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A week before the start of the Arab Spring, the Lebanese Al-Akhbar website was hacked by a group supporting the Saudi regime as retaliation for the stories they ran about the cables. As the revolutionary spirit spread, so did a cyber war of propaganda, DDoS attacks, hacking, threats and arrests of activists across the Middle East. The target of that war was the information in the cables and the carriers of that information, people and infrastructure. But despite the efforts to shut the information down, dictatorships started to fall, one after the other.
But it had to start somewhere, and the release of the cables started with Private Chelsea Manning, alone in the Iraqi desert. She, like Assange and Snowden and many less famous and mostly anonymous activists, are the deities of a new mythology that no prison can ever detain. The battle for a transparent and accountable world is spreading, despite all the measures of repression and surveillance. It’s being carried by a worldwide movement exposing secrecy, corruption and human rights abuses, for which Chelsea Manning will be an inspirational and iconic figure, as free as her ideas and dreams while her body is behind walls and bars. After she was sentenced to 35 years in prison Chelsea Manning said in her statement that “Sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.” I don’t know if she knows that she helped us, in this part of the world, to move toward that noble goal. Closing a cell door on a prisoner with a free mind has opened a thousand and one doors for a free society.
Everywhere US officials travel, we need to publicly hound them with demands to "Free Chelsea Manning". Enough people are sick of the hypocrisy and vindictiveness towards people like Chelsea and Snowden who were naive enough to take that "free society" "democracy" shit seriously while politicians the world over twist those words for their sick exploitation of people.
Edit: Thank you for posting this! A HUGE REC! And a huge hurrah for Chelsea!
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