ඇමෙරිකාවේ දෘෂ්ටිවාදීමය යුද්ධය ........ නිදහස, ප්ජාතන්ත්රවාදය, ලෝක සාමය උදෙසා
Nihal Ananda
+ඒ අතරම ඇමෙරිකානු රජය තවත් යුද්ධයක් කරමින් සිටි, ප්ධානව පෙරමුනු දෙකකිනි. දෘෂ්ටිවාදී අරගලයක් ලෙස හැඳින්විය හැකියි.
#1 රුසියාව ට එරෙහි ආර්ථික දේශපාලන යුද්ධයට , ඇමෙරිකානු ජනතාවගේ 100% ක් සහයෝගය අනුමැතිය , අනුකුලහාවය (අවම විරුද්ධතාව) ලබා ගැනීම, රැක ගැනීම සඳහාය.......... මෙය WWII වලින් අසු සෝවියට් සමුහාන්ඩුඩුවට එරෙහිව ගෙනගිය cold war ක්‍රියාදාමයේම දිගුවක් ලෙසද සැලකිය හැකියි. ඇමෙරිකානු ජනතාවට පෙනවා සිටින්නේ ,සිටින්නේ, ඇමෙරිකානු ජිවන ක්‍රමය ආර්ථික ක්‍රමය වෙලන්දපල නිදහස , පුද්ගලික දේපල අයිතිය වැනි දේ American Values රැක ගැනීම සඳහා මෙම රුසියා විරෝධී දේශපාආලනික යුද්ධය කරගෙන යාම අත්‍යාවශ්‍ය බවයි.
+රජය ලෙස සඳහන් කලත්, මෙම අරගලය ගෙනයන්නේ , බලයේ සිටින දෙශාපාලන පක්ෂය එහි නායකයන් පමනක් නොවේ. රුසියාවට චීනයට එරෙහිව ගෙනයන මතවාදී අරගලයටෙහි ප්ධාන දේශපාලන පක්ෂ දෙකම බොහෝ විට එකඟ වේ. සහභාගී වේ. රජය ලෙස අදහස් කරන්නේ Ruling Elite යන්නයි. සමන්විත වන ප්ධාන ආයතන පුද්ගලයන් ....
- President ,Vice president , White House
-Democratic party, Republican party, party leaders
- congress 100, House of reps 535
-Security /Military/ Intelligence Organizations, Heads , senior Officers
-Business organizations ,Leaders -
-Religious orgs, churches, Evangelists
--Media Organizations - MSM , Social Media Co.s
රුසියාවට /චීනයට එරෙහි මතවාදී අරගලවලදී , ඇමෙරිකානු මහජනතාව දෘෂ්ටිමය වශයෙන් බැඳ තබා ගැනීමේ දී ප්රධාන කාර්යයක් කරන්නේ එහි රධාන ධාරාවේ මාධ්‍ය MSM සහ සමාජ මාධ්‍යයයි.
රුසියාවට එරෙහි යුද්ධයක් සිදුවන මේ අවස්ථාවේදී , මෙම MSM /Sicial Media, මෙම රජය /Ruling Elite වෙනුවෙන් ,ප්රවුර්ති ප්රචාරය සැපයීම උපරිමයෙන්ය සිදුවන කාලයකි. . Iraq War කාලයේත් මෙන්ම ,පසුගිය සති කිහිපය තුලත් මෙම Media War හොඳින්ම දකින්නට ලැබුණි.
+ලෝක ප්වුර්ති මාධ්‍යයද CNN , BBC, Reuters Associated Press මේ ගැන ප්වුර්ති ලෝකය පුරා බෙදා හරිති.සමාජ මාධ්‍යන් වන GOOGLE Facebook Twitter Utube මාධ්‍යන්ද වැඩි දෙනෙක් ප්වුර්ති, මතවාද දැන ගා මාධ්‍යයන්ය. ලෝක ජනමතය සකස්වනුයේ මේ අනුවය.
+ඇමෙරිකාවේ මාධ්‍යයන් ගෙන යන දෘෂ්ටිවාදී මතවාදී පක්ෂපාතිත්වය හෙළිදරව් කරන මාධ්‍යවේදීන් /ආයතන කිහිපක්ද සිටිති.
Nihal Ananda
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House overwhelmingly approved legislation Wednesday night that would ban Russian oil imports to the United States, an effort to put into law the restrictions announced by President Joe Biden in response to the escalating war in Ukraine.Going further than Biden’s import ban on Russian oil, the bill making its way through Congress would also encourage a review of Russia’s status in the World Trade Organization and signal U.S. support for sanctions on Russian officials over human rights violations, as the U.S. works to economically isolate the regime.Lawmakers in both parties have been eager to act, willing to risk higher gas prices at home in order to support Ukraine with a show of U.S. bipartisanship. The legislation was approved Wednesday, 414-17, and now goes to the Senate.
Nihal Ananda
ඇමෙරිකාව විසින් , යුක්රේනයේ Biological/ Weapons' laboratories පවත්වාගෙන ගොස් ඇති බවට රුසියානු පාර්ශ්වයෙන් චෝදනා කර තිබෙනවා. ඇමෙරිකානු රජයේ/ආරක්ෂක සංවිධාන ර්ශ්වයෙන් එය තරයේ ප්රත්ක්ෂේප කර තිබෙනවා.
+ හැම ඇමෙරිකානු මාධ්‍යකම වාර්තා කරන්නේ, ඇමෙරිකානු රජයේ denial ගැනයි. රුසියානු චෝදනාව පමනක් හෝ ප්රමුකත්වය දෙන වාර්තාවක් එකම තැනක්වත් නැහැ.
රුසියානු චෝදනාව 'පට්ටපල් බොරුවක්' බවත් , ඇමෙරිකානු රජයේ denial 'පරම සත්‍යය' බවත් සහතිකව මාධ්‍ය හැම එකක්ම පාහේ වාර්තා කරයි. මාධ්‍ය විසින් කරන ලද investigations ,verifications , independent sources ,doubts ගැන වැඩි සඳහනක් නැහැ.
+ Biological /Chemical weapons' ගැන ඇමෙරිකානු රජයේ වාර්තා, ප්රකාශන සහ යුද්ධ අතර සම්බන්ධය ගැන, මෑත කාලයේම හොඳ ඉතිහාසයකුත් තිබෙනවා. ඉරාකයේ WMD සහ සිරියාවේ chemical weapons'...... .
Dharmapala Gunawardena
--
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "INDRAKA" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to indraka+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/indraka/CAD7ocS2xSZm0gZmrnUzvysvoRnsKhCOgZXeWH%2BmH3smxCy%3D5oQ%40mail.gmail.com.
Nishantha Kamaladasa
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/indraka/CAHAjjARMOB9Jg8LMbXqwBsAGkVeG1%3D9fs%2BGLSNgfpZBD0ib7iA%40mail.gmail.com.
Nihal Ananda
යුද්ධය ඉරාකයේ යනවිට එක ලෙසකිනුත් උක්‍රේනයේ යුද්ධය තව ආකාරයකිනුත් ප්රචාරය කරන බව....
විශේෂයෙන් ඇමෙරිකාවේ , සමාජය බෙදී ඇති ආකාරයට, මාධ්‍ ආයතන ද බෙදී...... තමන් පක්ෂපාතී පාර්ශවයේ ප්රවුර්ති / ඔපිනියන් / විග්රහයන් උපරිමයෙන් වාර්තා කරනවා. හැම පාර්ශ්වයකටම පාහේ 'හඩක් ' අවස්ථාවක් ලැබෙනවා. අමෙරිකාචේ.... #metoo #blacklivesmatter #bernie sanders ව්‍යාපාර සලකා බලන්න.
රුසියවෙ ක්රියාවේ හරි වැරදි තීරනය කිරීමට ,ප්රකාශ කිරීමට.....අවුරුදු 20 කට කලින් සිදු වු අමෙරිකාවේ ක්රියා වන් අදාල කර ගත යුතු ද? ....... නොවිය යුතු බවයි මගේ අදහස .
+රුසියාව, සෝවියට් සමාජවාදී කාලයේත් අසල්වැසි හංගේරියාව, චෙකොස්ලෝවෙකියාව ආක්‍රමණය කර තිබෙනවා. රුසියානු චීන රටවල ,සමාජවාදයේ නාමයෙන් රටවැසියන් මිලියන ගණනක් ඝාතනය වී තිබෙනවා. ඒ නිසා ඒ රටවලට මෙය ඒ තරම් අමුතු දේකුත් නොවෙයි.
+ මිට වෙනස්ව ඇමෙරිකා යුරෝපා රාජ්‍ය නායකයන්, නිදහස් ප්ජාතන්ත්රවාදී, ලිබරල්සම්ප්රදායේ රාජ්‍ය නායකයන්. ලෝකයේ human rights ආරක්ෂා කරන , ලෝක සාමය , නිදහස් වෙළඳපල නිදහස් වෙළඳාම වෙනුවෙන් පෙනි සිටින, නියෝජිතයන්.
මෙය තේරුම් ගන්නේ කොහොමද ...?
Nihal Ananda
මේ twitter thread එකේ සාරාංශයක් කියවන්න පුලුවන්. try to copy/paste
Nihal Ananda
(අර පොඩි එකෙක් ලොලි පොප් ඉල්ලනවා වගේ...!
හැබැයි ,Biden පප්පා ත් එච්චරම කැමති නැහැ වගේ දෙන්න .... )
Nihal Ananda
Nihal Ananda
Mr. Collina is an expert on nuclear weapons, missile defense and nonproliferation.
In his stirring address to Congress on Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine asked the United States for more help as his nation defends itself against a brutal and unjustified Russian invasion. Invoking the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center, Mr. Zelensky said simply, “I call on you to do more.”
Given the stakes, the United States can and should do more to end the war and help alleviate human suffering in Ukraine. We were already providing weapons for the Ukrainians to defend themselves, such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles and Javelin antitank missiles, as well as hitting Russia with huge economic sanctions. And soon after Mr. Zelensky’s speech, President Biden announced that the United States would send an additional $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine, as part of the $14 billion of support he had already approved.
But there is a limit to how far we should go. Even as our hearts go out to the brave Ukrainian people, the Biden administration is right to resist calls to deepen American military involvement in Ukraine, because the consequences of a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia could be unimaginably dire. If Mr. Biden bows to public pressure and, for instance, attempts to create a no-fly zone in Ukraine, we could be stepping on the path to nuclear war. As the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said this week, “The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”
A product of the Cold War, Mr. Biden well understands that direct U.S.-Russian conflict could escalate to nuclear war. The Soviet Union may have disappeared 30 years ago, but its nuclear weapons did not — and neither did ours. If they are used, the consequences would be horrific — instant death for people in the immediate blast area followed by environmental destruction, possible famine and more death as the radiation spread. It could mean the end of civilization as we know it.............................................................
Nihal Ananda
මේ දෘෂ්ටිවාදීමය යුද්ධය බලපාන්නේ ..... යුක්රේන යුද්ධයෙන් අසු අනාගත ලෝක තත්වයට යි,
ඒ නිසාම රුසියාවට, චීනය ටත් තීරණාත්මකයි,..... , අඩු ලන්සුවකින් ඉන්දියාවටත් ......
Ukraine urges China to condemn Russia
China refuses to condemn Russia’s invasion as US warns of consequences for any Beijing support for Moscow.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has arrived in India, with officials in Tokyo predicting “candid discussions” about New Delhi’s unwillingness to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Unlike fellow members of the Quad alliance, Japan, Australia and the United States, India has abstained in three UN votes deploring Moscow’s actions, calling only for a halt to the violence.
Earlier this month in a four-way call of Quad leaders, Kishida, US President Joe Biden and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison failed to convince India’s Narendra Modi to take a tougher line.
UK warns against post-Ukraine reset with Putin
The West must not try to “normalise relations” with Russian President Vladimir Putin after his invasion of Ukraine, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, calling the crisis a “turning point for the world”
Ukraine’s leader warns war will cost Russia for generations
Ukraine’s president warned that continuing the invasion would exact a toll on Russia for “generations”. The remarks came after Moscow held a mass rally in support of its bogged-down forces.
White House: Biden to discuss China’s Russia alignment in Europe
The White House has said President Joe Biden will discuss China’s moves to align with Russia when he travels to Europe next week.
Amid Ukraine war, all things Russia face scorn and backlash
Many Russians and Russian-themed institutions have faced backlash and anger in Western nations since the invasion of Ukraine began.
Biden did not offer incentives to Xi: White House
Asked whether Biden offered Xi incentives to get China on board with the US effort to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: “This was not about carrots.
“This was about laying out what the implications and consequences would be” if Beijing aids Moscow in the war, Psaki told reporters.
Biden warns Xi of ‘consequences’ should China back Russia
US President Joe Biden has warned Chinese President Xi Jinping of “implications and consequences” should Beijing provide material support to Moscow in the war in Ukraine, the White House said.
Arthur Arambepola
Embassies from US, key western nations urge Sri Lanka to extend 'vocal support' for Ukraine
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/embassies-from-us-key-western-nations-urge-sri-lanka-to-extend-vocal-support-for-ukraine/articleshow/90309696.cms
"We urge the government of Sri Lanka to join us in vocal support for Ukraine and international law, including the UN Charter. We will work together with our friends and allies around the world to ensure that the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine is restored. We stand with Ukraine; and for freedom, democracy, and the sovereignty of nations around," a statement jointly signed by the heads of missions of US, EU and key Western nations called upon Sri Lanka to join them in calling on Russia to end its hostilities immediately.
මොවුන් ඉන්දියාවට නම් මෙහෙම කියන්නේ නැහැ.
Quad has accepted India’s position on Ukraine crisis, says Australia
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/russia-ukraine-war/story/quad-accepted-india-position-ukraine-crisis-australia-1927339-2022-03-20
"The Quad countries have accepted India's position. We understand that each country has a bilateral relationship and it is clear from the comments of the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) and Prime Minister Modi himself that he has used his contacts to call for the end of the conflict and no country will be unhappy with that," he told reporters.
The Quad comprises India, Japan, Australia and the US.
Nihal Ananda
මේක තවත් පැත්තක් තියෙනවා......... ඒක hypocrisy කියල කියන්නත් පුළුවන්.
ඒ විදියට තමයි , ලංකාවේ ප්ජාතන්ත්රවාදී විදියට බලයට පත් වී ඇති රජය , යුක්රේනය /රුසියාව් යුද්ධය ගැන යම් තීරණයක් අරගෙන තියෙන්නේ. මේ බටහිර රටවල් 10ක් එකතුවෙලා , ඉතා බලවත් විදියට ඒ තීරණය වෙනස් කරන්න බලපෑම් කරන එක වැටෙන්නේ මොන freedom, democracy, and the sovereignty එකටද ?
මේකට කියන්න උලුවන් ....ඒ බටහිර රටවල් ඉතා කාරුණිකව ඉල්ලිමක් කරනවා විතරයි, කිසිම බලපෑමක් නැහැ කියල.
අවශ්‍ය නම් .....මේ කාරණාත් සැලකිල්ලට ගන්න.
+මේ රටවල් තමයි ලංනාවේ exort markets
+නය ආධාර ලබාදෙන ,IMF World Bank , ADB වැනි ආයතන බොහෝ විට ලනයකරන්නෙත්, මේ රටවල්, ඇමෙරිකාව
+ UN WHO WTO වැනි ආයතනවලත් තීන්දු තීරණ ගන්නේ මේ බටහිර රටවල් බල[මෙන්....විශේෂයෙන් UNHRC
Nihal Ananda
Amarasiri Gunawardena
The following content is from Hera’s Facebook posting (which was also posted in Indraka Masenger group). I thought of posting this in the Indraka forum for the benefit of other members of this forum.
I added my comments in itallics below.
The concept of Whistleblowing may be new to Sri Lanka but in western countries this is supposed to be encouraged by relevant institutes. However when some one does the whistle blowing, the response from that institute may not be very receptive.
When Chelsea Manning was contemplating in going public with the information he (then Bradley Manning) knew the potential repurcussions due to that. In spite of that Chelsea went ahead with that.
Her memoir will be launched on the 18th October.
Appreciate Hera’s efforts in getting this very thought provoking remarks made by Chelsea from New York Times & posting for us.
Chelsea Manning is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama.
Ms. Manning is the author of the forthcoming memoir “README.txt,” from which this essay has been adapted.
( Extracted from New York Times and copy/pasted here in full .... since NYTimes is pay-walled )
It is not possible to work in intelligence and not imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when the idea first crossed my mind. Maybe it was in 2008, when I was learning to be an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army and was exposed to sensitive information for the first time. Or maybe the germ of the idea was planted when I was stationed at Fort Drum, in upstate New York. I was tasked with transporting a cache of classified hard drives in a large box in the summer heat, and I began to imagine what might happen if I screwed it up and left the box unattended. If someone managed to get ahold of a stray hard drive, what ripple effects might it cause?
I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.
While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?The months I spent in Iraq in 2009 changed the way I understood the world. Every night, I woke up in the desert at 9 p.m. and walked from my tiny trailer to the Saddam Hussein-era basketball court that the military had converted into an intelligence operations center.
I sat at a computer screen for hours at a stretch, going through reports from our troops in the field. Monitoring reporting was like drinking from a fire hose: The military used at least a dozen different intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Each gave us a different view of the conflict and of the people and places we were watching. My job was to analyze, with emotional detachment, what impact military decisions were having on this giant, bloody “war on terror.”
The daily reality of my job was like life in a trauma ward. I’d spent hours learning every aspect of the lives of the Iraqis who were dying all around us: what time they got up in the morning, their relationship status, their appetites for food and alcohol and sex, whether they were engaged in political activities, and all the people they interacted with electronically. In some cases, I probably knew more about them than they knew about themselves.
I couldn’t talk about my work with anyone outside my unit, nor about this conflict that looked nothing like the one I’d read about back home or watched on the TV news before I enlisted.We were seven years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people in the United States had begun to pretend that all of the conflict — all the lost American lives and the still-uncounted lost lives of Iraqis and Afghans — had been worth it. Attention turned away. The establishment moved on. There was the recession to deal with. People at home were losing everything. The health care debate was on the news every night. Yet we were still there. Still dying.
I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.
The idea that the information I had access to held real power began to flash into my brain more often. I’d try to ignore it, and it would come back.In the intelligence field, you are vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This secrecy comes to control how you think and how you operate in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the justifications start to seem arbitrary.
During my time in intelligence, I had noticed that there was inconsistent internal logic to classification decisions. And I came to see that the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government — in other words, it seems to exist not to to keep secrets safe but to control the narrative.In December 2009, I began the process of downloading reports of all our activities from Iraq and Afghanistan.
These were descriptions of enemy engagements with hostile forces or explosives that detonated. They contained body counts, coordinates and businesslike summaries of confusing, violent encounters. They contained, in their aggregate force, something much closer to the truth of what those two wars really looked like than what Americans were learning at home. They were a pointillist picture of wars that wouldn’t end.
I burned the files onto DVDs, labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix. I later transferred the files to a memory card, then shattered the discs with my boots on the gravel outside the trailers. On my next leave, I brought the documents back to America in my camera, as files on an SD memory card. This was every single incident report the U.S. Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan, every instance where a soldier thought there was something important enough to log and report. Navy customs personnel didn’t blink an eye. No one cared enough to notice.
Uploading the files directly to the internet wasn’t my first choice. I tried to reach traditional publications, but it was a frustrating ordeal. I didn’t trust the telephone, nor did I want to email anything; I could be surveilled. Even pay phones weren’t safe.
I went into chain stores — Starbucks, mostly — and asked to borrow their landline because supposedly my cellphone was lost or my car had broken down. I called The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I didn’t get anywhere.
I recalled that in 2008, during intelligence training, our instructor — a Marine Corps veteran turned contractor — told us about WikiLeaks, a website devoted to radical transparency, while instructing us not to visit it. But while I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.
The website was the publication of last resort, but as the weeks went by and I got no response from traditional newspapers, I grew increasingly desperate. So, on the very last day of my leave, I went to a Barnes & Noble with my laptop.
Sitting at a chair in the bookstore cafe, I drank a triple grande mocha and zoned out, listening to electronic music — Massive Attack, Prodigy — to wait out the uploads. There were seven chunks of data to get out, and each one took 30 minutes to an hour. The internet was slow, and the connection was bad. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete my work before the store closed. But the Wi-Fi finally did its job.
The fallout was instant and intense. The documents proved, unambiguously and unimpeachably, just how disastrous the war still was. Once revealed, the truth could not be denied or unseen: This horror, this constellation of petty vendettas with an undertow of corruption — this was the truth of the war.
The disclosures became a flash point for a larger argument about how the United States should engage internationally, and how much the public deserved to know about how their government was acting in their name. I had changed the terms of the debate and pulled back the curtain. But while all that was happening, I knew nothing about it. I was in a cage.
Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the ugly truth about its own actions. What I was trying to do had never been done before, and therefore the consequences were, at the time, unknowable.
Daniel Ellsberg, who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, avoided prison because of illegal evidence-gathering by the Nixon White House (which had ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist’s office, in search of information that might discredit Mr. Ellsberg).
Nobody had gone to prison for this sort of thing; I hadn’t heard of Mr. Ellsberg at the time, but I was very aware of Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistle-blower who had been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He’d faced charges that carried a 35-year prison sentence, but shortly before trial he’d cut a deal that left him with only probation and community service.
I certainly weighed the potential consequences. If I was caught, I would be detained, but I figured at most I was going to be discharged or lose my security clearance. I cared about my work, and it was frightening to imagine losing my job — I had been homeless before enlisting — but I thought that if I was court-martialed, it would damage only the government’s own credibility. I never really reckoned with the notion of a life spent in prison, or worse.
The details of what happened to me are, by now, well known. I was held for several months in a cage in Kuwait. I was sentenced to 35 years in a maximum-security prison, where I spent seven years, much of it in solitary confinement. During that time, I came out as transgender and transitioned. Denied gender-affirming health care, I went on a hunger strike. I attempted suicide twice.
But even in prison I remained active. I began writing a column for The Guardian. I drafted a bill, “Bill to Re-establish the National Integrity and to Protect Freedom of Speech, and the Freedom of the Press,” which I proposed on Twitter and sent to members of Congress. It was meant to outlaw some of the most egregious ways that the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act had been used against me, so that others wouldn’t be put in such a bind for wanting to do the right thing. It also included fixes to the Freedom of Information Act and would give stronger federal protections to journalists. It was a pipe dream and was treated as such.
On Jan. 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted my sentence, and I was released. Everyone expected me to be in shock at being out, to kiss the ground or something. It did feel surreal to be free, but it also felt as if what I’d been dealing with for the previous seven years would never be over. It certainly isn’t over now. I can never leave it behind.
This was my first time as a free woman. I had spent several years transitioning, so I felt comfortable in the way my body moved and felt. Even in prison, with restrictions on hair length and clothing, people had begun to accept me as a woman. They treated me as a human being. But now I needed to navigate a larger world with this new identity.
I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.
The main upside to my notoriety has been that I can do important work. Activism quickly became almost a full-time job. I went to the Pride parade in New York City; I ran for Senate in Maryland; I protested the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and refugees, and President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the ban on transgender personnel in the military. The political moment into which I emerged is one in which we are figuring out what got us here as a country.
What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.
Despite becoming notorious for my acts of divulgence, I am still, in many ways, bound to secrecy. There are things the media has made public about this story that I can’t comment on, confirm or deny. Certain details remain classified. I am limited to some degree in what I can put on the record.
Some people have characterized me as a traitor, which I continue to reject. I have faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest. But I believe that what I did was my democratic and ethical obligation.
--
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "INDRAKA" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to indraka+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/indraka/41b5fc18-b60d-4ad7-b6cf-b1f20f7e450en%40googlegroups.com.
Badra Kamaladasa
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "INDRAKA" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to indraka+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/indraka/CADM7HN%3Dj3swE_Td%2BV5TpUYsS%2BJahDk3-uwPDSy%2Bm2OS%2BkWjGLA%40mail.gmail.com.
Kurundu Hewage Nandisena
නව ලෝක ආර්ථිකයක්- නව නොබැඳි ව්‍යාපාරයක්! – යානිස් වරුෆකිස්
ගෝලීයකරණයේ හරය සහ නව අධිරාජ්‍යවාදයේ ජයග්‍රහණයට හේතුව
කෙටි පිලිතුර මේකයි ; ව්‍යවහාරයේ දී, තමුන් අපිට වඩා හොඳ ජාත්‍යන්තරවාදීන් බව ධනපතීන් ඔප්පු කලා. ගෝලීය පන්ති අරගලයේ ස්වභාවය ඔවුන් හොඳින් වටහා ගත්තා, ඒ අනුව ඔවුන් ජය ලැබුවා……………………..
https://www.prathivada.lk/political/new-world-economy/