Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Bradley (a.k.a.
Brianna) Manning
“Truth-Telling Is Not
a Crime”
Manning’s face in the
banner
Nemo in the pen
Anokai Casey with
chalk
March leader Cecile
Veillard
“Hero”
“Arrest war criminals
… ”
“Free Manning” banner
Veterans for Peace
flag-bearer
A support
demonstration for U.S. Army private first class Bradley Manning, who is being
charged with “aiding and abetting the enemy” by providing extensive information
about U.S. foreign policy and military actions to the now-defunct Web site
WikiLeaks, drew 100 people to the streets of Hillcrest in San Diego June 1. The
action was part of an international day of support for Manning timed to
commemorate the third anniversary of his arrest on June 1, 2010, and also to
come on the eve of his court-martial, which began June 3.
“This day of
protest began 13 hours ago in Canberra and Sydney, Australia,” said Joe Cruz of
San Diego Veterans for Peace at the start of the rally. “Then it moved to
Korea, where freedom fighters demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy. Then
it moved west to Heidelberg, Germany, where I was stationed when I was in the
U.S. military, and to Amsterdam, London, Wales, and then across the ocean to
Hartford, New York, Boston, Maine and even Tampa, Florida. Then it came west to
Phoenix and then to California, in San Diego, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles
and now San Diego.”
Manning’s plight
has gripped anti-war activists and other progressives worldwide despite minimal
coverage by the corporate media. It was dramatized as part of the San Diego
action. Organizers set up an outdoor pen of wooden standards and cord made to look
like barbed wire, and a volunteer activist named Nemo stood inside the pen in
an orange garment that resembled a prison jumpsuit. The pen was 6’ by 8’ — the
size of the cell in which Manning has been held in solitary confinement for
much of the time he’s been in custody. But since the event was outdoors and in
a public place, they could not have Nemo be naked — as the real Manning was
forced to through much of his incarceration, supposedly to keep him from
killing himself.
The action began
with Nemo reading some of the 10,000-word statement Manning himself presented
in court on February 28, when he acknowledged providing WikiLeaks with U.S.
military and State Department cables but denied aiding and abetting the enemy.
Manning explained how his job as an intelligence analyst for the Army gave him
access to State Department communications.
“With my
insatiable curiosity and interest in geopolitics, I became fascinated,” Manning
recalled. “I read not only the cables on Iraq, but also about countries and
events I found interesting. The more I read, the more I was fascinated by the
way we dealt with other nations and organizations. I soon began to think the
documented back-door deals and seemingly criminal activity didn’t seem
characteristic of the de facto leader of
the free world. … The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion
this was the type of information that should become public.”
“This is one
American solider,” Joe Cruz said of Manning. “We have over 5,000 [U.S.]
soldiers killed [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and we have killed up to 1 million
Iraqis. Why all this fuss about one man? It’s a symbolic case. It’s because we
are all Bradley Manning. The war against
Manning is a war against all of us, against a security state, a surveillance
state.” Cruz compared the Obama administration’s war against whistleblowers and
their subpoenas for information from the Associated Press and Fox News to the
tactics of the East German intelligence agency STASI, which spied on everybody
in the country (or tried to) and let them know it in order to intimidate them
into silence.
“Just three
months ago, our media felt Bradley Manning was not a major story,” Cruz said.
“Then they found out at the AP, Fox News and CNN that they were being targeted for doing their duty as
journalists. It’s about more than Bradley Manning. It’s about the principles we
hold dear.” Cruz also noted that the oath one takes to join the U.S. military —
which hasn’t changed between his enlistment in 1962 and Manning’s in 2006 — “is
not an oath to the Commander in
Chief, nor to Congress, nor to God. It’s an oath to the U.S. Constitution, to
protect it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And that Constitution has been violated by
the fascist war parties in Washington, D.C.”
A number of speakers
cited other individuals who have attempted to resist U.S. militarism and the
growing power of the American surveillance state and have suffered for it. Pat
Grayson of the San Diego Coalition to Free Manning mentioned the late Aaron
Swartz, Internet entrepreneur and inventor of the RSS data-management system,
who killed himself last January while facing up to 35 years in prison for
allegedly hacking into the database of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) to steal articles from medical journals. She also mentioned
another Internet activist, Jeremy Hammond, who is currently being held in
prison pending trial for allegedly exposing the activities of Strategic
Forecasting, Inc., also known as Stratfor, a private intelligence corporation
that Barron’s magazine called “the
shadow CIA.”
Grayson noted
that, like Manning, Hammond is being held without bail, “which is unheard of,
because the government doesn’t want them to defend themselves. Jeremy Hammond
is in jail for stealing e-mails from a secret corporation that is monitoring
private e-mails and selling information to other corporations and the
government. … This corporation was going after civil-rights, animal-rights and
Occupy activists.” According to Grayson, the judge in Hammond’s case, Loretta
Preska, has a conflict of interest since her husband, Thomas Kavaler, had one
of the e-mail accounts Hammond is accused of disclosing and also shares clients
with Stratfor, but she has refused to remove herself from the case.
Alfie Padilla,
who identifies as a male-to-female Transgender person and works as volunteer
coordinator for the Hillcrest-based Queer rights organization Canvass for a
Cause (CFAC), focused on Manning’s own gender identity. Though most accounts of
Manning’s case — including the official Bradley Manning Support Group and its
Web site, www.bradleymanning.org —
refer to him as a male and use Bradley as his first name, Manning made contact
with a gender-identity counselor on the Internet in November 2009 and discussed
his desire to transition to female. Other chat logs indicate that Manning
decided on “Brianna” as her feminine first name, which has led some of
Manning’s supporters not to identify Manning by a first name at all and to use
gender-ambiguous language like the ordinarily plural pronouns “they” and “them”
to describe Manning.
“One of the most
emotional times in my research on Manning was when I read a quote that they
didn’t mind going to jail but they didn’t want pictures of themselves as a man
plastered all over the media,” Padilla said. She called Manning’s incarceration
and trial “an intentional attack on Queer and Trans people by the state. The
state wants to make it seem like a random person did this, but Manning is one
in a long line of Queer people who stood up for the truth. The Queer movement
is not just corporate people and celebrities.”
Long-time San
Diego peace activist Lynn Gonzalez talked about post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) and told the story of Omar, a former Marine she became acquainted with
when he called the hotline she staffs for disaffected servicemembers. When he
was sent to Iraq in the early years of the war, Omar “got off the plane in
Baghdad and was shipped right to Falloujah and put under constant combat stress
for three weeks,” Gonzalez recalled. “He didn’t even have a chance to shower.
He was in the trenches as a sniper when a woman darted out. He shot her before
he realized she was a woman. Then he had to listen to her scream for hours
before she finally died. No one in his unit could risk coming out for her
body.”
Omar’s PTSD
first kicked in in 2004 when he was still in Falloujah, Gonzalez recalled. “He
was sleepwalking, breaking bottles and cutting himself with the edges,” she
said. “He was sent home, and at first he just wanted to go back to his unit.
Then I finally got him to go to the psych ward at Balboa Hospital, and when he
got out he wanted nothing to do with the Marines anymore. In fact, he even gave
me the keys to his car so I could pick it up for him at Camp Pendleton, since
he didn’t want to go back there.”
According to
Gonzalez, servicemembers who get PTSD generally get it from guilt feelings over
innocent civilians they killed. “War is an aberration,” she said. “We are not
meant to be killing each other. It’s hard for a lot of people [in the peace
movement] to maintain sympathy for the soldiers because they’re the ones doing
the killing, but all those in war are
victims. Wars are fought by the 99 percent for the benefit of the 1 percent.” Gonzalez
closed by mentioning another victim: Kimberly Rivera, a U.S. war resister who
fled the military, went to Canada, then was deported to the U.S. by the
Canadian government and is now in the Miramar brig in San Diego County awaiting
charges. She’s also separated from her four children, two of whom are
Canadian-born.
Attorney Charlie
Pratt, a long-time Queer activist, talked not only about Manning and Rivera but
also fellow attorney Lynne Stewart, whom he’s known for 40 years — and who is
currently in prison for violating so-called “special administrative measures”
in connection with representing Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, convicted of
masterminding the first attempt by terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center
in New York in 1993. The “special administrative measures” were supposed to
prevent her from relaying any communications between her and Rahman, ostensibly
to keep him from using her as a conduit to relay instructions to his followers
to commit terrorist acts — but Stewart pointed out they also prevented her from
telling Rahman’s followers not to get
involved in terrorism.
Stewart is
suffering from severe breast cancer, and her supporters have alleged that her
cancer was allowed to become terminal after she was refused medical treatment
in prison. Pratt called the government’s attack on her, and their refusal to
give her compassionate release, “pure persecution” and part of a campaign to
silence all dissent against the U.S.’s war policy. “Everyone has a time in
their life as an activist when you have to stand up,” Pratt said. “We have to
stick to our principles, suck it up, be brave and understand not to separate
Bradley Manning, Lynne Stewart and Kimberly Rivera from the rest of us. We owe them. We can stand up and we must stand up.”
After the rally,
participants staged a march to the military recruiting office near the Uptown
District shopping center. They marched in the street and, to make it difficult
for the police to push them back to the sidewalks, marched against the direction of traffic. The action ended at about
3:30 p.m., though some people reconvened later that night for an Overpass Light
Brigade display of lights spelling “Free Manning” from the 10th
Street Bridge, aimed at the drivers on the 163 freeway below.
