President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning-She Must Not Die In Jail-A Story Goes With It-Observe Her Birthday December 17th
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. She had been charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents via Wiki-leaks to a candid world. Many of them documenting the cover-up at all levels of military atrocities by American soldiers, mercenaries under contract to the American government or within the American-led coalition. The most graphic and infamous piece of evidence of such actions was a tape of a helicopter crew gunning down unarmed civilians in Iraq which is available on YouTube under the title Collateral Murder and laughing about it afterwards. (That tape, the entire tape, all thirty-nine minutes is permanently part of the record in the Manning case placed there at trial by the defense team. No one ever challenged the veracity of the tape although no one was ever charged with any crimes either.)
Chelsea was held in pre-trial confinement for over three years (opening an appeal question about constitutional speedy trial rights-applicable even in the military courts. Her solitary confinement (for her own good either because she was then a suicide risk by one account or because her fellow soldiers would be so outraged by her whistle-blowing that they feared for her safety by another-take your pick) at Quantico lasted almost a year before she was due in part at least to a public outcry and rallies of hundreds at the gates of Quantico for her release she was placed in Fort Leavenworth. (Here is the military logic tough-every time she had to appear for some matter before the court at Fort Meade she would be flown back and forth after the conclusion of whatever had transpired.) Ms. Manning (Private if you prefer her rank) has after an over two month trial been convicted of a number of charges including several counts of espionage under a law going back to World War I 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 details of 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. (Bart was not sure that he had not seen something about the matter earlier on Boston Indy Media where Anonymous, a radical underground group, had places news about the case and of course the leaks would have been by then public knowledge but this forum was the first active part they played in the case.) They both attended that forum and as a result have been ever since involved one way or another in Chelsea’s defense. Their first action was to “pony up,” these are working-class guys so pony up is right, some money for the defense. (Courage To Resist was/is the repository for raising and accounting for all legal defense monies since the beginning. As stated above that organization has had a long history of supporting military resisters-for military whistle-blowers as well.)
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, actually since the last days of the Vietnam War when they supported an anti-war G.I. coffeehouse near Fort Devens about forty miles outside of Boston, they had no opportunity to get involved in a military resister case so once this case surfaced they were “all in.” (After they “got religion” on the war issue they had done their respective peace activist works through various mostly ad hoc organizations and for the past several years through VFP. The last time I checked they were still “all in.” That will tell you something about them, about how razor sharp that military service had made them about the folly of war 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. (Google the Chelsea Manning Support Network for details.) So Frank Jackman’s phrase “she must not die in jail” in the headline is not a rhetorical flourish. Not at all. F.T.]
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“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 draconian 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. The banner “President Obama Pardon-Chelsea Manning-“We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind” with two copies of a photograph of her as some friendly artist had drawn of an image her as she might look like if she could express her full sexual identity (see above) and not the Army’s hard-ass male version since she had “come out” as a transgender woman shortly after her sentencing in 2013 had been inspired, the last part anyway by their fellow VFPer Frank Jackman. Frank had had his own very personal “war” against the military during his war, again Vietnam, and had served time in an Army stockade for refusing to go to that war. He always said that the one thing the Army did teach him was that you did not leave your fellow soldiers behind, and sometimes that might be the only reason left to fight. He thought it appropriate that peaceful veterans could express that same sentiment about a political prisoner who once the notoriety of the case faded could use plenty of that sentiment.
(Ralph thought to himself while he was yelling over to Bart and cutting some wind holes in the banner to cut the sometimes fierce winds that passed through the Boston Common 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 very place after having done what he should have done-resist- but he 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 of while both men could tell a million zany stories about 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.
(That business about formerly Bradley having to reveal her true sexual identity the day after her sentencing had been a personal safety necessity against the taunts of the guards out in Leavenworth as both men had been told by a man from Courage To Resist who knew the inside story when they asked why she had “come out” so soon after the sentencing which threw a lot of supporters off-center who had not been privy to the sexual politics involved although some stuff had come out courtesy of the Army about her sexual identity in order to diminish her heroic actions.)
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 continued to 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 we 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 location since Chelsea was in the Army and the various branches of the services jealously guard their prerogatives) in solitary and their organization, Veterans for Peace, had called for demonstrations to have her released even then, or at least taken have her taken out of solitary and stop being tortured (not some small “peacenik” charge or propaganda super-charged to gain sympathy for the victim of government repression since the appropriate United Nations rapporteur had made such a finding in her case concerning her pre-trial treatment). 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. The weekly shout-out on Friday afternoons is the place where Ralph not known a as a public speaker but more as a “Jimmy Higgins” figure (a rank and filer who did the odd chores to insure the success of the event) began get his “voice,” get his political facts in a row with at first maybe a minute speech. By the end of that series of vigils which were switched the busier intersection at Central Square in Cambridge you could hardly get the “mic” out of his hand. Bart who had some college behind him where he had to take a debating class as a requirement his freshman year tended to give the pitches about what people could to support Chelsea, usually a set five minute speech.
(That shout-out designation was simply current usage for such events in the wake of the Occupy movement where the term took on an almost religious mantra quality. Also acceptable and used at other times including the event that Brad and Ralph were helping stage this day- vigil, rally or whatever other appropriate name you want to call an event where people were free to express their opinions about Chelsea’s case and other causes which made sense to speak of and a few times budding folk singers who also hung out in the space would come by and sing some song, especially David Rovacs tribute to Chelsea’s heroic action.)
Both men freely admitted and it bears repeating here that what was driving them on this case more fervently that other peace and progressive actions they had been involved with over the decades had been their own admittedly sorry response to “their” war, Vietnam. In Ralph’s case joining the Army, meaning volunteering for three years and in Bart’s case by accepting induction into that same Army for the mandatory two years 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. Had bought in hook, line and sinker all the admittedly paper-thin anti-communist domino theory reasons provided by the government any given week to justify their actions. Hell, the hard truth and Ralph was hardly alone in this a young man was looked down at in his old Forsythe 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. Ralph in any case like his class had done his “tour” in Vietnam without a peep although already he knew that he had to do something to let people know what really was going on-mostly straight out murder and mayhem against people that he had no quarrel with-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 feelings about the war while he was in uniform he had kept quiet mostly, kept the drill sergeant-driven “you don’t want to wind up in Leavenworth” quiet. He did not wind up going to Vietnam as after Tet in 1968 when all hell broke loose which signaled either endless war or an ordered retreat the military authorities 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, his very patriotic wife whose two brothers were doing second tours in ‘Nam wanted him too when the deal went down. No Canada or jail for him. To his shame as he told the military resister one night at a VFP general meeting after hearing about what Frank had done during his time (this is about Chelsea but Frank had done time in the Army stockade for refusing to go to Vietnam).
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. The case like all high publicity and high stakes political prisoner cases had been front and center for a while, say from the time of the Wikileaks exposes with their endless documentation of the nefarious activities of the American and other governments in covering up everything that could be covered up in order as both Ralph and Bart knew from their short Army experiences to “cover your ass” to the verdict and sentence at trial. After that unfortunately even some supporters drift away and the thing becomes yesterday’s news in the welter of some new case (here the Snowden case took a lot of the air out since his revelations were current unlike Chelsea’s which dealt with pass atrocities and had personal effects on almost everybody in the cyberspace universe meaning almost everybody). Yesterday’s news to everybody but the defendant who has to do the hard time while the attorneys sniff around for issues on the long drawn out appeal. That is the hard reality of political prisoner cases, especially when it seems the trial was “fair” and the defendant had been convicted of a crime after all.
Not doing what was right at the time of your confrontation with 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 life 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. They had urged everybody who had not done so to sign the on-line petition to President Obama (see link above) to commute her sentence to “time served.” That on-line petition needed one hundred thousand signatures in order to get an official response from the White House about the matter (it also had to be done in a thirty day period). They were still short so hence the urgency of their calls. 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. (She had as well under some bizarre Army logic been “sentenced” to fourteen days in solidarity for the first attempt-Jesus, figures both men had blurred out when they heard that news earlier in the fall.)
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 gung-ho wife as soon as he got out of the Army, or maybe she divorced him but the parting was in any case acrimonious and threats had emanated from those two lifer brother after he had been arrested in Cambridge at the draft board along with a bunch of Quakers and other angry gentle people), to go down and get arrested during the May Day actions. Bart’s anti-war girlfriend, Josie, a lovely gentle woman from, if you can believe this, Manhattan although she like a lot of NYC kids went west to Wisconsin for college, had been met at the Morning Report coffeehouse located just outside of Fort Devens about forty miles west of Boston when they were part of an action to distribute Daniel Ellsberg’s “hot” Pentagon Papers. Pretty good credentials to start an affair in those days. (Ironically forty years later Daniel Ellsberg would be one of Chelsea Manning’s most fervent public supporters raising a ton of money so that she could have a complete transcript of all the pre-trial and trial work. A very expensive proposition without “angels” gathered by Ellsberg to fund the effort of what would become the longest trial and number of volumes of transcripts in Army history.)
Ralph’s girlfriend, Sarah, had been a woman who he had known in high school in Troy but who after leaving the town and heading to Skidmore blossomed into a fervent anti-war activist. He had met her in Albany when the local Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) whichhe had joined was staging a silent march through the streets of that city and she had helped plan the event. The lived together for a few years before she got weary once again of Troy and headed west. He would even now run into her when several years ago she returned from the Wet after her husband had passed away among the small diehard crowd of peace activists who could be counted on to show up at events in that section of upstate New York.
That 1971 May Day event which was in some ways decisive in both men’s understanding of how hard the struggle against the American war machine was going to be. In those desperate times when it seemed like the Vietnam War would never end (seemed endless although now with Afghanistan entering its sixteenth year the record for endless had definitely been extended) they tried to help shut down the government if it would not shut down the war-the Vietnam War. All they got was tear gas, police batons and several days in RFK stadium for their efforts. Totally unprepared for the vicious governmental response when under threat. Ralph and Bart had met on the floor of the stadium when Ralph had noticed that Bart had his VVAW pin on and had asked where he was from (where he “hailed from” was the way Ralph put it) and had become fast friends over the years-with the usual periods of absence from each other’s lives when family commitments got too heavy. 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 as previously mentioned 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. That was Chelsea’s public persona then before she came out as a transgender woman.
In the old days they had also gone along with the “better dead that red,” “if your mommy is a commie turn her in” red scare dark age Cold War night, “the night of the night-takers” Ralph had called that time one night when told Bart how he had stood shoulder to shoulder with his father trying to get some poor bedraggled family out of the Forsythe Street neighborhood because they were some kind of “reds” (he later had also stood shoulder to should with his father and neighbor when blacks tried to move into the neighborhood in the mid-1960s). As far as the sexual preference-sexual identity stuff went in the old days the best term they could think of to describe their respective attitudes toward gays was “faggot and dyke”-Jesus. Trans-genders did not compute didn’t come up on the radar and were dismissed as transvestites and weirdos whenever Bart would see them strutting their stuff around the Boston Common on Saturday nights. One time he and his boys had gone to Provincetown, P-town then as now the summer Mecca in New England for LGBTQers, dressed in drag just to “lure” the guys down there (and who knows for what non-drunken reason-could have been insecurities about their own sexual identities they after all were only late teenagers so who knows)
(That whole Chelsea gay-transgender 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 in charge of handling the 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 having a few shots to ward away the cold of the day’s events both had been a bit morose. (Ralph has after bouncing around on the West Coast and New York City for years picking up wives along the way after that last divorce moved back to hometown Troy after he father was too ill to care for himself and then after he passed away took over the family house which looks with few updates almost like it had back in the days when Ralph and his father were “smoking” out reds, commies, and holding blacks at arm’s length side by side on old Forsythe Street.) The event had gone as well as could be expected for a political prisoner case that was three years removed from the serious public eye. Ralph and Bart both speculated that there must be something like a law of diminishing returns on these types of cases once the verdict and sentence has been rendered and the mainstream media move on to the next 24/7 event that just has to be covered. Of course then the prisoner is left to fight his or her future battles out of the public as paper-heavy appeals slowly work their way through the court systems. The winter holiday season is particularly tough as Bart knew when he was sentenced to thirty days for “criminal trespass” and to show jailhouse solidarity all six convicts decided to not pay the fine and went to jail instead. The winter holidays were when the sentences came up and although Bart was not a big fan of Christmas not being able to celebrate the occasion made the time that much tougher.
As the pair sat, talked, and compared notes they found that the usual small coterie of “peace activists” had shown up and a few who were supporting Chelsea as a fellow transgender to listen to 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-the petition in the end got the 100, 000 on-line signatures it needed in order for the White House to be required to officially respond to the request-here the commutation of Chelsea’s sentence to “time served”). (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. This in the days before the U.S Supreme Court rulings in favor of gay marriage. The twice divorced Ralph and three times divorced mumbled to themselves over that one. Moreover there was some push back about her actions being traitorous and/or that she was “grandstanding”-Jesus).
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. If Obama ignored her case, the likely situation before January 20th then she was in for a very long wait before there was any realistic possibility of clemency again. 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. The last stand-out across from the main entrance to the base had been one of the few times that Ralph, and remember he was in Vietnam for a year and they both had faced down the brunt of the action when the cops went berserk on May Day, 1971, had been afraid, hell, scared, at what might have occurred if the government had used the full force it had on hand. Had been personally afraid of some “bad shit” coming down since the cops looked like they were ready for bear. As it was there were a few dozen arrests and some very forceful pushing around by the cops and MPs. Barr mentioned at the time that they should have known there was going to be trouble for they had parked up the road at the Marine museum which turned out to be a staging area for the governmental forces and there had seemingly been contingents from every local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the D.C. area. All in all an incredible array of cops and military personnel all to “monitor” a few hundred supporters. Bart figured out later that unlike in D.C. where some kind of demonstration, sit-I, acts of deliberate civil disobedience are all in a day’s work for the security forces out in the boondocks of nowhere Triangle, Virginia they were not used to such activity and frankly over-reacted.
There had also been trips to the White House to proclaim their message as part of various other ‘anti-war actions, including the time they were arrested when they had hand-cuffed (plastic hand-cuffed, okay) themselves to the iron fence that surrounds the White House. (They paid the fines after being held for a few hours processing through-there should have been cops from Virginia there to see what proper reaction to non-violent demonstrations are like). 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). Those trips in summer heat which affected Bart considerably were to sit in the court room and show Chelsea physical solidarity while she was going through the arduous trial. (The trial itself on a day to day basis was like any other such event rather boring except at points like the time the defense had the full thirty-nine minutes of the damning video called Collateral Murder where helicopter gun crews in their search for enemies blew away some unarmed civilians-and laughed about it afterwards.) Of course the weekly vigils for almost three years at various locations around Boston and the suburbs 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 Ralph and Bart 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.
