Chelsea Manning sentenced to 35 years

Scan page 5

SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2013 5 NOTE: The day after her sentencing, Manning provided a statement to the press, “As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a fe­ male. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hor­ mone therapy as soon as possible.” Social­ ist Action will respect Chelsea Manning’s wishes, and refer to her using female pro­ nouns.

U.S. Army whistleblower Pfc. Chelsea (Bradley) Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for giving hundreds of thousands of secret military and dip­ lomatic documents to WikiLeaks. The military judge, Col. Denise Lind, offered no explanation for the sentence. As mili­ tary guards conducted Manning from the courtroom on Aug. 21, her supporters shouted out, “We will keep fighting for you!”

The response to the sentence was swift.

Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, stated, “The only person prosecuted for the crimes and abuses uncovered in the WikiLeaks releases is the person who exposed them. That alone proves the in­ justice of even one more day in prison for Bradley Manning.”

Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said, “This is a sad day for Bradley Man­ ning, but it’s also a sad day for all Ameri­ cans who depend on brave whistleblow­ ers and a free press for a fully informed public debate.”

“It seems clear,” Wizner noted, “that the government was seeking to intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future.”

Three and a half years will be credited to Manning’s sentence for time served. This will include time for the period that the judge ruled she was mistreated at the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico, Va., before being moved to the prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Throughout her time at Quantico, she was designated a “maximum custody” detainee and locked up alone for at least 23 hours a day. She was forced to sleep naked for several nights and required to stand at attention naked in the morning. She will have to serve one-third of the sentence before being eligible for parole.

Manning faced a possible 90-year sen­ tence. The government had denied her a ... Snowden (continued from page 4: “Whistleblower Snowden plagues Obama’s national security state”)

communications monitored daily, Obama promised better oversight. This was followed by the govern­ ment’s insistence that its spying was carefully mod­ erated, only to be refuted yet again with a Snowden revelation that even this “moderation” was violated through “backdoor” channels that allowed virtual to­ tal access to everyone and everything under any cir­ cumstances.

Reporters James Bell and Spencer Ackerman, writ­ ing in the Aug. 9 Guardian in an article entitled “NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’

emails and phone calls,” noted that a U.S. “spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans’ communications.”

The authors continued: “Details of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), give the NSA au­ thority to target without warrant the communica­ tions of foreign targets. The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’

e-mail and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

“The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ commu­ nications using their name or other identifying infor­ mation. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing ‘warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans.’”

President Obama took to the airwaves in mid-Au­ whistleblower defense and the right to describe intent or to show that his ac­ tions harmed no one. U.S. prosecutors asked for a sentence of 60 years while acknowledging Manning’s youth. But it was clear that the true motivation for the prosecution’s request for the extremely long sentence was to deter future leaks. Prosecutor Capt. Joe Morrow stated, “There is value in deterrence.”

“Pfc. Manning was one of the brave Americans who was not willing to re­ main silent,” defense attorney David Coombs told the media. “Instead he de­ cided to provide us with information that he believed would spark reform, would spark debate and he provided us with information that he believed might change the world.”

“Perhaps the biggest crime was that he cared about the loss of life that he was seeing and couldn’t ignore it, and was struggling with it.”

The forensic psychologist who testi­ fied in Manning’s defense, Capt. David Moulton, told the military court, “Man­ ning was under the impression that his leaked information was going to really change how the world views the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and future wars. … It was his opinion that if through crowd sourcing that enough analysis was done on these documents, that it would lead to greater good.”

Manning downloaded the leaked mate­ rial to her computer when she was de­ ployed as an intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2010. What did she actually reveal?

The most widely seen information was seen in the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed an Apache helicopter at­ tack on a group of people walking in a Baghdad street in 2007. Two of the vic­ tims were employees of Reuters news agency. A member of the helicopter crew yelled “dead bastards!” at those they killed. They also blew up a van of civil­ ians who had stopped to help the initial victims of the first round of gunfire.

The “Reykjavik-13 Cable” was the first leak to be published by WikiLeaks; it describes frank discussions of meet­ ings between the U.S. embassy chief in Reykjavik and members of the Icelandic government. The scornful attitude of the U.S. representative towards their nation in the middle of its banking crisis so an­ gered activists in Iceland that they edited the “Collateral Murder” video, which was soon released worldwide.

The “Iraq War Logs” were 75,000 Army documents that detailed U.S. nighttime raids with reports from U.S. troops on the ground. These reports have been used to track civilian casualties that officials pre­ viously had said were not available.

The “Afghanistan War Logs” were 75,000 pages of documents that The New York Times described as “a ground level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is more grim than the official portrayal.”

The “Guantanamo Files” included 700 detainee files and 250,000 State Depart­ ment cables detailing CIA extraordinary renditions, in violation of international law, of people suspected of “terrorism.”

gust to forcefully proclaim that, minus some tweaks here and there wherein a handful of secret govern­ ment oversight individuals would now keep track of what’s going on, no changes would be made. It now appears even this “oversight” is meaningless. In any capitalist state, so-called national security inter­ ests—that is, ruling-class interests—trump those of the people regardless of the formalities of “the law.”

Edward Snowden has been granted temporary sta­ tus to remain in Russia for at least one year while he negotiates with other governments for permanent residency status. Obama officials were so enraged at the Russian refusal to send Snowden home to be per­ secuted as a criminal and face charges under the in­ famous Espionage Act that a long-scheduled ObamaPutin “summit” meeting was cancelled in retaliation.

On Aug. 18, at the behest of U.S. officials and Brit­ ish Prime Minister David Cameron, Glen Greenwald’s companion, David Michael Miranda, was detained and interrogated for nine hours at London’s Heath­ row Airport. Miranda was forced, under threat of im­ prisonment, to divulge his computer passwords, on the grounds that he was suspected of being in posses­ sion of “stolen materials.”

Miranda was en route to Brazil from Germany. His confiscated computer and other electronic devices contained some of Snowden’s encrypted material. While he was eventually released, his detention dem­ onstrates the ever increasing measures that U.S. and British governments are prepared to employ to ter­ rorize anyone and everyone who dares tell the truth about secret and illegal government operations.

It is no exaggeration to conclude that courageous revelations of Snowden and Manning have cut deep into the credibility of all U.S. government functioning. There is more than a strong whiff in the air akin to the Shane Kadidal, a lawyer for the Center For Constitutional Rights, believes the volume of the material is part of the im­ portance of these leaks: “It is one thing to tell a few anecdotes based on a few items, but to be able to say across the board that most of the men that are there shouldn’t be there and are people that could be safely released, that is pretty staggering.”

The leaks also showed the hypocrisy of the U.S. collaboration with Arab dicta­ tors while proclaiming a commitment to democracy.

The Bradley Manning Support Network will continue to keep the spotlight on Manning. They have organized interna­ tional support through education and activism about her case as well as rais­ ing $1.4 million for defense. Even as the sentence was handed down, the network announced they were teaming with Am­ nesty International to launch a petition asking President Obama for a pardon.

At the same time, Manning’s attorney, David Coombs, is preparing to bring the case to the Army Court of Criminal Ap­ peals to address violations of due pro­ cess rights. Manning was detained with­ out trial for more than three years in violation of her Constitutional right to a speedy trial. She was only awarded four months off of her sentence for the psy­ chological torture suffered while in soli­ tary confinement for over nine months.

The U.S. Marine Corps was never held accountable for Manning’s treatment. Also, Obama declared Manning guilty in April 2011, more than two years before her trial began. This constitutes unlawful command influence, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The Center For Constitutional Rights has made clear that supporters of Brad­ ley Manning must continue to struggle for her freedom and raise the demand for a presidential pardon. And this campaign will be more aggressive than simply a legal maneuver and petitions. On Aug. 22 Ursula Rozem and Amelia RamseyLefevre interrupted President Obama’s speech at Henninger High School in Syracuse by raising a sign saying, “Free Bradley Manning,” and shouting, “Private Manning exposed war crimes. Private Manning exposed torture. Private Man­ ning aided the public, not the enemy. Pri­ vate Manning is a hero.” The two women were escorted off the premises. n anti-government “Vietnam Syndrome” of the 1960s and ’70s. This was a time when the lies attendant to the Vietnam War and the associated atrocities—four million Vietnamese murdered by unprecedented bombings and the widespread use of chemical war­ fare—led the great majority to question, if not chal­ lenge, all government warmongering statements and actions.

Today’s Snowden/Manning revelations and the es­ sentially failed cover-ups have once again brought public confidence in government to a new low. It was only the massive lobbying effort exerted by Obama and his top aides that prevented the U.S. House of Representatives from approving an extremely lim­ ited bill restricting government surveillance. The bill, presented by “dissident” Democrats and “libertarian” Republicans, failed by a vote of 205 to 217.

The severely damaged credibility of U.S. imperial­ ism at home and abroad cannot be underestimated. Rapidly increasing numbers understand that they are daily subject to economic, political, socially repres­ sive, and war-making policies. The fact that millions of capitalism’s victims have yet to take to the streets in massive protest cannot be taken for consent.

It is only a matter of time until the accumulation of insults of every type and the knowledge that they are unremitting and inherent in the system’s day-to-day operations, burst out in new and unprecedented mo­ bilizations that challenge the status quo.

Today’s beleaguered whistleblowers will become tomorrow’s national heroes. Their names will be­ come synonymous with the early dissidents who helped unleash the pent-up anger of millions who will challenge the purveyors of lies, economic and so­ cial degradation, and endless wars and bring a new world into being. n