Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  The sentencing of Manning marked the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or will be forced, like Snowden, to flee into exile. State power, the sentence showed us, will be unaccountable. And those who do not accept unlimited state power—always the road to tyranny—will be persecuted.

  Two burly guards who towered over Manning hustled her out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing. I listened to half a dozen of Manning’s supporters shout: “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!”

  Manning, if we had a functioning judiciary, would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals she helped expose. She would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

  But the government effectively shut down Manning’s defense team. The Army private was not permitted to argue that she had a moral and legal obligation under international law to defy military orders and to make public the war crimes she had uncovered. Because the documents that detailed the crimes, torture, and killing that Manning revealed were classified, they were barred from discussion in court, and so the fundamental issue of war crimes was effectively removed from the trial. Manning was forbidden to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that she had harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.”23 And that is what happened.

  Manning was also barred from presenting to the court her motives for giving WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of her motives and the potential harm to national security could be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it was too late.

  Coombs opened the trial by pleading with the judge for leniency based on Manning’s youth and sincerity. Coombs was permitted by Lind to present only circumstantial evidence concerning Manning’s motives or state of mind. He could argue, for example, that Manning did not know al-Qaeda might see the information she leaked. Coombs was also permitted to argue, as he did, that Manning was selective in her leak, intending no harm to national interests. But these were minor concessions by the court to the defense. Manning’s most impassioned pleas for freedom of information, expressed in email exchanges with the confidential government informant Lamo, were never permitted to be heard in court.24

  These restrictions prevented Manning from appealing to the Nuremberg principles, a set of guidelines created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations after World War II to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles make political leaders, commanders, and combatants responsible for war crimes, even if domestic or internal laws allow such actions. The Nuremberg principles are designed to protect those, like Manning, who expose these crimes. Under the Nuremberg principles, military orders do not offer an excuse for committing war crimes. And the Nuremberg principles would clearly exonerate Manning and condemn the pilots, shown in the “Collateral Murder” video, who fired on unarmed civilians in Baghdad, leaving twelve dead, including the two Reuters journalists.25 “He [Manning] knew that the video depicted a 2007 attack,” Coombs said of the “Collateral Murder” video. “He knew that it [the attack] resulted in the death of two journalists. And because it resulted in the death of two journalists, it had received worldwide attention. He knew that the organization Reuters had requested a copy of the video in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] because it was their two journalists that were killed, and they wanted to have that copy in order to find out what had happened and to ensure that it didn’t happen again. He knew that the United States had responded to that FOIA request almost two years later, indicating what they could find and, notably, not the video.”

  Coombs continued: “He knew that David Finkel, an author, had written a book called The Good Soldiers, and when he read through David Finkel’s account and he talked about this incident that’s depicted in the video, he saw that David Finkel’s account and the actual video were verbatim, that David Finkel was quoting the Apache air crew. And so at that point he knew that David Finkel had a copy of the video. And when he decided to release this information, he believed that this information showed how [little] we valued human life in Iraq. He was troubled by that. And he believed that if the American public saw it, they too would be troubled and maybe things would change.

  “He was twenty-two years old,” Coombs said as he stood near the bench, speaking quietly to the judge at the close of his opening statement. “He was young. He was a little naive in believing that the information that he selected could actually make a difference. But he was good-intentioned in that he was selecting information that he hoped would make a difference.

  “He wasn’t selecting information because it was wanted by WikiLeaks,” Coombs concluded. “He wasn’t selecting information because of some 2009 most wanted list. He was selecting information because he believed that this information needed to be public. At the time that he released the information, he was concentrating on what the American public would think about that information, not whether or not the enemy would get access to it, and he had absolutely no actual knowledge of whether the enemy would gain access to it. Young, naive, but good-intentioned.”

  “I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this, it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Manning said on February 28, 2013, when she pleaded guilty to the lesser charges, her back to a few dozen of us, including Cornel West, who made it into the courtroom as she faced the judge. She said that she had hoped the release of the information to WikiLeaks “might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counterterrorism while ignoring the situation of the people we engaged with every day.”

  But it has not. Our mechanical drones still circle the skies delivering death. Our attack jets still blast civilians. Our soldiers and Marines still pump bullets into mud-walled villages. Our artillery and missiles still raze homes. Our torturers still torture. Our politicians and generals still lie. And the soldier who tried to stop it all is serving a thirty-five-year prison sentence.

  The Afghans, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis, and the Somalis know what American military forces do. They do not need to read WikiLeaks. It is we who remain ignorant. Our terror is delivered daily to the wretched of the earth with industrial weapons. But to us, it is invisible. We do not stand over the decapitated and eviscerated bodies left behind on city and village streets by our missiles, drones, and fighter jets. We do not listen to the wails and shrieks of parents embracing the shattered bodies of their children. We do not see the survivors of air attacks bury their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We are not conscious of the long night of collective humiliation, repression, and powerlessness that characterizes existence in Israel’s occupied territories, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We do not see the boiling anger that war and injustice turn into a cauldron of hate over time. We are not aware of the very natural lust for revenge against those who carry out or symbolize this oppression. We see only the final pyrotechnics of terror, the shocking moment when the rage erupts into an inchoate fury and the murder of innocents. And willfully uninformed, we do not understand our own complicity. We self-righteously condemn the killers as subhuman savages who deserve more of the violence that created them. This is a recipe for endless terror.

  Manning, by providing a window into the truth, opened up the possibility of redemption. She offered hope for a new relationship with the Muslim world, one based on compassion and honesty, on the rule of law, rather than on the cold brutality of industrial warfare. But by refusing to heed the truth that Manning laid before us, by ignoring the crimes committed daily in our name, we not only continue to swell the ranks of our enemies but put the lives
of our citizens in greater and greater jeopardy.

  Manning showed us through the documents she released to WikiLeaks what all Iraqis know. They have endured hundreds of rapes and murders, along with systematic torture by the military and police of the puppet government we installed. None of the atrocities from the leaked videos and documents were investigated. Manning provided the data showing that between 2004 and 2009 there were at least 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians, and that coalition troops were responsible for at least 195 unreported civilian deaths. In the “Collateral Murder” video, she allowed us to watch as a US helicopter attacked unarmed civilians in Baghdad and as a US Army tank then crushed one of the wounded lying on the street. The actions of the US military in this one video alone, as law professor Marjorie Cohn has pointed out, violate Article 85 of the First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the targeting of civilians; Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that the wounded be treated; and Article 17 of the First Protocol, which permits civilians to rescue and care for the wounded without being harmed.26

  David Coombs read a brief statement from the twenty-five-year-old Manning after the sentencing:

  The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

  I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

  In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantánamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

  Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

  Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps—to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

  As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

  I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

  If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.27

  I sat in the front row of a New York federal court in November 2013 the day Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to ten years in prison for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and corporations such as Dow Chemical and Raytheon.

  Hammond, then age twenty-six, released to WikiLeaks, Rolling Stone, and other publications some 5 million emails in 2011 from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. His four codefendants, convicted in Great Britain, were sentenced to less time combined—the longest sentence was 32 months—than the 120-month sentence meted out to Hammond. The 5 million email exchanges, once made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring, and surveillance of protesters and dissidents on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And perhaps most importantly, the information provided chilling evidence that antiterrorism laws are being routinely used by the state to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none.

  The email exchanges Hammond provided to the public were entered as evidence in my lawsuit against Barack Obama over Section 1021(b) (2) of the National Defense Authorization Act. One of my coplaintiffs was Alexa O’Brien, a journalist and content strategist who cofounded the US Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process. Because of the Hammond leaks, we know that Stratfor officials attempted to falsely link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as jihadist ideology, setting her up for detention under the new law. US District Judge Katherine Forrest ruled, in part because of the leak, that we did as plaintiffs have a credible fear, and she nullified the law, a ruling that the higher appellate court overturned when the Obama administration appealed her ruling.

  Hammond’s ten-year sentence was one of the longest in US history for hacking. It was the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point.

  I met Hammond in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center about a week and a half before his sentencing. He was wearing an oversized brown prison jumpsuit that fell over his shoes. He had long brown hair and a wispy beard. He had been held for twenty months.

  “People have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors,” he said.

  Judge Preska, who sentenced Hammond with the same venom she displayed in sentencing Syed Fahad Hashmi, is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society.28 And the hack into Stratfor disclosed the email address and password for a business account of Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Some emails of the firm’s corporate clients, including Merrill Lynch, also were exposed. The National Lawyers Guild, because the judge’s husband was a victim of the hack, filed a recusal motion. Preska, as chief judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and therefore the final authority, was able to deny it. Her refusal to recuse herself allowed her to oversee a trial in which she had allegedly a huge conflict of interest.

  The judge, who herself was once employed at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, fulminated from the bench about Hammond’s “total lack of respect for the law.”29 She read a laundry list of his arrests for acts of civil disobedience. She damned what she called his “unrepentant recidivism.” She said: “These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela … or even Daniel Ellsberg”—an odd analogy given that Mandela founded the armed wing of the African National Congress, was considered a terrorist by South Africa’s apartheid government and the US government, and was vilified, along with King and Ellsberg, by the US government. Preska said that there was a “desperate need to promote respect for the law” and a “need for adequate public deterrence.” She read from transcripts of Hammond’s conversations in Anonymous chat rooms in which he described the goal of hacking into Stratfor as “destroying the target, hoping for bankruptcy
, collapse,” and called for “maximum mayhem.” She admonished him for releasing the unlisted phone number of a retired Arizona police official who allegedly received threatening phone calls afterward.

  The judge, in addition to the ten-year sentence, imposed equally harsh measures for after Hammond’s release from prison. She ordered that he be placed under three years of supervised control, be forbidden to use encryption or aliases online, and submit to random searches of his computer equipment, person, and home by police and any internal security agency without the necessity of a warrant. The judge said that Hammond was legally banned from having any contact with “electronic civil disobedience websites or organizations.”

  The sentence required the judge to demonstrate a callous disregard for transparency and our right to privacy. It required her to ignore the disturbing information Hammond released showing that the government and Stratfor had attempted to link nonviolent dissident groups, including some within Occupy, to terrorist organizations so that peaceful dissidents could be prosecuted as terrorists. It required her to accept the frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of corporations as well as the state. She also had to sidestep the fact that Hammond made no financial gain from the leak.

  Hammond’s draconian sentence, like the draconian sentences of other whistle-blowers, will fan open defiance of the state. It will solidify the growing understanding that we must resort, if we want to effect real change, to unconventional and illegal tactics to thwart the mounting abuses by the corporate state. There is no hope, this sentencing showed, for redress from the judicial system, elected officials, or the executive branch.