Order up a war crime and there’ll be a welcome on the mat.
 
Blow the whistle on a war crime and you’ll be chained to a wall.
May 29 will see the first anniversary of the imprisonment of Bradley Manning. He was held until last month at Quantico base in Virginia, in solitary confinement in a windowless room 12’ x 6’, fed a daily diet of disorientating antidepressants, forbidden to exercise, shackled hand and foot. Following worldwide protests, a complaint from the UN special rapporteur on torture and an angry letter from 250 American legal scholars, Obama allowed a transfer to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The scholars signing the letter included Laurence Tribe, Obama’s law professor at Harvard. The letter declared: “The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates... There is only one reasonable inference: this degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.”
Bradley, a military intelligence analyst, was arrested after the publication by WikiLeaks of a 2007 video showing US soldiers jeering and chuckling as they fired from an Apache helicopter, killing 11 civilians – eight Iraqis, two Reuters journalists and another Iraqi, who had gone to the aid of wounded children.
It was only when Bradley supplied the footage to WikiLeaks that the world learned what had happened – and about scores of similar atrocities perpetrated by Western forces in Iraq.
Bradley’s commitment to human rights didn’t begin in Iraq. Openly gay since his mid-teens – he’s 23 now – he had been a vocal campaigner against the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ restrictions on gay members of the US military. He had helped organise a rally in New York in 2008 in protest against attempts to ban same-sex marriage in California.
He is now allowed letters. Write to: PFC Bradley Manning 89289, Fort Leavenworth Military Detention Centre, 830 Sabalu Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, KS 66027, USA.
You can watch the video released to Wikileaks at collateralmurder.com.
For a detailed account of the mistreatment of Bradley at Quantico by men under Obama’s command, see tiny.cc/junb2.
If you are wondering what sort of message to convey to Obama during his visit, why not hold up a sign: “Bradley Manning is a hero. Free him now”.
 
The infuriating genius Morrissey was showered with bile a couple of weeks back for raining on the royal parade. The Windsors, he observed, were “benefit scroungers and nothing more. I don’t believe they serve any purpose whatever.” He went on to suggest that the “blubbering praise” heaped on Ms. Middleton was altogether inappropriate.
Widely missed was the Smithsonian institution’s particular point. His rage was directed against the warped priorities which plastered the meaningless farce at Westminster across the front pages while reporting the death of Poly Styrene, if at all, as an obscure and unimportant event. The punk legend had succumbed to cancer just three days before the taxpayer-funded Middleton-Windsor marriage. She was 53.
In the late ‘70s, Marianne Elliot-Said was as full-on, original and screechingly authentic a punk presence as any. With a knock-kneed stance in a plastic dress she delivered the number that shattered all preconceptions of music performance, ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’, like the dark angel of the apocalypse scrunching a fist into the face of oppression, like kicking sexism in the balls with a hob-nailed boot.
“Bondage” referred not just to sexuality but to the way we are ever corralled into limiting stereotypes.
She was a major force propelling punk away from the apolitical nihilism of the Sex Pistols towards the politics of revolutionary imagination.
Her band, X-Ray Spex, opened the 100,000-strong Rock Against Racism carnival at Victoria Park in London in April 1978, which established punk for the first time as far more than mere fashion, but a cultural movement of major significance.
She was, perhaps, the biggest single influence on the Riot Grrrls of the ‘90s.
In April 2008, she was given an ecstatic reception at a Love Music, Hate Racism festival back at Victoria Park.
She was a flash of freedom, a trigger for the imagination, a harbinger of much in music and life that was later to come. And the media make more of Ms. Middleton’s frock...
Poly’s unmuffled drum-beat still falls ominously on establishment ears. She’s worth a wilderness of Windsors.
 
Called into the Context gallery the other day to contribute to the latest high-concept art installation to hit Derry, my input being an on-the-spot vinyl recording of Sheb Wooley’s ‘50s classic, ‘Purple People Eater’.
I was taken aback and sorely disappointed that some usually switched-on folk on the premises appeared to know not nearly enough about Sheb and his unforgettable (for those who remember it) song.
Sheb also had a debut starring role in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, alongside John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan and Ward Bond. Unfortunately for Sheb, the first cut came out at 200 minutes plus. The studio ordered it hacked back. The version released was a mere 141 minutes. And Sheb’s entire storyline was gone. He never figured in a film again.
But the main reason for this item is the excuse it provides to quote once more the super-brilliant line: “I said, Mr. Purple Eater, what’s your line/He said, Eatin’ Purple People/An’ it sure is fine”.