A petition with 100,000 signatures urging for the Nobel Peace Prize to be given to the US whistleblower Bradley Manning will be presented today in Oslo at 1300 GMT.
The petition was initiated by the online activist organisation RootsAction which claims that the former soldier stationed in Iraq who passed along hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables over to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, deserves the prize and should receive it.
American media report that a former winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mairead Corrigan-Maguire, has formally nominated Manning for the honor, saying “I can think of no one more deserving.”
The document to be presented in Oslo later today has been signed by Americans in every state. Even though, the vast majority of signers are U.S. citizens, the petition has also been signed by people in other countries.
Just before heading to Norway, the piece of RootsAction’s co-founder, Norman Solomon, “Manning Deserves Nobel Peace Prize”, appeared in USA Today. In his article Solomon writes that the leaker Bradley Manning“let Americans, and many others around the world know what their governments were really doing. The disclosures caused problems for leaders in many nations who much preferred to operate behind an opaque curtain.”
It seems that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be highly contested as Manning is by far not the only US whistleblower who has been nominated for it. In July, the Swedish professor at Umeå University, Stefan Svallfors, nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel prize.
In a letter to the Nobel peace prize committee Svallfors says that the former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ”has helped to make the world a little bit better and safer.”
He further claims that awarding Snowden the prize this year would “help to save the Nobel Peace Prize from the disrepute that incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision to award U.S. President Barack Obama 2009 award.”
Will this year’s peace prize go to an American leaker?