LAFF 2014: LAST DAYS OF VIETNAM

A scene from Last Days in Vietnam. 

Family heirlooms 

By Ed Rampell

As U.S. foreign policy in Iraq faces its biggest defeat since the Indochina invasions, the niece of US President John Kennedy -- who escalated the U.S. presence in Vietnam -- has directed the cinematic equivalent of putting a blossom on a turd. Rory Kennedy has fired the opening salvo in the propaganda war regarding upcoming historic anniversaries with Last Days in Vietnam. This film is so shamefully, wildly one-sided film that this historian/reviewer hesitates to call it a “documentary” -- rather, Last Days in Vietnam is a piece of propaganda in the very worst sense of the term. Indeed, this egregiously biased, one-sided work is arguably more of a mock-umentary -- but unlike This is Spinal Tap, Rory's Orwellian disinformation is no laughing matter.

As the 50^thanniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident -- that fabricated hoax US President Lyndon Johnson exploited to further escalate U.S. military activities in Vietnam -- much as  the Bush regime’s blatant lies about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction were cooked up to “justify” another disastrous U.S. invasion of a sovereign nation that had not attacked America -- nears this August, and the 40^th anniversary of Vietnam’s liberation approaches next April 30, Last Days in Vietnam desperately tries to find something positive to say about the role the American military and diplomats played as the “Yankees go home” scenario unfolded and the communists took over what was then Saigon.

According to the film, some soldiers and State Department officials took great pains -- and sometimes at grave personal risk to themselves -- to evacuate about thousands of the Vietnamese, including military, who had worked for and married U.S. personnel, as well as the up to 5,000-7,000 Yanks still “in country.”

Rory and her partners, including co-writer/husband Mark Bailey, have taken great pains to try and find something glorious and heroic in the greatest defeat for U.S. imperialism in the entire history of the American empire. In their disgraceful effort to make a stinking garlic smell like a rose, the filmmakers willfully expunge history and any sort of context from their one dimensional exercise in disinformation. 

For example: It’s alleged that during 1968’s TếtOffensive the communists executed thousands of South Vietnamese at Huế. However, the countless war crimes committed by Washington and US forces are never, never once mentioned in this execrable piece of agitprop. Hey Rory, ever hear of the Mỹ Lai Massacre? How about the 1972 bombing of Hanoi -- during Christmas? Or the mining of Haiphong Harbor? Of course, the list of American atrocities committed against the Indochinese -- starting with intervention in the domestic affairs of nations that never attacked the U.S.A. -- is endless, the millions murdered by carpet bombing, landmines, agent orange, etc., is innumerable, and it would require an entire series of documentaries to record them all. But Rory never mentions any of them -- although she goes out of her way to vilify the Reds (don’t forget that her father, Bobby Kennedy, served on anti-communist Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting Senate Permanent Subcommitteeon Investigations).

Last Days in Vietnam simplistically endeavors to depict the Vietnam invasion (which, by the way, the Vietnamese call “the American War”) as a conflict between the north and the south, with Washington backing the latter. Rory conveniently commits the heinous crime of omission by never -- not even once! -- ever mentioning the National Liberation Front (NLF), the resistance fighters in the south. According to the Pentagon Papers, 300,000 people belonged to the NLF by 1962 (you know, when Rory's uncle was president). Millions f people in the south must have supported the NLF in order for the TếtOffensive to have been carried out in 1968, let alone for the south to have been liberated seven years later, beating both the American imperialists and the army it supplied and funded. Last Days in Vietnam mentions that the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) “eroded” in 1975, but never ponders why the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong didn’t.

(Assuming that Last Days in Vietnam's conceit -- that the U.S. merely backed the south against the north -- is correct, then why is it that last month, when this critic visited Hanoi, he saw wartime shrines, such as the Hanoi Hilton and Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, but did not see some wall inscribed with the names of the 50,000-plus Vietnamese who died fighting in the U.S. Civil War, from 1861-1865?)

Last Days in Vietnam's sources include former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who appears in news clips and presumably in contemporary, original interviews, where this mass murderer of millions in Indochina, Chile, Timor, etc., is once again given the softball “elder statesman” treatment. Richard Armitage -- no, not the Hobbit actor but the Navy and U.S. government operative who apparently never met a covert action he didn’t like -- is likewise given the hero treatment. But Armitage’s willingness to break the law -- purportedly to save south Vietnamese lives -- is never put in the context of his alleged involvement with Ted Shackley, the CIA chief in south Vietnam, and the heroin trade, or Armitage’s dubious role in the Iran-Contra Scandal -- are never mentioned.The film also conducts original interviews with former ARVN officers.

After the LA Film Festival screening an audience member asked Rory and crew members why nobody from the communist and NLF side were interviewed for the film and she replied, “We considered this but ultimately their part of the story was about the war. We wanted to focus on the heroes,” that is, those Americans who put themselves in peril to rescue south Vietnamese lives, in order to tell what Rory blithely called “a human story.”

Author Stuart Herrington, who served in military intelligence and then the Defense AttachéOrganization in south Vietnam and is a source in the film as he was an eyewitness to the events of April 1975, joined Rory for the post-screening Q&A. Herrington said that the communist side “did not add to the film” and that they would have merely indulged in “chest thumping” had they been interviewed. Sore Loser!  As if Yanks never take part in “American triumphalism” screaming “USA! USA!” and the like, especially when it invades -- unprovoked -- smaller, weaker nations.

But here’s the real reason why this agitprop pic never makes any effort to show the other side of the story: NVA and NLF supporters would presumably point out that the southerners the Yankees tried to save at the last minute were collaborators and running dogs of U.S. imperialism, who supported a Washington-backed puppet government. And that it was the Viet Cong who were the south’s real patriots. But don’t worry: The former president’s niece, charter member of the ruling class, has taken great care to make sure that American ears aren’t offended by hearing the other side of this “human story.” The Vietnamese Left doesn’t just not get equal time -- it gets no air time in this blatantly biased propaganda flick, violating journalistic ethics to present multiple viewpoints, without fear or favor.

However, skillful propagandist that Rory is, in her effort to whitewash history and to try to ferret out something positive in a colossal debacle so she can pander to U.S. rightwing sentiment, there’s something even she can’t hide. Look closely at the newsreel clips as the NVA tanks roll into what was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Not only are the soldiers jubilant, but look at the smiling faces of the Vietnamese masses as they are being liberated from decades of Japanese, French and Yankee occupation and imperialism. Perhaps we should thank Rory for not using CGI to turn those smiles into frowns.

To be fair, Rory has produced and/or helmed some good documentaries in the past, including 2005’s Street Fight, 2006’s The Homestead Strike and 2007’s Ghost of Abu Ghraib. The jury is still out as to what US President Kennedy would have done in Vietnam had he had a second term in office. Some, like film director Oliver Stone (JFK), contend he planned to pull out of Vietnam (which Stone and others believe is a major reason why the president was liquidated). And Rory’s father, Bobby, did run as a peace candidate in 1968, although again, bullets cut short his life and who knows how a possible Bobby presidency might have ended the war, instead of Tricky Dick Nixon's ascension to the presidency in 1968?

And Last Days in Vietnam does point out that the U.S. Ambassador to south Vietnam, the Nixon-appointed Graham Martin, was in denial of reality up to the very last minute (if not, like the pig who appointed him, unhinged), resulting in chaotic, last minute evacuation plans. More than 400 of those Vietnamese camping out at the U.S. embassy grounds in what had been Saigon never made it to those choppers or boats to escape their fates. 

Having said this, with liberals like Rory Kennedy, who needs reactionaries? 

Last Days in Vietnam will premiere on PBS’ (your tax dollars at work!) American Experience in Winter/Spring 2015 -- just in time to brainwash Americans as the 40^th anniversary of U.S. imperialism’s greatest defeat nears, and as another catastrophe for Washington’s foreign policy unfolds in Iraq. 

But the real lesson to draw from the Vietnam invasion is not that at the very end, perhaps a handful of Yanks put themselves in harm’s way. (Which is a bit like arsonists patting themselves for rescuing a few folks from the house they’ve set afire.) Rather, the true moral of the story is that being the world’s policeman is a disastrous policy that costs Americans and the nations they willy-nilly invade dearly, in blood and treasure. U.S. military and intelligence are arguably the most destabilizing forces on Earth, with bases straddling the globe and eternally intervening in others’ internal affairs. Nobody likes busybodies and meddlers: If you go around the world sticking your nose into other people’s business you’re likely to get punched in the nose. Washington’s empire is bankrupting a country that can’t even take care of those hapless soldiers who politicians and corporations blithely send abroad for foreign misadventures -- should they eventually make it back home outside of body bags. No amount of flag waving can hide the truth: that when it comes to militarism, Washington should mind its own business -- as if America doesn’t have enough pressing problems back home.

Having just returned from Vietnam, this reviewer can assure readers that there is life after U.S. imperialism. Rory's despicable, reprehensible propaganda flick might be called Last Days in Vietnam, but the liberation and reunification were certainly not the last days of Vietnam. The Vietnamese won the war and they are winning the peace, proving that the last shall be first.

FILM REVIEW: THE MAN NOBODY KNEW

William Colby in The Man Nobody Knew.

The sins of my father

By Ed Rampell

The Man Nobody Knew is a conventionally made, 104 minute-long documentary about former Central Intelligence Agency Director William Colby. There is the usual use of archival footage, plus a collection of talking heads, which includes a who’s who of the usual scumbags from government, military and top secret circles. However, while its technique is straightforward, what makes this doc -- subtitled In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby -- different is the fact that it’s directed by the subject’s son, Carl Colby. In this sense, The Man Nobody Knew is like Tell Them Who You Are, Mark Wexler’s 2004 documentary exploration of his dad, cinematographer Haskell Wexler – albeit from the opposite side of the political aisle.

History buffs and espionage aficionados will probably be interested in much of the terrain The Man Nobody Knew covers, starting with Colby’s derring-do in the fabled OSS, the World War II precursor of the CIA. Following WWII Colby was recruited by the Agency, and he was posted at Rome along with his family, under the cover of being a U.S. embassy staffer. There, his wife and children enjoyed a privileged existence as Colby helped orchestrate an unofficial version of the Marshall Plan, subverting Italian democracy with massive infusions of dollars to corrupt voting to ensure that the popular Communist Party didn’t win elections and join a coalition government. (Here the doc treads on similar ground as the 2006 feature, Fade to Black, with Danny Huston playing a beleaguered Orson Welles acting in a costume pic in Huston’s birthplace, postwar Rome, and it’s intriguing to see a nonfiction treatment of the same subject matter.)

After sabotaging Italy’s elections, in the late 1950s this not so quiet American was reassigned to wreak similar havoc in Vietnam, where -- as in Italy – the U.S. made sure the masses could not elect the very popular Ho Chi Minh president. In Saigon Colby and his well-heeled kin hobnobbed with South Vietnamese Pres. Ngo Din Diem and other U.S. puppets, such as his despicable sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, who is seen in a news clip haughtily dismissing a Buddhist Monk’s self immolation as “barbecuing.” After Colby left Indochina to become the CIA’s Chief of its Far East Division, Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were liquidated in a U.S.-backed coup – just a few weeks before Pres. Kennedy himself succumbed to the Cold War era violence that would also claim his brother Bobby five years later.

When America was waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool said to push on, Colby was re-posted to Vietnam, where he ran a pacification program, including the extremely controversial Phoenix Program, which resulted in the killing of up to 40,994 Viet Cong -- according to the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John Marks. 

(It’s interesting to revisit this counterinsurgency strategy as President Obama once again deploys targeted assassination as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. In any case, the extreme prejudice of Colby’s desperate measures were all for naught as Vietnam was liberated from scourges like Colby in 1975.)

Meanwhile, the sleazeball-in-chief – uh, I mean Richard Milhous Nixon – appointed Colby Director of Central Intelligence in 1973. But like King Rat Nixon himself, as DCI Colby became embroiled in scandals that made the Watergate break-in look like a frat house prank in comparison, the Catholic Colby’s sins and covert actions, and those of his Agency, caught up to him by 1974, as the Church Committee launched a nine month-long investigation of dirty tricks, dirtier tricks and dirtiest tricks (can you say “Allende”?) by the CIA, which LBJ had pithily summed up as “Murder, Inc.” Colby dutifully appeared before Congress 32 times in one year, and the doc features choice footage of Congressmembers Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug grilling the spymaster on the hot seat, as the people’s elected Representatives confronted America’s shadowy secret government.

Suspected mass murderer William Colby got his comeuppance when Pres. Gerald Ford rewarded him for his decades of loyal service by summarily firing him in October 1975. Twenty-one years later, Colby rather appropriately died as he had lived: Mysteriously. His filmmaker/ son suspects his dad’s death was somehow self-inflicted. Who knows?

Throughout the rest of the doc director Carl Colby tries to fathom his enigmatic father and come to terms with the parent who led a cloak and dagger life that inextricably cut him off from his own family. Along the way, his rogues’ gallery of interviewees include Zbigniew Brezinski (the foreign policy whiz who helped give us Osama and Al Qaeda), ex-CIA Director James Schlesinger, Iran-Contra co-conspirator Lt. Col. Robert “Bud” McFarlane, former Ford NSA adviser and Bush toady Brent Scowcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld, who had been Ford’s chief of staff (infections).

Also interviewed are investigative reporters Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward, and the helmer’s mother, Barbara Colby, a faithful wife whom William dumped after 38 years of marriage. She, like Carl, try to make sense of it all; who really was this bowtied 007? The doc appears to make an attempt to exculpate and justify Colby’s decades of wreaking mayhem around the globe, as nonfiction threatens to turn into fiction. But it’s more delusional than those humans unwittingly subjected to psychotropic drugs by the CIA were to fantasize that Colby, the grand subverter of democracy from Europe to Asia, was an honorable man simply serving his country. It’s no secret that this most private of public servants was, in reality, an agent of imperialism whose claws were as blood drenched as his masters’. 

SFIFF 2011: THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975

Angela Davis in The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.

Remember me to America

By Don Simpson

You never know what you might discover in those dusty old boxes that have been sitting in the basement for decades. In the case of Swedish documentary director Göran Hugo Olsson, he unearthed — technically, undusted — a treasure trove of pristine, never-before-seen, 30-year-old 16mm reels of film in the basement of the Swedish Television network. The footage was originally shot by Swedish Television journalists who studiously documented the Black Power movement in the United States during the 1960s and ’70s.

Why were the Swedes so damn interested in the Black Power movement in the U.S.? (Rumor has it that the Swedes amassed more footage of the Black Power movement than the entire U.S.) Well, as far as I can surmise from the footage, the Swedes were probably attempting to prove that they shared a Utopian goal of “equal rights for all” with the Black Power movement. (Swedes were also notably obsessed with the anti-war movement in the U.S. as well, a movement with which Black Power was synonymous.)

While the mainstream media in the U.S. tried their best to ignore the Black Power movement altogether — or they painted Black Power as a form of violent terrorism — Swedish Television practically glorified the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Emile de Antonio and Angela Davis -- all of whom appear in The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. This is more than likely why TV Guide considered Swedish Television’s coverage of the U.S. to be anti-American. (The U.S. broke diplomatic ties with Sweden in 1972 after the Swedish Prime Minister compared the atrocities in Vietnam to those of the Nazis.) Besides, white America was too busy pretending that everything was alright to pay attention to a bunch of "Socialist" Scandinavians; Olsson is quick to place The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 into its proper context, beginning the documentary with archival footage of a white Miami Beach restaurateur obliviously touting the incomparable freedom and equality in the U.S., a statement that is promptly negated by clips of Hallandale, a poor black shantytown a short drive north of Miami Beach.

Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 views the Black Power movement via the kino eye of Swedish filmmakers — outsiders philosophizing about the state de la démocratie en Amérique. One would assume that these white-as-driven-snow foreign journalists probably had a difficult time immersing themselves into the black as midnight as a moonless night subculture, but the resulting footage reveals a deeply entrenched kinship and trust between the filmmakers and their subjects. The outsider perspective lends a very unique advantage to the footage. Although we can all but prove the journalists’ allegiance to the Black Power movement, the footage is still significantly less culturally biased than film shot by a member of the Black Power movement. 

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 features voice overs by a menagerie of prominent black personalities of the 21st century: Davis, Harry Belafonte, ?uestlove, Erykah Badu, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, Robin Kelley, Kathleen Cleaver, Abiodun Oyewole and John Forte. For the most part, the narrations seem to be unscripted, as if the participants are reacting naturally to the Swedish Television footage (you know, like a DVD commentary).

The titular mixtape refers simultaneously to both sound and image. ?uestlove provides an impeccable compilation of era-appropriate tunes, while Olsson reveals a priceless compilation of 16mm footage: Carmichael is practically worshiped as an iconic hero in Europe; J. Edgar Hoover declares the Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program to be the most dangerous internal threat to America; iconic images of Che Guevara purposefully sneak into the frame from time to time; school children studying at a Black Panther headquarters sing a song with the refrain “pick up the gun”; a Swedish tour guide warns his all-white audience not to visit Harlem; Lewis Farrakhan emerges as a rising Muslim star, providing strict discipline in a very chaotic time; an imprisoned Davis provides a comprehensive refutation of the Black Power movement’s supposed embrace of violence. 

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 provides us with a glorious portrait of the socially and economically conscious side of the Black Panthers as they try their best to address their local impoverished communities’ basic needs while always keeping larger national issues (the Vietnam war, record levels of incarceration, extreme poverty, drug addiction, lack of government accountability, failing public schools and the pervasiveness of structural racism) in their sights. The Black Power movement did fuel societal change even if their influence on other liberation struggles and political movements has been erased from U.S. history textbooks.

Thankfully, we now have access to this rare Swedish footage to remind us of the significance of Black Power as Olsson contextualizes the movement and highlights its successes and failures.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 screens April 30, 9 p.m., Sundance Kabuki Cinemas; May 3, 6 p.m., New People. For more information: Renegades of funk. 

FILM NEWS: HOLLYWOOD PROTEST

Demonstrators and tourists in front of the fabled Chinese Theatre during the antiwar protest. Photo by Horace Coleman.

Antiwar Activists Arrested at Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre

By Ed Rampell

A March 19 antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles ended with around nine activists being taken away by L.A.P.D. officers after they occupied the courtyard of Hollywood’s world famous Chinese Theatre. Up to 25 veterans or relatives of military personnel deployed to Iraq and/or Afghanistan staged the sit-down strike on the cement blocks bearing movie stars’ footprints and inscriptions in front of the Asian-themed movie palace Sid Grauman opened in 1927. The protesters held photos of their uniformed loved ones and placed boots with name cards over the cement that had been autographed when wet by celebrities such as Clint Eastwood. The sit-down strikers also displayed a cement slab of their own engraved with boot prints and the words “Forgotten Dead,” plus a placard that read: “True Cost of War, 5,941,” referring to the number of U.S. servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The act of civil disobedience began around 3:15 p.m. as an antiwar march and rally protesting the eighth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, plus the Afghan and now Libyan wars. A speaker on the truck that served as a stage commented that the sit-in participants were “Disrupting business as usual, taking a stand by sitting down.” About 40 armed L.A.P.D. officers surrounded the peaceful activists, using metal railings and bicycles to cut the courtyard off from throngs of demonstrators, tourists and superhero impersonators in front of what is now Mann’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Blvd.’s celebrated “Walk of Fame,” with its inset stars honoring various Tinseltown talents.

A policeman videotaped the courtyard occupiers and a policewoman kneeled to talk with participants in the action, which included Dede Miller, the sister of noted “Antiwar Mom” Cindy Sheehan (who reportedly took part in a Northern California protest) and aunt of Casey Sheehan, who was killed in Iraq and whose photo Miller held. The sit-down strikers also included members of Military Families Speak Out, a national organization of people opposed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who have relatives or loved ones currently in the military, or who have served in the military since the fall of 2002.

The uniformed officers conferred with an African-American man in a suit who may have been a theater employee, as well as with attorney Jim Lafferty, an organizer of the peace march and rally and head of the L.A. office of the National Lawyers Guild. This reporter, who was in the frontline of the crowd watching the unfolding drama, overheard a sergeant give orders to L.A.P.D. officers: “Take responsibility for the arrests. Two at a time.” At this point about six policemen were admitted from the sidewalk into the Chinese Theatre’s courtyard. One protester, a middle aged man who’d earlier given an angry speech at Hollywood and Vine about what the Iraq War had done to his PTSD-suffering son, was allowed to leave the courtyard, and then delivered another address from the truck/stage.

One by one, beginning with a woman, up to nine sit-down strikers rose and were peacefully led away, accompanied by an officer on either side, as supporters in the crowd applauded and cheered their comrades on, sometimes by name. One women escorted off the property wore a Code Pink T-shirt. Another woman gave the peace sign behind her back as officers accompanied her across the courtyard to an entrance way of an exit leading outside of the theatre complex. The last protester was taken away by police around 4:05 p.m. According to Lafferty, they were booked and charged with trespassing, and then released. The rest of the demonstrators left the scene of their own accord, apparently without being arrested. The black man in plainclothes returned the boots representing fallen warriors to the sidewalk. Police were still inside the theatre courtyard as late as 5:00 p.m.

Coincidentally, one of the cement blocks the sit-down strikes had occupied bore the footprints and inscription of Tom Cruise. Shortly before the civil disobedience had begun, Ron Kovic -- the paralyzed Vietnam vet portrayed by Cruise in Oliver Stone’s 1989 antiwar classic, Born On the Fourth of July – spoke onstage to thousands of rally-goers while ensconced in the wheelchair he’s been confined to since Kovic was shot 43 years ago in Indochina.

“The power of the people is unbeatable,” declared Kovic. “We see it in Tunisia, Cairo. We are not exempt in this country from sweeping change… It can happen here… We are moving into a period of great change.”

Kovic then led the crowd in an a cappella rendition of John Lennon’s "Give Peace a Chance."

Other notables at the demo included actor James Cromwell, who was Oscar-nominated for playing the farmer in 1995’s talking pig comedy, Babe, and more recently appeared in Secretariat, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who won two Academy Awards, including for the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic, Bound For Glory. The Foo Fighters’ Chris Shifflet spoke and sang onstage. Marci Winograd, a perennial left-leaning Democratic congressional candidate now seeking to replace Rep. Jane Harmon, also denounced the wars.

Empty military footgear symbolizing fallen warriors were placed on spots bearing celebrity footprints. Photo by Horace Coleman.

The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, which had organized the peace rallies and march, estimated the number of L.A. participants to be about 4,000 people. The event started at noon with a brief rally at the fabled intersection of Hollywood and Vine, followed by a march down Hollywood Blvd. to Sunset Blvd., past CNN’s L.A. headquarters, then back up to Hollywood Blvd., where a second and longer rally was held in front of the Chinese Theatre. Along the way, marchers encountered a handful of religious counter-demonstrators, who they outnumbered by more than 100 to one. The peace parade was led by Kovic, who frequently flashed the peace sign with his fingers. Marchers held antiwar banners and signs and chanted slogans such as: “Hey Obama We Say No, The Occupation’s Got To Go. Hey Obama, Yes You Can. Troops Out of Afghanistan.” An overhead blimp carried by demonstrators bore a banner asking: “How’s the war economy for you?” Speakers emphasized the economic costs of the wars, which they estimated to cost $700 million per day, while schools, hospitals and other essentials were being cutback.

Rally speakers denounced not only the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the spread of warfare to Libya; the allegedly abusive treatment of imprisoned PFC Bradley Manning, accused of giving classified information to WikiLeaks; as well as the perils of the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Japan. There were demonstrations at other U.S. cities, such as at Washington, D.C., where more than 100 demonstrators, including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, were arrested outside the White House.