The unfolding story of the pre-trial hearing of Bradley Manning, all over both the internet and the MSM, is spawning lots of commentary as well, some of it very interesting. Here’s two pieces:
Ray McGovern: The Humiliation of Bradley Manning
Excerpt: “It is a bitter irony that Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, whose conscience compelled him to leak evidence about the U.S. military brass ignoring evidence of torture in Iraq, was himself the victim of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment while other military officers privately took note but did nothing.”
Julien Assange: Two Years of Cablegate as Bradley Manning Testifies for the First Time
Excerpt: “The material that Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked has highlighted astonishing examples of U.S. subversion of the democratic process around the world, systematic evasion of accountability for atrocities and killings, and many other abuses. Our archive of State Department cables have appeared in tens of thousands of articles, books and scholarly works, illustrating the nature of U.S. foreign policy and the instruments of U.S. national power. On the two-year anniversary of the start of Cablegate, I want to highlight some of the stories that have emerged.”
My question has always been: How could this tiny young man endure conditions of such horrifying isolation and constriction for so long? Did he have any idea, when he leaked such sensitive material, what the ramifications would be to his own person? According to a Quantico psychiatrist, his pre-trial hearing conditions have been “worse than death row.” 921 days, so far, of unmitigated hell and now that he’s allowed to speak on the witness stand, we sense that they have not managed to break him, not by a long shot.
So I decided to look up Manning’s astrological birth chart. And what I found blew me away. Never, and I mean never, have I seen a planetary configuration that was more indicative of a collective destiny than this one. And I’ve seen a lot of them! Manning’s chart not only hooks up with the Mayan Calendar end date, but he was born in 1987, the year of Harmonic Convergence, when the whole 25-year countdown started!
And that doesn’t even begin to touch the question of how he could endure the abuse for so long and still come up kicking. That’s there in the chart, too.
I’m going to write this whole thing up, hopefully over this weekend, as an essay that utilizes Manning’s chart as an example of personal/collective convergence in astrology. I want to spend some time with this, so that readers can get even a glimpse of the kind of awe-inspiring revelations that come when you start thinking in cycles, long ones, short ones, and their interpenetration.
As a long-time student of astrology, there is simply no way that I could ever wonder if the universe is meaningful. Of course it’s meaningful! Majestically so. And yet, the meaning is that of mystery beyond our comprehension. Our job is to bow to that mystery, while, hopefully, going some way in being able to at least point to it, if not describe tiny little inklings of light that shine through the many cracks of our very limited perceptions. It’s as if our naked bodies are all inside Bradley Manning’s 6 x 8′ cell, and yet with our questing minds and magnificent spirits we do manage to sometimes soar to the unfathomable beyond.
I have a sense that Bradley Manning, while sitting in military/industrial hell, is learning how to soar. After all, he’s a truth-telling Sagittarian, whose fiery spirit leans toward the furthest horizon, and it calls to him like a lover.
