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On the last Sunday of May, I was on the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I stood in the back of a crowd of a few thousand, one composed largely of graduating seniors, and family and friends there to support them. We were all listening to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) deliver the commencement address. As a member of the faculty, I could have been up on the stage positioned in a seat behind the senator, but, as I typically do for the event, instead opted to stand in the back - not least because I don't like sitting under a hot sun in a heavy robe.
Gillibrand's speech included reflections on her entry into what she called grassroots politics - Hillary Clinton's multi-million-dollar US senate campaign in 2000 - as well as platitudinous exhortations that the graduates challenge themselves and assertions that no goals are too big to achieve. While toward the end, she spoke briefly of the need to fight poverty in the United States and raise the country's minimum wage, and voiced strong support for women's and LGBT rights, there was little in the speech to which one could object - at least in the context of the politically liberal ethos that prevails at Vassar.
Later that day, I felt irritated, but I wasn't quite clear why - until I realised that I was angry with myself for quietly standing there, for not speaking out, for not indicating any protest during Gillibrand's speech. Instead, I followed everyone around me and offered my polite applause for someone whose politics (much of which) are abhorrent - at least from a perspective that takes seriously matters of global justice, universal human rights and international law.
New York's junior US senator, Kirsten Gillibrand got her start in Congress when she was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. Mirroring the relatively conservative nature of her district, the Democrat was a member of the Blue Dog Caucus, one who voted, for example, against gun control legislation and opposed efforts by New York's governor to provide driver's licenses to unauthorised immigrants.
In early 2009, she became a US senator when another New York governor appointed her to fill Hillary Clinton's seat after Barack Obama chose the former first lady to be secretary of state. With her move from the House to the Senate, Gillibrand's politics quickly changed from one of the most conservative to one of the more liberal among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Whether the shift manifests a chameleon-like opportunism or simply her adjusting to the realities of moving from representing a relatively small, rural district to serving all of New York State, I am not sure. What is clear that Gillibrand plays a safe politics.
Thus, even at her most crusading moments, as when Gillibrand has criticised US military leaders for not doing enough to combat sexual assault within the armed forces, she ends up endorsing the larger institutional status quo. Incidents of sexual violence, she argues, "degrade military readiness [and] subvert strategic goodwill." In other words, sexual violence within the military is wrong because, among other reasons, it undermines the Pentagon and its gargantuan, global footprint.
"American Empire"
While Gillibrand has expressed disapproval of the Obama administration for its slow withdrawal from Afghanistan and voted in favour of an expedited timetable, she strongly endorses the overall war effort. She thus embodies the spirit of "American Empire" explicated by Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and now professor of international relations at Boston University, in his eponymous book. In this regard, her disagreement is an example of what Bacevich characterizes as "little more than quibbles over operational details."
It embodies the profound consensus among Democrats and Republicans about what Bacevich calls the "fundamentals" of US policy, ones that include, as he explains in a more recent book, the American credo - that the necessary job of the United States is "to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world." It sees the world in generally black and white terms, with obvious forces of good - the United States and its allies - and those that are indisputably nefarious.
This credo dovetails with a "scared trinity" of convictions that underlie US military practice: international peace and order require a global American military presence, a military able to project power globally, and one that intervenes globally to counter existing or anticipated threats.
Together, Bacevich asserts, the credo and trinity create the foundation of the "rules" Washington follows and draws upon to justify what it does, while "precluding that intrusion of aberrant thinking" that could lead to vibrant debate.
Lack of aberrant thinking
As an imperial team player, Gillibrand embraces these rules, while showing almost no evidence of aberrant thinking when it comes to matters of US military and foreign policy. This is partly why Politico can say that she is "quietly building a resume that would allow her to be taken seriously should she ever decide to run for president."
This also explains how and why she referred to her 2011 tour of the Hancock Air National Guard Base, just outside of Syracuse, NY, as "inspirational". This for one of the locations from which the United States flies the MQ-9 Reaper - the military's best "hunter-killer" drone - in Afghanistan. It is a technology, said Gillibrand in echoing the Pentagon's standard fare, which "will save lives".
As the New York senator's words suggest, the lives of some - "us" (and those with whom "we" identify) - are effectively the only ones that matter. Thus, her official website speaks of the need of the United States to support Israel and "protect its citizens against terrorist threats," but says nothing about Palestinians. And when Israel commits atrocities, as it has, for instance, in its attacks over the last few years against the people of the illegally occupied Gaza Strip, she not only says nothing critical, but unequivocally supports them.
She even endorsed a 2010 Israeli attack on a six-ship flotilla to Gaza in international waters that killed nine individuals, framing the brutality as part of "Israel's right to self-defense" while ignoring that it constituted a clear violation of international law. Instead, Gillibrand "called on the Obama Administration to determine whether or not an organizer of the flotilla, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), should be placed on a list of foreign terrorist groups".
Similarly, Gillibrand has marched in step with the official consensus on Iran, one that purportedly seeks to deny Iran a right both the US and Israel demand for themselves - to have nuclear weapons. In this spirit of nuclear apartheid, she co-authored a 2012 economic sanctions bill whose passage only helped to escalate tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Gillibrand was silent about these policies during her Vassar commencement speech. On the eve of Memorial Day, a national holiday dedicated to remembering individuals who have died while serving in the US military, she offered nothing on matters of war and militarism - or of peace. And I mimicked her silence, setting a bad example as to how one lives a politically committed and ethical life, confronts abusive power, and takes seriously the concept of democratic engagement.
The Bradley Manning factor
Less than a week later, I found myself in a very different environment, in a crowd of approximately one thousand people outside the gates of Fort Meade in Maryland. Along with anti-war veterans, peace activists, and queer rights advocates - among many others - I was part of a demonstration of solidarity with Bradley Manning two days before of the beginning of his court martial trial.
Imprisoned since 2010, Manning is a US Army private and an intelligence analyst. It was he who released to Wikileaks the "Collateral Murder" video, one that provides a cockpit view of a US Apache helicopter gunning down and killing two Reuters journalists and shooting children in Baghdad, along with tens of thousands of pages of other military and diplomatic documents related to US activities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Facing a variety of charges including "aiding the enemy," Manning could receive life imprisonment without parole.
A key goal of the US government's case against Manning is to establish a working relationship between him and Julian Assange. It appears that the Obama administration hopes to gain evidence for a possible federal criminal prosecution against the Wikileaks founder, a man Kirsten Gillibrand has opined should be prosecuted to "the fullest extent of the law" and "thrown in jail for a very long time."
Although Gillibrand's opinion of Manning is not on record, her words on Assange, and her larger politics, make clear what she thinks of those who challenge the US national security state and its global pretensions by exposing its secrets, and what should happen to them.
Of course, Gillibrand is hardly alone in Congress. Indeed, while her politics on the domestic front are left-leaning - albeit in what is (relative to most countries) a very narrow political spectrum - her positions on matters defined as within the realm of national security put her squarely in the center of the Washington establishment. Validating Bacevich's assertion regarding bipartisan agreement on foreign policy "fundamentals," more than 80 senators, for example, shared her endorsement of the Israeli attack against the Gaza flotilla. And her Iran economic sanctions bill passed by a 94-0 vote.
It is this consensus that Manning's revelations helped to disrupt. It is a consensus built on, among other things, hundreds of US military bases in dozens of countries. It is one that demands impunity for the United States for its actions abroad and accountability for those of its official enemies, and requires that Washington have a right to wage war around the globe.
Bradley Manning helped to shine a bright light on many of the lies that both justify and help obscure the underlying workings of unjust power - within the US and far beyond. It is for such reasons that Sarah Shourd, one of three US hikers arrested by Iranian forces in Iraqi Kurdistan and jailed in Tehran as a political hostage for over a year, expressed her gratitude to Manning. Speaking at the rally, the writer and anti-solitary-confinement activist thanked Manning - for trying to prevent the torture of Iraqis, for exposing corruption in Tunisia and contributing to the Arab Spring, for helping to bring about a more informed debate, and for his courage and extraordinary example.
The invisible empire
The very fact of empire as such is invisible to most within the United States. Meanwhile, its violent and unjust manifestations - from Afghanistan to Diego Garcia, Gaza, and Guantanamo to Iraq and Yemen to the large sectors of the population at home impoverished by a military budget that rivals those of all the rest of the world's countries combined - are widely accepted as the way things should be, or simply the way things are, with little that can be done to change the situation.
What allows empire to endure in part is the quiescence of those among us who see empire as simply wrong. In that sense, how different are people like me who fail to confront the polite politicians that so blithely reproduce empire's violence on a regular basis from those who hold Bradley Manning at Fort Meade and deny his freedom, or those who now seek to hunt down and prosecute Edward Snowden? Perhaps if we did speak out and protest that which we find unacceptable, we wouldn't need such extraordinary individuals to take great risks in exposing the depraved levels to which we have sunk.
Next time, I will try very hard not to be still when one of its empire's chief proponents is in front of me.
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On the last Sunday of May, I was on the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I stood in the back of a crowd of a few thousand, one composed largely of graduating seniors, and family and friends there to support them. We were all listening to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) deliver the commencement address. As a member of the faculty, I could have been up on the stage positioned in a seat behind the senator, but, as I typically do for the event, instead opted to stand in the back - not least because I don't like sitting under a hot sun in a heavy robe.
Gillibrand's speech included reflections on her entry into what she called grassroots politics - Hillary Clinton's multi-million-dollar US senate campaign in 2000 - as well as platitudinous exhortations that the graduates challenge themselves and assertions that no goals are too big to achieve. While toward the end, she spoke briefly of the need to fight poverty in the United States and raise the country's minimum wage, and voiced strong support for women's and LGBT rights, there was little in the speech to which one could object - at least in the context of the politically liberal ethos that prevails at Vassar.
Later that day, I felt irritated, but I wasn't quite clear why - until I realised that I was angry with myself for quietly standing there, for not speaking out, for not indicating any protest during Gillibrand's speech. Instead, I followed everyone around me and offered my polite applause for someone whose politics (much of which) are abhorrent - at least from a perspective that takes seriously matters of global justice, universal human rights and international law.
New York's junior US senator, Kirsten Gillibrand got her start in Congress when she was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. Mirroring the relatively conservative nature of her district, the Democrat was a member of the Blue Dog Caucus, one who voted, for example, against gun control legislation and opposed efforts by New York's governor to provide driver's licenses to unauthorised immigrants.
In early 2009, she became a US senator when another New York governor appointed her to fill Hillary Clinton's seat after Barack Obama chose the former first lady to be secretary of state. With her move from the House to the Senate, Gillibrand's politics quickly changed from one of the most conservative to one of the more liberal among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Whether the shift manifests a chameleon-like opportunism or simply her adjusting to the realities of moving from representing a relatively small, rural district to serving all of New York State, I am not sure. What is clear that Gillibrand plays a safe politics.
Thus, even at her most crusading moments, as when Gillibrand has criticised US military leaders for not doing enough to combat sexual assault within the armed forces, she ends up endorsing the larger institutional status quo. Incidents of sexual violence, she argues, "degrade military readiness [and] subvert strategic goodwill." In other words, sexual violence within the military is wrong because, among other reasons, it undermines the Pentagon and its gargantuan, global footprint.
"American Empire"
While Gillibrand has expressed disapproval of the Obama administration for its slow withdrawal from Afghanistan and voted in favour of an expedited timetable, she strongly endorses the overall war effort. She thus embodies the spirit of "American Empire" explicated by Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and now professor of international relations at Boston University, in his eponymous book. In this regard, her disagreement is an example of what Bacevich characterizes as "little more than quibbles over operational details."
It embodies the profound consensus among Democrats and Republicans about what Bacevich calls the "fundamentals" of US policy, ones that include, as he explains in a more recent book, the American credo - that the necessary job of the United States is "to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world." It sees the world in generally black and white terms, with obvious forces of good - the United States and its allies - and those that are indisputably nefarious.
This credo dovetails with a "scared trinity" of convictions that underlie US military practice: international peace and order require a global American military presence, a military able to project power globally, and one that intervenes globally to counter existing or anticipated threats.
Together, Bacevich asserts, the credo and trinity create the foundation of the "rules" Washington follows and draws upon to justify what it does, while "precluding that intrusion of aberrant thinking" that could lead to vibrant debate.
Lack of aberrant thinking
As an imperial team player, Gillibrand embraces these rules, while showing almost no evidence of aberrant thinking when it comes to matters of US military and foreign policy. This is partly why Politico can say that she is "quietly building a resume that would allow her to be taken seriously should she ever decide to run for president."
This also explains how and why she referred to her 2011 tour of the Hancock Air National Guard Base, just outside of Syracuse, NY, as "inspirational". This for one of the locations from which the United States flies the MQ-9 Reaper - the military's best "hunter-killer" drone - in Afghanistan. It is a technology, said Gillibrand in echoing the Pentagon's standard fare, which "will save lives".
As the New York senator's words suggest, the lives of some - "us" (and those with whom "we" identify) - are effectively the only ones that matter. Thus, her official website speaks of the need of the United States to support Israel and "protect its citizens against terrorist threats," but says nothing about Palestinians. And when Israel commits atrocities, as it has, for instance, in its attacks over the last few years against the people of the illegally occupied Gaza Strip, she not only says nothing critical, but unequivocally supports them.
She even endorsed a 2010 Israeli attack on a six-ship flotilla to Gaza in international waters that killed nine individuals, framing the brutality as part of "Israel's right to self-defense" while ignoring that it constituted a clear violation of international law. Instead, Gillibrand "called on the Obama Administration to determine whether or not an organizer of the flotilla, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), should be placed on a list of foreign terrorist groups".
Similarly, Gillibrand has marched in step with the official consensus on Iran, one that purportedly seeks to deny Iran a right both the US and Israel demand for themselves - to have nuclear weapons. In this spirit of nuclear apartheid, she co-authored a 2012 economic sanctions bill whose passage only helped to escalate tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Gillibrand was silent about these policies during her Vassar commencement speech. On the eve of Memorial Day, a national holiday dedicated to remembering individuals who have died while serving in the US military, she offered nothing on matters of war and militarism - or of peace. And I mimicked her silence, setting a bad example as to how one lives a politically committed and ethical life, confronts abusive power, and takes seriously the concept of democratic engagement.
The Bradley Manning factor
Less than a week later, I found myself in a very different environment, in a crowd of approximately one thousand people outside the gates of Fort Meade in Maryland. Along with anti-war veterans, peace activists, and queer rights advocates - among many others - I was part of a demonstration of solidarity with Bradley Manning two days before of the beginning of his court martial trial.
Imprisoned since 2010, Manning is a US Army private and an intelligence analyst. It was he who released to Wikileaks the "Collateral Murder" video, one that provides a cockpit view of a US Apache helicopter gunning down and killing two Reuters journalists and shooting children in Baghdad, along with tens of thousands of pages of other military and diplomatic documents related to US activities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Facing a variety of charges including "aiding the enemy," Manning could receive life imprisonment without parole.
A key goal of the US government's case against Manning is to establish a working relationship between him and Julian Assange. It appears that the Obama administration hopes to gain evidence for a possible federal criminal prosecution against the Wikileaks founder, a man Kirsten Gillibrand has opined should be prosecuted to "the fullest extent of the law" and "thrown in jail for a very long time."
Although Gillibrand's opinion of Manning is not on record, her words on Assange, and her larger politics, make clear what she thinks of those who challenge the US national security state and its global pretensions by exposing its secrets, and what should happen to them.
Of course, Gillibrand is hardly alone in Congress. Indeed, while her politics on the domestic front are left-leaning - albeit in what is (relative to most countries) a very narrow political spectrum - her positions on matters defined as within the realm of national security put her squarely in the center of the Washington establishment. Validating Bacevich's assertion regarding bipartisan agreement on foreign policy "fundamentals," more than 80 senators, for example, shared her endorsement of the Israeli attack against the Gaza flotilla. And her Iran economic sanctions bill passed by a 94-0 vote.
It is this consensus that Manning's revelations helped to disrupt. It is a consensus built on, among other things, hundreds of US military bases in dozens of countries. It is one that demands impunity for the United States for its actions abroad and accountability for those of its official enemies, and requires that Washington have a right to wage war around the globe.
Bradley Manning helped to shine a bright light on many of the lies that both justify and help obscure the underlying workings of unjust power - within the US and far beyond. It is for such reasons that Sarah Shourd, one of three US hikers arrested by Iranian forces in Iraqi Kurdistan and jailed in Tehran as a political hostage for over a year, expressed her gratitude to Manning. Speaking at the rally, the writer and anti-solitary-confinement activist thanked Manning - for trying to prevent the torture of Iraqis, for exposing corruption in Tunisia and contributing to the Arab Spring, for helping to bring about a more informed debate, and for his courage and extraordinary example.
The invisible empire
The very fact of empire as such is invisible to most within the United States. Meanwhile, its violent and unjust manifestations - from Afghanistan to Diego Garcia, Gaza, and Guantanamo to Iraq and Yemen to the large sectors of the population at home impoverished by a military budget that rivals those of all the rest of the world's countries combined - are widely accepted as the way things should be, or simply the way things are, with little that can be done to change the situation.
What allows empire to endure in part is the quiescence of those among us who see empire as simply wrong. In that sense, how different are people like me who fail to confront the polite politicians that so blithely reproduce empire's violence on a regular basis from those who hold Bradley Manning at Fort Meade and deny his freedom, or those who now seek to hunt down and prosecute Edward Snowden? Perhaps if we did speak out and protest that which we find unacceptable, we wouldn't need such extraordinary individuals to take great risks in exposing the depraved levels to which we have sunk.
Next time, I will try very hard not to be still when one of its empire's chief proponents is in front of me.
On the last Sunday of May, I was on the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. I stood in the back of a crowd of a few thousand, one composed largely of graduating seniors, and family and friends there to support them. We were all listening to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) deliver the commencement address. As a member of the faculty, I could have been up on the stage positioned in a seat behind the senator, but, as I typically do for the event, instead opted to stand in the back - not least because I don't like sitting under a hot sun in a heavy robe.
Gillibrand's speech included reflections on her entry into what she called grassroots politics - Hillary Clinton's multi-million-dollar US senate campaign in 2000 - as well as platitudinous exhortations that the graduates challenge themselves and assertions that no goals are too big to achieve. While toward the end, she spoke briefly of the need to fight poverty in the United States and raise the country's minimum wage, and voiced strong support for women's and LGBT rights, there was little in the speech to which one could object - at least in the context of the politically liberal ethos that prevails at Vassar.
Later that day, I felt irritated, but I wasn't quite clear why - until I realised that I was angry with myself for quietly standing there, for not speaking out, for not indicating any protest during Gillibrand's speech. Instead, I followed everyone around me and offered my polite applause for someone whose politics (much of which) are abhorrent - at least from a perspective that takes seriously matters of global justice, universal human rights and international law.
New York's junior US senator, Kirsten Gillibrand got her start in Congress when she was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. Mirroring the relatively conservative nature of her district, the Democrat was a member of the Blue Dog Caucus, one who voted, for example, against gun control legislation and opposed efforts by New York's governor to provide driver's licenses to unauthorised immigrants.
In early 2009, she became a US senator when another New York governor appointed her to fill Hillary Clinton's seat after Barack Obama chose the former first lady to be secretary of state. With her move from the House to the Senate, Gillibrand's politics quickly changed from one of the most conservative to one of the more liberal among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Whether the shift manifests a chameleon-like opportunism or simply her adjusting to the realities of moving from representing a relatively small, rural district to serving all of New York State, I am not sure. What is clear that Gillibrand plays a safe politics.
Thus, even at her most crusading moments, as when Gillibrand has criticised US military leaders for not doing enough to combat sexual assault within the armed forces, she ends up endorsing the larger institutional status quo. Incidents of sexual violence, she argues, "degrade military readiness [and] subvert strategic goodwill." In other words, sexual violence within the military is wrong because, among other reasons, it undermines the Pentagon and its gargantuan, global footprint.
"American Empire"
While Gillibrand has expressed disapproval of the Obama administration for its slow withdrawal from Afghanistan and voted in favour of an expedited timetable, she strongly endorses the overall war effort. She thus embodies the spirit of "American Empire" explicated by Andrew Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and now professor of international relations at Boston University, in his eponymous book. In this regard, her disagreement is an example of what Bacevich characterizes as "little more than quibbles over operational details."
It embodies the profound consensus among Democrats and Republicans about what Bacevich calls the "fundamentals" of US policy, ones that include, as he explains in a more recent book, the American credo - that the necessary job of the United States is "to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world." It sees the world in generally black and white terms, with obvious forces of good - the United States and its allies - and those that are indisputably nefarious.
This credo dovetails with a "scared trinity" of convictions that underlie US military practice: international peace and order require a global American military presence, a military able to project power globally, and one that intervenes globally to counter existing or anticipated threats.
Together, Bacevich asserts, the credo and trinity create the foundation of the "rules" Washington follows and draws upon to justify what it does, while "precluding that intrusion of aberrant thinking" that could lead to vibrant debate.
Lack of aberrant thinking
As an imperial team player, Gillibrand embraces these rules, while showing almost no evidence of aberrant thinking when it comes to matters of US military and foreign policy. This is partly why Politico can say that she is "quietly building a resume that would allow her to be taken seriously should she ever decide to run for president."
This also explains how and why she referred to her 2011 tour of the Hancock Air National Guard Base, just outside of Syracuse, NY, as "inspirational". This for one of the locations from which the United States flies the MQ-9 Reaper - the military's best "hunter-killer" drone - in Afghanistan. It is a technology, said Gillibrand in echoing the Pentagon's standard fare, which "will save lives".
As the New York senator's words suggest, the lives of some - "us" (and those with whom "we" identify) - are effectively the only ones that matter. Thus, her official website speaks of the need of the United States to support Israel and "protect its citizens against terrorist threats," but says nothing about Palestinians. And when Israel commits atrocities, as it has, for instance, in its attacks over the last few years against the people of the illegally occupied Gaza Strip, she not only says nothing critical, but unequivocally supports them.
She even endorsed a 2010 Israeli attack on a six-ship flotilla to Gaza in international waters that killed nine individuals, framing the brutality as part of "Israel's right to self-defense" while ignoring that it constituted a clear violation of international law. Instead, Gillibrand "called on the Obama Administration to determine whether or not an organizer of the flotilla, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), should be placed on a list of foreign terrorist groups".
Similarly, Gillibrand has marched in step with the official consensus on Iran, one that purportedly seeks to deny Iran a right both the US and Israel demand for themselves - to have nuclear weapons. In this spirit of nuclear apartheid, she co-authored a 2012 economic sanctions bill whose passage only helped to escalate tensions between Washington and Tehran.
Gillibrand was silent about these policies during her Vassar commencement speech. On the eve of Memorial Day, a national holiday dedicated to remembering individuals who have died while serving in the US military, she offered nothing on matters of war and militarism - or of peace. And I mimicked her silence, setting a bad example as to how one lives a politically committed and ethical life, confronts abusive power, and takes seriously the concept of democratic engagement.
The Bradley Manning factor
Less than a week later, I found myself in a very different environment, in a crowd of approximately one thousand people outside the gates of Fort Meade in Maryland. Along with anti-war veterans, peace activists, and queer rights advocates - among many others - I was part of a demonstration of solidarity with Bradley Manning two days before of the beginning of his court martial trial.
Imprisoned since 2010, Manning is a US Army private and an intelligence analyst. It was he who released to Wikileaks the "Collateral Murder" video, one that provides a cockpit view of a US Apache helicopter gunning down and killing two Reuters journalists and shooting children in Baghdad, along with tens of thousands of pages of other military and diplomatic documents related to US activities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Facing a variety of charges including "aiding the enemy," Manning could receive life imprisonment without parole.
A key goal of the US government's case against Manning is to establish a working relationship between him and Julian Assange. It appears that the Obama administration hopes to gain evidence for a possible federal criminal prosecution against the Wikileaks founder, a man Kirsten Gillibrand has opined should be prosecuted to "the fullest extent of the law" and "thrown in jail for a very long time."
Although Gillibrand's opinion of Manning is not on record, her words on Assange, and her larger politics, make clear what she thinks of those who challenge the US national security state and its global pretensions by exposing its secrets, and what should happen to them.
Of course, Gillibrand is hardly alone in Congress. Indeed, while her politics on the domestic front are left-leaning - albeit in what is (relative to most countries) a very narrow political spectrum - her positions on matters defined as within the realm of national security put her squarely in the center of the Washington establishment. Validating Bacevich's assertion regarding bipartisan agreement on foreign policy "fundamentals," more than 80 senators, for example, shared her endorsement of the Israeli attack against the Gaza flotilla. And her Iran economic sanctions bill passed by a 94-0 vote.
It is this consensus that Manning's revelations helped to disrupt. It is a consensus built on, among other things, hundreds of US military bases in dozens of countries. It is one that demands impunity for the United States for its actions abroad and accountability for those of its official enemies, and requires that Washington have a right to wage war around the globe.
Bradley Manning helped to shine a bright light on many of the lies that both justify and help obscure the underlying workings of unjust power - within the US and far beyond. It is for such reasons that Sarah Shourd, one of three US hikers arrested by Iranian forces in Iraqi Kurdistan and jailed in Tehran as a political hostage for over a year, expressed her gratitude to Manning. Speaking at the rally, the writer and anti-solitary-confinement activist thanked Manning - for trying to prevent the torture of Iraqis, for exposing corruption in Tunisia and contributing to the Arab Spring, for helping to bring about a more informed debate, and for his courage and extraordinary example.
The invisible empire
The very fact of empire as such is invisible to most within the United States. Meanwhile, its violent and unjust manifestations - from Afghanistan to Diego Garcia, Gaza, and Guantanamo to Iraq and Yemen to the large sectors of the population at home impoverished by a military budget that rivals those of all the rest of the world's countries combined - are widely accepted as the way things should be, or simply the way things are, with little that can be done to change the situation.
What allows empire to endure in part is the quiescence of those among us who see empire as simply wrong. In that sense, how different are people like me who fail to confront the polite politicians that so blithely reproduce empire's violence on a regular basis from those who hold Bradley Manning at Fort Meade and deny his freedom, or those who now seek to hunt down and prosecute Edward Snowden? Perhaps if we did speak out and protest that which we find unacceptable, we wouldn't need such extraordinary individuals to take great risks in exposing the depraved levels to which we have sunk.
Next time, I will try very hard not to be still when one of its empire's chief proponents is in front of me.
"Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires," said one critic. "It is as malicious as it is absurd."
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration faced an onslaught of criticism on Tuesday for starting the process of repealing the 2009 legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people—which has enabled federal regulations aimed at the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency over the past 15 years.
Confirming reports from last week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled the rule to rescind the 2009 "endangerment finding" at a truck dealership in Indiana. According to The New York Times, he said that "the proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States."
If the administration succeeds in repealing the legal finding, the EPA would lack authority under the Clean Air Act to impose standards for greenhouse gas emissions—meaning the move would kill vehicle regulations. As with the reporting last week, the formal announcement was sharply condemned by climate and health advocates and experts.
"Greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and are the root cause of the climate crisis," said Deanna Noël with Public Citizen's Climate Program, ripping the administration's effort as "grossly misguided and exceptionally dangerous."
"This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
"Stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases is like throwing away the fire extinguisher while the house is already burning," she warned. "The administration is shamelessly handing Big Oil a hall pass to pollute unchecked and dodge accountability, leaving working families to bear the costs through worsening health outcomes, rising energy bills, more climate-fueled extreme weather, and an increasingly unstable future. This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
Noël was far from alone in accusing the administration's leaders of serving the polluters who helped Trump return to power.
"Zeldin and Trump are concerned only with maximizing short-term profits for polluting corporations and the CEOs funneling millions of dollars to their campaign coffers," said Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch. "Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires. It is as malicious as it is absurd."
Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, similarly said that the proposal is "purely a political bow to the oil industry" and "Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people's health."
Earthworks policy director Lauren Pagel also called the rule "a perverse gift to the fossil fuel industry that rejects yearslong efforts by the agency, scientists, NGOs, frontline communities, and industry to protect public health and our environment."
"Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are playing with fire—and with floods and droughts and public health risks, too," she stressed, as about 168 million Americans on Tuesday faced advisories for extreme heat made more likely by the climate crisis.
🚨 The Trump administration just took its most extreme step yet in rolling back climate protections.
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— Sierra Club (@sierraclub.org) July 29, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents over 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said that the repeal plan "is reckless and will have far-reaching, disastrous consequences for the USA."
"EPA career professionals have worked for decades on the development of the science and policy of greenhouse gases to protect the American public," he continued, "and this policy decision completely disregards all of their work in service to the public."
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) highlighted that Chris Wright, head of the Department of Energy, joined Zeldin at the Tuesday press conference and "announced a DOE 'climate science study' alongside remarks that were rife with climate denial talking points and disinformation."
UCS president Gretchen Goldman said that "it's abundantly clear what's going on here. The Trump administration refuses to acknowledge robust climate science and is using the kitchen sink approach: making every specious argument it can to avoid complying with the law."
"But getting around the Clean Air Act won't be easy," she added. "The science establishing climate harms to human health was unequivocally clear back in 2009, and more than 15 years later, the evidence has only accumulated."
Today, Zeldin’s EPA plans to release a proposal to revoke the Endangerment Finding, which is the legal & scientific foundation of EPA’s responsibility to limit climate-heating greenhouse gas pollution from major sources.
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— Moms Clean Air Force (@momscleanairforce.org) July 29, 2025 at 12:58 PM
David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, was a lead attorney in the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts vs. EPA, which affirmed the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and ultimately led to the endangerment finding two years later.
Bookbinder said Tuesday that "because this approach has already been rejected by the courts—and doubtless will be again—this baseless effort to pretend that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not harmful pollutants is nothing more than a transparent attempt to delay and derail our efforts to control greenhouse pollution at the worst possible time, when deadly floods and heat waves are killing more people every day."
In a statement from the Environmental Protection Network, which is made up of ex-EPA staff, Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the agency's Office of Air and Radiation, also cited the 2007 ruling.
"This decision is both legally indefensible and morally bankrupt," Goffman said of the Tuesday proposal. "The Supreme Court made clear that EPA cannot ignore science or evade its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act. By walking away from the endangerment finding, EPA has not only broken with precedent; it has broken with reality."
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, responded to the EPA proposal with defiance, declaring that "Donald Trump and his Big Oil donors are lighting the world on fire and fueling their private jets with young people's lives. We refuse to be sacrifices for their greed. We're coming for them, and we're not backing down."
Israel has already summarily rejected the U.K. leader's ultimatum to take "substantive" steps to end the war on Gaza by September, agree to a two-state solution, and reject West Bank annexation.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer was accused of "political grandstanding" after he said Tuesday that his country would recognize Palestinian statehood if Israel did not take ambiguously defined steps to end its war on Gaza—conditions that were promptly dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the U.K. will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a cease-fire, and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution," Starmer said during a press conference.
"This includes allowing the U.N. to restart the supply of aid and making clear that there will be no annexations in the West Bank," the prime minister continued, adding that "the terrorists of Hamas... must immediately release all of the hostages, sign up to a cease-fire, disarm, and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza."
Member of Scottish Parliament Scott Greer (Scottish Greens-West Scotland) responded to Tuesday's announcement on social media, saying, "Starmer wouldn't threaten to withdraw U.K. recognition of Israel, but he's made recognition of Palestinian statehood conditional on the actions of their genocidal oppressor?"
"Another profoundly unjust act from a Labour government thoroughly complicit in Israel's crimes," Greer added.
British attorney and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu asserted that "Keir Starmer knows his time is up and pivots to save his career but it's too late."
"By placing a condition on recognizing Palestine this declaration is performative and disingenuous because before September he can claim Israel has substantively complied with the condition," she added.
Leftist politician and Accountability Archive co-founder Philip Proudfoot argued on social media that "decent" Members of Parliament "need to table a no-confidence motion in Starmer now."
"He has just used the recognition of Palestine as a bargaining chip in exchange for Israel following its BASIC LEGAL OBLIGATIONS," he added. "This is one of the lowest political acts in living memory."
Media critic Sana Saeed said on social media, "Using Palestinian life and future as a bargaining chip and threat to Israel—not a surprise from kid starver Keir Starmer."
Journalist Sangita Myska argued that "rather than threatening the gesture politics of recognizing a Palestinian state (that may never happen)," Starmer should expel Israel's ambassador to the U.K., impose "full trade sanctions" and a "full arms embargo," and end alleged Royal Air Force surveillance flights over Gaza.
Political analyst Bushra Shaikh accused Starmer of "political grandstanding" and "speaking from both sides of his mouth."
Starmer's announcement followed a Monday meeting in Turnberry, Scotland with U.S. President Donald Trump, who signaled that he would not object to U.K. recognition of Palestine.
However, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce called Starmer's announcement "a slap in the face for the victims of October 7," a reference to the Hamas-led attack of 2023.
While the United States remains Israel's staunchest supporter and enabler—providing billions of dollars in annual armed aid and diplomatic cover—Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have all expressed concerns over mounting starvation deaths in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the U.N.-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that a "worst-case" famine scenario is developing in Gaza, where health officials say at least 147 Palestinians, including at least 88 children, have died from malnutrition since Israel launched its obliteration and siege of the enclave following the October 2023 attack.
Israel—which imposed a "complete siege" on Gaza following that attack—has severely limited the amount of humanitarian aid that can enter the strip. According to U.N. officials, Israel Defense Forces troops have killed more than 1,000 aid-seeking civilians at distribution points run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. IDF troops have said they were ordered to shoot live bullets and artillery shells at aid seekers.
Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and weaponized starvation—responded to the U.K. prime minister's ultimatum in a social media post stating, "Starmer rewards Hamas' monstrous terrorism and punishes its victims."
"A jihadist state on Israel's border TODAY will threaten Britain TOMORROW," Netanyahu said. "Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails. It will fail you too. It will not happen."
The U.K. played a critical role in the foundation of the modern state of Israel, allowing Jewish colonization of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine under condition that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," who made up more than 90% of the population.
Seeing that Jewish immigrants returning to their ancestral homeland were usurping the indigenous Arabs of Palestine, the British subsequently prohibited further Zionist colonization. This sparked a nearly decadelong wave of terrorism and other attacks against the British occupiers that ultimately resulted in the U.K. abandoning Palestine and the establishment of Israel under the authority of the United Nations—an outcome achieved by the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.
On the topic of annexing the West Bank, earlier this month, all 15 Israeli government ministers representing Netanyahu's Likud party recommended the move, citing support from Trump. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found last year that Israel's occupation of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, is an illegal form of apartheid.
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country would announce its formal recognition of Palestinian statehood during September's U.N. General Assembly in New York. France is set to become the first Group of Seven nation to recognize Palestine, which is currently officially acknowledged by approximately 150 of the 193 U.N. member states.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz subsequently threatened "severe consequences" for nations that recognize Palestine.
Starmer's announcement came on the same day that the Gaza Health Ministry said that the death toll from Israel's 662-day assault and siege on Gaza—which is the subject of a South Africa-led genocide case at the ICJ—topped 60,000. However, multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet have concluded that Gaza officials' casualty tallies are likely significant undercounts.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked a founding partner of pollster Zenith Research.
A new poll of the New York City mayoral race found that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is very well positioned to win later this year and that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is only competitive in the race if every other Mamdani opponent drops out.
The survey, which was conducted by polling firm Zenith Research, showed Mamdani holding what Zenith founding partner Adam Carlson described on X as a "commanding" lead of 28 points among likely voters in a five-way race featuring Cuomo, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and independent candidate Jim Walden. Even in other scenarios where other candidates drop out of the race, Mamdani would still garner more than 50% of likely votes in each instance.
However, Mamdani's lead becomes much smaller when the poll is expanded to all registered voters, among whom he only holds a three-point advantage over Cuomo in a head-to-head matchup. This suggests that Cuomo has room to grow as long as he can convince Adams, Sliwa, and Walden to exit the race.
Even so, commented Carlson, Cuomo faces significant headwinds that could block his path to victory even if he succeeds somehow in making it a one-on-one race.
"Another thing that’s extremely tough for Cuomo is that 60% of likely voters (as well as 52% of registered voters) would not even consider voting for him," he explained. "Only 32% say they wouldn't consider voting for Mamdani. Cuomo will need to go scorched earth to bring that number up."
New Yorkers who oppose Mamdani will have to place their hopes in the disgraced former governor, given the dismal standing held by incumbent Adams.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked Carlson. "He polls at 7% in the five-way race, 14% if Cuomo drops out, and 32% if Cuomo and Sliwa drop out. More than half of [likely voters] strongly disapprove of his performance and have a very unfavorable view of him. 68% won't consider voting for him."
The poll also found Mamdani with an overall lead among Jewish voters despite efforts by opponents to paint him as antisemitic given his opposition to Israel's war in Gaza and his past reluctance to criticize the slogan "globalize the intifada," which he told The Bulwark he viewed as "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights." New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive Jewish ally of Mamdani's who has endorsed his mayoral bid, acknowledged before the election that some Jewish people view the phrase as a threat of violence.
Among likely Jewish voters, Mamdani leads Cuomo by 17 points in a five-way race. Although Cuomo holds a double-digit lead over Mamdani among likely Jewish voters over the age of 45, Mamdani dominates among young Jewish voters by pulling in more than two-thirds of likely Jewish voters between the ages of 18 and 44.