Category Archives: Resistance

Russian Draft Resisters/Refugees in Alaska: Update

[NOTE: After risking their lives cross cold ocean watersin a tiny boat, have they traded one of Putin’s gulags for “detention” (aka jail) in the “free” world?Given the crappy conditions in which many refugees/asylum seekers are held, I wish there was some better way to monitor their situation.]

 

AP News: Alaska asylum seekers are Indigenous Siberians from Russia

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Two Russian Indigenous Siberians were so scared of having to fight the war in Ukraine, they chanced everything to take a small boat across the treacherous Bering Sea to reach American soil, Alaska’s senior U.S. senator said after talking with the two.

The two, identified as males by a resident, landed earlier this month near Gambell, on Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait, where they asked for asylum.

“They feared for their lives because of Russia, who is targeting minority populations, for conscription into service in Ukraine,” Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Saturday during a candidate forum at the Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage.

“It is very clear to me that these individuals were in fear, so much in fear of their own government that they risked their lives and took a 15foot skiff across those open waters,” Murkowski said when answering a question about Arctic policy.

“It is clear that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is focused on a military conquest at the expense of his own people,” Murkowski said. “He’s got one hand on Ukraine and he’s got the other on the Arctic, so we have to be eyes wide open on the Arctic.”

Murkowski said she met with the two Siberians recently but didn’t provide more details about exactly when or where the meeting took place or where their asylum process stood. She was not available after the forum for followup questions.

Murkowski’s office on Oct. 6 announced their request for asylum, saying the men reportedly fled one of the coastal communities on Russia’s east coast.

A village elder in Gambell, 87yearold Bruce Boolowon, is believed to be the last living Alaska National Guard member who helped rescue 11 U.S. Navy men who were in a plane that was shot down by Russian MIGs over the Bering Sea in 1955. The plane crashlanded on St. Lawrence Island.

Gambell, an Alaska Native community of about 600 people, is about 36 miles (58 kilometers) from Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula in Siberia.

Even though one of the Russians spoke English pretty well, two Russianborn women from Gambell were brought in to translate. Both women married local men and became naturalized U.S. citizens, said Boolowon, who is Siberian Yupik.

Russians landing in Gambell during the Cold War was commonplace, but the visits were not nefarious, Boolowon said. Since St. Lawrence Island is so close to Russia, people routinely traveled back and forth to visit relatives.

But these two men seeking asylum were unknown to the people of Gambell.

“They were foreigners and didn’t have any passports, so they put them in jail,” he told The Associated Press last week.

The two men spent the night in the jailhouse, but townspeople in Gambell brought them food, both Alaska Native dishes and items bought at a grocery store.

“They were pretty full; they ate a lot,” Boolowon said.

“The next day, a Coast Guard C130 with some officials came and picked them up,” he said, adding that was the last he heard about the Russians.

Since then, officials have been tightlipped.
“The individuals were transported to Anchorage for inspection, which includes a screening and vetting process, and then subsequently processed in accordance with applicable U.S. immigration laws under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” was all a Department of Homeland Security spokesman said in an email this past week when asked for an update on the asylum process and if and where the men were being held.
Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney in Anchorage, said it’s very unlikely information about the Russians will ever be released.

“The U.S. government is supposed to keep all of this confidential, so I don’t know why they would be telling anybody anything,” she told the AP.

Instead, it would be up to the two Russians to publicize their situation, which could put their families in Russia at risk. “I don’t know why they would want to do that,” Stock said.

Thousands of Russian men fled the country after Putin in September announced a mobilization to call up about 300,000 men with past military experience to bolster forces in Ukraine.

Messages sent last week and again on Saturday to the Russian consular office in San Francisco were not returned.

Chelsea Manning: A Searching, Thought-Provoking Profile

A Compelling Read . . .

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

The January 6 Committee’s Thursday Hearing in Ten Quick Screen Shots

The Last Hearing? Maybe. Or maybe not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Former VP: “I’m not getting in that car.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two of the architects
Steve Bannon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“If [Trump] comes [to the Capitol] I’m going to punch him out,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “I’ve been waiting for this, for trespassing on Capitol grounds. I’m going to punch him out, and I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”

 

 

Chelsea Manning Is an American Hero. Full Stop.

. . . 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’

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?

Chelsea Manning

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.

Quote of the Weekend: Iran Women’s Resistance

The gap between the freedoms and opportunities enjoyed by the system’s affiliated elite and those of ordinary Iranians has never been so wide — and never have so many people expressed so much anger about it.

Radical protests: Iranian women discarding the enforced head covering, cutting their: challenging a system.

This fundamental repudiation of the system is what makes these protests so different from other restive moments in Iran’s recent past: In 1999, students demonstrated against the closing of a reformist newspaper; in 2009, millions marched against an allegedly rigged presidential election, demanding the ascent of different leaders within the system. Today, many despair of any prospect for change and feel a sense of bleak, collective loss.

The [Iranian] singer Shervin Hajipour summarized that pain in his song “Baraye,” or “For.” The lyrics, sewn together from protesters’ tweets and offering reasons for their protests, often wafts from cars and balconies across Tehran now, especially in the evenings:

For my sister, your sister, our sisters
For the renewal of rusted minds
For embarrassed fathers with empty hands
For our longing for an ordinary life

For the students and their future
For this forced paradise
For the bright ones in prisons

For woman, life and freedom

One morning, I met Niloofar, a translator and graphic artist (most Iranians work more than one job these days to get by) in her mid-30s who remembered the ferocity of the full-fledged crackdown in 2009. Two days before we met, she had joined the crowds gathering in Sattarkhan, a neighborhood in central Tehran, which had become one of the capital’s most restive areas. She was heartened by the women in head scarves she saw among the protesters, women who choose to wear hijab by choice but had come out to support a movement against its imposition. “It’s no small thing to come out into the street,” she said. “You risk your life, arrest, injury. It’s like a war out there.”

Niloofar saw the decision of these women to oppose the government as critical, a feature that makes this movement, even if smaller by numbers, broader than anything Iran has experienced since 1979. In turn, protesters are careful to avoid insulting religion, mindful that despite society’s steady shift toward secularism, tolerance for individual freedom in belief is at the very core of their demands. “Islam is one thing; the system is another,” Niloofar said. “Maybe this system has damaged people’s piety most of all. And maybe secularism is the answer to our problems. But no one is saying it’s time to say that yet.”

—-Azadeh Moaveni, New York Times