Category Archives: Jail & Incarceration

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Heads Up: Willian Penn Followup Coming Soon

November 21, 2022 Chuck Fager 9 Comments

Was William Penn Punished Enough? (Partial List)

Jailed:

Cork Ireland, Sept. 1668, for attending meeting.
Tower of London, Nov or Dec-1668 – 8 months; accused (but not tried) of blasphemy, wrote No Cross, No Crown.
Again in August 1670, for preaching, tried with Quaker William Mead in Mead-Bushell case: established the right of juries to reach their own verdict free of judicial pressure.

Continue reading Heads Up: Willian Penn Followup Coming Soon →

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Chuck Berry: An American Original

November 13, 2022 Chuck Fager Leave a comment

Washington Post Book World:

Chuck Berry’s complicated path to becoming a rock legend

By David Kirby — November 9, 2022

Chuck Berry was playing a concert in Paris once when the audience started to get out of hand. But instead of engaging the rowdy fans, security did nothing. Things went from bad to worse, and tear gas was fired into the venue. Everybody ran for the exits — everybody except one.

Continue reading Chuck Berry: An American Original →

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Chelsea Manning: A Searching, Thought-Provoking Profile

October 21, 2022 Chuck Fager 1 Comment

A Compelling Read . . .

The Guardian

Chelsea Manning: ‘I struggle with the so-called free world compared with life in prison’

Nihilist, anarchist, idealist, troubled young transperson crying out for help: when a 22-year-old US military analyst leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents, everyone thought they knew why. They were wrong, she says. This is what really happened

by Emma Brockes — Sat 22 Oct 2022

Chelsea Manning: ‘I’m not an actor or a movie star. Even YouTubers make more money than me.’ Photograph: Camila Falquez/The Guardian. Dress: Balenciaga Photograph: Camila Falquez/The Guardian

Chelsea Manning’s memoir opens like a Jason Bourne novel with a scene in which the then 22-year-old, on the last day of two weeks’ military leave, tries to leak an enormous amount of classified data via a sketchy wifi connection in a Barnes & Noble in Maryland.

Outside, a snowstorm rages. Inside, Manning, a junior intelligence analyst for the US army, freaks out as the clock ticks down. In 12 hours, her flight leaves for Iraq. Meanwhile she has half a million incident reports on US military activity to upload from a memory stick to an obscure website called WikiLeaks.

The cover of Manning’s book, the German translation.

The military would later argue she didn’t have the clearance even to access these files – “exceeded authorised” as Manning puts it, in army parlance – but the fact is, she says, “It was encouraged. I was told, ‘Go look!’ The way you do analysis is you collect a shit-ton of data, a huge amount, in order to do the work on it.”

Everything about Manning on that afternoon of 8 February 2010 – her name, her gender, her anonymity, her freedom – is provisional and shortly to change. Three months later, she’ll be in a cage in Kuwait. Three years after that, she’ll be starting a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Meanwhile, the wider consequences of her actions that day will, depending on your view, topple governments; endanger lives; protect lives; uphold democracy; compromise global diplomacy; change the world in no measurable way whatsoever; or – Manning’s least favourite interpretation – boil down to a cry for help from a troubled young transperson seeking the care she required.

Today, sitting across the table from me in an office in Brooklyn, Manning is tiny, fierce, dressed all in black with long blond hair, and vibrating with enough nervous energy to power the lights.

“Are we recording?” she says as her eyes skim the room. For the space of our 90-minute encounter, she will seem only partially present, each question yanking her back to some unseen site of contest where she must defend herself against endless and wide-ranging charges.

The memoir is called README.txt, a misleadingly clunky title (it refers to the file name she used for the leaks) for a highly entertaining book that, while telling the story of why and how Manning leaked the data, gives equal space to her origins in Oklahoma, a complex and traumatic family story creating the conditions for all her subsequent decisions.

It’s a terrific read, full of unexpected turns and details that counter many of the assumptions made about Manning at the time. In the wake of her arrest, she was characterised by the US government as, variously, a nihilist, an anarchist, an idealist and an ideologue. Three days into her trial in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents revealing how the US government spied on its own citizens, something, Manning notes drily in the book, that only damaged her image further.

“I support Ed generally, but on a personal level, the timing was difficult for me,” she writes. Snowden emerged as the grownup, the credible whistleblower to Manning’s loose cannon, “hero” to her “bad leaker”.

Compared with Snowden, Manning was young, inexperienced and, because she was in prison, unable to defend herself in interviews. When, at the end of the trial, a photo surfaced of Manning wearing a blond wig and eye makeup, it delivered to her critics a further made-for-TV narrative: she had a secret she couldn’t tell, so she told a nation’s secrets.

Continue reading Chelsea Manning: A Searching, Thought-Provoking Profile →

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October 16 Was William Penn’s Birthday. I’ll still celebrate it, even if others won’t.

October 14, 2022 Chuck Fager 37 Comments

I don’t hear or read much about William Penn among Friends these days. It appears he has been canceled and erased, wiped away in the Great Dismantling. (Indeed, Penn seems to get the most attention today from ultra-right wing activists, who are busy trying to turn him into an avatar of their drive to turn the USA into a Christian nationalist theocracy.)

Meantime, in 2016, a long-running Penn lecture series in Philadelphia was redubbed the “Seeking Faithfulness” lectures.

Then, in late 2020, a Washington DC Quaker hostel and conference center, founded as William Penn House in the late 1960s, was scrubbed and rechristened “Friends Place.”

In April of 2021, across the pond, Friends House in London, which has twenty or so rooms named for various Friends, deleted Penn’s name from the list; I’ve not seen if the space has been renamed.
[Update: it has been renamed for Benjamin Lay, the very dramatic early slavery protester, who was disowned for his disruptive actions.]

A statue of Penn that has been on the top of Philadelphia city hall for more than a century. Some say it should come down, along with the Confederate icons of the South.

In the abstract, I have no problem with renaming (or no-naming) Quaker facilities; our buildings are not sanctified, but functional; memories and attitudes about the dead evolve, and even reverse.

One instructive case is the Quaker burial ground on Nantucket island off the Massachusetts coast. Thousands of Friends are interred in it, with no name markers at all, except for a few headstones placed later by some renegades, described as “heretics” by earlier worthies.

That was the Nantucket way: however different while alive, in personality, position, wealth or poverty, all those Friends ultimately testified to equality in the anonymity of their graves. So it goes.

The Nantucket island Friends Burial Ground.

But not always.

I find I can’t go along with erasing Penn. It’s not “principle” in this case, but practice: his figure keeps popping up in my mind.

He popped up again for me over the last weekend in July: the 30th was the 304th anniversary of Penn’s death in 1718. I don’t know if anyone else noticed that “anniversary”; I did. Continue reading October 16 Was William Penn’s Birthday. I’ll still celebrate it, even if others won’t. →

Agni ad Bellum/ The Lamb's War, Classified, Heroes, Intelligence, Jail & Incarceration, Journalism/Media, Other War Notes, Remarkable People, Resistance, Signs of the Times, Spies & such, The Law — Inside & Outside it, Top-Secret, Torture & Human Rights, War & Peace, Women & Girls

Chelsea Manning Is an American Hero. Full Stop.

October 9, 2022 Chuck Fager 3 Comments

. . . And both an inspiration & challenge to Quakers & other people of faith.

Thank you to the Times for implicitly acknowledging this. And to Obama for commuting her prison sentence.

Chelsea Manning: ‘I’m Still Bound to Secrecy’

New York Times — Oct. 8, 2022

By Chelsea Manning

Ms. Manning is an American activist and the author of the forthcoming memoir “README.txt,” from which this essay has been adapted.

It is not possible to work in intelligence and not imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the idea first crossed my mind. Maybe it was in 2008, when I was learning to be an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army and was exposed to sensitive information for the first time. Or maybe the germ of the idea was planted when I was stationed at Fort Drum, in upstate New York. I was tasked with transporting a cache of classified hard drives in a large box in the summer heat, and I began to imagine what might happen if I screwed it up and left the box unattended. If someone managed to get ahold of a stray hard drive, what ripple effects might it cause?

I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.

While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?

The months I spent in Iraq in 2009changed the way I understood the world. Every night, I woke up in the desert at 9 p.m. and walked from my tiny trailer to the Saddam Hussein-era basketball court that the military had converted into an intelligence operations center.

I sat at a computer screen for hours at a stretch, going through reports from our troops in the field. Monitoring reporting was like drinking from a fire hose: The military used at least a dozen different intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Each gave us a different view of the conflict and of the people and places we were watching. My job was to analyze, with emotional detachment, what impact military decisions were having on this giant, bloody “war on terror.”

The daily reality of my job was like life in a trauma ward. I’d spent hours learning every aspect of the lives of the Iraqis who were dying all around us: what time they got up in the morning, their relationship status, their appetites for food and alcohol and sex, whether they were engaged in political activities, and all the people they interacted with electronically. In some cases, I probably knew more about them than they knew about themselves.

I couldn’t talk about my work with anyone outside my unit, nor about this conflict that looked nothing like the one I’d read about back home or watched on the TV news before I enlisted.

We were seven years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people in the United States had begun to pretend that all of the conflict — all the lost American lives and the still-uncounted lost lives of Iraqis and Afghans — had been worth it. Attention turned away. The establishment moved on. There was the recession to deal with. People at home were losing everything. The health care debate was on the news every night. Yet we were still there. Still dying.

I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.

The idea that the information I had access to held real power began to flash into my brain more often. I’d try to ignore it, and it would come back.

In the intelligence field, you are vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This secrecy comes to control how you think and how you operate in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the justifications start to seem arbitrary.

During my time in intelligence, I had noticed that there was inconsistent internal logic to classification decisions. And I came to see that the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government — in other words, it seems to exist not to to keep secrets safe but to control the narrative.

In December 2009, I began the process of downloading reports of all our activities from Iraq and Afghanistan.

These were descriptions of enemy engagements with hostile forces or explosives that detonated. They contained body counts, coordinates and businesslike summaries of confusing, violent encounters. They contained, in their aggregate force, something much closer to the truth of what those two wars really looked like than what Americans were learning at home. They were a pointillist picture of wars that wouldn’t end.

I burned the files onto DVDs, labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix. I later transferred the files to a memory card, then shattered the discs with my boots on the gravel outside the trailers. On my next leave, I brought the documents back to America in my camera, as files on an SD memory card. This was every single incident report the U.S. Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan, every instance where a soldier thought there was something important enough to log and report. Navy customs personnel didn’t blink an eye. No one cared enough to notice.

Uploading the files directly to the internet wasn’t my first choice. I tried to reach traditional publications, but it was a frustrating ordeal. I didn’t trust the telephone, nor did I want to email anything; I could be surveilled. Even pay phones weren’t safe.

I went into chain stores — Starbucks, mostly — and asked to borrow their landline because supposedly my cellphone was lost or my car had broken down. I called The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I didn’t get anywhere.

I recalled that in 2008, during intelligence training, our instructor — a Marine Corps veteran turned contractor — told us about WikiLeaks, a website devoted to radical transparency, while instructing us not to visit it. But while I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.

The website was the publication of last resort, but as the weeks went by and I got no response from traditional newspapers, I grew increasingly desperate. So, on the very last day of my leave, I went to a Barnes & Noble with my laptop.

Sitting at a chair in the bookstore cafe, I drank a triple grande mocha and zoned out, listening to electronic music — Massive Attack, Prodigy — to wait out the uploads. There were seven chunks of data to get out, and each one took 30 minutes to an hour. The internet was slow, and the connection was bad. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete my work before the store closed. But the Wi-Fi finally did its job.

The fallout was instant and intense. The documents proved, unambiguously and unimpeachably, just how disastrous the war still was. Once revealed, the truth could not be denied or unseen: This horror, this constellation of petty vendettas with an undertow of corruption — this was the truth of the war.

The disclosures became a flash point for a larger argument about how the United States should engage internationally, and how much the public deserved to know about how their government was acting in their name. I had changed the terms of the debate and pulled back the curtain. But while all that was happening, I knew nothing about it. I was in a cage.

Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the ugly truth about its own actions. What I was trying to do had never been done before, and therefore the consequences were, at the time, unknowable.

Daniel Ellsberg, who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, avoided prison because of illegal evidence-gathering by the Nixon White House (which had ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist’s office, in search of information that might discredit Mr. Ellsberg).

Nobody had gone to prison for this sort of thing; I hadn’t heard of Mr. Ellsberg at the time, but I was very aware of Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistle-blower who had been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He’d faced charges that carried a 35-year prison sentence, but shortly before trial he’d cut a deal that left him with only probation and community service.

I certainly weighed the potential consequences. If I was caught, I would be detained, but I figured at most I was going to be discharged or lose my security clearance. I cared about my work, and it was frightening to imagine losing my job — I had been homeless before enlisting — but I thought that if I was court-martialed, it would damage only the government’s own credibility. I never really reckoned with the notion of a life spent in prison, or worse.

The details of what happened to me are, by now, well known. I was held for several months in a cage in Kuwait. I was sentenced to 35 years in a maximum-security prison, where I spent seven years, much of it in solitary confinement. During that time, I came out as transgender and transitioned. Denied gender-affirming health care, I went on a hunger strike. I attempted suicide twice.

But even in prison I remained active. I began writing a columnfor The Guardian. I drafted a bill, “Bill to Re-establish the National Integrity and to Protect Freedom of Speech, and the Freedom of the Press,” which I proposed on Twitter and sent to members of Congress. It was meant to outlaw some of the most egregious ways that the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act had been used against me, so that others wouldn’t be put in such a bind for wanting to do the right thing. It also included fixes to the Freedom of Information Act and would give stronger federal protections to journalists. It was a pipe dream and was treated as such.

On Jan. 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted my sentence, and I was released. Everyone expected me to be in shock at being out, to kiss the ground or something. It did feel surreal to be free, but it also felt as if what I’d been dealing with for the previous seven years would never be over. It certainly isn’t over now. I can never leave it behind.

This was my first time as a free woman. I had spent several years transitioning, so I felt comfortable in the way my body moved and felt. Even in prison, with restrictions on hair length and clothing, people had begun to accept me as a woman. They treated me as a human being. But now I needed to navigate a larger world with this new identity.

I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.

The main upside to my notoriety has been that I can do important work. Activism quickly became almost a full-time job. I went to the Pride parade in New York City; I ran for Senate in Maryland; I protested the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and refugees, and President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the ban on transgender personnel in the military. The political moment into which I emerged is one in which we are figuring out what got us here as a country.

What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.

Despite becoming notorious for my acts of divulgence, I am still, in many ways, bound to secrecy. There are things the media has made public about this story that I can’t comment on, confirm or deny. Certain details remain classified. I am limited to some degree in what I can put on the record.

Some people have characterized me as a traitor, which I continue to reject. I have faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest. But I believe that what I did was my democratic and ethical obligation.

Chelsea Manning is an American activist and the author of the forthcoming memoir “README.txt,” from which this essay has been adapted.

A Friendly Letter

Chuck Fager — Writer, Editor