Bourgeoisie Debates Drones, Military Costs-Fine-Tuning U.S. Imperialist Terror Machine

Workers Vanguard No. 1020	22 March 2013

Bourgeoisie Debates Drones, Military Costs-Fine-Tuning U.S. Imperialist Terror Machine

In the nearly 12 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, America’s capitalist rulers have implemented an unprecedented enhancement of their repressive powers in the name of fighting the “war against terrorism.” While unleashing its unrivaled military might from Iraq to Afghanistan, Washington has instituted massive wiretapping, surveillance and detention without trial at home. This trampling of basic rights was implemented first by the Bush administration and expanded by the Obama White House, as the ruling class sought to inculcate fear and acquiescence in the population. In obtaining legal sanction for its crimes at home and abroad, the government has made permanent fixtures of measures that in the main were portrayed as temporary exigencies. This is a deadly danger to the working class and oppressed minorities, the principal targets of capitalist repression.

The recent sparring between some on Capitol Hill and the White House over the targeted killings of U.S. citizens is all about making the state apparatus more effective in its murderous work. For weeks, various Senators made noises about holding up the confirmation of John Brennan as Obama’s CIA chief. Four years ago, Brennan was so tarred by his association with torture under George W. Bush that Obama did not pursue his nomination to the same post. But he since became the architect of Obama’s drone program.

Brennan’s critics demanded that the White House release secret legal memos that had authorized the assassination of U.S. citizens, although neither Democrats nor Republicans have batted an eye over the thousands of Pakistanis, Yemenis and others slaughtered by drones. When the Justice Department White Paper summarizing the memos surfaced in February, politicians on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly hailed this augmentation of the lethal powers of the imperial presidency. In urging Brennan’s rapid confirmation, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein intoned, with presumably unintended menace: “He draws on a deep well of experience.”

It was to be expected that the Democrats would go along with their Commander-in-Chief. So it was right-wing Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky who challenged Obama, mainly about the prospect of the assassination of U.S. citizens on American soil. Paul’s 13-hour filibuster on March 6, aimed at blocking Brennan’s confirmation vote, was widely covered in the media and received plaudits from some liberal antiwar activists and others. Make no mistake, libertarians like Paul, a Tea Party favorite, hate unions and spending government money on black people—or anyone else for that matter—far more than they object to the evisceration of civil liberties.

The Obama administration demonstrated its determination to assassinate U.S. citizens when it killed New Mexico-born Islamist Anwar al-Awlaki by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. His son and several Yemenis were similarly blown away some months later. And all along, the White House has kept open the option of assassinating U.S. citizens on American soil as well. In a March 4 letter to Rand Paul, Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed the scenario of drone strikes inside U.S. territory as “entirely hypothetical” but granted that the president could “conceivably” authorize such attacks in the context of a “catastrophic attack” like Pearl Harbor or September 11.

On the day after the filibuster, Holder issued a curt follow-up letter claiming the right of the president to assassinate anyone, anywhere except for citizens “not engaged in combat” on U.S. soil. For the imperialists, who is “engaged in combat” is a very elastic concept. In May 2002, U.S. citizen Jose Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on trumped-up charges. One month later, he was declared to be an “enemy combatant” and was disappeared into a Navy brig in South Carolina. In the end, he was railroaded to 17 years in prison. In an amicus brief filed by the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee on Padilla’s behalf, we stressed that the “rationale of the ‘war against terrorism’ is a construct justifying not only the right to disappear citizens, but the right to assassinate them as well.”

Imperialist Crimes

A week after Brennan’s confirmation, a UN official presenting an investigation into U.S. drone strikes declared that such attacks carried out in Pakistan over the objections of local authorities violated international law. The UN investigation, carried out at the request of Russia and China as well as Pakistan, identified some 330 strikes in that country, totaling at least 2,200 dead. With U.S. drones firing with impunity on the population, including emergency response personnel, funeral processions and schools, life in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border has been shattered. Some imperialist strategists worry, with reason, that the unbridled drone program is creating a lot more “enemy combatants” around the world.

To mollify those in Washington who worry about the excessive secrecy of the drone program and have qualms about deploying drones against U.S. citizens, proposals have been made for a special court to approve the “targeted killings.” This is a total sham. Such a court would be modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts for wiretapping applications. FISA courts have never been more than a rubber stamp for the executive office.

In another proposal to refine U.S. imperialist policies, a New York Times (9 March) editorial called for repealing the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). This legislation, which was adopted three days after the September 11 attacks, gave the executive carte blanche in the global “war on terror,” providing a go-ahead for the invasion of Afghanistan and also much of the basis for “anti-terror” measures on the home front. The Times—whose services to the “war on terror” included reporter Judith Miller retailing the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”—now laments “an unintelligible policy without express limits or protective walls” implemented under the 2001 authorization. The Times editorialists worry mainly that the greatly enhanced powers of the executive will someday be wielded by one less enlightened than the former constitutional law professor Obama—namely, a Republican less to their liking.

Whatever their policy differences at various times, the Democratic and Republican parties are united in furthering the interests of U.S. imperialism against the exploited and oppressed around the world. During the recent “sequestration” circus, there was bipartisan consensus that the U.S. military could stand some trimming, particularly now that the Iraq occupation is officially over and the deployment of troops to Afghanistan is coming to a close. Of course, any cuts to the Pentagon budget that Washington comes up with would still leave the U.S. as the overwhelmingly predominant military force on the planet. There is also bipartisan consensus on the strategic military “pivot” toward Asia announced last year by Obama, the primary target of which is the Chinese deformed workers state. The retailing of endless scare stories about Chinese “cyberattacks” is above all a means for the administration to justify its increased belligerence toward China.

Blood-Soaked American “Democracy”

The New York Times has apparently decided that it, too, lacked some transparency in regard to Army Private Bradley Manning. After providing WikiLeaks with a trove of classified material documenting U.S. imperialist crimes and duplicity, Manning was thrown into a military brig three years ago, suffering enormous abuse, and now faces a potential life sentence. Last month, WV wrote a letter to Margaret Sullivan, the Times’ Public Editor, noting the omission of any mention of Bradley Manning in two February 9 articles condemning cover-ups in the drone program and charging that this was “simply cowardice on the part of the Times” (see WV No. 1018, 22 February). With his court martial approaching, Manning confessed on February 28 to having released the materials to WikiLeaks after unsuccessfully trying to interest the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Judging by Sullivan’s subsequent article “The Danger of Suppressing the Leaks” (9 March), we were not alone in calling attention to Manning’s disappearance by this major bourgeois mouthpiece. Sullivan’s column notes that the military has charged Manning with “aiding the enemy” for breaking through the wall of official secrecy. The next day, the Times ran an op-ed piece by Bill Keller, its former executive editor, which suggested that the Times might well have suppressed many of the files and would certainly feel no obligation to come to his defense in any case.

In “Hail Bradley Manning! Free Him Now!” (WV No. 1019, 8 March), we wrote: “In lifting a bit of the veil of secrecy and lies with which the capitalist rulers cover their depredations, Bradley Manning performed a great service to workers and oppressed around the world. All who oppose the imperialist barbarity and machinations revealed in the material he provided must join in demanding his immediate freedom.” Manning’s admission to being the source of the leaks has garnered him wider support, forcing even the Times to take note. With his trial slated to begin on June 3 at Fort Meade, Maryland, his supporters should turn out to demand his immediate freedom.

One writer in the bourgeois media who has given Manning extensive coverage is Glenn Greenwald. In a March 4 speech at Brooklyn College, the London Guardian columnist observed that the torture of Manning by the U.S. military was intended as a message to chill political dissent. In condemning the open-ended “war on terror,” Greenwald noted, among other things, how what started as a crackdown on immigrants from the Muslim world after September 11 became a far broader net of repression, even extending into the Occupy protests.

The civil libertarian Greenwald painted a picture of democracy dying after September 11. But attacks on the working class, minorities and perceived political opponents of the ruling class are built into the very fabric of this “democracy,” which is but a veil over the class dictatorship of the capitalist exploiters. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin taught:

“There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a ‘violation of public order,’ and actually in case the exploited class ‘violates’ its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.”

— The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

U.S. history is replete with the intentional slaughter of citizens, from gunning down workers in strike battles to cops shooting black youth in the streets. As a Spartacist comrade said in the discussion period following Greenwald’s talk: “I have a memory of what American capitalism is all about: Black Panthers killed in their beds while they’re asleep, 1969, Chicago; internment of Japanese Americans. These are not excesses. The deception and the repression are inherent within the capitalist system. It has to be abolished through fighting for workers revolution.”

In the last five years, millions of workers in the U.S., and many more around the world, have lost their livelihoods and even their homes due to the grinding capitalist economic crisis. The enormous tensions between the tiny class of exploiters and the mass of people at the base of society are the seeds of future sharp class battles. When the workers are propelled into struggle against their conditions, they will be confronted with the exercise of naked state repression. This underscores the crucial need for the proletariat to oppose all imperialist wars and occupations and all domestic measures strengthening the capitalist state apparatus. The principal task for Marxists is to forge a revolutionary workers party—a tribune of the people—to lead the proletariat in sweeping away capitalist class rule and replacing it with a workers government. 

For the Right of Gay Marriage…and Divorce!Uproar Over Same-Sex Marriage-France

Workers Vanguard No. 1020	22 March 2013

For the Right of Gay Marriage…and Divorce!

Uproar Over Same-Sex Marriage

France

The following article was translated from Le Bolchévik No. 203 (March 2013), which is published by the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the ICL. A law legalizing gay marriage and adoption, which was passed by the National Assembly on February 12, is due to be debated in the Senate in early April.

The LTF has joined in the recent mobilizations for “marriage for all,” which are aimed at winning some degree of basic rights for gay couples, including finally the right to adopt children. In fact, the first limited legal recognition of gay couples dates back only to 1999 with the introduction of the Civil Solidarity Pact [a form of civil union]. As Marxists, we support the right of homosexuals to marry—and to divorce freely—because we are for full legal equality and democratic rights for gays, just as we support any legal advances that the working class and oppressed can wrest from the capitalists and their state. At the same time, we fight for a society in which no one is forced into a legal straitjacket to get the basic rights that capitalist society grants only to those locked in the traditional legal mold of “one man on one woman for life.”

In the wake of parliament’s adoption of the new bill, the Communist Party (PCF) writes that “marriage is no longer (or not exactly) a patriarchal institution, outdated and reactionary” and that “the National Assembly has revolutionized the institution of the family” (l’Humanité, 13 February). On the one hand the PCF captures a certain truth: the law on gay marriage is intended to adapt marriage to the reality of how people live today in order to better defend the institution of the bourgeois family. As Jean-Jacques Urvoas, the Socialist Party president of the parliamentary law commission, stated in an interview in Le Monde (15 January): “It is mistaken to accuse us of attacking the family when what we want is to make all families secure.”

But until the day capitalism is destroyed, the function of marriage as a key pillar of the bourgeois family unit will not change. Like the oppression of women, the oppression of homosexuals is not primarily the result of right-wing reaction and social backwardness but is rooted in the institution of the family, whose historical function is to transmit private ownership of the means of production to “legitimate” heirs through inheritance. This is why France forbids single people and gay couples from using artificial insemination or medically assisted procreation (including in vitro fertilization) as well as surrogate motherhood. The family is also one of the means through which the ruling class seeks to instill respect for authority and obedience to its moral codes. Homosexuality is deemed “sinful” and “deviant” by the Catholic church and the bourgeois order because it deviates from the patriarchal structure of the monogamous one man/one woman family.

The PCF’s opposition to surrogate parenthood, a practice that benefits gay men in particular, also speaks to its faith in the institution of the family. Surrogate parenthood currently carries a fine of 45,000 euros and a three-year prison sentence. It was strongly denounced by Justice Minister Christiane Taubira and the PCF’s Marie-Georges Buffet during the parliamentary debates on gay marriage and is also attacked by feminists in the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA). They all argue that it commercializes women’s bodies: “Giving power to a third party over a woman’s pregnancy is a threat to the right to abortion. Moreover, the ability to alienate her body by a contract opens the door to the legalization of prostitution” (Tout Est à Nous! La Revue magazine, April 2011).

At bottom, they uphold the bourgeois model that decrees that it is the job of the woman (and not two men) to raise children. They also deny a woman’s fundamental right to choose what to do with her body. If a woman decides to carry a baby for someone else, that’s her decision and the state and its politicians should stay out of it. Likewise, if she becomes a prostitute to make a living rather than being exploited by some factory owner at a job where she breaks her back or suffers relentless harassment, that’s her business and not something for the capitalist state to legislate.

We stand for the decriminalization of prostitution, which we regard as a “crime without a victim,” like drug use, gambling, pornography, homosexual and intergenerational sex—activities that are generally illegal or heavily regulated under capitalist law. For us Marxists, the guiding principle in sexual relations is that of effective consent, not age, relationship, sex, number of people or degree of intimacy. This means nothing more and nothing less than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. As long as those who take part agree to do what they are doing, no one, least of all the state, has the right to tell them they cannot. State out of the bedroom!

Homophobic Hysteria and the Fight for Democratic Rights

The church and the right-wing parties have mobilized hundreds of thousands of bigots in the streets against gay marriage. The level of homophobic hysteria can be so grotesque as to seem farcical. Take the diatribe by Dassault, a leading French capitalist, predicting the end of civilization if gay marriage became law: “There will be no more reproduction, so what is the point? Do we want a nation of gays? If so, in ten years there will be no one left; it’s stupid…. Look at history, ancient Greece; it is one of the reasons for its decline” (Le Monde online, 7 November 2012). But some things are more sinister. The youth group of the UMP [Union for a Popular Movement of former president Nicolas Sarkozy] of the Haute Garonne département [administrative division] published on its Web site a photo of a bare-chested young man hanging from a rope with the words above him: “You will not be a queer, my son.” All this will fuel violent assaults against gays and lesbians…as well as their kids. One out of every four homosexuals has been the victim of a physical attack over the last ten years, according to a poll conducted for the gay magazine Têtu. The gay rights association SOS Homophobie in its last annual report lists 29 murders in France during the past decade in which homophobia or transphobia was the motive.

A revolutionary party must vigorously make known to the workers movement all attacks and discrimination on homosexuals and every oppressed sector of the population, vigorously protesting against these assaults. Such attacks are ultimately aimed at weakening the entire working class and dividing it along sexual and racial lines, serving to strengthen the capitalist state’s repressive powers and maintain capitalist rule. The working class must come to understand that in order to liberate itself from the shackles of capitalist oppression and exploitation, it must seize its historic task: to abolish class society in order to open the road to human freedom for everyone.

But to mobilize the immense social power of the organized working class against capitalism necessarily means an intransigent political struggle against the leaders of the social-democratic parties of the Left Front, the NPA and others who take up the defense of the bourgeois family, albeit in its refurbished form. They promote the lie that if only sufficient pressure is applied from the streets, capitalism can be “revolutionized” and made more humane by means of a “left” government. In this way they work to preserve capitalist exploitation and the social reaction that goes with it.

Anti-Woman, Anti-Youth “Republican Values”

Given the reactionary rubbish being spewed by the right, the Socialist Hollande government has had little trouble appearing “progressive” by promoting “marriage for all” (which does not diminish its capitulation to the church and right-wing parties over in vitro fertilization). The government hopes to use this as political capital to get on with presiding over factory closures, criminalizing the trade unions and implementing the rest of its racist, anti-worker agenda without too much opposition. In Britain, it is the Conservative prime minister who has just steered a vote on gay marriage through Parliament in order to strengthen the institution of the family and also, as in Hollande’s case, to give itself a “social” cover in order to better push through its relentless austerity attacks.

Justice Minister Taubira declared of the new marriage law: “Marriage for everyone well illustrates the slogan of the Republic…freedom of choice, equality of all couples, fraternity, because no differences should serve as pretexts for discrimination by the state” (l’Humanité, 30 January). Talk about hypocrisy! The French state, whether run by the right or the left, has no qualms over breaking up families when it comes to the working class, immigrants and other oppressed layers. A gathering in Aubervilliers recently marked the first anniversary of the deportation of Changfeng Mo, an undocumented immigrant with two young children born and educated in France, who was deported after ten years living and working in the country. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants and their families! There is, of course, no sign of “fraternity” coming from cop minister Valls to reunite this man with his family.

Or take France’s latest département, the small island of Mayotte [part of the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean, near Mozambique], which in 2010 carried out 26,400 deportations, of whom 6,400 were children. This number was not far below the 33,000 immigrants deported from metropolitan France. Under Valls & Co., the deportation machine in Mayotte continues to operate at such a pace that kids frequently come home from school to find one or both of their parents gone, taken to the transit center to await deportation. There are also several documented cases in which children have been deported without their parents by being arbitrarily “assigned” to a stranger. Down with the deportations!

For months and months we have heard politicians of the left and right swearing that they have only the best interests of children and youth at heart when at the same time all of them work to maintain the capitalist class and its machinery of state repression—the real source of violence, crime and alienation inflicted on young people in this society. In France today, a quarter of those between the ages of 16 and 24 are jobless and see little immediate prospect of getting out from under the family roof to live independently. In many banlieue areas [minority and working-class neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities], the jobless figures for youth have been at 50 percent (or more) for some years now. The 2005 banlieue revolt spoke to this despair, particularly among male youth of minority backgrounds, who see no future for themselves outside of a McJob or more likely the unemployment office or prison. And since 2005, the situation has only gotten worse.

Today the Peugeot company and Hollande are shutting down the Aulnay car plant, historically one of the main employers for youth—albeit on lousy temporary contracts—in the “93” [a heavily minority département northeast of Paris]. People like Arnaud Montebourg [Socialist minister of industrial recovery] wag their fingers in the tradition of their hero, [19th-century colonialist] Jules Ferry. They lecture the workers that they need to “try harder,” be more flexible and take jobs hundreds of miles from their homes. In fact, by doing that they are creating thousands more single-parent households with all the weight of oppression this implies, especially for women. Repeated deep cuts in education and health care budgets in recent years also weigh particularly on women and children. It is now common practice for municipalities to refuse school lunches to children of unemployed parents—sometimes their only hot meal of the day—with the state arguing that since the parents don’t work the kids can go home to eat. Thus they ensure that mothers (in the main) remain jobless and isolated in the home. Free school meals and quality, 24-hour childcare for all!

The Family as a Pillar of Capitalism

The only way to begin to do away with the deep-rooted chauvinism and violence generated by the capitalist profit system against youth, women, gays, immigrants and other oppressed layers is the struggle to overthrow bourgeois rule by socialist revolution. Through the expropriation of the productive property of the capitalist class, a workers government will lay the basis for a planned economy that qualitatively expands the productive forces, eliminates scarcity and vastly expands the range and depth of scientific knowledge. Making such a leap in social productivity presupposes the international extension of the revolution, crucially in the advanced imperialist countries. Socialist revolution can then begin to lay the basis for replacing the family by providing the material means to socialize and collectivize its household functions (for example, establishing communal 24-hour childcare, kitchens, cafeterias and laundries as well as free health care).

The family originated with the development of classes. Prior to that stage of history, it was not important who the father was since children were to a large extent raised collectively by the entire community. But the invention of agriculture made it possible for the first time for people to produce more than they could consume themselves. This led to the creation of a surplus and of private property, and thus of an idle class that lived off the labor of others. In order to pass down its fortune and property to the next generation, that class had to know who the father was. This is the origin of the institution of marriage, whose goal was precisely to restrict women’s sexual activity, enforcing monogamy for women (not men). Therefore by its nature the family is sexually repressive. Even today, if a woman in France wants to re-marry in the nine months following her divorce, she is legally obliged to undergo a medical examination to obtain a doctor’s certificate stating that she is not pregnant. This is in line with the Civil Code, which specifies that “if a child is conceived or born during the marriage, the father is the husband.”

French Revolution’s Legacy for Women and Gays

To understand that social progress will only come from revolutionary struggle, it is necessary to look back and study the significant advances won during such periods for women and homosexuals and other minorities. The French Revolution of 1789 was a bourgeois revolution preserving private property, which limited the changes it introduced. Nevertheless it brought monumental progress in women’s and homosexual rights, particularly during its most radical years.

As late as 1783 under the ancien régime, a monk was burned alive after being charged with conducting a sexual act with a boy. The penal code of 1791 removed the crime of sodomy from the books and declared it an “imaginary crime.” Police surveillance of known homosexual meeting places such as the Tuileries gardens diminished markedly in the wake of the revolution.

Women had no rights whatsoever under the ancien régime. The monarchy constantly sought to reinforce, consolidate and extend the father’s control over the marriage of his children. Women charged with committing adultery were sentenced to be publicly whipped, thrown in prison or, worst of all, sent to the convent for life. Men could not marry without parental consent, and if they married a minor (under 25 years for women) without that consent they could be sentenced to death, whether the woman consented or not. Marriage was indissoluble—a life sentence.

In 1792, the age of legal adulthood was reduced to 21 years for all and marriage without parental consent became possible. The divorce law enacted the same year was extremely liberal (even by today’s standards), allowing couples to divorce by mutual consent or through either spouse declaring incompatibility. It made divorce affordable even for the poor throughout the country. In the year following the introduction of the law, 70 percent of all divorces were initiated by women. Further, a 1793 decree gave illegitimate children the right to inherit from both the mother and the father. There was also legislation accepting “free unions,” so that, for example, unmarried partners of soldiers could receive government pensions. With one stroke, the institution of the family lost one of its main functions, i.e., to transfer property from one generation to another. As we wrote in “Women and the French Revolution” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 56, Spring 2001):

“The family was temporarily undermined in order to serve the needs of the revolution against its enemies, the feudal nobility and Catholic church. This is one demonstration of the fact that social institutions which seem to be immutable, to be ‘natural’ and ‘eternal,’ are in fact nothing more than the codification of social relations dictated by the particular economic system that is in place. After the bourgeoisie consolidated its power as the new ruling class, it re-established the constraints of the family. But nothing would ever be the same again. The contradictory reality of the French Revolution—the breathtaking leap in securing individual rights and the strict limits imposed on those rights by the fact that this was a bourgeois and not a socialist revolution—was captured by Karl Marx in The German Ideology:

“‘The existence of the family is made necessary by its connection with the mode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois society. That it was impossible to do without it was demonstrated in the most striking way during the French Revolution, when for a moment the family was as good as legally abolished’.”

With the Thermidorian reaction many of these gains were diminished or overturned, but the situation of women had progressed qualitatively as it also had for homosexuals; there could never be a return to the total subjugation of women that existed under the ancien régime. The fight for women’s liberation was front and center during the Paris Commune decades later. With the establishment of the Napoleonic civil code in 1804, which consolidated the bourgeois order, various morality laws were reintroduced which were used in part to repress gay men, but there was no explicit criminalization of homosexuality in the penal code. This was why Oscar Wilde and other gay men settled in France in order to escape prison in their own countries.

Anti-Homosexual Repression After World War II

It was not until 1942 under Vichy that the Pétain government [quisling regime of the Nazi occupation] amended the law to once again explicitly criminalize homosexuality. Under the German occupation, the French police and the Gestapo rounded up homosexuals and sent them to the labor and death camps—crimes that were not recognized by a French head of state until 2005. These laws were not repealed but were reinforced under the early postwar governments under General de Gaulle and the PCF. This was the period of the “battle of production”: after the devastation of the imperialist war, there were enormous social expectations and great anger among the working class. The PCF labored to save French capitalism and supported de Gaulle’s “moral order.” They condemned strikes and pushed workers to toil harder and longer in order to produce more profits (and also to produce children that would later work in the factories…). In 1945, de Gaulle evoked the “12 million beautiful babies that France needs in 12 years,” and legislation was introduced to further strengthen the family.

In July 1945, the government voted to increase the age of consent to 15 for heterosexuals and 21 for homosexuals (previously set at eleven years old in 1832 and in 1863 at 13, for everyone). The following year, the government introduced a law targeting homosexuals whereby only people “of good moral character” could work in the civil service. In 1960, again under de Gaulle, a Gaullist parliamentarian denounced homosexuality as “a scourge against which it is our duty to protect our children,” and the need to “struggle against homosexuality,” alongside alcoholism, prostitution and certain illnesses like tuberculosis, was inscribed in law. This amendment did not produce the slightest debate.

It was only in the wake of the May 1968 upheaval that anything changed. In May ’68, youth rose up against de Gaulle’s stultifying moral order, sparking strikes and factory occupations that threatened the capitalist order. Women and homosexuals once again began to make advances in their democratic rights. Already during May ’68, attempts were made to create a Revolutionary Committee of Gay Action, but its leaflets posted at the Sorbonne university were torn down. In subsequent years, homosexual organizations such as the FHAR (Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action) were set up, fighting centrally for gay rights but also for the right to abortion and contraception and in opposition to the age-of-consent laws. These organizations gave unprecedented visibility to the fight for gay rights. They participated in the labor movement’s traditional May Day demonstrations, although not without hostility from the leaders of the PCF at that time. Speaking of the FHAR’s participation in the 1972 May Day demonstration, the PCF’s Roland Leroy wrote in l’Humanité: “This riffraff does not represent the vanguard of society but the rottenness of capitalism in its decay.”

But it was the refusal of the workers movement (centrally the PCF) to embrace the fight for gay rights that led to the development of petty-bourgeois sectoralism, i.e., a view that the fight for gay rights was a separate issue, to be engaged mainly by those concerned. Today’s gay rights groups have few links with and are often hostile to the workers movement and class struggle, the only means by which gay liberation can be won. Finally in 1974, access to contraception was opened up, including for minors, and the Pill reimbursed by the national health care system. A year later, abortion was legalized. Then between 1980 and 1982, under [conservative president] Giscard d’Estaing followed by [Socialist president François] Mitterrand, the laws criminalizing homosexuality were also for the most part repealed at last.

The Russian Revolution and Social Emancipation

For Marxists, contrary to gay rights organizations like the FHAR in the 1970s or groups like Act Up today, there is no special program for homosexuals. The communist program includes demands that address the special oppression of gays, and we understand that the fate of homosexuals—like all other oppressed groups—is determined by the class struggle. But under capitalism, gains and advances are reversible and social reaction is always strengthened during periods of economic crises, as can be seen today.

Only a socialist revolution can lay the basis for definitively putting an end to social oppression. Our model is the 1917 October Revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. Immediately after the seizure of power, the Soviet workers state began to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of women and homosexuals. The Bolsheviks abolished all legal impediments to women’s equality and all laws against homosexual acts and other consensual sexual activity. Their position was explained in a 1923 pamphlet by Dr. Grigorii Batkis, Director of the Moscow Institute for Sexual Hygiene, titled “The Sexual Revolution in Russia” (see also “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006):

“[The new Soviet legislation] declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon.... Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called ‘natural’ intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters.”

For the Bolsheviks, women’s emancipation was an integral part of the emancipation of the working class itself, not something subordinate to it. The Bolsheviks, informed by their Marxist program for women’s liberation, sought to build socialized alternatives to the family, within the limits of their capacity in backward Russia. The country had been bled white by World War I and the civil war that broke out soon after the October Revolution and was under the immense pressure of hostile imperialist encirclement. They struggled, amid the harsh economic situation, to provide the material and economic means to abolish the family unit and release women from the isolation of childcare and domestic work. These glimmers of a new society and an end to the oppression of women and gays later faded under the political counterrevolution led by Stalin in 1923-24 in the context of the isolation of the young workers state. In 1934 a law was passed punishing homosexuality with imprisonment, and in 1936 abortion was outlawed.

Sexuality is not in itself a political question. It is the bourgeoisie that politicizes this issue by victimizing those who do not fit the norms established by the family, church and state. We seek to carry forward the program of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks and to mobilize the proletariat in defense of the rights of all the oppressed as part of the fight to overturn capitalism through socialist revolution. To create genuinely free and equal relations among people in all spheres, including sex, requires nothing less than the destruction of capitalist class rule and the creation of a communist world. 

Lenin on Women’s Emancipation

Workers Vanguard No. 1020	22 March 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

Lenin on Women’s Emancipation

(Quote of the Week)

Writing nearly two years after the 1917 Bolshevik-led proletarian seizure of power in Russia, V.I. Lenin gave a critical progress report on the status of women in the fledgling workers state. Under conditions of extreme backwardness, civil war and imperialist invasion, the early Soviet government sought, insofar as it was able, to make women full participants in the workforce and all realms of life by taking steps to replace the family with collective institutions to perform household tasks. The Bolsheviks understood that the oppression of women would ultimately be rooted out only with the development of a socialist society based on material abundance, requiring the extension of proletarian revolution to the advanced capitalist countries.

Take the position of women. In this field, not a single democratic party in the world, not even in the most advanced bourgeois republic, has done in decades so much as a hundredth part of what we did in our very first year in power. We really razed to the ground the infamous laws placing women in a position of inequality, restricting divorce and surrounding it with disgusting formalities, denying recognition to children born out of wedlock, enforcing a search for their fathers, etc., laws numerous survivals of which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, are to be found in all civilised countries. We have a thousand times the right to be proud of what we have done in this field. But the more thoroughly we have cleared the ground of the lumber of the old, bourgeois laws and institutions, the clearer it is to us that we have only cleared the ground to build on but are not yet building.

Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins.

Do we in practice pay sufficient attention to this question, which in theory every Communist considers indisputable? Of course not. Do we take proper care of the shoots of communism which already exist in this sphere? Again the answer is no. Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens—here we have examples of these shoots, here we have the simple, everyday means, involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life.

—V. I. Lenin, “A Great Beginning” (28 June 1919)

Appeal by Husband of Imprisoned Leftist Lawyer-Lynne Stewart Critically Ill—Free Her Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1020	22 March 2013

Appeal by Husband of Imprisoned Leftist Lawyer

Lynne Stewart Critically Ill—Free Her Now!

The Partisan Defense Committee joins with the family of Lynne Stewart, whose cancer has metastasized, in calling for her immediate release from prison. To date, prison authorities have refused all requests for her to receive medical care outside the walls of America’s dungeons. In response to a January letter from the PDC, the warden of the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where the 73-year-old Stewart is incarcerated, admitted that she is dying. But in the same breath he coldly stated that “a terminal illness is a life expectancy of one year or less,” concluding that by the state’s sadistic logic she does not qualify for compassionate release.

The PDC—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people—has defended Stewart since she was first indicted over a decade ago. The government went after her for vigorously defending her client, an Islamist cleric, concocting the charge of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism. After Stewart’s original sentence was quadrupled in 2010, we wrote: “This is a loud affirmation by the Obama administration that there will be no letup in the massive attacks on democratic rights under the ‘war on terror’” (“Vindictive Transfer to Texas Prison: Free Lynne Stewart Now!” WV No. 975, 4 March 2011).

We print below a petition by Stewart’s husband, Ralph Poynter, and family, available at lynnestewart.org. The PDC has signed the petition as well as contributed to her legal defense, and we encourage our readers to do the same. Send donations to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York 11216. Those wishing to correspond can send letters to: Lynne Stewart, #53504-054, Federal Medical Center, Carswell, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.

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Lynne Stewart has devoted her life to the oppressed—a constant advocate for the countless many deprived in the United States of their freedom and their rights.

Unjustly charged and convicted for the “crime” of providing her client with a fearless defense, the prosecution of Lynne Stewart is an assault upon the basic freedoms of us all.

After years of post-conviction freedom, her bail was revoked arbitrarily and her imprisonment ordered, precluding surgery she had scheduled in a major New York hospital.

The sinister meaning of the relentless persecution of Lynne Stewart is unmistakably clear. Given her age and precarious health, the ten-year sentence she is serving is a virtual death sentence.

Since her imprisonment in the Federal Prison in Carswell, Texas her urgent need for surgery was delayed 18 months—so long, that the operating physician pronounced the condition as “the worst he had seen.”

Now, breast cancer, which had been in remission prior to her imprisonment, has reached Stage Four. It has appeared in her lymph nodes, on her shoulder, in her bones and her lungs.

Her daughter, a physician, has sounded the alarm: “Under the best of circumstances, Lynne would be in a battle of the most serious consequences with dangerous odds. With cancer and cancer treatment, the complications can be as debilitating and as dangerous as the cancer itself.”

In her current setting, where trips to physicians involve attempting to walk with ten pounds of shackles on her wrists and ankles, with connecting chains, Lynne Stewart has lacked ready access to physicians and specialists under conditions compatible with medical success.

It can take weeks to see a medical provider in prison conditions. It can take weeks to report physical changes and learn the results of treatment; and when held in the hospital, Lynne has been shackled wrist and ankle to the bed.

This medieval “shackling” has little to do with any appropriate prison control. She is obviously not an escape risk.

We demand abolition of this practice for all prisoners, let alone those facing surgery and the urgent necessity of care and recovery.

It amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of human rights.

There is immediate remedy available for Lynne Stewart. Under the 1984 Sentencing Act, after a prisoner request, the Bureau of Prisons can file a motion with the Court to reduce sentences “for extraordinary and compelling reasons.” Life threatening illness is foremost among these and Lynne Stewart meets every rational and humane criterion for compassionate release.

To misconstrue the gravamen of this compassionate release by conditioning such upon being at death’s door—released, if at all, solely to die—is a cruel mockery converting a prison sentence, wholly undeserved, into a death sentence.

The New York Times, in an editorial (2/12), has excoriated the Bureau of Prisons for their restrictive crippling of this program. In a 20-year period, the Bureau released a scant 492 persons—an average of 24 a year out of a population that exceeds 220,000.

We cry out against the bureaucratic murder of Lynne Stewart.

We demand Lynne Stewart’s immediate release to receive urgent medical care in a supportive environment indispensable to the prospect of her survival and call upon the Bureau of Prisons to act immediately.

If Lynne’s original sentence of 28 months had not been unreasonably, punitively increased to ten years, she would be home now—where her medical care would be by her choice and where those who love her best would care for her. Her isolation from this loving care would end.

Prevent this cruelty to Lynne Stewart whose lifelong commitment to justice is now a struggle for her life.

Free Lynne Stewart Now!

Ralph Poynter and Family

From The American Left History Blog Archives (2007)- On American Political Discourse

Markin comment:

In the period 2006-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.

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TROUBLE IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE

COMMENTARY

ABOLISH THE BRITISH MONARCHY, STATE CHURCH AND HOUSE OF LORDS

In the normal course of events news from England’s Buckingham Palace, the seat of the British monarchy, does not directly concern socialist militants except in a propagandistic way. Most of the news lately has concerned the ‘plight’ of poor Prince Harry (or is it Prince William?) and his non-deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan with his tank unit. However another more recent piece of news permits me to make some points about the socialist attitude toward those ‘revered’ English institutions of British royalty, the established Anglican Church and the moribund House of Lords.

I will admit that I have received this news second hand but Queen Elizabeth’s eldest grandson Peter Phillips, son of her daughter Princess Anne, has become engaged to a Canadian woman. Nothing extraordinary there. However in the convoluted process of the British royal succession Peter Phillips stands number ten in line to the throne. That, again, would be neither here nor there except that the woman he proposes to marry, Autumn Kelly, is a strongly self-professed Catholic. And there is the rub. Although Peter's real chances of getting to be the ’once and future king’are just a shade better than mine apparently if he marries the Catholic woman without some form of renunciation he violates British law. According to the Act of Settlement of 1701 (the one that brought Queen Anne, daughter of the papist James II, to the throne) no British monarch can marry a papist- a Roman Catholic. Thus, either Peter Phillips has to renounce his right to the throne or Autumn has to renounce her religious beliefs. Attempts, including one last year, to rescind that law have failed. And that is where socialists have a duty to comment.

Strange to have to say in the year 2007 but socialists, while hostile to religion on principal, are opposed to religious tests for anyone- including marrying into royalty. A great part of the struggle during the heroic days of the rise of the bourgeoisie and the fight for the Enlightenment centered on this very question of state support of, and interference in, the private realm of religion. But that is not the main point. In England the head of state, in this case the queen, is also the head of the state church. This brings me to the real argument. Despite the so-called aura of tradition and despite its alleged benign symbolic place the real fight here is to abolish the monarchy. When Oliver Cromwell and his friends established the Commonwealth during the English Revolution one of the important acts, if not the most important act, was the abolishing of the monarchy exemplified by the beheading of Charles I. I, however, do not believe that Cromwell spent enough time trying to round up Charles' sons, who later during the counter-revolution became Charles II and James II, in order to eliminate (or at least curtail) the chances of restoration. So here is my proposal. British militants take note. In order for the kids, Citizen Peter Phillips and Citizen Autumn Kelly, to get married life off to the right start-ABOLISH THE BRITISH MONARCHY, ABOLISH THE STATE CHURCH and ABOLISH THE HOUSE OF LORDS. In short, finish the tasks of the old English Revolution of the 1600’s. Those are our tasks, among others, in the British Isles.

***Buy The Ticket-Take The Ride- Doctor Gonzo-Hunter S. Thompson At The End

Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century by Hunter S. Thompson

Make no mistake the late, lamented Hunter Thompson was always something of a muse for me going way back to the early 1970’s when I first read his seminal raw and no-holds-barred (or only a few in order to save his teeth, arms, legs, head, whatever from any adverse blowback-those guys with the whipsaws and chains were serious and seriously knew how to use the damn things) work on the Oakland-based outlaw bikers, The Hell’s Angels. Since then I have devoured, and re-devoured virtually everything that he has written. I have reviewed many of those efforts elsewhere in this space. As I noted recently in reviewing his 2004 work Hey, Rube not all his efforts have been equally compelling. That was the case in panning Hey, Rube (basically some scribbles bemoaning the decline of major league football in America as a sporting proposition anyway) but here we are on much more solid tradition ‘gonzo’ style from the old days. Maybe it is because this work is in the form of a memoir and thus intentionally places the good Doc’s actions in the center of the writing that makes this more in the mold of his better compilations like The Great Shark Hunt and Songs Of The Doomed.

Thompson uses a stream of consciousness trope going from the present (early 2000s) and his then current doings and splices them together, in some segments randomly, to events as far back as his childhood in Louisville, Kentucky. Along the way we find out him at age nine in trouble with the FBI. Down and dirty in Rio with the crazies. Incessantly testing his beloved guns and various hot motorcycles (how about a Vincent Black Lightning) at various and sundry appropriate and inappropriate times. Taking trips to places like Vietnam just before the fall, Cuba, Grenada after the invasion and elsewhere where the journalistic action might be and a story, in the Thompson style, might develop.

Needless to say there is plenty of ink about sex, drug and rock and roll including his deeply affecting and traumatic tangle with the law in home port Colorado in the early 1990s (and prove positive that they were really out to get him any way they could and so any sly thoughts of paranoia on his, or his partisans parts, were laughable in the face of that governmental full-court press). That, my friends, was a close call (although the governmental madnesses later on the civil rights front in post 9/11 era make that time seem Arcadian). And throughout, as usual, there are pithy political comments about the various idiots-in-chiefs (aka Presidents of the USA) and their henchman (hench people?) that he spent his life hammering. Maybe not your way, definitely not my way, but his way. His fateful run for Sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket in 1970 probably set the tone of his politics accurately. Some big old popular front like back in FDR times, times long gone and ain’t coming back and so, yes, Arcadian. For those who have read other works by Thompson some of the signature language may be old hat as he meanders along in this volume. For others it is a chance to learn the lingo. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Enough said.

Pardon Private Bradley Manning Stand-Out-Central Square, Cambridge, Wednesdays, 5:00 PM -Update –April 2, 2013

Let’s Redouble Our Efforts To Free Private Bradley Manning-President Obama Pardon Bradley Manning -Make Every Town Square In America (And The World) A Bradley Manning Square From Boston To Berkeley to Berlin-Join Us In Central Square, Cambridge, Ma. For A Stand-Out For Bradley- Wednesdays From 5:00-6:00 PM
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Beginning in September 2011, in order to publicize Private Manning’s case locally, there have been weekly stand-outs (as well as other more ad hoc and sporadic events) in various locations in the Greater Boston area starting in Somerville across from the Davis Square Redline MBTA stop on Friday afternoons and later on Wednesdays. Lately this stand-out has been held each week on Wednesdays from 5:00 to 6:00 PM at Central Square, Cambridge, Ma. (small park at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Prospect Street just outside the Redline MBTA stop, renamed Manning Square for the duration of the stand-out) in order to continue to broaden our outreach. Join us there in calling for Private Manning’s freedom. President Obama Pardon Private Manning Now!

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Those who have followed the heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Private Bradley Manning’s case over the past year or so, since about April 2012 when the pre-trial hearings began in earnest, know that last November the defendant offered to plead guilty to a few lesser included charges in his indictment, basically taking legal and political responsibility for the leaks to WikiLeaks that had been the subject of some of the government’s allegations against him. Without getting into the arcane legal maneuvering on this issue the idea was to cut across the government’s pretty solid case against him being the leaker of information and to have the now scheduled for June trial be focused on the substantial question of whether his actions constituted “material aid to terrorism” which could subject Private Manning to life in prison. We noted then that we needed to stay with Bradley on this and make sure people know that what he admitted to was that he disclosed information about American military atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and other diplomatic high crime and misdemeanors and only that. We also noted that he was, and is, frankly, in trouble, big trouble, and needs our support more than ever. Especially in light of the following:

After enduring nearly three years of detention, at times under torturous conditions, on February 28, 2013 Bradley Manning confessed that he had provided WikiLeaksa trove of military and diplomatic documents that exposed U.S. imperialist schemes and wartime atrocities. Private Manning’s guilty plea on ten of 22 counts against him could land him in prison for 20 years. A day after Bradley confessed, military prosecutors announced plans to try him on the remaining counts, including “aiding the enemy” and violating the Espionage Act. Trial is expected to begin in early June. If convicted on these charges, Bradley Manning faces life in prison.

In lifting a bit of the veil of secrecy and lies with which the capitalist rulers cover their depredations, Bradley Manning performed a great service to workers and oppressed around the world. All who oppose the imperialist barbarity and machinations revealed in the material he provided must join in demanding his immediate freedom. Also crucially important is the defense of Julian Assange against the vendetta by the U.S., Britain and their cohorts, who are attempting to railroad him to prison by one means or another for his role in running WikiLeaks.

In a 35-page statement he read to the military court after entering his plea (written summary available at the Bradley Manning Support Network and an audio transcript as well), Manning told of his journey from nearly being rejected in basic training to becoming an army intelligence analyst. In that capacity he came across mountains of evidence of U.S. duplicity and war crimes. The materials he provided to WikiLeaks included military logs documenting 120,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and a formal military policy of covering up torture, rape and murder. A quarter-million diplomatic cables address all manner of lethal operations within U.S. client states, from the “drug war” in Mexico to drone strikes in Yemen. He also released files containing assessments of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These documents show that the government continued to hold many who, Manning stated, were believed or known to be innocent, as well as “low level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence.”

The Pentagon and the Obama Administration declared war against WikiLeaks following the release of a video, now entitled Collateral Murder and widely available, conveyed by Manning, of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter airstrike in Iraq that killed at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists. American forces are then shown firing on a van that pulled up to help the victims. Manning said he was most alarmed by the “bloodlust they appeared to have.” He described how instead of calling for medical attention for a seriously wounded individual trying to crawl to safety, an aerial crew team member “asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage.”

By January 2010, Manning said, he“began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year” and decided to make public many of the documents he had backed up as part of his work as an analyst. Manning first offered the materials to the Washington Post and the New York Times. Not getting anywhere with these pillars of the bourgeois press establishment, in February 2010 he made his first submission to WikiLeaks. He attached a note advising that “this is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.”

The charge of “aiding the enemy”—i.e., Al Qaeda—is especially ominous. This used to mean things like military sabotage and handing over information on troop movements to a battlefield enemy. In Manning’s case, the prosecution claims that the very act of publicizing U.S. military and diplomatic activities, some of which took place years before, amounted to “indirect” communication with Al Qaeda. Manning told the court that he believed that public access to the information “could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” He hoped that this “might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the affected environment everyday.” But by the lights of the imperialists’ war on terror, any exposure of their depredations can be construed as support to the“terrorist” enemy, whoever that might be.

The Pentagon intends to call no fewer than 141 witnesses in its show trial, including four people to testify anonymously. One of them, designated as “John Doe,” is believed to be a Navy SEAL who participated in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. “Doe” is alleged to have grabbed three disks from bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound on which was stored four files’ worth of the WikiLeaksmaterial provided by Manning.

Nor do charges under the Espionage Act have to have anything to do with actual spying. The law was one of an array of measures adopted to criminalize antiwar activity after U.S. imperialism’s entry into the First World War. It mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Among its first and most prominent victims was Socialist Party spokesman Eugene V. Debs, who was jailed for a June 1918 speech at a workers’ rally in Canton, Ohio, where he denounced the war as capitalist slaughter and paid tribute to the leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Dozens of Industrial Workers of the World organizers were also thrown into prison.

In the early 1970s, the Nixon government tried, unsuccessfully, to use this law to go after Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times shed light on the history of U.S. imperialism’s losing war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. Obama has happily picked up Nixon’s mantle. Manning’s prosecution will be the sixth time the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act against the source of an unauthorized leak of classified information—more than the combined total under all prior administrations since the law’s enactment in 1917.

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The Private Bradley Manning case is headed toward an early summer trial now scheduled for June 2013. The news on his case over the past several months has centered on the many pre-trial motion hearings including recent defense motions to dismiss for lack of speedy trial. Private Manning’s pre-trial confinement is now at over 1000 days and will be over well over 1000 days by the time of trial. That dismissal motion has now been ruled on by Military Judge Lind. On February 26, 2013 she denied the defense’s motion for dismissal, the last serious chance for Bradley Manning to go free before the scheduled June trial. She ruled furthermore that the various delays by the government were inherent in the nature of this case and that the military authorities, except in one short instance, had been diligent in their efforts to move the proceedings along. For those of us with military experience this is a classic, if perverse, case of that old army slogan-“Hurry up, and wait.” This is definitely tough news for Private Manning although perhaps a good appeal point in some future civilian court review.

The defense had contended that the charges should be dismissed because the military by its own statutes (to speak nothing of that funny old constitutional right to a speedy trial guarantee that our plebeian forbears fought tooth and nail for against the bloody British and later made damn sure was included in the Amendments when the founding fathers“forgot” to include it in the main document) should have arraigned Private Manning within 120 days after his arrest. They hemmed and hawed for almost 600 days before deciding on the charges and a court martial. Nobody in the convening authority, as required by those same statutes, pushed the prosecution forward in a timely manner. In fact the court-martial convening authority, in the person of one Colonel Coffman, seemed to have seen his role as mere “yes man”to each of the government’s eight requests for delays without explanation (and without informing the defense in order to take their objection). Apparently the Colonel saw his role as a mere clearing agent for whatever excuse the government gave, mainly endless addition time for clearing various classified documents a process that need not have held up the proceedings. The defense made timely objection to each governmental request to no avail.

Testimony from military authorities at pre-trial hearings in November 2012 about the reasons for the lack of action ranged from the lame to the absurd (mainly negative responses to knowledge about why some additional delays were necessary. One “reason” sticks out as a reason for excusable delay -some officer needed to get his son to a swimming meet and was thus “unavailable” for a couple of days. I didn’t make this up. I don’t have that sense of the absurd. Jesus, a man was rotting in Obama’s jails and they let him rot because of some damn swim meet). The prosecution, obviously, argued that the government has moved might and main to move the case along and had merely waited until all leaked materials had been determined before proceeding. The judge saw it the government’s way and ruled according as noted above.

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The defense has also recently pursued a motion for a dismissal of the major charges (espionage/ indirect material aid to terrorists) on the basis of the minimal effect of any leaks on national security issues as against Private Manning’s claim that such knowledge was important to the public square (freedom of information issues important for us as well in order to know about what the hell the government is doing either in front of us, or behind our backs). Last summer witnesses from an alphabet soup list of government agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA, Military Intelligence, etc., etc.) testified that while the information leaked shouldn’t have been leaked that the effect on national security was de minimus. The Secretary of Defense at the time, Leon Panetta, also made a public statement to that effect. The prosecution argued, successfully at the time, that the mere fact of the leak of classified information caused irreparable harm to national security issues and Private Manning’s intent, even if noble, was not at issue.

The recent thrust of the motion to dismiss has centered on the defense’s contention that Private Manning consciously and carefully screened any material in his possession to avoid any conflict with national security and that most of the released material had been over-classified (received higher security level than necessary). Much of the materials leaked, as per those parts published widely in the aftermath of the disclosures by the New York Times and other major outlets, concerned reports of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic interchanges that reflected poorly on that profession. The Obama government has argued again that the mere fact of leaking was all that mattered. That motion has also not been fully ruled on and is now the subject of prosecution counter-motions and has been a cause for further trial delay.

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A defense motion for dismissal based on serious allegations of torturous behavior by the military authorities extending far up the chain of command (a three-star Army general, not the normal concern of someone so far up the chain in the matter of discipline for enlisted personal) while Private Manning was first detained in Kuwait and later at the Quantico Marine brig for about a year ending in April 2011 has now been ruled on. In late November and early December Private Manning himself, as well as others including senior military mental health workers, took the stand to detail those abuses over several days. Most important to the defense was the testimony by qualified military mental health professionals citing the constant willful failure of those who held Private Manning in close confinement to listen to, or act, on their recommendations during those periods

Judge Lind, the military judge who has heard all the pre-trial arguments in the case thus far, has essentially ruled unfavorably on that motion to dismiss given the potential life sentence Private Manning faces. As she announced at an early January pre-trial hearing the military acted illegally in some of its actions. While every Bradley Manning supporter should be heartened by the fact that the military judge ruled that he was subject to illegal behavior by the military during his pre-trial confinement her remedy, a 112 days reduction in any future sentence, is a mere slap on the wrist to the military authorities. No dismissal or, alternatively, no appropriate reduction (the asked for ten to one ratio for all his first year or so of illegal close confinement which would take years off any potential sentence) given the seriousness of the illegal behavior as the defense tirelessly argued for. And the result is a heavy-handed deterrent to any future military whistleblowers, who already are under enormous pressures to remain silent as a matter of course while in uniform, and others who seek to put the hard facts of future American military atrocities before the public.

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There has been increased media attention by mainstream outlets around the case (including the previously knowingly oblivious New York Times), as well as an important statement in November 2012 by three Nobel Peace Laureates (including Bishop Tutu from South Africa) calling on their fellow laureate, United States President Barack Obama, to free Private Manning from his jails. (Available on the Support Bradley Manning Network website.)

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On February 23, 2013, the 1000th day of Private Bradley Manning’s pre-trial confinement, an international day of solidarity was observed with over seventy stand-outs and other demonstration held in America and internationally. Bradley Manning and his courageous stand have not been forgotten. Go to the Bradley Manning Support Network for more details about the events of that day. Another international day of solidarity is scheduled for June 1, 2013 at Fort Meade, Maryland and elsewhere just before the scheduled start of his trial on June 3rd. Check the support network for updates on that event as well.

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Plan to come to Fort Meade outside of Washington, D.C. on June 1^st for an international day of solidarity with Bradley before his scheduled June 3^rd trial. If you can’t make it to Fort Meade plan a solidarity event locally in support of this brave whistle-blower.

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5 Ways To Support Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-blower Private Bradley Manning

*Urgent: The government has announced, in the wake of Bradley Manning’s admission of his part in the Wikileaks expose in open court on February 28th, its intention to continue to prosecute him for the major charges of “aiding the enemy” (Espionage Act) and “material aid to terrorism.” Everyone should contact the presiding officer of the court –martial process, General Linnington, at 1-202-685-2807 and tell him to drop those charges. Once Maj. Gen. Linnington’s voicemail box is full – you can also leave a message at the DOD: (703) 571-3343 – press “5″ to leave a comment.*If this mailbox is also full, leave the Department of Defense a written message. Do it today.

*Come to our stand-out in support of Private Bradley Manning in Central Square, Cambridge, Ma (corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Prospect Street near MBTA Redline station) every Wednesday between 5-6 PM. For other locations in Greater Boston, nationally, and internationally check the Bradley Manning Support Network -http://www.bradleymanning.org/ and for details of the current status of the case and future event updates as well. Also plan to come to Fort Meade outside of Washington, D.C. on June 1^st for an international day of solidarity with Bradley before his scheduled June 3^rd trial. If you can’t make it to Fort Meade plan a solidarity event locally in support of this brave whistle-blower.

*Contribute to the Bradley Manning Defense Fund- as the trial date approaches funds are urgently needed! The government has unlimited financial and personnel resources to prosecute Bradley. And the Obama government is fully using them. We have a fine defense civilian lawyer, David Coombs, many supporters throughout America and the world working hard for Bradley’s freedom, and the truth on our side. Still the hard reality of the American legal system, civilian or military, is that an adequate defense cost serious money. So help out with whatever you can spare. For link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/

*Sign the online petition at the Bradley Manning Support Network (for link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/ )to the Secretary of the Army to free Bradley Manning-1000 plus days is enough! The Secretary of the Army stands in the direct chain of command up to the President and can release Private Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him at his discretion. For basically any reason that he wishes to-let us say 1000 plus days is enough. Join the over 25,000 supporters in the United States and throughout the world clamoring for Bradley’s well-deserved freedom.

*Call (Comments”202-456-1111), write The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, e-mail-(http://www.whitehouse.gov’contact/submitquestions-and comments) the White House to demand President Obama pardon Bradley Manning- The presidential power to pardon is granted under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution:

“The President…shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in case of impeachment.”

In federal cases, and military cases are federal cases, the President of the United States can, under authority granted by the U.S. Constitution as stated above, pardon the guilty and the innocent, the convicted and those awaiting trial- former President Nixon and former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, for example among others, received such pardons for their heinous crimes- Now that Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to some lesser charges and is subject to further prison time (up to 20 years) this pardon campaign is more necessary than ever. Free Bradley Manning! Free the whistleblower!

***Out In The 1970s Film Night- With Robert Mitchum’s The Friends Of Eddie Coyle In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

It was a shame, a crying shame when they knocked off Eddie, Eddie Fingers. Good old Eddie Fingers, Eddie from the old school, the old school of hard knocks, the school of life, life on the mean streets, the mean streets of Boston. Although the guys, the corner boy guys that he grew up with around Millie’s Variety Store over on M Street in Southie, had heard through that seamless grapevine that corner boys and career street lugs have no matter how far removed from the sacred soil, that he had lately placed himself and his family out of the city and into North Adamsville. Away from the corrupting city influences, the n----rs Eddie said, them and every son of a whoremaster who might want at his three lovely virginal and very Irish Catholic daughters being properly novena and rosary bead brought up by his ever-loving wife. So maybe he wasn’t so old school, so committed to the old ways since they all, and their families too, had stayed on the old sod. And maybe those whispered rumors about who Eddie was, or was not, seeing of late, had a little more truth to them that one might have previously dismissed out of hand.

Yah, Eddie, Eddie Fingers had been a stand-up guy no question, a guy who knew the rules, a guy who had your back, a big hefty raw-boned guy who was handy to have around when fists began to fly, a guy nobody figured to wind up like some crushed paper doll in the front seat of some classy late model vehicle with two big slugs running through his brain. And that, the two slugs, and the Eddie didn’t figure to be wearing them, got the guys, some of the guys, some of guys around town, around the old neighborhoods, maybe a little nervous about their own futures, figuring out, trying to figure out as a far as possible, and no more, what transgression did Eddie in, what made him a pin cushion and his children fatherless.

Eddie Fingers was nothing but a soldier, had always been nothing but a soldier despite his handiness in a fight, a guy pretty far down on the totem pole though so it didn’t figure he got hit, hit bad, for trying to get too uppity, trying to move up the food chain, or worse, trying to go independent. He was just a soldier and, frankly, just too old to be acting like some two-bit kid just off the street (and every guy had some funny, now funny, stories about how they were going to be the king hell kings of the Southie, or name your neighborhood, when young before they wised up, or were wised up, that the thing was rigged, fixed, sewed up long before they drew breath and just took their places assigned in the food chain) or just out of reform school to be thinking about making some big splash.

Eddie had done alright, alright for a half-bright guy (eighth grade dropout , or put out, in any case nobody at home or school was pulling for him to stick around, especially after he almost killed the headmaster at the Tobin when that man tried to give him the ruler) who got caught up with Big Jim, Big Jim from the old Southie neighborhoods, when he was making his big moves around the city. Eddie’s brother, Boyo, had been tight with Big Jim and hence Eddie got some leavings, some easy work without working, and no heavy lifting either. Toward the end he was just drawing dough for his old reputation as a knee-breaker, and that was enough in Boston anyway to scare guys straight. Until that one night when he screwed up, showed up drunk, maybe had a little reefer thrown in, and some side honey to share it with, to calm the nerves, and worse late, and Big Jim wound up doing a nickel, a hard nickel , at the state pen. And Eddie earned his nickname, earned it the hard way, but also the forever way every time he looked at his hands so it didn’t figure he screwed up again either.

See though crime, money crime, robberies, heists, big dough stuff, transporting stolen goods, and all, that is for young men, young and agile men, and quick-thinkers too. Eddie, well, Eddie had lost a step or two, maybe more, and so he got clipped, clipped bad one night coming down some road from hell loaded with more booze than you could shake a stick at. And see that lost step or two cost him since he had eased up on the coming around those hell road curves and “uncle”was waiting for him. Waiting all decked out in shotguns and semis so Eddie, thinking of that wife and three kids (and maybe that reefer honey too, everybody knew they had been together for years after the wife decided that she wanted to sleep alone) stopped. Stopped and took the fall. And thus was facing something like a nickel or a dime’s worth all cozy and out of the sunlight.

But see too a guy, a guy too old for the runs, if he has done a stretch or two already gets real shy, almost girlishly shy, about going in again, about taking the big step into that small good night. And so old stand-up Eddie, old school Eddie, sensing his time was short, sensing that that old school was out and gone, reconsidered his options. So he thought, night sweats thought, about seeing“uncle” about seeing things uncle’s way and about getting out from under that rock. As so Eddie slipped down the slippery slope. As the corner boys figured away, and figured out what Eddie (or any guy, especially any family man guy) would, or would not, do it came up “snitch.” It had to be that without getting to close on the question. So every corner boy, every lowly soldier from Southie to Charlestown looking to keep his head unfilled with those nasty pieces of metal put two and two together and decided, decided not to take the Eddie way, no way. But a few guys too thought, hey, if a stand-up guy like Eddie could be turned then they had better watch their corner boy friends too.