BRADLEY MANNING

Bradley Manning's attorney David Coombs, 12/3/12:

"When I'm in the courtroom, I stand up and look to my right, and, I see the United States government. The United States government with all of its resources, all of its personnel, I see them standing against me and Brad. And I have to admit to you, that can be rather intimidating. And I was intimidated. Especially when the President of the Unit ed States says your client broke the law. Especially when congress members say your client deserves the death penalty. I want to tell you though today as I stand here I'm no longer intimidated. I am not intimidated because when I stand up I know I'm not standing alone. I know I'm not alone because I turn around and I see the support behind me. I see members here today in the audience that are there every time we have a court hearing. I see what I am not going to affectionately call the 'truth batallion,' those who wear a black shirt. It has the word 'truth' on it, and they are behind me. And when I look there, I know that I also have unlimited personnel and unlimited resources."

Go to www.bradleymanning.org to learn how you can join in the struggle for Bradley Manning.

UPDATED - The Japanese Earthquake & Tsunami

UPDATE @ 10:59 a.m.:

Maggie Gunderson on Green Mountain Daily: The Fukushima nuclear plant lost containment integrity and is leaking radiation.

ORIGINAL POST:

Richard Estes/American Leftist yesterday had commentary and news links on the quake and aftermath, but also added a rather telling (ironic) comment at the bottom of his post,

On a more mundane note, the New York Times can't resist exploiting the situation as an opportunity to cast the US military presence in Japan, disliked by many people there, in a favorable light. The US military is, after all, first and foremost, a humanitarian institution.

How many Iraqis have died?

Left I on the News:

A few days ago it was the story of the coverup of the murder by U.S. forces of civilians in Afghanistan, today it's the story of a 2007 massacre in which U.S. helicopter gunships fired on civilians in Iraq. WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald were on Democracy Now! this morning, drawing the (hopefully obvious long ago) conclusion that you can't trust a word the U.S. military says, and also the conclusion that these type of events are absolutely daily occurrences, with only the tip of the iceberg of them being exposed to the public.

All true. But I'd like to point readers to an additional conclusion. Over the years I've written a great deal about the number of people killed in Iraq, and one of the points I have made repeatedly is that when you look at various statistics, some of them (e.g., Iraq Body Count) want to count only "civilians", while others (the statistical surveys) count all the dead (and some count only "violent" deaths, while others count all deaths, e.g., deaths from lack of medical care or poor public health conditions caused by the invasion).

And so one point that can't be emphasized enough is that, whether you agree with me or not that all the deaths, be they of members of the Iraqi armed forces, members of the Iraqi resistance, or "innocent civilians" are equally reprehensible, and all the result of the U.S. invasion, is that the numbers for "civilian" deaths are completely and utterly skewed and rendered meaningless by the kind of false reporting represented by these two incidents. I'm not going to look up this specific incident in IBC, but it's an absolute certainty that a huge number of deaths were excluded from that count because they were reported (first by the U.S. military, and then by the U.S. press stenographic pool) as "insurgents" or perhaps "terrorists" (or maybe "suspected terrorists"). Which is just one more reason why the numbers to focus on are the total number of Iraqis killed, not the bogus and almost completely arbitrary "civilian" totals.

Notice I'm not dwelling on the actual numbers in this post. I've been over that ground before, and for the purposes of this discussion the actual numbers really don't matter. Needless to say they do matter to the actual people involved, those no longer living and those still mourning (and suffering from in very real ways) their loss.