The Chelsea Manning Story
Photo by Win McNamee/GETTY IMAGES
Written by: Aidan Jonah
Today, Chelsea Manning sits in a Virginia jail, jailed for refusing to sell out Julian Assange to the US government.
The Backstory;
In 2010, Manning provided Assange and Wikileaks with 750,000 classified and sensitive documents that revealed America’s secret diplomatic cables and Iraqi and Afghanistan war logs. The key piece was the video “Collateral Murder”, which showed the murder of a dozen unarmed civilians by the US army. Her life would never be the same.
Three years later, Manning was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for that act and sentenced to 35 years in military prison.
At the time, Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project said, “this is a sad day for Bradley Manning, but it’s also a sad day for all Americans who depend on brave whistleblowers and a free press for a fully informed public debate.”
In August 2016, she announced her gender transition, coming out as a transgender woman. For the next four years of her life, she lived in an all-male military prison. She tried to kill herself twice that year and spent 23 hours a day in a 6-by-8-foot cell for nine months in conditions that a United Nations special rapporteur later said could qualify as torture.
In 2017, Manning’s sentence was commuted by former president Barack Obama. “Obama may well have just saved Chelsea Manning's life,” said Sarah Harrison, who defended Manning as Active Director of the Courage nonprofit. “Freeing her is clearly and unambiguously the right thing to do.”
The Buildup;
After two years of freedom, Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury and give testimony in March.
This grand jury is allegedly connected to the American government’s attempts to extradite Julian Assange from Britain. They are struggling to justify his extradition as he is only facing one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
She attempted to squash the subpoena but failed. Days later, she was ordered to custody by Federal Judge Claude M. Hilton for refusing to testify.
Manning spent 62 days in jail over the course of the two and a half months for her initial refusal. She only got out in May on a technicality related to the expiration of the prior grand jury’s term.
A week later, Manning was held in civil contempt, sentenced to 18 months in jail, and had a fine scheme imposed upon her by US District Judge Anthony Trenga. BuzzFeed reported that those fines could start at $500 a day and increase to as much as $1,000 a day after a 60-day period.
Grand Juries;
According to the Intercept, federal grand juries are some of the blackest boxes in the judicial system. Closed to the press, the public, and even attorneys for those who have been subpoenaed, the process is ripe for nefarious state use.
For decades, federal grand juries have been used to investigate and intimidate activist communities — from the late-19th-century labor movements, to the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and black liberationists of the last century, to environmentalists, anarchists, and indigenous-rights fighters more recently.
“While the federal grand jury purports to be a simple mechanism for investigating criminal offenses,” civil rights attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen, who represented Manning in her effort to quash the subpoena, told the Intercept, “it can be — and historically has been — used by prosecutors to gather intelligence to which they are not entitled, for example about lawful and constitutionally protected political activity.”
The present day;
Manning will soon have served seven months in prison. Unless there is a stunning change of heart from the grand jury, she will have to serve 11 more months.
However, she recently sent out a cryptic tweet, which has her supporters hoping for an early release.
It would be almost unprecedented for someone to escape jail time for refusing to testify to a grand jury. In this political era, the impossible becomes possible every day, so these hopes could be closer to reality than fiction.
Manning is currently writing a memoir, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in the winter of 2020.