I think Manning is a masochist, among other things. There was a way to appear
and not answer questions, but she wouldn't appear because she believes that the
grand jury system is wrong. It's heroism, but at what cost?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2019 12:09 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Manning and the New Inquisition
Another thought provoking piece by Chris Hedges.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/18/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Manning and the New Inquisition
Mr. Fish
The U.S. government, determined to extradite and try Julian Assange
for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange and WikiLeaks
did in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea
Manning from what The New York Times and The Washington Post did in
publishing the same material. There is no federal law that prohibits
the press from publishing government secrets. It is a crime, however,
to steal them. The long persecution of Manning, who on March 8 was
sent back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is
about this issue.
If Manning, a former Army private, admits she was instructed by
WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain and pass on the leaked
material, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents. The
prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the
Obama administration, which under the Espionage Act charged eight
people with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz,
Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John
Kiriakou and Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the
vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the
government had been severed.
Manning, who worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009,
provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000 documents copied from military
and government archives, including the “Collateral Murder” video
footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed
civilians that included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in 2010 and
found guilty in 2013.
The campaign to criminalize whistleblowing has, by default, left the
exposure of government lies, fraud and crimes to those who have the
skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden did, needed to hack
into or otherwise obtain government electronic documents. This is why
hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and
WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the
corporate state is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of
power, especially those activities that violate the law. Movement
toward this goal is very far advanced. The failure of news
organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post to
vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt them.
The
corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The
target is the press itself.
“If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent
press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against
the war criminals he helped expose,” I wrote after I and Cornel West
attended Manning’s sentencing in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. “He would not
have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort
Leavenworth, Kan.
His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war,
tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications
and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells.
If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders
Manning made public would be investigated.
The
officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep
a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032
‘violent deaths’ in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The
pilots in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which showed the helicopter
attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including
two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.”
Manning has always insisted her leak of the classified documents and
videos was prompted solely by her own conscience. She has refused to
implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, although
President Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence after she
served seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer
questions before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and
WikiLeaks. While incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods
in solitary confinement and torture. She twice attempted to commit
suicide in prison. She knows from painful experience the myriad ways
the system can break you psychologically and physically. And yet she
has steadfastly refused to give false testimony in court on behalf of
the government. Her moral probity and courage are perhaps the last
thin line of defense for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is
deteriorating in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been
holed up since 2012.
Manning—who was known as Bradley Manning in the Army—has undergone
gender reassignment surgery and needs frequent medical monitoring. Judge
Claude M.
Hilton, however, dismissed a request by her lawyers for house arrest.
Manning was granted immunity by prosecutors of the Eastern District of
Virginia, and because she had immunity she was unable to invoke the
Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination or to have her
attorney present. The judge found her in contempt of court and sent
her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton, who has long been
a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has vowed to
hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is
disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning
said any questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First,
Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with the
grand jury.
“All of the substantive questions pertained to my disclosures of
information to the public in 2010—answers I provided in extensive
testimony, during my court-martial in 2013,” she said on March 7, the
day before she was jailed.
“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury,” she said later
in a statement issued from jail. “Imprisoning me for my refusal to
answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my
repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.”
“The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years
ago and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics
case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events,”
she went on. “I stand by my previous public testimony.”
Manning reiterated that she “will not participate in a secret process
that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically
used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political
speech.”
The New York Times, Britain’s The Guardian, Spain’s El País, France’s
Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel all published the WikiLeaks files
provided by Manning. How could they not? WikiLeaks had shamed them
into doing their jobs. But once they took the incendiary material from
Manning and Assange, these organizations callously abandoned them. No
doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized against the
two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking
place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press
and cement into place an American version of China’s totalitarian
capitalism. President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for
news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post,
referring to them as the “enemy of the people.” Any legal tools given
to the administration to shut down these news outlets, or at least
hollow them of content, will be used eagerly by the president.
The prosecutions of government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act,
warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of the communications of Americans
and the persecution of Manning and Assange are parts of an
interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the
machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian
systems. The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism
exposed as a con, have had enough of us examining and questioning their
abuses, pillage and crimes.
“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” Assange
told me during one of our meetings at the embassy in London. “It can
close the neck a little tighter. But there are three forces working
against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect
its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the
military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you
know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to
deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge
not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to
even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and
intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it
around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will
always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy
authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ
[Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can
discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is
also true. When that behavior is successful it is an example. It
encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide
this encouragement.”
“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he said. “The education of
young people takes place on the internet. You cannot hire anyone who
is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the
internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to
hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the internet.
This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means
that these organizations will see their capacity to control
information diminish as more and more people with our values are
hired.”
The long term is not so sanguine. Assange, along with three
co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie
Zimmermann—wrote a book titled
“Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” It warns that
we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” The internet has
become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to
create a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and
dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control
will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance
and mass control.”
“All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded,
permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions
permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment,
from birth to death,” Assange says in the book. “I think that can only
produce a very controlling atmosphere.”
“How can a normal person be free within that system?” he asks. “[He or
she] simply cannot, it’s impossible.”
It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, the
authors argue, and only by breaking through the digital walls of
secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the abuses of power.
But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become more
sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult
and perhaps impossible to use.
“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes,
“has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of
totalitarianism we have ever seen.”
That is where we are headed. A few resist. Assange and Manning are two.
Those who stand by passively as they are persecuted will be next.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers… Chris Hedges
