Tag Archives: Chelsea Manning

The Leak That ‘Exposed the True Afghan War’, by Elizabeth Vos

Posted on August 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

Julian Assange rots in Belmarsh Prison not because of anything he did wrong, but what he did right—exposing the depredations of the US government in Afghanistan. From Elizabeth Vos at consortiumnews.com:

The Afghan Diaries set off a firestorm when it revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad, and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict, as Elizabeth Vos reports.

Three months after it published the “Collateral Murder” video, WikiLeaks on July 25, 2010 released a cache of secret U.S. documents on the war in Afghanistan. It revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict, among other revelations. The publication of the Afghan War Diaries helped set the U.S. government on a collision course with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ultimately led to his arrest last month.

The war diaries were leaked by then-Army-intelligence-analyst Chelsea Manning, who had legal access to the logs via her Top Secret clearance. Manning only approached WikiLeaks, after studying the organization, following unsuccessful attempts to leak the files to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

A major controversy surrounding the Diaries’ release were allegations that operational details were made public to the Taliban’s battlefield advantage and that U.S. coalition informants’ lives were put at risk by publishing their names.

Chelsea Maning in 2017. (YouTube)

Chelsea Maning in 2017. (Vimeo)

Despite a widely-held belief that WikiLeaks carelessly publishes un-redacted documents, only 75,000 from a total of more than 92,201 internal U.S. military files related to the Afghan War (between 2004 and 2010) were ultimately published.

WikiLeaks explained that it held back so many documents because Manning had insisted on it: “We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source.”

Manning testified at her 2013 court-martial that the files were not “very sensitive” and did not report active military operations.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Media, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Assange’s Extradition, Escalation of the US War on Terror, by Nozomi Hayese

Posted on March 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

If you’re an American locked in your home because of coronavirus, you’re getting a small taste of what it’s been like for Julian Assange the last eight years. Assange has been a profile in courage, the coronavirus nonsense is a study in panic and cowardice. From Nozomi Hayese at antiwar.com:

Last week the US District Judge Anthony Trenga released Chelsea Manning from detainment after concluding that the grand jury that she had been subpoenaed to testify before no longer needed her, since it was being disbanded. Manning was incarcerated because of her principled stance against the secrecy of the grand jury and her refusal to cooperate in its coercive procedure.

The release of Manning came after the US government tried to break her to the point of suicide. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, wrotea letter to the US government late last year indicating that Manning’s imprisonment amounted to torture. Her resistance is a part of the US government’s war on the free press, going after WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange.

Assange has been charged under the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents which exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. This indictment is recognized by free speech groups as an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment. In February, the first week of the UK hearing of the US request for Assange’s extradition revealed a scale of this “war” that goes well beyond press freedom. What took place inside the Woolwich Crown Court in southeast London was a sign of a dangerous slippery slide towards fascism.

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Chelsea Manning Supporters Raise A Quarter Million Dollars In Two Days, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 15, 2020 | 1 comment

At a time when “feel good” stories are few and far between, here’s one. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

In the likely event that you need some news to give you a bit of faith in humanity today, you should know that supporters of whistleblower Chelsea Manning have raised over a quarter million dollars to pay the cruel, draconian fine that was heaped upon her for her principled stand against testifying at corrupt secret grand jury proceedings.

In just two days after Manning was released from prison, more than six thousand donors banded together to pay off the $258,000 fine assigned at a thousand dollars a day by a federal judge on top of imprisonment to coerce her to testify. Fundraising was so enthusiastic that it had overshot the goal and reached $267,002 before the GoFundMe was closed.

Those of us who support Manning have been looking at this more as a fine on us than on her, because of course we were never going to let a heroic whistleblower spend the rest of her life under crushing debt. The fact that the money came together so quickly and easily, though, says a lot about the beauty of humans in my opinion.

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Chelsea Manning Is Free From Jail, Faces Exorbitant Fines, by Kevin B. Zeese and Margaret Flowers

Posted on March 13, 2020 | 2 comments

Chelsea Manning recently tried to kill herself. She has been released from jail, but not from $256,000 in fines. From Kevin B. Zeese and Margaret Flowers at antiwar.com:

Alexandria – Yesterday, March 12, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia ended the grand jury of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in which Chelsea Manning refused to testify. As a result, US District Court Judge Anthony Trenga ordered the immediate release of Chelsea Manning.

Manning has been incarcerated since May 2019. Judge Trenga had tried to coerce Manning into testifying by imposing a fine for every day she resisted even though she said repeatedly that she would not violate her principles, which include opposition to the secret grand jury system, and would never testify.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Intelligence, Investigations, Law, Media, Military, Politics, War

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Edward Snowden Speaks Out for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, by Adam Dick

Posted on December 15, 2019 | Leave a comment

No one is more conscious of the carnage being wreaked on First Amendment rights than Edward Snowden. From Adam Dick at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has been silenced. Assange was prevented from communicating with the outside world in his final 13 months at the Ecuador embassy in London, where he had obtained sanctuary from extradition to the United States. The silencing has continued in a British prison where Assange has been detained pending extradition to the US since British police forcibly removed him from the embassy in April.

Similarly, communication by Chelsea Manning has been much curtailed after Manning reveled United States military secrets. First, Manning served seven years in United States military prison after being convicted for the leak. Released from prison in 2017, Manning has been condemned to jail for most of the time since March of this year for refusing to testify for a grand jury involved in the US government’s effort to prosecute Assange. Continue reading →

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A New Kind of Tyranny: The Global State’s War on Those Who Speak Truth to Power, by John Whitehead

Posted on November 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

Tell the truth about government and our rulers, go to jail…or worse. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“What happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most sacred rights. Speak up now or wake up one morning to the silence of a new kind of tyranny. The choice is ours.”—John Pilger, investigative journalist

All of us are in danger.

In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, there is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose reach has gone global.

The Deep State has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.

Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike are being terrorized, traumatized, tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.

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MSM Defends CIA’s “Whistleblower”, Ignores Actual Whistleblowers, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on September 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

An official intelligence community approved whistleblower is not a whistleblower, he or she is an operative. To remind everyone, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning are whistleblowers, and have paid the price for their courage. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

The word “whistleblower” has been trending in news headlines lately, but not for the reasons that any sane person might hope for.

“Read the whistleblower complaint regarding President Trump’s communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky”, says The Washington Post. “Trump responds to hearing on whistleblower complaint”, says MSNBC. “Trump-Ukraine scandal: what did the whistleblower say and how serious is it?”, writes The Guardian. “Whistleblower complaint says White House tried to ‘lock down’ Ukraine call records” announces CBS. “Whistleblower’s complaint is a devastating report from a savvy official”, declares CNN.

So who is this “savvy official”? Who is this courageous whistleblower who boldly shone the light of truth upon the mechanisms of power in the interests of the common man? Who is this brave, selfless individual who set off an impeachment inquiry by taking a stand and revealing the fact that the US president made a phone call in July urging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to help investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son?

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Cronyism, Government, Horseshit, Intelligence, Media, Politics

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How Many Are Not Blowing the Whistle? by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on June 21, 2019 | Leave a comment

What we see of government depredations is only the tip of the iceberg. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning is now being slammed with $500 fines for every single day that she remains imprisoned in contempt of court for refusing to testify in a secret grand jury against Julian Assange. Next month it will increase to $1,000 a day.

Again, this is while Manning is also locked up in jail. It’s not enough to re-imprison a whistleblower who already served years of prison time, including nearly a year in solitary confinement, for taking a principled stand against an opaque and unjust grand jury system; they’re going to potentially ruin her life with crippling debt as well. The only way to make it more cruel and unusual would be to start waterboarding her or threatening her family members.

All for refusing to participate in a corrupt and unaccountable legal performance designed to imprison a publisher to whom she leaked evidence of US war crimes in 2010.

People see this. People watch this and learn from this, as sure as people watched and learned from the public town square executions of those who spoke ill of their medieval lords. And just like those medieval executions, many of the onlookers have been trained to cheer and celebrate at the fate of the accused; have a look at the power-worshipping, government-bootlicking comments under my recent tweet about Manning’s persecution for a perfect example of this. People have been taught what happens to those who blow the whistle on the powerful, and they have been taught to become quite comfortable with it.

And, of course, that is the whole idea.

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Secrecy and Lies: Chernobyl and the U.S. Government, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on June 14, 2019 | 4 comments

The truth is no more welcomed by the US government now than it was by the Soviet government after Chernobyl. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not yet seen the excellent HBO miniseries Chernobyl and might yet do so, you might want to wait to read this article until after you have seen the series, as it contains spoilers.

The five-part series documents the catastrophic nuclear explosion that took place at a nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, an event that threatened the lives and health of millions of people, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Europe. The series documents the heroic life-endangering efforts of thousands of people in an effort to resolve the crisis with the least amount of damage and loss of life.

The most powerful part of the series occurs in part 5.

Whenever power plant officials conducted tests on the system, everyone knew that there was a failsafe button in the event that everything went wrong with the test and an explosion became imminent. All that the power plant people had to do was push the failsafe button and the entire plant would come to a halt. The reason was that the button activated the introduction of control rods containing boron into the fissioning uranium, which would cause the entire system to be immediately shut down.

To save money, Soviet officials had used graphite in the rods. In the 1970s, a Soviet nuclear scientist wrote an article stating that the graphite would serve as an accelerator, not a suppressant, of an impending nuclear explosion. He wrote that it was imperative that all the control rods be replaced immediately.

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Posted in Energy, Government, History, Horseshit, Media, Technology

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A Soldier’s Defense of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on June 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

A former soldier applauds Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange’s exposure of US  war crimes. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

It’s a matter of principles over personalities. Whether one loves or hates Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange is besides the point. The First Amendment freedom of the press is at stake now. In this case the government’s tool for oppression is the Espionage Act, an archaic relic from America’s repressive World War I-era legislation. Chelsea Manning already served seven years of a 35-year sentence, one of the longest ever meted out to a whistleblower, and was recently jailed again after she refused to testify about WikiLeaks.

That was harsh and disturbing enough for those of us who value transparency regarding our national security state. Now the Trump administration has gone a step further and threatens, for the first time ever, to imprison an actual publisher – in this case Julian Assange. Charged on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, Assange – currently jailed in Britain – faces extradition and a lengthy sentence in the United States.

I’ve been called a whistleblower, myself, for my decision to write a book and articles critical of the American warfare state and the military to which I dedicated my entire adult life from the age of seventeen. But the truth is I’ve got nothing on Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. Manning broke the law, risked it all, went to prison for her principles. Assange is headed for the same fate. And as a soldier I’m glad they did what they did!

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