Chelsea Manning is back in jail and I can’t link to an article about it. Why? Tons of them, including the top google results, are including images of her pre-transition. You know damn well they’re doing it to try and make her look like a criminal too. Fuck the media for its transmisogyny, its bias, its willingness to support fascism without any prodding from the state at all.
Great American Satan
Opposing any & all Status Quo Warriors
Here’s a report that honers Chelsea’s gender choice:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/03/chelsea-manning-jailed-refusing-testify-wikileaks-190308183405276.html
Thanks, sjdorst!
Another with current photographs.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-09/chelsea-manning-jailed-for-refusing-to-testify-on-wikileaks/10886280
australia and aljazeera, reprezent. big middle fingers for cnn.
The Guardian with current picture and pronouns:
Chelsea Manning jailed for refusing to testify to grand jury in WikiLeaks case
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/08/chelsea-manning-judge-jails-wikileaks-case
I haven’t been able to find a lot of info on it, but this whole issue with her arrest just seems rather fishy…
I remember reading about her trying to get her previous testimony unsealed, and that was denied, and that she wanted this most recent testimony to be public, and that was also denied, and I believe part of her defense was that she already testified on this matter.
Reading up on her history, she should have been processed out out of basic training, she should never have been deployed, never granted a security clearance, and should have been removed from access to sensitive information. I do feel that she is a genuine whistle-blower, but that the U.S. Army owns any breach of security, she clearly had issues, and wasn’t fit to serve in the role demanded of her, but the Army insisted, because they were short staffed.
I hope she isn’t imprisoned too long, and that her legal team can clear this up ASAP, but I have a lot of respect for what she’s done and what she’s been through.
I’m not even sure why they grabbed her, except because they could. Manning’s interactions with wikileaks have been extensively documented in the past and it’s not as though she was in solitary confinement in a US military prison, cooking up schemes to rig the election with Julian Assange.
I suspect that a certain amount of this is just “let’s make Manning miserable a bit more, because damn that Obama pardon!”
I don’t blame her for her view of grand juries. My view, colored by having been on a Federal grand jury for 2 years, is, if anything, a lot more negative.
In principle, grand juries are supposed to protect ordinary citizens from the excesses of prosecutors.
In practice, grand juries are just a tool for prosecutors to get around what constitutional protections we have.
I have seen prosecutors threaten witnesses, we got “legal advice” that I was pretty sure was slanted if not made up out of whole cloth so the jury would vote the way they wanted. The few times I dared to question something the prosecutors did, I got rather severely browbeaten, not to mention yelled at by the other grand jurors for keeping them in the jury session a few minutes longer. Moreover, most grand jurors believe that someone must be guilty if a prosecutor is trying to get an indictment. The general feeling among grand jurors is that we’re there to help the prosecutors put people in jail.
When they say that a decent prosecutor can get an indictment against a ham sandwich, they’re understating how bad it is.
I’ve also noticed that you can tell how likely the victim is to be able to afford a real defense by the effort the prosecutors go to to get lots of evidence into the record. For poor defendants (usually from the Bronx), they never bothered to do more than get a warm body in to read the cop’s arrest report, and we had no way of investigating whether any of it was true. (Note that the NYPD is infamous for making stuff up out of whole cloth in their arrest reports. And I wouldn’t trust the warm bodies we saw not to do a little lying, too.) On the other hand, the people who are accused of rich people’s crimes get many, many sessions to enter encyclopedias full of “evidence.”
The Intercept also used a photo from October 2018. They’re reporting it as a free press issue, an angle also represented by The Young Turks (who also used a more current photo in their thumbnail – don’t think they used any pictures of her in the video). Both of those used quotes from a New York Times article I haven’t read. Any article you read that doesn’t mention it as a freedom of the press issue is ignoring quite a bit of context, including tweets posted by Chelsea Manning and others.
And for added context there’s also this:
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1103833291491368960
High quality comments, once again putting my post to shame, heh. Thanks everybody, really.
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