By Niles Niemuth
17 May 2019
“I would rather starve to
death than change my opinion”
Whistleblower Chelsea Manning
was jailed by a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia for contempt of court for
the second time since March, after she again refused to testify before a grand
jury impaneled to bring frame-up charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange.
Federal Judge Anthony Trenga
rejected two motions submitted by Manning’s lawyers to quash the subpoena and
disclose any evidence of unlawful electronic surveillance by the government.
An appointee of President
George W. Bush who ruled in favor of Trump’s xenophobic anti-Muslim travel ban,
Trenga instead ordered Manning to be jailed immediately after a two-hour
hearing. On top of imprisonment, he vindictively imposed fines of $500 per day
if she does not testify after a month of confinement and $1,000 a day after two
months.
According to her attorneys,
the piling on of a coercive financial penalty is highly unusual, typically
reserved for compelling testimony from representatives of corporations, not
individuals.
Manning has courageously
insisted on principle that she will never testify before any grand jury about
her possible contacts with Assange and WikiLeaks or anything else. “I would
rather starve to death than to change my opinion in this regard,” Manning told
Judge Trenga during the public portion of Thursday’s hearing. She added, “And
when I say that, I mean that quite literally.”
Asked during a press
conference before the hearing how long she was prepared keep refusing to answer
questions before a grand jury, Manning replied resolutely, “Forever, indefinitely.”
Assange currently faces
extradition to the United States from the UK on a hacking charge for allegedly
seeking to assist Manning to crack a password so she could remain anonymous on
a military computer network. Based on the evidence and interviews that have
been made public, Manning on Thursday criticized the case against Assange as
“bananas.”
The journalist is currently
being held in the maximum security Belmarsh Prison, known as Britain’s
Guantanamo, after being sentenced to 50 weeks in prison on a bail-jumping
charge related to long-discredited rape allegations in Sweden. Assange was
illegally snatched from the Ecuadorian embassy in London on April 11 when his
asylum status was revoked after seven years by the government of Lenin Moreno.
He also now faces possible extradition to Sweden, after the “preliminary
investigation” into the rape allegations was reopened on Monday.
The persecution of Assange and
Manning comes amid a frenzied war fever, as the Trump administration
simultaneously threatens Iran and Venezuela and escalates its trade war with
China. Hand in hand with an intensifying campaign to censor the internet, the
effort to silence Assange and Manning is aimed at crushing dissent and
preventing the development of a mass anti-war movement.
Manning spent 62 days in the
Alexandria City Jail before being released last week after the term of that
grand jury expired. Even before she was released, however, she was served with
a subpoena to appear before a new grand jury on Thursday. Manning was given
just one week of freedom to spend with her friends and family before being
cruelly thrown back into federal detention.
The former Army Specialist is
being persecuted by the Trump administration for the role she played in
exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan by leaking secret and sensitive
documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. She has already served seven years of a 35-year
sentence in a military prison, including a year in solitary confinement.
Her sentence was commuted by
President Barack Obama in 2017 on the very last day of his second term in
office, in an effort to paper over his administration’s record of pursuing
whistleblowers. However, Obama refused to grant a full pardon, which would have
cleared Manning’s criminal record.
Prior to Thursday’s hearing,
Manning told the press: “I think that this is ultimately an attempt to place me
back in confinement. I think that the questions are the same questions I was
asked before the court martial seven eight years ago.
There is nothing new. They’re
not asking anything new. There’s no new information they are trying to get from
me.
“Ultimately the goal here is
to re-litigate the court martial, from my perspective. They didn’t like the
outcome. I got out. So, this is a way to place me back into confinement.”
Manning’s attorney, Moira
Meltzer-Cohen, addressed the media after Manning was returned to jail,
expressing her disappointment and reiterating that her client would not betray
her convictions by testifying.
“In 2010, Chelsea made a
principled decision to let the world see the true nature of modern asymmetric
warfare,” Meltzer-Cohen said. “It is telling that the United States has always
been more concerned with the disclosure of those documents than with the
damning substance of the disclosures.
“The American government
relies on the informed consent of the governed, and the free press is the
vigorous mechanism to keep us informed. It is a point of pride for this
administration to be publicly hostile to the press. Grand juries and
prosecutions like this one broadcast an expanding threat to the press and
function to undermine the integrity of the system according to the government’s
own laws.
“This administration is also
obsessed with undercutting the legacy of President Barack Obama, from reversing
health care policy to Chelsea Manning’s commutation.
“It is up to the press to
stand up for themselves, to stand up for the practice of journalism, and to
stand up for Chelsea in the same manner she has consistently stood up for the
press.”
The response of the establishment
media and the Democratic Party to Manning’s re-incarceration has been to
maintain their silence. Neither the New York Time s nor
the Washington Post carried reports of her latest detention on their
front pages in the hours after the news broke.
When contacted by the World
Socialist Web Site for a comment on the arrest of Manning, Senator Bernie
Sanders’ Washington DC press office continued the 2020 presidential candidate’s
complicit silence. “The senator has not made any statements on Julian Assange
or Chelsea Manning,” a staffer confirmed.
The same is the case for
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, both members of the
Democratic Socialists of America, neither of whom, as of this writing, had made
a statement on their social media accounts about Manning’s latest
incarceration. There was no response to a request from the WSWS for a statement
from Tlaib’s office, and Ocasio-Cortez’s office was unreachable by phone.
While they have been abandoned
by the Democrats and the mainstream press, Manning and Assange have the support
of millions of workers and young people around the world. This support must be
developed into a conscious political movement. Demonstrations, meetings and
teach-ins should be organized in every city to demand their freedom and an end
to their persecution by the US government.
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