An Evening to Honour Chelsea Manning at the Oxford Union

This year, Chelsea Manning was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.

Edward Snowden, the recipient of the award last year, paid, by video,  a tribute to Chelsea’s extraordinary act of public service at an unbelievable personal cost

In the video, he says he is going to focus on an issue that he credits Chelsea with bringing to the fore, an issue that he says Chelsea raised to public prominence, that is very important, but less well acknowledged; that issue is over-classification

With 95 million documents classified in the US 2012 (an ongoing increase), and the government of Australia arguing that the price of shrimps and clove cigarettes in Indonesia are a matter of National Security, it’s obvious that the situation is out of control and the trend is worsening.

Snowden lists the true cost of wars, instances of official corruption, rendition, torture and war crimes as information revealed in Chelsea’s releases to WikiLeaks, and says that the public unambiguously need this information to fulfil the role and responsibility of participating in the ‘self-correcting’ form of government that is the essence of American governance at its best.