What Bradley Manning Really Did

In all the hysterical spin surrounding Wikileaks and the detention of PFC Bradley Manning, it's easy to forget the ... "incident" is too mild a word ... that inspired his act of whistle-blowing.

Now the man who was there, who knows what really happened, tells the truth about what PFC Manning really did.

Greg Mitchell at The Nation:

For months I have followed the story of Ethan McCord, a former US Army specialist who took heroic actions to help save the two children in the van badly injured in the incident captured in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikILeaks in April 2010. He has since spoken out against the Iraq war and is featured in a new documentary that won a top prize at the recent Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Now he has responded to the lengthy profile of Bradley Manning published in last week's New York magazine. On its site the magazine has printed brief excerpts, but we have obtained the full letter and here it is (below).
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By Ethan McCord

Serving with my unit 2nd battalion 16th infantry in New Baghdad Iraq, I vividly remember the moment in 2007, when our Battalion Commander walked into the room and announced our new rules of engagement:

"Listen up, new battalion SOP (standing operating procedure) from now on: Anytime your convoy gets hit by an IED, I want 360 degree rotational fire. You kill every [expletive] in the street!"

We weren't trained extensively to recognize an unlawful order, or how to report one. But many of us could not believe what we had just been told to do. Those of us who knew it was morally wrong struggled to figure out a way to avoid shooting innocent civilians, while also dodging repercussions from the non-commissioned officers who enforced the policy. In such situations, we determined to fire our weapons, but into rooftops or abandoned vehicles, giving the impression that we were following procedure.

On April 5, 2010 American citizens and people around the world got a taste of the fruits of this standing operating procedure when WikiLeaks released the now-famous Collateral Murder video. This video showed the horrific and wholly unnecessary killing of unarmed Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists.

I was part of the unit that was responsible for this atrocity. In the video, I can be seen attempting to carry wounded children to safety in the aftermath.

The video released by WikiLeaks belongs in the public record. Covering up this incident is a matter deserving of criminal inquiry. Whoever revealed it is an American hero in my book.

Private First Class Bradley Manning has been confined for over a year on the government’s accusation that he released this video and volumes of other classified documents to WikiLeaks — an organization that has been selectively publishing portions of this information in collaboration with other news outlets.

If PFC Bradley Manning did what he is accused of doing, then it is clear—from chat logs that have been attributed to him—that his decision was motivated by conscience and political agency. These chat logs allegedly describe how PFC Manning hopes these revelations will result in “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.”

Unfortunately, Steve Fishman's article Bradley Manning's Army of One in New York Magazine (July 3, 2011) erases Manning’s political agency. By focusing so heavily on Manning's personal life, Fishman removes politics from a story that has everything to do with politics. The important public issues wrapped up with PFC Manning’s case include: transparency in government; the Obama Administration’s unprecedented pursuit of whistle-blowers; accountability of government and military in shaping and carrying out foreign policy; war crimes revealed in the WikiLeaks documents; the catalyzing role these revelations played in democratic movements across the Middle East; and more.

The contents of the WikiLeaks revelations have pulled back the curtain on the degradation of our democratic system. It has become completely normal for decision-makers to promulgate foreign policies, diplomatic strategies, and military operating procedures that are hostile to the democratic ideals our country was founded upon.

The incident I was part of—shown in the Collateral Murder video—becomes even more horrific when we grasp that it was not exceptional. PFC Manning himself is alleged to describe (in the chat logs) an incident where he was ordered to turn over innocent Iraqi academics to notorious police interrogators, for the offense of publishing a political critique of government corruption titled, "Where did the money go?" These issues deserve “discussion, debates, and reforms” — and attention from journalists.

Fishman's article was also ignorant of the realities of military service. Those of us who serve in the military are often lauded as heroes. Civilians need to understand that we may be heroes, but we are not saints. We are young people under a tremendous amount of stress. We face moral dilemmas that many civilians have never even contemplated hypothetically.

Civil society honors military service partly because of the sacrifice it entails. Lengthy and repeated deployments stress our closest relationships with family and friends. The realities, traumas, and stresses of military life take an emotional toll. This emotional battle is part of the sacrifice that we honor. That any young soldier might wrestle with his or her experiences in the military, or with his or her identity beyond military life, should never be wielded as a weapon against them.

If PFC Bradley Manning did what he is accused of, he is a hero of mine; not because he's perfect or because he never struggled with personal or family relationships—most of us do—but because in the midst of it all he had the courage to act on his conscience.

Give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to ... Bradley Manning

Finally, somebody cuts through the fear-mongering and the gay-bashing and State Department ass-covering and the knee-jerk military bullshit to the core of the patriotic achievement of despised "bad soldier" Bradley Manning. (And since when is being a "bad soldier" punishable by months of torture during illegal detention?)

Chase Madar at The Nation:

We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material -- the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War logs, and the State Department cables -- which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth.

President Obama recently gave one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much. Is he really more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans -- and the world -- a far fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?
Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison. He is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what our government has done -- and is still doing -- globally. He has blown the whistle on criminal violations of American military law. He has exposed our secretive government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents.
Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time.

1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has given our foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly needs.

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Thanks to Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures, we do have a sense of what did happen afterwards in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just how the US operates in the world. Thanks to those disclosures, we now know just how Washington leaned on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War and just how it pressured the Germans to prevent them from prosecuting CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man and shipped him off to be tortured abroad.

As our foreign policy threatens to careen into yet more disasters in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, we can only hope that more whistleblowers will follow the alleged example of Bradley Manning and release vital public documents before it’s too late. A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us. In a democracy, the workings of our government should not be shrouded in an opaque cloud of secrecy. For bringing us the truth, for breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

2: Knowledge is powerful. The WikiLeaks disclosures have helped spark democratic revolutions and reforms across the Middle East, accomplishing what Operation Iraqi Freedom never could.

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In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the people’s revolts under way have occurred despite US support for their autocratic rulers. In each of these nations, in fact, we bankrolled the dictators, while helping to arm and train their militaries. The alliance with Mubarak’s autocratic state cost the US more than $60 billion and did nothing for American security -- other than inspire terrorist blowback from radicalized Egyptians like Mohammad Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Even if US policy was firmly on the wrong side of things, we should be proud that at least one American -- Bradley Manning -- was on the right side. If indeed he gave those documents to WikiLeaks, then he played a catalytic role in bringing about the Arab Spring, something neither Barack Obama nor former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (that recent surprise recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom) could claim. Perhaps once the Egyptians consolidate their democracy, they, too, will award Manning their equivalent of such a medal.

3: Bradley Manning has exposed the pathological over-classification of America’s public documents.

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If we hope to know what our government is actually doing in our name globally, we need massive leaks from insider whistleblowers to journalists who can then sort out what we need to know, given that the government won’t. This, in fact, has been the modus operandi of WikiLeaks. Our whistleblower protection laws urgently need to catch up to this state of affairs, and though we are hardly there yet, Bradley Manning helped take us part of the way. He did what Barack Obama swore he would do on coming into office. For striking a blow against our government’s fanatical insistence on covering its mistakes and errors with blanket secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves not punishment, but the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

4. At immense personal cost, Bradley Manning has upheld a great American tradition of transparency in statecraft and for that he should be an American hero, not an American felon.

Bradley Manning is only the latest in a long line of whistleblowers in and out of uniform who have risked everything to put our country back on the right path.

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Transparency in statecraft was not invented last week by WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange. It is a longstanding American tradition. James Madison put the matter succinctly: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”

A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations report caught the same spirit: “Secrecy -- the first refuge of incompetents -- must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society…. Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.” John F. Kennedy made the same point in 1961: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Hugo Black, great Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court had this to say: “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.” And the first of World-War-I-era president Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points couldn’t have been more explicit: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”

We need to know what our government’s commitments are, as our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they cannot be left to their own devices. Based on the last decade of carnage and folly, without public debate -- and aggressive media investigations -- we have every reason to expect more of the same.

The Crime Wikileaks Publicized

No, not exposed or revealed, because it was already public knowledge.

Greg Mitchell at The Nation:

Today (April 5) marks the first anniversary of the day WikiLeaks started to become a household name in the U.S. -- when Julian Assange released the video he had titled Collateral Murder. It showed a 2007 incident in Baghdad when a U.S. Apache copter crew gunned down more than a dozen Iraqis, most likely civilians, on the streets below, including two Reuters staffers. After a flurry of publicity, the episode soon faded from the media, although three major WikiLeaks releases followed last year, all allegedly coming via Private Bradley Manning, now sitting in near-solitary confinement in the brig at Quantico.

But largely thanks to one soldier who was in the thick of things on that day in 2007, the incident is far from over.

He is Ethan McCord, who spoke out after the release of the video to testify that he was on the scene that day and helped rescue two badly injured children (who were riding in a van driven by their father who had tried to helped the wounded only to be killed himself) and carry them to a vehicle that took them to a hospital.

Now he is featured in a film short that will debut in three weeks at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here is a link to the film's site which includes background, a trailer, and a director's statement in which he reveals he is now working on a feature length film and hopes to talk with the triggerman.

My colleague Kevin Gosztola talked to McCord last week. McCord says that he has turned over all photos from that day and they will air soon. Here is the audio and transcript. One key quote from McCord: The video was released on April 5th of 2010. However, the entire incident was written about in a book by David Finkel called The Good Soldiers. So, they’re stating that this was classified, but it was already released back in 2009 through a book so how is it classified if it’s already for released? I mean, word for word this video is described in the book The Good Soldiers so yet we’re going to charge Bradley Manning for releasing classified information. Shouldn’t we also be charging David Finkel for writing this book detailing the entire engagement in his book in 2009?

Finally, below, here is an excerpt from my The Age of WikiLeaks book—recounting a remarkable interview McCord gave nearly one year ago.

One of the most remarkable interviews relating to this whole episode came to light on April 20, 2010, when Kim Zetter at Wired revealed that she had located and interviewed one of the soldiers in the video.

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(McCord) “Personally, I believe the first attack on the group standing by the wall was appropriate, was warranted by the rules of engagement. They did have weapons there. However, I don’t feel that the attack on the van was necessary…. And where the soldier said [in the video], ‘Well, you shouldn’t take your kids to battle.’ Well, in all actuality, we brought the battle to your kids.

“I think that the bigger picture is what are we doing there? We’ve been there for so long now and it seems like nothing is being accomplished whatsoever, except for we’re making more people hate us.

“I don’t say that Wikileaks did a bad thing, because they didn’t…. I think it is good that they’re putting this stuff out there. I don’t think that people really want to see this, though, because this is war.… It’s very disturbing.”

Read the whole thing.

No One Deserves Inhumane Treatment - Not Even Bradley Manning

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, something that I'm sure is false: that Bradley Manning did deliberately and with malice aforethought seek to undermine the government of the United States of America by leaking highly classified and potentially disastrous military documents to Wikileaks.

That, assuming conclusive evidence collected legally by authorized law enforcement officials and determination by a jury of his peers that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, would certainly justify the U.S. government executing him.

It would not, however - and nothing ever could - justify the torture being inflicted on Manning by a U.S. government that loves pointing the "torturer!" finger at every nation but itself.

Firedoglake has the latest:

Bradley Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, writes about the true reason Bradley Manning is being stripped each night and forced to report naked each morning in the same way prisoners were tortured at Abu Graib:

On Wednesday March 2, 2011, PFC Manning was told that his Article 138 complaint requesting that he be removed from Maximum custody and Prevention of Injury (POI) Watch had been denied by the Quantico commander, Colonel Daniel J. Choike. Understandably frustrated by this decision after enduring over seven months of unduly harsh confinement conditions, PFC Manning inquired of the Brig operations officer what he needed to do in order to be downgraded from Maximum custody and POI. As even Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell has stated, PFC Manning has been nothing short of “exemplary” as a detainee. Additionally, Brig forensic psychiatrists have consistently maintained that there is no mental health justification for the POI Watch imposed on PFC Manning. In response to PFC Manning’s question, he was told that there was nothing he could do to downgrade his detainee status and that the Brig simply considered him a risk of self-harm. PFC Manning then remarked that the POI restrictions were “absurd” and sarcastically stated that if he wanted to harm himself, he could conceivably do so with the elastic waistband of his underwear or with his flip-flops.

Without consulting any Brig mental health provider, Chief Warrant Officer Denise Barnes used PFC’s Manning’s sarcastic quip as justification to increase the restrictions imposed upon him under the guise of being concerned that PFC Manning was a suicide risk. PFC Manning was not, however, placed under the designation of Suicide Risk Watch. This is because Suicide Risk Watch would have required a Brig mental health provider’s recommendation, which the Brig commander did not have. In response to this specific incident, the Brig psychiatrist assessed PFC Manning as “low risk and requiring only routine outpatient followup [with] no need for … closer clinical observation.” In particular, he indicated that PFC Manning’s statement about the waist band of his underwear was in no way prompted by “a psychiatric condition.”

While the commander needed the Brig psychiatrist’s recommendation to place PFC Manning on Suicide Risk Watch, no such recommendation was needed in order to increase his restrictions under POI Watch. The conditions of POI Watch require only psychiatric input, but ultimately remain the decision of the commander.

Given these circumstances, the decision to strip PFC Manning of his clothing every night for an indefinite period of time is clearly punitive in nature. There is no mental health justification for the decision. There is no basis in logic for this decision. PFC Manning is under 24 hour surveillance, with guards never being more than a few feet away from his cell. PFC Manning is permitted to have his underwear and clothing during the day, with no apparent concern that he will harm himself during this time period. Moreover, if Brig officials were genuinely concerned about PFC Manning using either his underwear or flip-flops to harm himself (despite the recommendation of the Brig’s psychiatrist) they could undoubtedly provide him with clothing that would not, in their view, present a risk of self-harm. Indeed, Brig officials have provided him other items such as tear-resistant blankets and a mattress with a built-in pillow due to their purported concerns.

This is just vile. The former brig commander, James Averhart, violated military rules by putting Manning on suicide watch as punishment, and was subsequently replaced by Denise Barnes. Now she’s stripping him naked to punish him for a sarcastic quip. Who is she, Nurse Ratched? Abusing someone’s mental health classification in order to subject them to torture “for their own good” is sick and sadistic, reminiscent of Soviet gulags.

There is far, far more at the link, which connects to the whole Manning archive at one of the only two websites than give a damn (the other being Glenn Greenwald.)

Makes me wonder if Michelle Obama is still proud of her country.

The Leaks That Damage Are Not Coming from Wikileaks

Gregg Easterbrook, in his TMQ column:

Leaks Don't Come Out of the Sky: Is the WikiLeaks disclosure of Pentagon and State Department internal docments dangerous, by reducing U.S. military and diplomatic effectiveness? Or good, by pulling down the veil of secrecy around government? Obviously there are arguments on both sides. Here's what struck me. Last week this New York Times page-one story reported the Obama administration "plans to further step up attacks on al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in the tribal areas of Pakistan."

Maybe that's a good idea; maybe it's not. But as an item of information, the Times story is far more explosive than anything in WikiLeaks disclosures so far, most of which contain trivia and statements of the obvious. The Times story tells al-Qaeda and Taliban factions in tribal Pakistan that raids and air strikes will increase. The story is a warning of something about to happen, rather than a retrospective on prior events. And the story is sourced to unnamed "administration officials." That is -- the information was leaked by the White House or Pentagon.

Perhaps the purpose of the leak was to make the president sound tough at a time when his poll numbers are fluttering. Perhaps the purpose was to make the U.S. military sound powerful at a time when a $725 billion Pentagon budget request was awaiting approval in Congress. The purpose cannot have been to help American soldiers and air crew in the field. Their chances would be best if U.S. forces struck al-Qaeda and Taliban targets without warning, with nothing said by the White House or Pentagon until after the operation was over.

I don't question the Times' decision to run the story. What I question is White House and Defense Department officials denouncing Julian Assange when he publishes leaks that embarrass the powerful -- then merrily using leaks themselves when they think the powerful will benefit. If revealing government information is, on its face, an offense, White House and Pentagon officials who leak to reporters should be chased across the world and prosecuted just as vigorously as Assange.

Maybe the WikiLeaks idea is indeed wrong. But compared to White House and Pentagon officials who leak to the press when it suits them, isn't Assange -- who uses his name rather than hide behind anonymity -- the honest one?

Wikileaks has become the kind of litmus test that Clinton getting blow jobs from Monica Lewinsky was. People who freaked out over some harmless cocksucking were either overcompensating for personal problems or using it as a cover for another agenda.

People who are freaking out over Wikileaks doing nothing different than what investigative journalists used to do are either trying to distract the public from the really damaging leaks or lying about it for political purposes.

Take Off the Blindfold; Don't Fear the Truth

Coleen Rowley knows from terrorism, government secrets and the struggle to reveal the truth.

Read what she writes about Wikileaks:

Unfortunately, the US corporate PR machine is again triumphing. The naked emperor has shot the little boy trying to yell the truth. About 70% of Americans, misled by the likes of Amy Klobuchar, now declare that ignorance is bliss and they want to see Assange assassinated and WikiLeaks taken out. Only a tiny fraction of critical thinker Americans recognize that what they don't know CAN hurt them.

The last time an Administration got 70% of the country to believe a false proposition (that Iraq was behind 9-11), we launched an unending war that has already killed over a million and, in so doing, we shot ourselves in the foot. So unless Americans are willing to take their heads out of the sand, that's about to happen again. We find ourselves in such an Orwellian tragedy, that if we don't laugh, we'll cry.

Note: I agree with the realists that neither those in the White House nor in the Congress are listening. The elected in Washington DC operate in a kind of lead SKIF that encloses those inside the DC Beltway like Maxwell Smart's old "cone of silence". (So the politicians are truly unable to hear anyone outside that bubble and they are deaf to all except the ir own corporate and special interest funders, which include the powerful Military Industrial Complex war profiteers and also includes the neo-con aligned Likud branch of Israeli warhawks.)

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If the people recognized that their leaders' decisions to continue to fund war was bankrupting the U.S. and making it impossible to fund their "entitlements" and services, then there might arise more pressure on Congress to vote to end the war funding, but right now there doesn't seem to be a way to make people understand the horrible situation they are in. The main stream media merely transcribes the Pentagon and Obama press releases and fails to investigate as old Woodward and Bernstein once did and tell the harsh truth to the American public.

For the most part, the media seems to view a WikiLeaks truth-telling mechanism and government whistleblowers as trying to upset their easy job of transcribing leaders' press releases. Not surprisingly, much of the press says, "quick shoot the little boy calling the emperor naked." The corporate media is funded by the corporations and wealthy Americans who don't want to pay higher taxes or even pay any taxes and who are largely profiting off the continuing wars.

No one remembers that in the summer of 2001, Richard Clarke was unable to get anyone to pay attention to his plan to stem Al Qaeda terrorism. It seems incomprehensible as we bankrupt ourselves (which, by the way, is and always was Osama Bin Laden's stated goal, to bankrupt the U.S.) that Richard Clarke and others were repeatedly put off during that summer of 2001 when "all their hair was on fire", being told that there was "not one dollar available" for anti-terrorism efforts.

So that's the current horrible situation we find ourselves in at the present moment. The current quagmire devoid of truth on every level is a vortex sucking us all down. A truly independent media mechanism like WikiLeaks and more government whistleblowers would be a huge part of a root solution and that is why those in power are in the process of somehow (whether thru assassination or prosecution), taking them out. WikiLeaks had given me a flicker of hope of perhaps getting a sufficient number of Americans to take their heads out of the sand at least long enough to see the danger all around them, their children and grand children but sadly the Propaganda Machine already has 70% of Americans in agreement that they would prefer not to know the Sorrows of Empire that will befall them (as Chalmers Johnson termed it).

Americans continue like the lemmings in that Apple ad that flopped during the Superbowl a couple decades ago. They are being led blindfolded up to the edge of an abyss and then are, one by one, falling off.

Read the whole thing.

"No President should fear public scrutiny of his program."

As we struggle to digest the latest document dump from Wikileaks, Brad Friedman has a great post on the larger issues of government secrecy.

As this information becomes public, and as the U.S. Government continues to scramble to mitigate what the White House is calling today a "reckless and dangerous" leak, condemning it "in the strongest terms" as an alleged threat to national security, it's worth keeping in mind, for valuable perspective, what the 1970s legendary "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote in an op/ed for The BRAD BLOG in early 2008...

Many, if not most, covert operations deserve to be disclosed by a free press. They are often covert not only because they are illegal but because they are wildly ill-conceived and reckless. "Sensitive" and "covert" are often synonyms for "half-assed," "idiotic," and "dangerous to national security," as well as "criminal."

As well, John F. Kennedy's April 1961 speech on what he described as this nation's abhorrence of secrecy, and the necessity of a free press --- as delivered to the American Newspaper Publishers Association at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York a year or so before his death --- is rather astonishing, and more than a bit ironic, in light of today's leaks and, as directly, the actions of the Executive Branch and its enablers in this country --- in Congress, in the mainstream media and in the public --- over the past dark decade. JFK's remarks include these thoughts among others that must be heard or read...

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
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And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
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And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
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No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary.

Read the whole thing, including a video excerpt and full transcript here.

When Wikileaks Could Have Saved Us

Hindsight, I know. But the question is not "what if" then, but what we can learn now.

Jon Wiener in The Nation:

As WikiLeaks prepares to release 400,000 Iraq war documents, two former government security officials argue that WikiLeaks could have prevented 9-11, if the website had been around in 2001.

The two ought to know: Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who tried to sound the alarm a month before 9-11, and Bogdan Dzakovic, a special agent for the FAA’s security division, who was a leader of the agency’s “Red Team” that was warning officials about vulnerabilities in airport security just before 9-11.

“Things might have been different if there had been a quick, confidential way to get information out,” the two write – and WikiLeaks could have provided exactly that, according to their op-ed in the L.A. Times on Friday.

Read the whole thing.