Free Chelsea
Manning-Again, Again -Stop The Civil Contempt Madness To Have Her “Fink,” “Play
Ball With The Law” To Get WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange
By Frank Jackman
[Nothing new
on the Chelsea Manning front (July 22, 2019) as she sits in some funky facility
down in Virginia until she is ready to squeal like a pig (never happen) or some
appeals courts cuts her loose. Sam Eaton one of her ardent supporters along
with his longtime friend and fellow political activist has begun once again to
plan another stand-out somewhere in the Greater Boston area (usually following
some Redline MBTA subway logic where more people can see what is up, if they
care to or notice on their ways home, etc.)
Sam, always somewhat
of an ironist, made a couple of his fellow stand-out planning activist friends laugh
when he said that they could with slight modification use the old banners from
the struggle to get her out of the hands of the military from 2010-2017 when President
Obama commuted her sentence. (Check photograph from below and see if you don’t
agree.) FJ]
********
The heroic Wikileaks
whistle-blower Chelsea Manning who in
2010 passed (as Bradley Manning before she was able to come out as a tran) plenty
of important information to that on-line publication about American military
atrocities and cover-ups in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to be built in the Daniel
Ellsberg mold (he of Vietnam War era The Pentagon Papers which blew the
lid off the government’s longtime lies and duplicity over several administrations
about what was going on there as the body counts got higher and the light at the
end of the tunnel blew out). Ms. Manning seems to be organically incapable of
not resisting every attempt since that time to get her to “cooperate,” to snitch
on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who has his own legal problems in England with
a long drawn out extradition to the United States process ahead.
The odd thing
is that Chelsea, despite a 2013 court-martial down in Fort Meade in Maryland and
conviction and sentencing to thirty-five years, thirty five hard years for a woman
at all male Fort Leavenworth prison out in the wheat fields of Kansas on
espionage charges, has already taken personal and political responsibility for
her actions in giving the information out. Now with “bigger fish to fry,” Assange,
since she had her sentence commuted as President Obama left office they want “her
to play ball with the law” to get at Assange. She has rightly and righteously refused
to say “squat” to use an old Army term and so she is being held in civil confinement
down in Virginia where a grand jury has been convened looking into the Wikileaks
matter.
No, and here
is where the “again and again” part comes in, she has for a second time refused
to squeal. Under the rules of federal grand jury investigation Chelsea was brought
before a previous grand jury looking into the same matter earlier in the spring.
She refused to speak then and was committed for civil contempt and held for a
couple of months until that grand jury was dismissed in early May. A week later
another grand jury had been convened, and she was dragged before that with the
same result except now she can be held up to sixteen months, the life of the current
grand jury minus two months from the previous sitting. On top of that they are taking
the unusual step, and weird given Chelsea’s financial situation, of incremental
fines from $500 to $1000 per day until she squawks. As of today she sits like Buddha
in that detention center down in Alexandria while her legal team tries to get
those onerous fines dismissed and more importantly spring her.
This whole mess
this spring has left Chelsea’s supporters scratching their heads. Especially
guys like Sam Eaton and Ralph Morris from Veterans for Peace who have been supporting
his case since they first heard about it at an ACLU forum at Boston University
in 2010. (The photograph used in this piece is actually from a stand-out when she
was being tried at court-martial but has the same sentiments as now, and the same
guys trying to keep her case in the public eye.
They
understood the need to defend Chelsea when the government, when the Army was
holding her in solitary down at Quantico in Virginia in tortuous conditions and
had gone down there to protest her midnight incarceration. They had held a
million stand-outs for her in various locales in Boston and Washington, D.C.
They had attended her court-martial in 2013. They had started a petition campaign
to have then President Obama pardon her (especially once she publicly declared her
true gender-identity). As previously mentioned he did commute that sentence.
With that Ralph and Sam held a house party to raise funds for Chelsea to get a
fresh start. They thought she was through with her legal problems. Not so. Sam and Ralph set up another set of standouts
of late for her defense but that “scratching their heads” part is due to the
crazy unfairness of the grand jury system no matter its hallowed origins. And
to the flat-out craziness that except for raising defense money and morale this
case is not as easy to raise publicity on as her previous struggles. Free
Chelsea Now, again.
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