Julian Assange & Bradley Manning's Defense Fund

The US response to Assange's release of secret documents was to prohibit banks and PayPal transfer funds; now there is a way to help.

Manning and Assange: courtesy: This Can't Be Happening

(EUGENE) - You might recall that when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the press, no one in the press was prosecuted for releasing the information.

When Bush's chief advisor, Karl Rove and Cheney's chief advisor, Scooter Libby, outed an undercover agent by talking to the press, which resulted in the deaths of a dozen of her secret contacts, destroyed her career, and made her a death target for life, Bush waved his wand and it was all okay. The media anxiously published the story and of course this was okay because we have "freedom of the press." In this case at least four men committed treason, but it was okay because they said it was okay.

Bradley Manning's concern for the needless killing of civilians, which I am sure he reported to his superiors who no doubt told him to mind his own business, led him to "whistle blowing" to Wikileaks. When Whistle blowing is every human's responsibility when they witness wrongdoing and harm to fellow humans.

Whether in business or government, secrecy laws no longer apply when people are blatantly breaking the law. Because of the cruel and carefree manner in which our soldiers and their leaders were totally out of control and killing for sport, I feel that Bradley Manning is a world hero.

We could start with the fact that the war, initiated during the Clinton administration and supported by both parties was illegal, all killings in Iraq were illegal.

Though he has not yet been charged, the US government has cut off donations to Manning's defense fund by prohibiting banks and PayPal to transfer funds for him.

Julian Assange is a journalist just like those who published the Ellsberg papers and the story about the outed CIA agent. However, the US government is so pissed off about his revealing the truth about their corrupt operations, they set out to hang him. The manner in which Assange was entrapped by women in Sweden was right out of Karl Rove's bag of tricks. Assange is now fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden, for he and his attorneys believe he will be turned over to the US, which will lead to similar treatment that Manning suffered, which was considered by experts as torture.

The US has responded to Julian Assange's release of secret documents by working also prohibiting banks and PayPal transfer funds to them. This, even though he has not been charged with any crimes.

For now, Manning's and Assange's attorneys have worked around this and we can still donate to his defense fund.

If you want to donate to Manning's defense fund, go to the following site: http://couragetoresist.org/donate/bradley-manning.html

If you want to support Julian Assange, you can go to the following website: http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

Wayne was born in a small farm town in California's San Joaquin Valley. At age ten, he moved with his family to San Jose, California, which at the time had a population of 50,000 and was surrounded by orchards--mostly prunes. At age twenty, he joined IBM, one of the first electronic plants that would evolve into what we know today as Silicon Valley. Most of his college education was acquired through part-time classes while sometimes working ten hours a day. Wayne started on the bottom in the magnetic disk manufacturing facility, which produced the large disks for the earlier IBM computer systems. These magnetically coated disks would evolve into what we know today as hard drives. Wayne's last assignment with IBM was setting up their first inkjet printer lab that became what we know today as the Lexmark printer business. After his retirement from IBM, he wrote human interest stories for a small town newspaper.

You can write to Wayne Pierce at: mwp@wrenfeather.com