A Marriage of Conscience: Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning
Edward Curtin
“Anything to Say?” – Bronze art installation by Italian Davide Dormino which was placed in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on May Day 2015. It features the whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning
“About suffering they were never wrong,” wrote W. H. Auden in the poem “Musée Des Beaux Arts.”
These lines occurred to me last week when all eyes were focused on the brutal British seizure of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
No one should have been surprised by this despicable spectacle carried out in the noonday light for all to see, for the British government has not served as America’s jailer for the past seven years for no reason. It doesn’t take x-ray eyes to see that the British and the Moreno government in Ecuador are twin poodles on the American leash. After a phony display of judicial fairness, the British, as required by their American bosses, will dispatch Assange to the United States so he can be further punished for the crime of doing journalism and exposing war crimes.
Assange has suffered mightily for American sins. The Anglo-American torturers know how to squeeze their victims to make old men out of the young. Abu Ghraib was no aberration. The overt is often covert; just a thin skin separates the sadists’ varied methods, but their message is obvious. No one who saw Assange dragged to prison could fail to see what the war-mongers, who hate freedom of the press when it exposes their criminal activities, can do to a man. Nor, however, could one fail to see the spirit of defiance that animates Assange, a man of courageous conscience cowards can’t begin to comprehend.
Bought and sold, compromised and corrupted to their depths, the American, British, and Ecuadorian governments and their media sycophants have no shame or allegiance to law or God, and have never learned that you can imprison, torture, and even kill a person of conscience, but that doing so is a risky business. For even the corpses of those who say “No” keep whispering “No” forevermore.
While the media spotlight was on central London, Auden’s lines kept running through my mind:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters, how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
Walking dully along
His words transported me from London to a lonely jail cell in Virginia where Chelsea Manning sat brooding. Chelsea hearing the news about Assange. Chelsea realizing that now the screws would be further tightened and her ordeal as a prisoner of conscience would be extended indefinitely. Chelsea summoning all her extraordinary courage to go on saying “No,” “No,” “No.”
Chelsea refusing the 30 pieces of silver that will be continually offered to her, as they have been for almost a decade, and that she has refused in her emphatic refusal to give the Judas kiss to Julian, to whom she is wed in this non-violent campaign to expose the truth about the war criminals.
Auden’s words reminded me not to turn away, to pay attention, to not walk dully along and ignore the lonely suffering of truth-tellers. How can anyone who claims to oppose the American wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc., turn away from defending Manning and Assange, two brave souls who have already spent nearly 15 years combined imprisoned for exposing the war crimes of the American and British governments, crimes committed in our name and therefore our crimes.
Who will have the bad faith to buy the torrent of lies that the propagandists will spew forth about Assange as they wage a media blitz to kill his reputation on the way to disposing of him?
The jackals in government and media, so-called liberals and conservatives, will be sadistically calling for blood as they count their blood money and wipe their lips. Only cowards will join this bleating crowd and refuse to go to that lonely, empty place – that cell of conscience – where the truth resides.
All should remember that Chelsea Manning spent more than seven years in prison under the Obama administration for revealing a video about George W. Bush’s war crimes in Iraq; that Assange had to escape the Obama administration’s clutches by seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy; and that now that Trump is in office, the reimprisonment of Manning and arrest of Assange are perfectly in accord with the evil deeds of his predecessors. These men are titular heads of the warfare state. They follow orders.
Who can sail calmly on and pretend they don’t see the gift of truth and hear the forsaken cries of two lonely caged heroes falling into the sea? Who can fail to defend such voices of freedom?
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I’m not sure what your point is, Robbobbobin. Do you believe that only 8 seconds is not sufficient to have an impression of someone’s mood? Do you interpret the word “bounce” in a literal sense as in lifting both feet from the ground? I believe that 8 seconds is sufficient to get a sense of someone’s mood and I did not mean bounce in a literal sense but simply a conveyance of their mood as in a feeling of a spring in their step. I also think that the showing of this mood was very deliberate and a sign from the power elite of the sentence being faked but we can leave that as an opinion.
Your comment reminds me of when I first started bleating about all the smiling parents at Sandy Hook and being rounded on by, “People show grief in different ways.” It was this sort of response that gravitated me towards Occam’s Razor. I thought, “Well, it’s true, people do show grief in different ways but you could never say that Robbie Parker’s broad smile as he walked to the microphone favoured “real” event over “staged”. You could never say that.” Similarly, you could never say that in the 8 seconds we view Chelsea being led from the courthouse to the car that her demeanour favoured “genuine sentencing to 35 years in prison” over “fake sentencing”. You could never say that. And there are just so very, very many things that tend to favour “intelligence asset” over “genuine leaker” – so very many. I am now going to do a 10-point Occam’s Razor exercise and when complete will invite you to come up with 10 points that favour “genuine leaker”. I will be very curious to see what your first one is if you bother to come up with one. Perhaps you have one already? If so, I’d be interested to know what it is.
“I am now going to do a 10-point Occam’s Razor exercise and when complete will invite you to come up with 10 points that favour “genuine leaker”. I will be very curious to see what your first one is if you bother to come up with one. Perhaps you have one already? If so, I’d be interested to know what it is.”
Pass.
Lenin
It’s only been 5 years since I woke up to 9/11 and yet I feel as though I’ve gone through all the possible disillusionment one could go through. Why do I feel as though I’m telling people who woke up so much earlier that there is no Santa Claus? I find it odd that those who woke up years earlier still believe in heroes whether they’re “genuine” so to speak or constructs of the power elite designed to dupe us.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye! Chelsea Manning is an agent and the fact is very much hidden in plain sight .
If you meet this hypothesis with a feeling of hostility by all means go ahead and downvote but just be conscious of what a downvote means without reason, logic and evidence to present against my reasoned argument. Think of the impotence of the act of downvoting with no argument to support your belief that Chelsea is a heroine. And please reflect on why you’re so invested in that belief. Two weeks ago I thought Chelsea was who she is purported to be by the media. From having my suspicions aroused from the expensive-looking photo of her and reading the Wikipedia article about her I changed my mind. Within all of about 10 minutes I went from thinking one thing to completely another. It definitely took a few months of dedicated research for me to recognise 9/11 was an inside conspiracy but once that eye-opening event occurred, I find I can change my mind about something I’ve believed from one moment to the next. What on earth are people so invested in and why? Julian Assange’s father was my neighbour for 13 years and a very regular and welcome visitor to our household. I met Julian briefly once before Wikileaks and a friend put up money for his bail. I have a slight personal connection but that doesn’t affect my ability to think straight about this situation. That doesn’t stop me thinking, “Oh dear, Julian was duped – as we all were.” There is no revelation of duping I am not prepared for now, that’s for sure.
Below are three points that will form part of my usual 10-point Occam’s Razor exercise which I will add to my $5,000 challenge to prove that Chelsea was a genuine leaker rather than an agent.
Hypothesis 1a (H1a) – Chelsea Manning is an agent.
Hypothesis 1b (H1b) – They inform us of this through obvious signalling
Hypothesis 2 (H2) – Chelsea Manning was an intelligence analyst who leaked a total of 700,000 documents to Wikileaks.
–1– They really have a lend of us (as we say in Australia) with Chelsea’s chosen method of sequestering 491,000 documents (of the total 700,000) to be leaked. They really do. You have to admire their chutzpah – but then they can pass off anything at all, anything at all. They must get bored with it. I wonder if they have pushing-the-envelope competitions in the ridiculousness that will be presented to the public.
“On January 5, 2010, Manning downloaded the 400,000 documents that became known as the Iraq War logs. On January 8, she downloaded 91,000 documents from the Afghanistan database, known later as part of the Afghan War logs. She saved the material on CD-RW and smuggled it through security by labeling the CD-RW media “Lady Gaga”. She then copied it onto her personal computer. The next day, she wrote a message in a readme.txt file, which she told the court was initially intended for The Washington Post.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning
This beyond-implausible method of obtaining documents for leaking supports H1b.
–2– We are told Adrian Lamo was 22 (magical multiple of 11) when he reported Chelsea in 2010. (Doncha love his surname? and how about Chelsea’s?) We are told he died last year at the age of 37 which adds up according to his year of birth (1981) given in Wikipedia, while the age of 22 in 2010 does not. Compare Malcolm Quantrill, witness at the Bologna station bombing in 1980 who the BBC tells us was 44 (magical multiple of 11) when according to Wikipedia he would have been 49. This supports H1b – they tell us. Wikipedia also tells us “Nearly three months later, the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center reported that “Despite a complete autopsy and supplemental testing, no definitive cause of death was identified.’” Mysterious, no? The rest of Adrian’s bio is the usual stilted nonsense-sounding stuff. Note also that Chelsea received 22 charges, she herself was 22 when she leaked the documents and she was said to spend 22 hours a day in solitary confinement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo
–3– In Chelsea’s first interview after her release in 2017, with Juju Chang, anchor of ABC’s NIghtline (and active member of the Council on Foreign Relations), we are shown a snippet of the footage of an alleged airstrike on civilians included in the leaked files which partly displays subtitles and is overlaid by Juju’s voiceover and her dialogue with Chelsea. My comments are in square brackets and my initial comment is that it seems very, very odd that this highly incriminating footage with the soldiers’ words would be shown on mainstream media, very, very odd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSx1VG8UnF8
Juju’s first words to Chelsea: So many people call you a traitor; many people call you a hero. Who is Chelsea Manning?
[Pretty much equal weight to traitor and hero. Odd on MSM, no?]
Chelsea: I’m just me. It’s as simple as that.
[So not a whistleblower, not disgusted with what she’s seen. She’s just her.]
Juju’s vo: Images like these. American soldiers opening fire from an Apache helicopter …
Subtitles: “Oh yeah, look at that … Right through the windshield.” “Ha! Ha!“
Juju’s vo: “… on what would turn out to be civilians including children …
Subtitles: “Well, It’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” “That’s right.”
Juju’s vo: … among the dead, two journalists from Reuters.”
Chelsea: Everything you need to know about warfare is right there in a 1 minute 47 [sec] video.
Juju: What do you mean by that?
Chelsea: Counterinsurgency is not a simple thing. … It’s not as simple as good guys versus bad guys. It’s a mess.
[Not the condemnatory words you’d expect from someone who’s prepared to go to prison for them, are they?]
Juju’s vo: Manning says she read news articles about how Reuters had tried in vain to request this video for two years so she decided to bring it up the chain of command.
Juju: What did he or she say back?
Chelsea: “It’s just another incident. The only reason it sticks out and is prominent is because it was two journalists. There are thousands and thousands of videos like that.
[Thousands and thousands! It’s hard to determine if Chelsea is reporting what the higher up said or if it’s her own words. If, at that stage, the footage was only accessible internally why would the higher up be saying “the only reason it sticks out … is because it was two journalists”? If there are “thousand and thousands” of videos like that why, internally, would this footage seem particularly prominent? And why wasn’t Chelsea privy to these “thousands and thousands” of videos. Why has she only seen this snippet? Could we infer this is the power elite telling us, “Hey, we do this sort of heinous stuff whenever we like – suck it up. What are you – yes you – what are you going to do about it?” And isn’t Chelsea concerned that this is just one snippet of thousands? Shouldn’t she make some noise about all the others she didn’t leak to Wikileaks. Did she not try to track any others down? We’ve just got the one even though she managed to leak 700,000 documents?]
…
Chelsea: I stopped seeing just statistics and information and I started seeing people.
[This sounds rather pat to me.]
…
Chelsea: I tried to go to the Washington Post first and I tried to go to the New York Times.
[Oh really? What was their response? They didn’t report her?]
Juju: … Were you ready to pay the price?
Chelsea: I’m not focused on consequences or what this means or what that means. I’m focused on the day to day.
[“day to day”? She was an intelligence analyst who managed to leak 700,000 documents before being caught!!!!!! and she’s focused on the “day to day” – whatever that means in this context.]
…
Juju: So you didn’t think any of it was going to threaten national security?
Chelsea: No.
Juju: There are some higher ups in the intelligence community who would argue you’re a low-level analyst, there’s no way you could have known what the outcome of that would have been.
Chelsea: Right, but these are the reports that I work with. I’m the subject matter expert for this stuff.
[She’s all of 22 at the time and she’s the one and only “subject matter expert”.]
…
Juju’s vo: Turns out some of the low-level army battlefield reports were found in Osama Bin Laden’s compound after his death.
[No one believes that do they?]
Juju to Chelsea: You may have been motivated to get the information into the public sphere but you might have also given it to our enemies.
Chelsea: Right but I have a responsibility to the public. It’s not black and white, it’s complicated.
[Oh come on. This is just complete say-nothing nonsense.]
[Move to gender transition.]
Juju: “So your despair was not with the 35 year prison sentence. It was …”
Chelsea: “… much more immediate.”
Juju: “It had more to do with your need to be Chelsea.”
Chelsea: “Yeah, I’d never done that. I’d never been able to be who I was.”
[As we see at the start and again partway through the video Chelsea positively bounced from the courtroom to start her 35 (commuted to 7) year sentence. She wasn’t in the least worried about that, nope, the only thing in her life that was of concern was transition. I get that people who feel they are in the wrong-gendered body feel suicidal if they are unable to transition but to not be concerned about a 35 year sentence is not credible.
The bouncing from the courtroom supports H1b.]
.. for someone, like Chelsea Manning, who has been continually facing traumatic incidents/situations (probably since birth) and who is on watch around the clock by a multitude of US agencies, and living under the threat of arrest and re-arrest and the threat of mental and physical torture and re-torture .. for someone like her, most probably, a deep psychological analysis of she could mean when talking in her first appearance on the national TV might not be a wise/fruitful endeavour.
Of course, we can perform deep psychoanalysis for everybody and everything they do and say, but how useful would that be in situations like this?
Flaxgirl: first, thank you for the link with Chelsea being interviewed on ABC. I had never seen her interviewed.
Second: a respectful question- you say Chelsea is an agent. An agent of whom? I don’t understand what you want to say. I admit that I was unable to prioritize my time in order to read the entire content of the essay you provided since it appears to be a transcript of the interview with your personal interpretation of her character woven between the statements. My questions about your motives are beyond a thumbs up or thumbs down response. I can’t figure out why it is important for you to present her as an “agent” as if her motives were to aid and abet one or more of the enemies of the rogue terrorist empire that the United States has demonstrated itself to be.
Hi auntiebuna, When I say agent I mean intelligence asset, that is, she works for the CIA or other intelligence agency. What the power elite always want to do is control the information from all sides which means they constantly infiltrate or in some way inveigle themselves into the opposition to control things. It’s a well-known phenomenon called “controlled opposition”. A controlled opposition is a protest movement that is actually being led by government agents. Nearly all governments in history have employed this technique to trick and subdue their adversaries.
So, as a matter of course, when Wikileaks appeared they had to be in on it. They hired Chelsea (also Adrian Lamo and no doubt others) to fraudulently pretend to leak important documents including the aerial shooting which I believe is faked, however, I need to analyse more closely before I post my analysis of that.
I wouldn’t say it’s my “personal interpretation” of the interview, more an objective analysis that points out that what occurs in this interview favours the hypothesis that Chelsea is an intelligence asset over the hypothesis that she is a genuine leaker. A most counterintuitive aspect is that they tell us loudly and clearly with extremely obvious anomalies that they’re hoaxing us – an insider informed analyst, Ole Dammegard, that they believe that by telling us with obvious anomalies, the onus is shifted to us to call them out and if we don’t, they are spared karmic repercussions (this phenomenon is also referred to as “revelation of the method”). You’d never believe such a thing except for the fact the evidence of this is so very clear. Obviously, if she’s an agent things might not look exactly as you’d expect for the genuine situation but they make the anomalies much more obvious than they need to be, eg, downloading 400,000 files in one day onto rewritable CDs all labelled “Lady Ga Ga” to “smuggle them through security”. Not only do they tell us loudly and clearly, they have a good old chortle while doing so.
“Below are three points that will form part of my usual 10-point Occam’s Razor exercise…”
Fortuitous pan out (quite apart from being twice the number of letters in one of Occam’s names). Makes it easy to know when you’ve won enough points (when there’s as many as the fingers on both of your more normal hands added). Imagine the problems that could have arisen if we had to take the average number of letters in each of his names [Occam] and [Ockham]–11 (!!!!!!!!!!!) letters in total–and divide it by the number of his names (2) (=5.½ !!.!!!) to get the number to know when to stop exercising !!!.!! On the other hand that would have speeded up the exercise. Difficult to say really–exhaustiveness or exhaustion–what’s best? Winning quicker is my choice. Where do we send our entries for your prize? You couldn’t up that to $5,500 could you? For postage and packaging. No downvotes here.
This is the challenge page, Robbobbobin. All details are there.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/5000-challenge.html
A few questions.
Do you accept the phenomenon of “controlled opposition”?
If not, why not?
Do you think that when Wikileaks appeared that it might be anticipated that the power elite would use intelligence assets to dupe Wikileaks as part of a “controlled opposition” effort?
If not, why not?
What makes you believe that Chelsea Manning is a heroine and genuine leaker and not an intelligence asset engaged in a controlled opposition effort?
If your response does not address my questions, please consider what credibility your response will have.
Pass. In the eight seconds he was visible on screen between exiting the court and entering a van in the CNN/YouTube record of that event (https://youtu.be/110rJ9mTKVg), Bradley Manning (was) marched out without bouncing even once. But, I do agree, he could have had anything on his mind at the time, including being in seriously deep politics. Unfortunately there were no explanatory subtitles for the blind in view and, in that case, it seems a pity to attempt to take your money before you know how much it might cost to have your spockets fixed.
Anyone who is using Wikipedia as a main source of “documentation” can’t really be taken seriously. Way beyond downvoting
They’ll need some money for a legal defence. Where do I send the money?
Despicable Guardian rightly critiqued here
https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2019/04/18/out-traitor-out-ecuadorians-respond-to-their-governments-betrayal-of-julian-assange/
I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with “.., crimes committed in our name and therefore our crimes.” They most certainly are not ‘our’ crimes. They’re the crimes of the rulers. And the rulers take succour from their shills, particularly MI5’s shill, the BBC and MI6’s shill, The Guardian.
Speaking of the latter, look at their latest disgusting piece: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/17/julian-assange-dominic-raab-literary-signalling-gore-vidal-arwa-mahdawi
‘….therefore our crimes’…cause we are accomplices by our silence, by commission or omission…
Cause the ones that rule are there cause we elected them….of course, this is not a personal matter but jut the result of a general or more widespread conscious state of the population.
As long as we do not recognize and accept the the state of affairs at present (and at any given moment) are also the result of our actions (or inactions) we will be stuck on the same situation.
We seem to be passive agents on the construction of reality but we are not. In that sense, we are also responsible, the crimes are also ours.
Most don’t know what the truth is and those that do can’t see a solution. It’s not the fault of the oppressed that they don’t do anything. Part of oppression is a well-ingrained, even fervent, belief in it. And this blaming it all on everyone, on the oppressed who are the majority because they’re not jumping up and down, logically leads to supporting collective punishment. But worst of all, it deflects blame from the real perpetrators of all the horrors facing our species. The current state of affairs needs to be recognised, and its perpetrators dealt with, but it should never be accepted.
By accept I mean recognition of our role in the general scheme of things, of our omissions and comissions, of iur ignorance and naivete that left room for manipulation of truth and emotions to happen.
This is not about fault, blame or guilt, is just that recognition that leads to action for change of my own role. That is, to become aware.
I (we) don’t need to find who to blame but just to underestand what and how basic humanity is being distorted. Basic humanistic values manipulated to bomb, kill, imprison human beings.
Once that is known, recognize then we wont fall again tobthe same lies, same manipulation….that is: we’ll no longer support atrocities committed in oir name, we are no longer complicit.
It’s most certainly about blame. The oppressors are the capitalist class, kept in power by their state of armed thugs, secret police, courts, prisons, military and bureaucracy. Their ‘soft power’ support comes from organised religion, the corporate media, in the ‘education’ system and from the political superstructure (‘democracy’, parliament, etc).
The capitalist class must be expropriated without compensation and the economy socialised and subject to democratic planning. Nothing short of that will help our species deal with the real and looming threats to its existence, let alone lay the basis for ending oppression. This requires a revolution. The working class alone, as politically backward as it might be now, has the social power to bring about such a change because it has its hands on the levers of production. The capitalist class and its helpers know this, but the working class doesn’t, and its consciousness is kept that way with ‘soft power’, principally by the trade union bureaucracy, the Labour Party and social democracy in general.
However, a revolutionary leadership is required to make a revolution. This is the real crisis of our time because there is only misleadership, and misleadership is all about misdirecting and deflecting blame, usually on other oppressed groups (or on ‘everyone’), and away from the malignancy at the core of society’s ills — capitalism and the capitalist class.
Revolutions are begun when the masses are sufficiently enraged to act, usually sparked by some event that won’t be predicted in advance. But without a party of the Bolshevik type armed with a revolutionary program that can take advantage of a strike (eg, the Great Coal Strike) or some other spontaneous uprising (eg, the yellow vests); without a party that can direct the righteous anger, hatred and pent up fury of the masses (with proper apportioning of blame); without a party that links all this to the social power of the working class, there will be no revolution. Instead, after the suppression of leaderless uprisings or betrayed strikes misdirected blame will remain.
Thank you for this brilliant article. And thank you for informing me of the bronze statues. Please share any links you have about this exhibition. It needs to be spread to others so they know there are others who recognize the heroism of Snowden, Assange and Manning.
That black and white photo is in Geneva – you can see the giant chair with the broken leg and the Palais des Nations (UN building) in the background. See the following photo to compare. I have never seen these sculptures there, though.
See the article (in French) from 2015. These sculptures were a traveling exhibition, taken from city to city.
https://www.lematin.ch/suisse/Snowden-Assange-et-Manning-a-Geneve/story/23308968
They are innocent in the eyes of God and that is what matters, more than the evil lies and depredations of secular beasts. We have all seen the spilled blood, the broken bodies, the crying children that the US, the UK and their evil minions have desecrated our green Earth with. These lost ones will be revenged, not by us, but by the evil doers own deadly mistakes!
Assuming that God actually exists, and if God exists, God obviously doesn’t care.
One of the basic premises of this piece is seriously misguided. In matters like this (Assange having, over the years,, discomforted more than enough of the British and European mighty to be a person eminently worthy of the UK ‘s own interest) the Americans could probably learn more about vindictive social coercion from the British working on their own account than the British could ever from the Americans. American exceptionalism as it actually is is hard enough to swallow without the tendency of its internal, covert believers, believing themselves to be emancipated from it, to misappropriate–by way of demonstration–all of the nation state evil in the world as its own as well. The UK’s behaviour towards Assange has needed no American spark to ignite it. In the absence of an extradition request from America the British establishment would have had its emissaries scouring the globe, seeking to buy one from somewhere else. Anywhere else with a good solid death penalty and a suitably irrational judiciary would have done. Oh yes, and, Jon Bon Jovi did fuck all to help the Brits, along with a bunch of Europeans, break the Enigma code, either.
Out with the plutocrats!
Out the excecutioners of Truth!
Out the manipulators of the people!
Expell those promoting war in the name of democracy!
Out the enemies of human life and the life of the planet!
Out those profiting from human suffering and death!
Out to the Rober Baron’s!
Out to the merchants of death and deceit!