When I was asked to speak at Saturday’s rally at Fort Meade in support of Pvt. Bradley Manning, I wondered how I might provide some context around what Manning is alleged to have done.

(In my talk, so as not to think I had to insert the word “alleged” into every sentence, I asked for unanimous consent to using the indicative rather than the subjective.

What jumped into my mind was the letter Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham City jail in April 1963, from which I remembered this:

“Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

I suggested that this is precisely what Bradley Manning did when he saw the need to uncover war crimes like the indiscriminate murder of civilians and torture he witnessed in Baghdad and read about in cables.

Every American should read this letter:
December 18, 2007

To: Mr. Randy Waddle, Assistant Inspector General, Ft Carson, Colorado
CC: LTC John Shawkins, Inspector General, Ft Carson, Colorado
Major General Mark Graham, Commanding Officer, Ft Carson, Colorado
Major Haytham Faraj, USMC, Camp Pendleton, California
Lt General Stanley Greene, US Army Inspector General
Subject: Formal Notification of War Atrocities and Crimes Committed by Personnel, B Company, 2-12, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division in Iraq
Dear Mr. Waddle,
My name is John Needham. I am a member of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, (BCo,2-12INF,2BCT,2ID . I deployed with my unit to Iraq from October 2006 until October 2007 when I was medically evacuated for physical and mental injuries that I suffered during my deployment. The purpose of my letter is to report what I believe to be war crimes and violation of the laws of armed conflict that I personally witnesses while deployed in Iraq.

The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police state. The doomsday clock of our republic just got noticeably closer to midnight, and the fact that almost nobody knows it, simply moves that fatal minute-hand a bit further still.

I'm not referring to the “doomsday” predicted by Leon Panetta should military spending be scaled back to the obscenely inflated levels of 2007. I'm talking about the complete failure to keep the republic that Benjamin Franklin warned we might not. Practices that were avoided, outsourced, or kept secret when Bill Clinton was president were directly engaged in on such a scale under president George W. Bush that they became common knowledge. Under President Obama they are becoming formal law and acceptable policy.

CORNUCOPIA, WI – An industrial-scale organic dairy, located south of Phoenix in the desert Southwest, is poised to lose its USDA organic certification. The enforcement action at Shamrock Farms is the result of a USDA investigation into organic livestock management practices that was triggered by a formal complaint from The Cornucopia Institute.

Shamrock operates a massive dairy that was milking approximately 16,000 cows at the time of an inspection by Cornucopia staff in 2008. Between 700 and 1,100 of the cows at the split operation were in the organic milk herd; the remainder were part of a conventional dairy that is part of the same sprawling complex. Shamrock is Arizona's first-ever certified organic dairy.

"We found inadequate, overgrazed pasture adjacent to their milking facility, and we were told by Shamrock employees that the confined cows had not been out in weeks," said Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst for Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute, an organic industry watchdog.

Never doubt that simple acts of generosity and solidarity can change lives---and the world.

George Whitman and his Shakespeare & Company bookstore have been uniquely powerful living proof of that. And his daughter has guaranteed it will continue.

Nestled into the Left Bank of the Seine, a stoned throw from the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral, George's bookstore has been a beacon of Bohemian/hippie/humanist/leftist writing and romance for decades.

Its roots stretch back to the great literary lights of the ex-pat 1920s and Beat 1950s. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Joyce and Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso....so much genius passed through the place its walls seemed to glow.

George Whitman, its owner since the 1940s, was known for letting budding young writers crash for weeks at a time. In the summer of 1967, I was one of them. Based on hippie urban legend, I sought the place out and asked if I could sleep on a couch upstairs.

Eyeing me suspiciously, George asked if I was a writer. I said I'd been a college editor, and had aspirations.

He said OK....I could have a week on the mattress.