Footnote to the preceding

In using the phrase "US hero Bradley Manning," I got to wondering to who else I have applied the term. Searching the archives, I came up with these:

- Elizabeth Solomon, an activist who repeatedly attempted to get the word "gay" into a vanity license plate. I called her "definitely a true American hero" because of her stubborn, principled refusal to back down in the face of official opposition and personal threats.

- The unknown person who leaked the information that the CIA was running a secret prison system around the world.

- Mark "Deep Throat" Felt ("a whistleblower extraordinaire").

- My personal hero, I. F. Stone.

- Bev Harris, a pioneer in calling attention to the risks of electronic voting, who I called an "unsung hero."

- That same term was applied to Betty Ostergren, a privacy activist in Virginia, who ran a sort of guerrilla campaign against that state's program of putting online public records that included a grossly unnecessary amount of personally-identifying information irrelevant for the purpose of government oversight but very relevant to identity thieves.

- One person for who I should have used the term but through some failure never did, instead using the term "a true patriot," is former Sergeant Joseph Darby, the man who risked his safety and sacrificed his military career to blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib.

And now to that list I've added Bradley Manning. I do think that there is a sort of common thread or at least some common threads there.