https://socialistaction.org/2019/03/14/chelsea-manning-jailed-again/
Chelsea Manning jailed — again
/ 21 hours ago
April 2019 Chelsea-Manning
By BARRY SHEPPARD
Chelsea Manning, a transgender U.S. soldier who blew the whistle on U.S.
war crimes and spent 2013 to 2017 in an army stockade as a result, is
back in prison again. This time, it is because she refuses to join a
bipartisan campaign against Wikileaks that seeks to bring Julian Assange
from his refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to the U.S. in order
to put him on trial and send him to prison.
In 2010, she leaked hundreds of thousands of documents about the U.S.
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She first tried to get mainstream media to
publish them, to no avail, before turning to Wikileaks, which did
publish them. One of these was a video, shown on TV at the time. The
video was taken by U.S. soldiers aboard a helicopter gunship as they
machine-gunned Iraqi civilians in the street as they attempted to flee.
The soldiers joked and laughed while they committed murder.
Daniel Ellsberg, who released the secret Pentagon Papers during the
Vietnam War that documented the long campaign Washington engaged against
Vietnam from the end of World War II through the Vietnam War itself,
said recently on “Democracy Now!”, “She also revealed massive,
widespread torture being conducted by our Iraqi allies, with our
knowledge and complicity, going from George W. Bush on into President
Obama’s term.
“So there is a lot of resentment against her in the intelligence
community and the Army about the shameful things she revealed. Also
assassination squads, death squads, corruption in general.”
Manning is in prison once again for refusing to answer questions before
a grand jury investigating Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
She was subpoenaed by federal prosecutors to appear for questioning
about her 2010 leak to Wikileaks, and jailed for contempt for refusing
to do so. In 2010 she testified that she acted alone (on record if the
prosecutors really want to know), and now stands by that.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald said on “Democracy Now!”, “I don’t think it’s
a surprise to anybody that Chelsea Manning is extraordinarily heroic.
She has demonstrated that repeatedly over the last decade in all kinds
of ways. But what she’s doing here is really remarkable, because the
context is that the Trump administration is trying to do what the Obama
administration tried to do but concluded it couldn’t do without
jeopardizing press freedoms, which is to prosecute Wikileaks and Julian
Assange for what it regards as the crime of publishing top secret or
classified documents.”
He added, “The Obama administration tried to create theories to say that
Wikileaks did more than passively receive documents from Chelsea Manning
and then publish them. … The Justice Department under Obama searched
high and low for evidence that Wikileaks participated in Chelsea
Manning’s taking of those documents. They found no evidence….
“And unfortunately, between the Republicans, who have long hated
Wikileaks for exposing the war crimes of the Bush administration and
Democrats, who now hate Wikileaks because they published documents that
reflected poorly on Hilary Clinton and the Democratic Party, very few
people are willing to stand up to this very serious attack on press freedom.
The latter refers to Wikileaks’ publishing Democratic National Committee
documents that exposed Clinton’s and the DNC’s dirty tricks to sabotage
Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016. That is, Wikileaks published the
truth. But the Democrats are joining the Trump administration in going
after Wikileaks for a deeper reason—the whole U.S. government operates
behind a vast wall of secrecy, and hates it when they are exposed for
their crimes.
In 2017, then head of the CIA Mike Pompeo, who is now Secretary of
State, charged that “Wikileaks walks like a hostile intelligence service
and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its
followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It
directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information. …
It’s time to call out Wikileaks for what it is: a non-state, hostile
intelligence service….”
That’s what the federal prosecutors are now trying to substantiate to
criminalize Wikileaks and jail Assange. Chelsea Manning won’t go along
with this, and is sitting in jail, with nary a squeak of protest by
Democrats.
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March 14, 2019 in Anti-War, Civil Liberties.
Related posts
Manning sentenced to 35 years
Bradley Manning convicted of espionage
Harassment of WikiLeaks reflects mounting assault on civil liberties
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