Chelsea should be out, enjoying herself under the sun.
Hers is a generation that will inherit the debt of American war crimes, and it is an utter tragedy that things are going down like this.
It is a real modern travesty; to consider how extremely dire the situation is, the dead public silence vis a vis military war-crimes, versus what Chelsea is going through.
By what righteous metric can a society that allows such an injustice to happen be allowed to continue to keep its secrets?
Challenge the narrative and either you get justification for mass-murder, downright hostility from folks who cannot brook a challenge to the military hegemony, or outright ignorance and pleas of victim-hood.
So-called western moral authority is torn to shreds - but the interesting thing is, if the West is to step back from the precipice and face the truth, then Chelsea is going to be a part of that, too.
Her pardon is the only appropriate way forward, followed by proper justice for the real crimes against humanity that were committed by her colleagues, in the name of their families.
Chelsea's release, as well as Julian's, would most definitely be the only way for things to turn around, for the generation that will inherit these debts is not easily going to forgive these deeds.
The leaks will continue.
Especially since the very real, extraordinarily catastrophic war crimes have continued to happen, and there is still not an appropriate level of responsibility for the situation. There is ZERO Justice for the victims.
Just how long we are going to be distracted by puppets until we start jailing our very real war criminals? Assange and Manning being pardoned has to happen.
Not going to happen. The military industrial complex has a stranglehold on our country. There is nobody with enough power to challenge them.
We tried to elect an anti-war candidate, but he was ignored and relentlessly attacked by mainstream news which are all part of the same political machine.
To even BEGIN to acknowledge the US's war crimes would open a whole can of worms. What ELSE have our intelligence agencies been doing? What ELSE have we covered up? What ELSE was an unjustifiable war crime?
Instead of holding people accountable, we pardon war criminals so vile that their fellow Navy Seals broke down crying while telling their story, describing the criminal as 'fucking evil'.[0]
The leaks will continue. They did massive damage already.
And, when you consider that much, much more has been happening in the meantime, its a certainty that the complex is on the defense against .. the people.
No matter how big the culture is, there will be dissent, and action.
It is a big mistake to assume that when/if Assange and Manning are 'dealt with' (i.e. dead, incarcerated, etc.) the leaks will cease.
The complex is on the run. Not everyone is so content to just bend over, these days. Of course, that is hard to see if you are actually in its bubble..
This grand jury is attempting to get her to testify on something she has already given sworn testimony on, hoping that she will make some contradiction in her previous statement they can use to prosecute Assange. Even if you agree with the original concept of a grand jury, this usage is appalling.
There is definitely a case to be made for a total miscarriage of justice in her case, and indeed this is supported by the evidence of her illegal detention.
It may not be obvious from a shallow observation of her case, but the very real and absolute war crimes and crimes against humanity she - and others - have revealed, were committed by the very group of people that currently has her in its sights.
Very real crimes were committed, and the people who committed them are now trying Chelsea, and Assange, in a corrupted court.
So .. no. This particular grand jury situation is going to be illegal and invalid, by any and all measure. You cannot be tried, in a fair and just society, by the very organizations you have revealed are committing crimes against humanity.
Chelsea Manning is this generations' Sophie Scholl. That was not 'justice' either, even if it was accepted by society at large as a consequence of the zeitgeist.
A pardon is not possible because she has not been convicted of any crime. She is being held for contempt of court because she refuses to testify to a secret closed door panel. She says she will testify in public about whatever they wish but not to secret proceedings. She has also previously answered the questions they say they want to ask her in the secret proceeding.
> refuses to testify to a secret closed door panel
Commonly known as "grand jury" and being the basic unit of US judicial system. You are welcome to rebuild the whole judicial system from scratch, but you'd be very naive expecting existing judicial system to cooperate with you on essentially ignoring the law. Usually people who tell judges they don't recognize the law and thus should be treated differently by the judicial system do not fare well. I personally don't believe a judicial system where everybody is free to ignore it at will can function. And thus any "sovereign citizen" types that decides to just ignore the law when it fits them are in trouble.
> She says she will testify in public about whatever they wish but not to secret proceedings
That's not how grand juries work. And the reason for that is that until there's reasonable assurance the crime has been committed or about to be committed, it is improper to publicize information about somebody being investigated, which may harm that person irreparably. If somebody suspects you in a crime, we'd want to be quite sure you're a criminal before we air your private information to the public and call you a potential criminal publicly. That's the function of the grand jury and that's why it closed.
If Manning has any information that needs to be shared, it can be shared independently, regardless of any grand jury. However, the contents of the grand jury proceedings should stay secret, because doing otherwise may harm innocent lives.
> A pardon is not possible because she has not been convicted of any crime.
Is that true? Wasn't Nixon pardoned for his crimes without actually being convicted of anything? He didn't even manage to get impeached, since he resigned before that could happen.
A quick web search shows this to be a matter of some dispute. Some cases have been ruled in favor of the executive being able to pardon contempt while others have declared contempt to not be an offense as defined by the Constitution and therefore not pardonable.
If her qualm is only wanting to be open (as opposed to a general objection to being part of the persecution of Assange), then couldn't she:
1. take the stand, be asked one question
2. refuse to answer question, be detained
3. prepare written answer to said question, publish it.
4. take the stand, read prepared answer to said question, be asked another question
5. repeat
It would be tedious, but likely less tedious than spending 500 days in jail with no forward progress.
The way it usually works is if your testimony is needed, you are granted immunity for whatever new crimes that testimony may reveal and are compelled to testify. Then, you can not use 5th amendment as a reason for refusal.
Yeah. Or in this case, she has already been convicted and served her sentence.
Although if she were going to testify, it would make sense to insist on further immunity, given this grand jury's tendency to conjure charges out of thin air just as IBM conjures fake patents - "X, but with a computer".
> Yeah. Or in this case, she has already been convicted and served her sentence.
I don't think the problem here is that there's some problems with 5th amendment. I think the problem is Manning just doesn't want to recognize the validity of US legal system in general and grand jury in particular. That can only end in one way, and that's the way it ended in.
More proof that it is unlawful to continue holding her, as the Grumbles motion her team submitted last month stated. Further imprisonment will not cause her to talk, so it is unlawful to imprison her.
In my opinion, she should be free. That being said, I don't think an emotional outburst is "more proof" (maybe you meant more evidence) that it is unlawful to hold her. Can you imagine going in from of a judge and saying "my client attempted suicide in prison, that means it's unlawful to hold her." The precedent would allow basically any prisoner who attempts suicide to be released.
The point of this kind of custody is to persuade someone to comply with the court. That the person in question would literally rather die means it isn't going to work.
Well, one wouldn't just go 'in front of a "judge"' in this case, but rather also present a long and sordid history of Chelsea's very real torture by her captors.
Chelsea has been kept in inhumane conditions which completely violate her human rights, for years. She has been very seriously tortured - physically, psychologically - by any measure.
Chelsea has had no justice. She is not a criminal, but rather a victim of a criminally corrupt military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex hell-bent on having its crimes covered up, by any and all means possible. "National Secrecy" has meant, for too long, 'our citizens will burn us to ashes if they find out what we have done'.
Secrecy corrupts. The empire will come unraveled with every secret kept, revealed.
The degree to which extremely corruptive measures (indefinite detention, 'black sites', secret courts) are taken, is indicative of just how much criminal behavior is being 'protected' by the Defense Department's lawyers ..
It is more proof that she is not being coerced into testifying by this imprisonment, meaning it is unlawful to continue imprisonment. Most prisoner are in prison to pay their debt to society, Manning is in to coerce her to testify.
He was killed. The story left the news cycle before coronavirus happened. So many rich and powerful people were close with him... I don’t think the story is coming back unless unavoidable new evidence is released.
> Can you imagine going in from of a judge and saying "my client attempted suicide in prison, that means it's unlawful to hold her." The precedent would allow basically any prisoner who attempts suicide to be released.
In order to support that point, I provided a concrete example. Jeffrey Epstein attempted to commit suicide in prison, but Jeffrey Epstein was also the exact type of person who shouldn't be freed from incarceration.
How does it prove that it's unlawful? As far as I know, the law does say that if you refuse judicial order, you will be imprisoned. If you really really really don't want to comply with a judicial order - there's no exception in the law that says "well, if you really don't want to - then it's ok, you can violate any judicial order, but only if you feel really strongly about it". The law is not about anyone's feelings. However you feel about what Manning thinks or does, it does not change the law, and by law it's certainly lawful to hold Manning until the compliance with the judicial order is achieved. That's the only way these orders can work - otherwise anybody who gets unfavorable order will just refuse them and say "no matter what you do, I will never comply so you can as well give up now".
> If you are uncoerciable, it is unlawful to imprison you for refusing the order
No, it's not. It's just a different process (criminal contempt, which is punitive, instead of civil contempt, which is coercive.)
Susan McDougal, in the Whitewater scandal, is an example of someone receiving both maximum civil contempt sanctions and subsequently being charged with criminal contempt for the same incident.
Manning has not been charged with contempt of court to my knowledge, so while there may be a legal way to imprison her the current imprisonment is illegal.
What does it mean "uncoerciable"? There's nothing particularly "uncoerciable" in Manning - we don't know the future and Manning is as human as anybody else. If this law applies to all other humans, it applies to Manning too.
Imprisonment clearly isn't enough to coerce her into complying. There may be other methods that could coerce her into it, but they would be obvious violations of the eighth Amendment.
> Imprisonment clearly isn't enough to coerce her into complying
By your logic, we should not imprison recidivist criminals, as prison is clearly not enough to deter them from further crimes. So we should just give up, shrug and release them, because apparently nothing can be done about it. In fact, if the criminal solemnly swears they'd go back to the life of crime as soon as they are released from prison, we should immediately release them as it is clear that keeping them in prison would not coerce them to comply with the law, and thus is completely pointless.
>By your logic, we should not imprison recidivist criminals, as prison is clearly not enough to deter them from further crimes.
Criminals are in prison as judgment for being convicted of their crimes. Manning is in prison to be coerced to comply with the grand jury, not as punishment for any action. This is they key difference you are missing. This isn't "my logic," this is the current law of the US, see "Grumbles motion."
Wouldn't the situation where you could just refuse any judicial order and then be set free erode the credibility of the entire judicial system in the eyes of the public? The point of contempt charge is to give teeth to judicial orders, otherwise it's just some ramblings of some random person sitting behind a desk in some fancy building, and there's no reason why anybody should listen to them. The credibility of the system, in part, rests in its ability to enforce judicial decisions.
No, I don't believe so; the whole point of a jury is to verify that a single authority figure's decision to imprison someone is not invalid.
If a judge wants someone imprisoned for a valid legal reason, they should be able to get a jury of that person's peers to agree. That's what prevents our judiciary from becoming arbitrary tool of oppression.
> the whole point of a jury is to verify that a single authority figure's decision to imprison someone is not invalid.
Juries never decided questions of authority and validity of judicial decisions. That's just not how juries work in common law.
> If a judge wants someone imprisoned for a valid legal reason, they should be able to get a jury of that person's peers to agree.
That may be your ideal picture, but again that's not how common law system works, and also not how it can work - if somebody would just refuse to comply with judicial orders, and you'd require a new jury trial each time one needs to be compelled to appear in hearing, answer a question, comply with a subpoena, etc. then you won't be able to enforce any decision and any judicial proceedings would be impossible as it would produce a fractal tree of sub-proceedings for every action, and any hostile actor would be able to bog down any proceedings by just refusing to comply with every judicial action. In actuality, there are enforcement actions in common law systems that can be performed without a jury trial. Jury trial is only necessary for conviction of a crime.
Fair enough, but I still believe that imprisonment absent a conviction or pretrial flight risk should not be allowed. I hope that in the future, we will see these sorts of situations like we see debtor's prisons today.
Another abhorrent example which shows where this leads: journalists can be unilaterally detained for not giving up their sources.
Prisoners who are either in for 10 years+ or are put into solitary confinement should be given a voluntary euthanasia option. If Chelsea Manning sincerely believes that she will not be freed, and wants to end her own life on her terms, let her.
This objectively reduces harms. You cannot sincerely tell me that people who wanted to end their suffering in the face of extreme torture or solitary confinement are "mentally ill" or acting irrationally.
This would be an indirect death sentence to many. Involuntary confinement is extremely stressful and has been known to lead to irrational acts like suicide. Why do you think they take your belt and shoelaces when you get incarcerated?
Likely to free her? You figured that out how exactly? From the article and how the civil contempt works, she would be held indefinitely, until the reasons for contempt charge would end. That is probably until the trial with Assange in US ends. And it didn't even start yet.
if you listen to the accompanying news reel, she was only suppose to be in there for a maximum of 18 months. it's been 2 years so with the hearing coming up on Friday, there should be a good chance she can go free fingers crossed.
The longest time incarcerated for contempt in the United States was fourteen years. If there is a maximum of 18 months, apparently it's an easily disregarded guideline rather than a hard rule.
I'm pretty sure that rule does not apply when the person has the ability to comply with the court at any time and continues to decide not to. That's why in this case, Chelsea is being fined an additional $1,000 per day. Each day is considered a separate act of contempt. She was not sanctioned summarily, but will be held until she complies.
Yeah, it sounds like she's mentally unstable and/or seeking attention. This whole thing grand jury thing is totally ridiculous. Manning is breaking the law by refusing to testify, which is fine (I break lots of laws I don't care about either). But you really can't have it both ways: break the laws and claim you are being unjustly punished for your crime. Moreover, there's really no practical reason why she can't just testify to the closed=door grand jury and then tell the press what she said or just leak it online or something.
I know this sounds a little harsh and I will probably get downvoted for this, but I think she wants to be in jail. Maybe it's better to be relevant (at least in some tangential sense) and imprisoned then free and forgotten. I've certainly met some people who might make a similar trade-off, usually because their egos' require it.
Also, let's look at her lawyer's statement: "Manning has previously indicated that she will not betray her principles, even at risk of grave harm to herself," her legal team said, adding, "Her actions today evidence the strength of her convictions, as well as the profound harm she continues to suffer as a result of her 'civil' confinement."
Her suicide attempts (if they are even that, I'm not 100% sure) have been a constant theme with her throughout the years. Most likely, as stated above, they are caused by either an underlying mental issue (I'm sure gender dysphoria has high co-morbidity with a ton of other mental illnesses) or are a cry for help/attention. What doesn't make any sense, to me, is that her suicide is some how proof of her convictions. Like you stated, she is scheduled for a hearing on Friday that could potentially set her free.
It seems to me like you're suggesting that the government (or someone) tried to kill her? While I'm sure she would be flattered, there's a zero probability chance that's what happened.
> here's really no practical reason why she can't just testify to the closed=door grand jury and then tell the press what she said or just leak it
I'm pretty sure if that happened, she'd be back inside before her feet even hit the ground and this time with criminal charges (violating national security, treason?) that means even less due process and chance of getting out.
This has more insight into your perception the world than anything about Manning. You (and I) know very little about the situation. Trying to ascribe self-harm to "seeking attention" is pure projection, and this whole comment tells me a lot more about you than about Manning's motivations.
Hers is a generation that will inherit the debt of American war crimes, and it is an utter tragedy that things are going down like this.
It is a real modern travesty; to consider how extremely dire the situation is, the dead public silence vis a vis military war-crimes, versus what Chelsea is going through.
By what righteous metric can a society that allows such an injustice to happen be allowed to continue to keep its secrets?
Challenge the narrative and either you get justification for mass-murder, downright hostility from folks who cannot brook a challenge to the military hegemony, or outright ignorance and pleas of victim-hood.
So-called western moral authority is torn to shreds - but the interesting thing is, if the West is to step back from the precipice and face the truth, then Chelsea is going to be a part of that, too.
Her pardon is the only appropriate way forward, followed by proper justice for the real crimes against humanity that were committed by her colleagues, in the name of their families.
Chelsea's release, as well as Julian's, would most definitely be the only way for things to turn around, for the generation that will inherit these debts is not easily going to forgive these deeds.
The leaks will continue.
Especially since the very real, extraordinarily catastrophic war crimes have continued to happen, and there is still not an appropriate level of responsibility for the situation. There is ZERO Justice for the victims.
Just how long we are going to be distracted by puppets until we start jailing our very real war criminals? Assange and Manning being pardoned has to happen.