Update 8/12/13: Delivering 100,000 Nobel Peace Prize petitions, and what about the Nuremberg charter?

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Supporters at an early morning vigil at Fort Meade prior to the defense beginning its sentencing arguments.

Paul Jay and Vijay Prashad discuss the Nuremberg charter, an international agreement signed 68 years ago, which holds soldiers accountable for war crimes, regardless of whether or not they have been ordered to commit the said crimes by their government. The charter creates an international law that demands soldiers act on and report atrocities they witness:

The war in Iraq was illegal, according to most legal scholars I’ve heard, including Kofi Annan, who, unfortunately, didn’t really come out and say it until after he left United Nations, but he said it. An illegal war, invading a country is a war crime. If Bradley Manning sees atrocities committed in the course of a war crime, it’s not just some choice he made. It’s not just a moral obligation. Under international law, he actually had a legal obligation, and certainly a defense, for doing what he did. (Read more…)

More than 100,000 people signed the petition to award Bradley Manning the Nobel Peace Prize, and today Norman Soloman will meet with the Director of the Nobel Research committee to urge them to consider the heroic selfless actions of 3 time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning:

This afternoon I’ll carry several thousand pages of a petition — filled with the names of more than 100,000 signers, along with individual comments from tens of thousands of them – to an appointment with the Research Director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The petition urges that Bradley Manning be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Like so many other people, the signers share the belief of Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire who wrote this summer: “I can think of no one more deserving.” (Read more…)