Subject: Peace Movement Supports Wikileaks
Date: Dec 4, 2010 8:01 AM 
 

 

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Unity

United National

Antiwar Committee


UNACpeace@gmail.com or UNAC at P.O. Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054

518-227-6947   www.nationalpeaceconference.org

 

For Immediate Release                                                                 12/2/2010

 

For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,

                    UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org

 

Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed.  We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.  

 

The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months.  We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.

 

Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law.  His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.

 

The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it.  The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.

At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ).  He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up.  It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed. 

We ask why this material was classified in the first place.  There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies.  To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars.  In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.

UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.

 

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