ACLU: Why Prosecution of Chelsea Manning Was Unconstitutional

[Octafish]

Why the Prosecution of Chelsea Manning Was Unconstitutional

Dror Ladin, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project
& Esha Bhandari, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

Disclosures of government information happen all the time, whether by officials seeking to advance their interests or by whistleblowers exposing misconduct for public benefit. But only one person in our history has ever been sentenced to decades in prison for disclosing truthful information to the press and public: Chelsea Manning.

The government targeted Manning for discriminatory prosecution, using the archaic Espionage Act of 1917. The vagueness of that law enables the government to go after speakers and messages it dislikes — often as it simultaneously leaks information to further its own agenda. For that reason, the ACLU filed a brief yesterday in support of Manning’s military court appeal, explaining why her conviction under the Espionage Act should be overturned as unconstitutional.

Leaks often come from the highest levels, including from CIA directors and the president’s staff. People holding those positions of power have not been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for their disclosures. Many of these leakers seek to influence and even manipulate public opinion by promoting the government’s chosen messages: that drone strikes work, that torture is effective, that the United States is doing everything right. Others pursue their own personal agendas, like Gen. David Petraeus, who shared highly classified information with his biographer.

No leakers were charged with violating the Espionage Act for many decades after it was passed.

But that has changed, dramatically. As we have previously written, the Obama administration has used this World War I-era anti-spying law to go after those whose disclosures run contrary to the government’s preferred narratives. That has resulted in a reality in which a general like Petraeus serves no jail time after sharing top secret information to serve his self-interest, while Manning gets decades in prison.

President Obama recently demonstrated this unfairness when he defended Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information by telling an interviewer that “there’s classified, and then there’s classified.” That’s exactly the problem: The government’s selective prosecution means that information is likely to be considered really classified when it’s embarrassing to the government or when someone like Manning discloses it.

Manning’s severe punishment is a perfect example of the government picking and choosing who can speak to the press. Even more disturbing is the fact that the law forbade Manning from mounting a defense that took into account the public interest in any of her disclosures. It violates the First Amendment for the government to punish the disclosure of truthful information without any consideration of whether the information was important to public discourse — and leaves the government free to inappropriately crack down on disclosures about its own illegality or misconduct.

The selective prosecution of those who disclose government information is profoundly dangerous to our democracy. Using the Espionage Act to punish government leakers or whistleblowers risks chilling speech on matters of significant public concern, and it gives the government too much power to maintain secrecy about matters that are critical for an informed public to hold its government accountable. The American people lose a vital check on our government when it is free to punish anyone who discloses truthful information that the government doesn’t want us to know.

SOURCE w links, etc.: https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/why-prosecution-chelsea-manning-was-unconstitutional

[SusanCalvin]

1. Bless the ACLU.

Have they backed off this yet (I hope)?

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-aclu-wrong-about-citizens-united/

Hmmm.... Guess they haven't. Corporations are not people, ACLU. And money is not speech.

https://www.aclu.org/aclu-and-citizens-united

[Octafish]

2. That is difficult to fit into a democratic framework.

Those august ACLU members argue for the right to keep and bear money come election season. It's not a fair fight when those without much can't be heard apart from Facebook and those without any can't be heard at all. It shows by who gets heard in Washington DC:

It’s sobering that Gilens and Page’s data come from the period 1981 to 2002, before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in its “Citizens United” and “McCutcheon” decisions. Their study also predated the advent of super PACs and “dark money,” and even the Wall Street bailout.

If average Americans had a “near-zero” impact on public policy then, their impact is now zero.

-- Robert Reich http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/26/volcanic-core-fueling-2016-election

Wasn't it the Democratic Party who are the ones who care about the little guy, the working people, the poor?

[SusanCalvin]

3. "Keep and bear money." Yep. nt

[silvershadow]

4. Bookmarking to read later. Thank you, Octafish! nt

[Octafish]

5. Election after Election: I vote for Democratic Action and all I get is more GOP Repression.

And here's where the swells got the idea for it all:

1980 campaign:

Agents for Bush

by Bob Callahan*
Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 33 (Winter 1990)

EXCERPT...

Bush and Terrorism

The Bush presidential campaign not only set the tone for the role and structure of the intelligence apparatus in the new Reagan administration, it also took up a new foreign policy theme which would reap huge political dividends in the years to come. This new theme was terrorism/counterterrorism.

In July 1979 George Bush and Ray Cline attended a conference in Jerusalem where this theme was given its first significant political discussion before leaders of Israel, Great Britain and the United States.

It would take an enormously important event to keep a major American presidential candidate away from campaigning on the Fourth of July weekend. For George Bush, the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism was such an event. The Jerusalem Conference was hosted by the Israeli government and, not surprisingly, most of Israel’s top intelligence officers and leading political (figures) were in attendance. (6)

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin rose to the podium on July 2, 1979 to provide the conference with its opening address. By the summer of 1979, even Menachem Begin was willing to join in the bashing of his old Camp David friend, Jimmy Carter – a practice which had become almost endemic by the fall of 1979.

The Israelis were angry with Carter because his administration had recently released its Annual Report on Human Rights wherein the Israeli Government was taken to task for abusing the rights of the Palestinian people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel’s new anti-Carter tone was mile, however, compared to the rhetoric of the two separate U.S. delegations which attended the conference. The first delegation was led by the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. It included the noted black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin; Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute; and Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of Commentary Magazine. The members of this delegation were registered Democrats, yet all became very active in neo-conservative politics during the Reagan years.

The Republican delegation was led by George Bush. It included Ray Cline and two important members of Bush’s Team B form his CIA days – Major General George Keegan, a Bush supporter who had served as intelligence chief for the United States Air Force; and Harvard professor Richard Pipes. (7)

Looking for a mobilizing issue to counter the Carter-era themes of détente and human rights, the Bush people began to explore the political benefits of embracing the terrorism/anti-terrorism theme.

As Jonathan Marshall of the Oakland Tribune explains: “At the conference, Ray Cline developed the theme that terror was not a random response of frustrated minorities, but rather a preferred instrument of East bloc policy adopted after 1969 when the KGB persuaded the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to accept the PLO as a major political instrument in the Mideast and to subsidize its terrorist policies by freely giving money, training, arms and coordinated communications.(8)

In Ray Cline’s imagination, terrorism had now hardened into a system – an international trouble making system. Richard Pipes elaborated on the Cline hypothesis. “The roots of Soviet terrorism, indeed of modern terrorism,” Pipes states, “date back to 1879….It marks the beginning of that organization which is the source of all modern terrorist groups, whether they be named the Tupamaros, the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Weathermen, Red Brigade or PLO. I refer to the establishment in 1879 of a Congress in the small Russian town of Lipesk, of an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People’s Will.”(9)

According to Philip Paull, who wrote his master’s thesis on the subject of the Jerusalem Conference, “If Pipes was to be believed, the Russians not only support international terrorism, they invented it!”(10)

The Bush/Cline/Pipes definition of terrorism was of course both expeditious and powerfully political. “Left out of their equation,” Jonathan Marshall comments, “was any mention of terrorist acts by CIA-trained Cuban exiles, Israeli ties to Red Brigades, or the function of death squads from Argentina to Guatemala. Soviet sponsorship, real or imagined, had become the defining characteristic of terrorism, not simply an explanation for its prevalence. Moreover, there was no inclination whatsoever to include, under the rubric of terror, bombings of civilians, or any other acts carried out by government forces rather than small individual units.” (11)

Within days after the conference the new propaganda war began in earnest. On July 11, 1979, the International Herald Tribune featured a lead editorial entitled "The Issue is Terrorism," which quoted directly from conference speeches. The same day Congressman Jack Kemp placed selected quotes from the conference in the Congressional Record. In his syndicated column of July 28, 1979, former CIA employee William F. Buckley blasted two of his favorite targets in one single mixed metaphor: “No venture is too small to escape patronage by the Soviet Union,” Buckley stated, “which scatters funds about for terrorists like HEW in search of welfare clients.” Then in August, George Will, who also attended the conference, wrote about it in the Washington Post.

Before the year was out Commentary, National Review, and eventually New Republic writers would all church out yard after yard of copy on this theme. Soon after, Claire Sterling, who had also attended the conference, would create the first "bible" of this new perspective with the publication of her highly controversial book, The Terror Network.(12)

With the help of George Bush and Ray Cline, the Jerusalem Conference had managed to start a propaganda firestorm.

In the following decade, the theme of terrorism/counter-terrorism would grow increasingly important to George Bush. He would become the ranking authority on this subject in the Reagan White House. Indeed, it would be Bush’s own Task Force – the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terroris, -- which would eventually provide Oliver North back channel authorization through which he would bypass certain dissenting administration officials in his ongoing management of the Reagan/Bush Secret War against Nicaragua.(13)

CONTINUED...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/GeorgeBushTheCompanysMan-CovertActionInformationBulletinNo.33

And that is how Poppy got his clue.

[senz]

6. A government whose existence depends on citizen ignorance

is illegitimate.

Poor Chelsea Manning. Her courage was selfless and heroic.

[Octafish]

7. ''Why I Keep Fighting''

Why I Keep Fighting

by Chelsea Manning
Huffington Post, 05/16/2016 08:26 am ET

Good evening from sunny Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

I wish I could be there to accept this award in person, but since I cannot, I am delighted to have Aaron Kirkhouse accept it on my behalf.

As you know, I am held in an American military prison with only a small library and without access to the internet. In this time of rapid technological advances in social networking and the machine learning age, it’s quite an odd predicament to find myself in.

Today, when once obscure online refrains are now finding their way into the global lexicon  —  “pics or it didn’t happen”  —  it’s easy to feel disconnected from a world exponentially intertwined and dependent on technology.

As a military prisoner, my public persona is carefully controlled and enforced. Any interviews or statements that I make  —  such as this one  —  must be written or dictated through someone else who types it up on my behalf. I am not allowed to be recorded over the telephone, do any video interviews, or have any pictures taken  —  with the exception of the occasional grainy mug shot. For those living in my situation, it’s easy to start feeling invisible  —  left behind and dismissed by the rest of a fast-paced society.

Despite these obstacles, I know I need to keep going. It is important to stay vocal. To stay creative. Active. Motivated. To keep fighting.

I keep fighting to survive and thrive. I am fighting my court-martial conviction and sentence before a military appeals court, starting this month. I am fighting to make the full investigation by the FBI public. I am fighting to grow my hair beyond the two-inch male standards by the U.S. military.

I keep fighting to warn the world of the dangerous trend in which the only information you can access is the kind that someone with money or power wants you to see.

And, I keep fighting to let people know that they too can create change. By staying informed and educated, anyone can make a difference. You have the ability to fight for a better world for everyone  —  even for the most desperate, those at the bottom of the social ladder, refugees from conflict, queer and trans individuals, prisoners, and those born into poverty.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chelsea-manning/why-i-keep-fighting_b_9990526.html

Absolutely, senz! It isn't a Democracy when We the People are replaced by secret laws and secret agents and secret beneficiaries.

When We the People no longer are in charge of Government -- when "Government of the People, By the People, and For the People" is no more -- when We have been replaced as the Deciders by the likes of Bush and Cheney for the benefit of Carlyle Group, Halliburton and the rest of the organizations and individuals making big bucks from the money trumps peace, it is a form of tyranny no different from the Crown of England, Hitler's chancellorship, or Stalin's Politburo.

Oh, and getting called "Conspiracy Theorist" by Cheney or a chunk of DU doesn't change it. Nor does having CIABCNNBCBSFakeNewsNutworks shout "Freedom!" all day long and putting a flag pin on it and chanting "USA! USA! USA!" cover it up.