The Solidarity Party of Afghanistan held a demonstration in Kabul last week for Pfc. Bradley Manning. As you can see in the video below, dozens of men, women, and children held signs and banners calling for Bradley Manning’s freedom. Their giant banner reads, ‘Bradley Manning, you are a hero of suffering Afghans!’
Other signs say, ‘When Bradley is stripped, America is exposed,’ and ‘Refusing to kill is not a crime.’
In a post on their website entitled (translated by Google), ‘Bradley Manning: I did not want America to be part of the killing machine and the state murder,’ the Afghan supporters refer to documents that Manning gave to WikiLeaks regarding the Garani massacre in the Farah province of Afghanistan. Manning found and passed to WikiLeaks a video and accompanying investigation of a 2009 U.S. airstrike on the village that killed more than 140 civilians, mostly women and children.
In his statement explaining his release of those files, Manning said he found the incident similar to the Collateral Murder video, except that it had far more casualties. He said, “the investigation and its conclusions helped explain how this incident occurred, what those involved should have done, and how to avoid an event like this from occurring again.”
“I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare,” he said.
He hoped releasing war logs could “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Other documents Bradley released exposed the fact that U.S. officials were told to cover up evidence of child abuse by contractors in Afghanistan.
See the Afghan War Diary here.
