President Obama Pardon Chelsea
Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A
Story Goes With It
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/commute-chelsea-mannings-sentence-time-served-1
By Fritz Taylor
[The organization that the two men,
Ralph Morse and Bartlett Webber, in the story below belong to, Veterans for
Peace, has been a long-time supporter of the struggle for freedom for heroic
whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Veterans for Peace has supported Chelsea since
the organization found out in the summer of 2010 through Courage to Resist, an
organization dedicated to publicizing the plight of military resisters, that
she had been arrested and through a long process wound up in solitary
confinement down at the Quantico Marine Base south of Washington in Virginia charged
with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents via Wiki-leaks to a candid
world. After being held for pre-trial confinement for over three years during
which due to in part at least to a public outcry she was transferred to
Leavenworth Ms. Manning (Private if you prefer her rank) had been convicted and
sentenced to a thirty-five year sentence as a result of being court-martialed
in the summer of 2013 and is currently being held in the all-male barracks at
Fort Leavenworth out on the prairies of Kansas.
Ralph and Bart first heard about the
case in the fall of 2010 when they received an e-mail from the American Civil
Liberties Union announcing a forum to be held at Boston University to publicize
the case. They both attended that forum and as a result have been ever since
involved one way or another in her defense. There were many reasons why this
case had appealed to them personally but the strongest reason was that they
were “paying their dues” as Bart put it while speaking about the case one Saturday
afternoon at a vigil for Chelsea at historic Park Street Station on the Boston
Common for not having had the courage during their own military service during
the Vietnam War to “buck the system.” For a long time as they were doing their
respective peace activist works through various organizations earlier and VFP
lately they had no opportunity to get involved in a military resister case so
once this case surfaced they were “all in.” The last time I checked they were
still “all in.” That will tell you something about them and about the
importance of the Chelsea Manning case, especially as now as the long drag of
her sentence and her environment has worn her down and she has attempted
suicide twice in the past few months. So the “she must not die in jail” in the
headline is not a rhetorical flourish. Not at all. F.T.]
******
“You know it is a crying shame that the
Chelsea Manning case has fallen beneath the cracks, that her plight as the only
woman prisoner in an all-male prison out there in the wheat fields of Kansas,
out at Leavenworth has been ignored except for an occasional news note or yet
another petition for President Obama to do the right thing like he has with the
drug cases and pardon her, to commute her sentence to time served, to the six
plus years she has already been tossed away behind the walls,” yelled Ralph
Morse over to Bart Webber while they were preparing to set up a banner
proclaiming that very idea as part of a birthday vigil for Chelsea on her 29th
birthday on this cold December day. (Ralph thought to himself while he was
yelling over to Bart that he would never get over those basic training drill
sergeants during his time in the military during the Vietnam War, never get
over being spooked by them that if you did not toe the mark you would wind up
in Leavenworth and here he was supporting a young transgender whistleblower who
wound up in that place and who did what he should have done but cowered to
those redneck drill sergeants. Well even 60-somethings can learn a thing or two
from the younger crowd.)
“Yeah, between the fact that she had to
in order to protect herself against maltreatment from a bunch of goddam
threatening guards who told her to “man up” at Leavenworth after she was
convicted and sentenced to those hard thirty-five years in 2013 “come out” as a
transgender woman and the overriding blow-up over the Snowden revelations which
took all the air out of any other whistle-blower case Chelsea got the short end
of the stick,” replied Bart also yelling his comment across to Ralph against
both the windy day and the constant stream of loonies, crazies and con men and
women who populated the environs around the Park Street subway station at
Boston Common on any given Saturday between the hours of one and two in the
afternoon when the space, or part of it, was given over to peace action groups and other left-wing
political organizations.
(Oddly, or maybe not so oddly at that,
Bart, as he told Ralph later that day when they were sitting in a bar having a
couple of drinks to warm themselves up against the coldness of the day thinking
about the day’s action that he too had been thinking about how incongruous it
would have been in his old working class neighborhood in Riverdale to be
supporting a transgender soldier condemned to Leavenworth, a “transvestite,” a
drag queen they would have called her not then making the subtle distinctions
that have evolved on questions of sexual identity. Had that day thought about
the time that he and his corner boys, that is what they called each other back then
when there were corners for dough-less guys to hang around on, that one summer
they had travelled down to Provincetown, even then a gay and other odd-ball Mecca
for the specific purpose of baiting the drag queens, faggots and dykes along
with getting the usual drunk to gather courage. Jesus.)
Ralph thought to himself as he cut a
few wind holes in the banner proclaiming the need for President Obama to grant
Chelsea her pardon that he had come a long way (and Bart too) since the fall of
2010 when they learned that Chelsea (then using her birth name Bradley but here
will use her chosen now legal name and assume everybody understands that this
is the same person we are talking about) was being held essentially incommunicado
down at the Quantico Marine Base (strange since Chelsea was in the Army) in
solitary and their organization, Veterans for Peace, had called for
demonstrations to have her released even then, or at least taken out of
solitary and stop being tortured (no small “peacenik” charge since the
appropriate United Nations rapporteur had made such a finding in her case).
Ralph and Bart had been among the very first to set up a rally (not at Park
Street but in Davis Square over in Somerville where Bart had lived for the
previous decade) and they had been committed to her defense ever since.
(Their own admittedly sorry response to
“their” war, Vietnam, by in Ralph’s case joining the Army and in Bart’s case by
accepting induction into that same Army had caused then after the fact, after
their military service to “get religion” on the questions of war and peace. Ralph
had gone out of his way to join up as soon after high school as he could. Hell
a young man was looked down at in his old Forsyth Street section of Troy if he
waited for the draft board to come calling for him to get on the ball. Most of
the guys he knew were already in or getting ready to. The neighborhood had
already lost a few guys over in Vietnam, a few more had come back as shells of
their former selves. He had done his “tour” in Vietnam without a peep although already
he knew that he had to do something after he got out if he survived to calm the
horrible pit that never left his stomach one he got “in country.”
Bart had had more qualms about the war,
had seen no way though that he could escape the draft once the draft board tagged
him. Like Ralph most of his friends and neighbors supported the war, the guys
doing their service, a few not coming back as in all wars. While he made a few
more noises about his feeling about the war while he was in uniform he had kept
quiet mostly, kept “you don’t want to wind up in Leavenworth quiet. He did not wind
up going to Vietnam as they were beginning to pull back the troops during his
time. He often wondered though if he had gotten orders for Vietnam what he would
have done. Probably gone quietly like his wife wanted him too when they deal
went down. No Canada or jail for him.)
They saw the Chelsea case as pay-back
to a real hero, maybe the only hero of the Iraq War and had worked like seven
dervishes on the case. More importantly had kept the faith even after the case
inevitably went off the front pages and became a cypher to the general
population. Not doing what was right at the time of your own war a very powerful
now lifelong impetus to push on in the face of indifference and hostility among
the general public these days.)
Both men had agreed once the fanfare
had died down that along with keeping the case in the public eye as best they
could they would commemorate two milestones in Chelsea’s live yearly-the
anniversary of her incarceration by the government now over six years in May
and her birthday in December (her 29th ). That was why Ralph and
Bart were struggling with the downtown winds to put their banner in place.
These days they were not taking the overall lead in setting up such events but
had responded to a call by the Queer Strike Force to do so and they were
following that organization’s lead to rally and to make one last desperate push
to get Chelsea a pardon. Everybody agreed, willingly or not, that under the impending
Dump the Trump regime that Chelsea’s chances of a pardon were about zero, maybe
less. So the rally. And so too the desperation in Ralph and Bart’s own minds
that the slogan their fellow VFPer Frank Jackman had coined-“we will not leave
our sister behind” would now fall on deaf ears, that she would face at least
four, maybe eight years of hard ass prison time-time to be served as a man in a
woman’s body when the deal went down. Worse that Chelsea had already attempted
twice earlier in the year to commit suicide and the hard fact emblazoned in the
added sentence on their banner-“she must not die in jail” had added urgency.
Ralph and Bart had met down in
Washington in 1971 after both had been discharged from the Army and had gotten
up some courage, with some prompting from their respective very anti-war
girlfriends (Bart had divorced that hung-ho wife as soon as he got out of the
Army), to go down and get arrested during the May Day actions when in another
desperate situation they tried to help shut down the government if it would not
shut down the war-the Vietnam War. They had been through a lot over the years
in the struggle to keep the peace message alive and well despite the endless
wars, and despite the near zero visibility on the subject over the previous ten
plus years.
Both had grown up in very working class
neighborhood respectively Troy in upstate New York and Riverdale out about
thirty miles west of Boston and had followed the neighborhood crowds
unthinkingly in accepting their war and participating in the war machine when
it came their time. So no way in 1968,1969 say could either have projected that
they would hit their sixties standing out in the lonesome corners of the
American public square defending an Army private who in many quarters was
considered a traitor and who moreover was gay. In the old days the best term
they could think of to describe their respective attitudes toward gays was
“faggot and dyke”-Jesus. (That whole gay issue was already well known to them
from some information provided by agents of Courage to Resist, the organization
which was the main conduit for publicity about the case and for financing
Chelsea’s legal defenses. They also were aware through those same agents about
Chelsea’s sexual identity which all partisans and Chelsea herself had agreed to
keep on the “low” in order not get that issue confused with her heroic
whistle-blower actions during trial and only later revealed by her publicly as
a matter of self-defense as mentioned above.)
Later that night after the birthday vigil
was over and Ralph and Bart were sitting at Jack’s over in Cambridge near where
Bart lives (Ralph still lived in Troy) having a few shots to ward away the cold
of the day’s events both had been a bit morose. The event had gone as well as
could be expected on a political prisoner case that was three years removed
from the serious public eye. The usual small coterie of “peace activists” had
shown up and a few who were supporting Chelsea as a fellow transgender and
there had been the usual speeches and pleas to sign the on-line petition to the
White House to trigger a response from the President on the question of a
pardon (see link above). (That lack of response by the greater LGBTQ community
to Chelsea’s desperate plight all through the case had had Ralph and Bart
shaking their heads in disgust as the usual reason given was that all energies
had to be expended on getting gay marriage recognized. The twice divorced Ralph
and three times divorced mumbled to themselves over that one).
Ralph and Bart were in melancholy mood
no question since they had long ago given up any illusion that the struggle
against war and for some kind of social justice was going to be easy but the
prospects ahead, what Ralph had called the coming “cold civil war” under the
tutelage of one Donald Trump had them reeling as it related to Chelsea’s case.
They bantered back and forth about how many actions they had participated in
since they got the news of the case that a young whistle-blower was being held
for telling the world about the cover-up of countless atrocities committed by
American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (via Wiki-leaks, not the mainstream
media who would not touch making the information that Chelsea had gleaned for
love or money).
There were the trips to Quantico down
in hostile Virginia in order to get Chelsea out of the “hole,” get her out of
Marine base solitary (and where they faced an incredible array of cops and
military personnel all to “monitor” a few hundred supporters). The trips to the
White House to proclaim their message. The several trips during the trial down
at Fort Meade in Maryland where they had to laugh about being on a military
base for the first time in decades (they had been barred many years back for
demonstrations on a military base against the Reagan administrations war
against Central America). The weekly vigils before the case went to trial and
over the previous three years the fight to keep the case in the public
eye.
As they finished up their last shots of
whiskey against the cold night both agreed though that come May they would be
out commemorating Chelsea’s seventh year in the jug if Obama did not do the
right thing beforehand. They both yelled as they went their separate ways (Ralph
was staying with his daughter in Arlington) old Frank Jackman’s coined
phrase-“we will not leave our sister behind.” No way.
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