under the ominous shadow of the Appeals Court’s
pronouncement: “There is no
First Amendment testimonial privilege, absolute or qualified, that protects a
reporter from being compelled to testify … in criminal proceedings.”

At the
Freedom of the Press Foundation, co-founder Trevor Timm calls the court ruling “the most significant reporter’s
privilege decision in decades” and asserts that the court “eviscerated that
privilege.” He’s not exaggerating. Press freedom is at stake.

Journalists who can be compelled to violate the confidentiality of their
sources, or otherwise go to prison, are reduced to doing little more than
providing stenographic services to pass along the official story. That’s what the
White House wants.

The federal Fourth
Circuit covers the geographical area where most of the U.S. government’s
intelligence, surveillance and top-level military agencies — including the NSA
and CIA — are headquartered. The ruling “pretty much guts national security
journalism in the states in which it matters,” Marcy Wheeler writes.

That court decision came
seven days after the Justice Department released its “News Media Policies” report
announcing “significant revisions to the Department’s policies regarding
investigations that involve members of the news media.” The report offered assurances
that “members of the news media will not be subject to prosecution based solely
on newsgathering activities.” (Hey
thanks!) But the document quickly added that the government will take such
action “as a last resort” when seeking information that is “essential to a
successful investigation or prosecution.”

Translation: We won’t prosecute journalists for doing
their jobs unless we really want to.

(more…)

(more…)

By Norman Solomon

For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother.

Now what?

Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers — past, present and future. But those vital efforts are far from sufficient.

For a moment, walk a mile in the iron-heeled shoes of the military-industrial-digital complex. Its leaders don’t like clarity about what they’re doing, and they certainly don’t like being exposed or denounced — but right now the surveillance state is in no danger of losing what it needs to keep going: power.

The huge digi-tech firms and the government have become mutual tools for gaining humungous profits and tightening political control. The partnerships are deeply enmeshed in military and surveillance realms, whether cruise missiles and drones or vast metadata records and capacities to squirrel away trillions of emails.

At the core of the surveillance state is the hollowness of its democratic pretenses. Only with authentic democracy can we save ourselves from devastating evisceration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

The enormous corporate leverage over government policies doesn’t change the fact that the nexus of the surveillance state — and the only organization with enough potential torque to reverse its anti-democratic trajectory — is government itself.

The necessity is to subdue the corporate-military forces that have so extensively hijacked the government. To do that, we’ll need to accomplish what progressives are currently ill-positioned for: democratic mobilization to challenge the surveillance state’s hold on power.

(more…)

By Norman Solomon

Rarely has any American provoked such fury in Washington’s high places. So far, Edward Snowden has outsmarted the smartest guys in the echo chamber — and he has proceeded with the kind of moral clarity that U.S. officials seem to find unfathomable.

Bipartisan condemnations of Snowden are escalating from Capitol Hill and the Obama administration. More of the NSA’s massive surveillance program is now visible in the light of day — which is exactly what it can’t stand.

The central issue is our dire shortage of democracy. How can we have real consent of the governed when the government is entrenched with extreme secrecy, surveillance and contempt for privacy?

The same government that continues to expand its invasive dragnet of surveillance, all over the United States and the rest of the world, is now asserting its prerogative to drag Snowden back to the USA from anywhere on the planet. It’s not only about punishing him and discouraging other potential whistleblowers. Top U.S. officials are also determined to — quite literally — silence Snowden’s voice, as Bradley Manning’s voice has been nearly silenced behind prison walls.

The sunshine of information, the beacon of principled risk-takers, the illumination of government actions that can’t stand the light of day — these correctives are anathema to U.S. authorities who insist that really informative whistleblowers belong in solitary confinement. A big problem for those authorities is that so many people crave the sunny beacons of illumination.

On Sunday night, more than 15,000 Americans took action to send a clear message to the White House. The subject line said “Mr. President, hands off Edward Snowden,” and the email message read: “I urge you in the strongest terms to do nothing to interfere with the travels or political asylum process of Edward Snowden. The U.S. government must not engage in abduction or any other form of foul play against Mr. Snowden.”

(more…)

For index of Norman Solomon's columns,

click here.

By
Norman Solomon

A
terrible formula has taken hold: warfare state + corporate digital
power = surveillance state.

“National
security” agencies and major tech sectors have teamed up to make Big Brother a
reality. “Of the estimated $80 billion the government will spend on
intelligence this year, most is spent on private contractors,” the New
York Times noted. The synergy is great for war-crazed snoops
in Washington and profit-crazed moguls in Silicon Valley, but poisonous for
civil liberties and democracy.

“Much of the coverage of the NSA spying scandal has
underplayed crucial context: The capacity of the government to engage in
constant surreptitious monitoring of all civilians has been greatly enhanced by
the commercialization of the Internet,” media analyst Robert McChesney pointed out this week.

Overall,
he said, “the commercialized Internet, far from
producing competition, has generated the greatest wave of monopoly in the
history of capitalism.” And the concentration of online digital power is, to
put it mildly, user-friendly for the surveillance state.

It’s a truly odious and destructive mix — a government bent
on perpetual war and a digital tech industry dominated by a few huge firms with
an insatiable drive to maximize profits. Those companies have a lot to offer
the government, and vice versa.

“The giant monopolistic firms that rule the Internet —
Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Version, AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft — all
have tremendous incentive to collect information on people,” McChesney said.
“There is a great deal of profit for these firms and others to work closely
with the national security apparatus, and almost no incentive to refuse to
participate. In short, there is a military-digital complex deeply embedded into
the political economy and outside any credible review process by elected
representatives, not to mention the public.”

Central pieces of the puzzle — routinely left out of
mainline media coverage — have to do with key forces at work. Why such resolve
in Washington’s highest places for the vast surveillance that’s integral to the
warfare state?

What has not changed is the profusion of corporations making
a killing from the warfare state in tandem with Washington’s quest for
geopolitical positioning, access to fossil fuels and other raw materials — and
access to markets for U.S.-based industries ranging from financial services to
fast food.

Let’s give credit to New
York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman for candor as he wrote approvingly in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: “The hidden hand of the market will never
work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell
Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that
keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called
the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

On Wednesday, I had a brief on-air exchange with Friedman, live on KQED Radio in San Francisco.

(more…)