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Frontline Hit Piece on Bradley Manning
by Jim Davidson
[email protected]

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

This evening the Pubic Broadcasting Service hour-long news analysis and editorial opinion show "Frontline" carried a carefully crafted hit piece on Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. It was crafty in its attempts to present itself as balanced or objective. It was clearly a deliberate hit piece, making repeated ad hominem attacks on both Manning and Assange.

Before you inundate me with comments about how PBS represents the American people, is objective, or is taxpayer and viewer supported and therefore unbiased, please allow me to introduce you to some of the major sponsors of PBS. For example, Frontline rather proudly announces it is funded by the Park Foundation. Here's a page on Roy H. Park, which is the redirect from wikipedia when you look for a page on that Foundation. If you were to conclude that Park and his foundation are pro-cotton and therefore anti-hemp, you might be right. You might also wonder how Park got through WW2 working at the Grange League Federation. If you want to know what the foundation says about where his wealth came from, see their page.

Other shows and the PBS network generally get support from a wide array of huge conglomerates including Chevron, BNSF Railway, insurance giant Pacific Life, chip giant Intel, the Bechtel foundation, Carnegie Corporation, the California Endowment, Ford Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, Gruber family foundation, William and Flora Hewlett foundation (yes, the notorious defence contractor Hewlett Packard, that Hewlett), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (yes, notorious defence contractor Hughes aerospace, a related company), Robert Wood Johnson foundation, Joyce foundation, John and James Knight foundation, John D and Catherine MacArthur foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore foundation (yes, that Gordon Moore), the national endowment for the arts, the national(ist socialist) science foundation, the John and Wendy Neu family foundation, the David and Lucile Packard foundation, (yes that Packard), the aforementioned Park foundation, the poetry foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (this would be brothers Nelson the drug war megalomaniac and power behind the World Trade Centre being built, David the Chase banking gangster, etc.), the Skoll foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan foundation (yes, that Alfred P. Sloan, conglomerate builder, streetcar system destroyer, alleged Nazi collaborator, and notorious American fascist-corporatist), the Starr foundation, and the Wallace foundation. Some shows are sponsored by Boeing, Lockheed, big banks, David Koch of the famous Kochtopus, giant mega corporations like Exxon, etc.

Basically, Frontline and PBS in general are financed by a who's who of American sycophants and beneficiaries of enormous government interference in world affairs, beneficiaries and profiteers of USA wars all over the world, beneficiaries of the drug war policies, beneficiaries and promoters of the fiscal and trade policies which impoverish Americans for the benefit of huge corporate conglomerates. In other words, these are the people least sympathetic to any kind of change, to any attacks on the existing power structure (which they built in some cases and from which they directly benefit).

So it is little wonder that their attitude toward Bradley Manning was to convict him in their hit piece, to attack him for his gay lifestyle, to attempt to negate his credibility by portraying him as disloyal, un-American, and mentally anguished. It is little wonder that their attitude toward Julian Assange is to portray him as arrogant, power mad, and uncaring.

Now, how did Bradley Manning get depressed or mentally anguished? Well, there is some minor mention of him being picked on, repeatedly, during basic training by the ugly, nasty, stupid, and deranged drill sergeants whose work in tearing apart human personalities has been criticised for well over 160 years (by, e.g., Henry David Thoreau who called their work black arts in 1848). There is no sympathetic voice for the position Manning took against a bigoted and discriminatory policy called "Don't Ask Don't Tell" because Frontline, PBS, and the corporate conglomerates and foundations behind them are in favour of that policy, prefer to discriminate against persons of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and otherwise sexually distinct lifestyles, and actively pursue bigoted policies.

Adrian Lamo (lame-oh) is presented as a sympathetic character, which is a really hard thing to do, given his actually despicable nature as a snitch, a coward, and a busy-body. Lamo makes the obsequious claim that he had to fuck over someone, so he picked Manning. But, in fact, there is scant evidence that Lamo had to say anything publicly, at all, about his discussions with Bradass87.

Frontline also rather idiotically ignores the recent declaration by President Obama that Manning "broke the law" and therefore must be found guilty in a command-directed verdict by a court martial. Much of the evidence of actual torture and physical abuse of Manning during his custody at Quantico is ignored. Manning's lawyers are not quoted in their extensive and well-written opinion indicating that under American jurisprudence rules for habeas corpus Manning should already have been released due to pre-trial punishment, including cruel and unusual punishment.

Naturally, because the Stailnists who run Frontline hate humanity and despise individual liberty, there is no discussion of the extensive litany of elements of the United States Bill of Rights—the major document that amends the USA constitution, and which all soldiers and elected officials are sworn to uphold and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic—which were violated in the treatment of Bradley Manning. A short list includes his first, fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth and ninth amendment freedoms. Frontline makes no mention of these violations of Manning's rights because Frontline's editors and producers don't care about those rights, don't think Americans should have any rights, and prefer the death camps and gulags of all authoritarian systems. Probably they are also over-population anti-human types with a glee for mass murder and genocide, judging by their extremely tentative and grudging comments about mass murder in Tunisia under the former regime and the many massacres and violations of war crimes treaties involved in the sundry leaked items from Wikileaks.

Considerable circumstantial and hearsay evidence was presented, but nothing conclusive. It seems doubtful that conclusive evidence that Manning leaked anything exists. If it does exist, it is evidence of his exemplary conduct as a whistleblower, revealing war crimes and corruption at the highest levels of government.

In all, it was exactly what I expected. Frontline is a shameful organisation which should be ignored and disregarded.

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur, and anti-war activist. His 1990 venture to offer a sweepstakes trip into space was destroyed by government action as was his free port and prospective space port in Somalia in 2001. His 2002-2007 venture in free market money and private stock exchange was destroyed by government action in 2007. He's going to Mars if he has to walk. His second book, Being Sovereign is now availble from Lulu and Amazon. He is currently working on a book about travel to Mars with John Wayne Smith, a book with international fugitive Chad Z. Hower on his story, a book on sovereign self-defence, and a book compiling his letters and essays in The Libertarian Enterprise from 1995 to 2010. Contact him at indomitus.net or indsovu.com. Come visit IndSovU teams at gatherings in June 2011 in New Hampshire, September 2011 in Montana, December 2011 in Florida, and March 2012 in Austin, Texas.

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