Chelsea Manning blames renewed violence in Iraq on U.S …

The disgraced former soldier convicted of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks warned, in a lengthy article penned from prison, that the current unrest in Iraq is the result a deeply flawed media strategy undertaken by the U.S. government and accused the White House of continuing to lie about political developments in the war-torn country.

In a New York Times editorial published Sunday, Chelsea Manning, the transgender ex-intelligence analyst who passed on a trove of sensitive state secrets for public dissemination, criticized the way the U.S. has controlled the media coverage of its involvement in Iraq, blaming the White House for willfully distorting the complicated, and now violent, reality on the ground.

I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance, wrote Chelsea Manning, who was known as Bradley before announcing her gender transition and changing her name to Chelsea last August.

Manning alleged that the U.S. government bombarded media outlets during the March 2010 elections in Iraq with success stories complete with upbeat anecdotes and optimistic photographs while, in fact, there was a far more complicated reality on the ground.

Military and diplomatic reports coming across my desk detailed a brutal crackdown against political dissidents by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and federal police, on behalf of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Detainees were often tortured, or even killed, wrote Manning, who went on to detail orders she received while stationed in the country to investigate anti-Iraqi print shops she said he found to have no ties to terrorism.

I was shocked by our militarys complicity in the corruption of that election. Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American medias radar, Manning, who worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009 and 2010, wrote.

Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison last August for six Espionage Act violations and 14 other offenses for leaking more than 700,000 secret military and U.S. State Department documents, blamed the lapse on the militarys selection process for embedding journalists.

In all of Iraq, which contained 31 million people and 117,000 United States troops, no more than a dozen American journalists were covering military operations, Manning wrote, claiming that the discrepancy was not a coincidence.

The process of limiting press access to a conflict begins when a reporter applies for embed status. All reporters are carefully vetted by military public affairs officials. This system is far from unbiased. Unsurprisingly, reporters who have established relationships with the military are more likely to be granted access, she wrote.

Less well known is that journalists whom military contractors rate as likely to produce favorable coverage, based on their past reporting, also get preference, she added. This outsourced favorability rating assigned to each applicant is used to screen out those judged likely to produce critical coverage.

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Chelsea Manning blames renewed violence in Iraq on U.S ...