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By Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian
Posted on December 15, 2011, Printed on December 16, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/153451/glenn_greenwald%3A_the_heroic_bradley_manning_faces_30_charges%2C_some_punishable_by_death_–_why_he_deserves_a_medal_instead

After 17 months of pre-trial imprisonment, Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old US army private and accused WikiLeaks source, is finally going to see the inside of a courtroom. This Friday, on an army base in Maryland, the preliminary stage of his military trial will start.

He is accused of leaking to the whistleblowing site hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, war reports, and the now infamous 2007 video showing a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad gunning down civilians and a Reuters journalist. Though it is Manning who is nominally on trial, these proceedings reveal the US government’s fixation with extreme secrecy, covering up its own crimes, and intimidating future whistleblowers.

Since his arrest last May in Iraq, Manning has been treated as one of America’s most dastardly traitors. He faces more than 30 charges, including one – “aiding the enemy” – that carries the death penalty (prosecutors will recommend life in prison, but military judges retain discretion to sentence him to die).

The sadistic conditions to which he was subjected for 10 months – intense solitary confinement, at one point having his clothing seized and being forced to stand nude for inspection – became an international scandal for a US president who flamboyantly vowed to end detainee abuse. Amnesty International condemned these conditions as “inhumane”; PJ Crowley, a US state department spokesman, was forced to resign after denouncing Manning’s treatment. Such conduct has been repeatedly cited by the US as human rights violations when engaged in by other countries.

The UN’s special rapporteur on torture has complained that his investigation is being obstructed by the refusal of Obama officials to permit unmonitored visits with Manning. (Even the Bush administration granted access to the International Red Cross at Guantánamo.) Such treatment is all the more remarkable in light of what Manning actually did, and did not do, if the charges are true. For these leaks have achieved enormous good and little harm.

From the start, US claims about the damage done have been wildly exaggerated, even outright false. After the release of the Afghanistan war logs, officials accused WikiLeaks of having “blood on their hands”, only to admit weeks later that they were unaware of a single case of anyone being harmed. That remains true today.

Even Robert Gates, the Pentagon chief, mocked alarmism over the diplomatic cables leak as “significantly overwrought”, dismissing its impact as “fairly modest”. Manning’s lawyer is seeking internal government documents that, he insists, concluded there was no meaningful harm to US diplomatic relations from the release of any documents. None of the leaked documents were classified at the highest level of secrecy – top secret – but rather bore only low-level classification.

By contrast, the leaks Manning allegedly engineered have generated enormous benefits: precisely the benefits Manning, if the allegations against him are true, sought to achieve. According to chat logs purportedly between Manning and the informant who turned him in, the private decided to leak these documents after he became disillusioned with the Iraq war. He described how reading classified documents made him, for the first time, aware of the breadth of the corruption and violence committed by his country and allies.

He explained that he wanted the world to know what he had learned: “I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” When asked by the informant why he did not sell the documents to a foreign government for profit, Manning replied that he wanted the information to be publicly known in order to trigger “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms”.

There can be no doubt that these vital goals have been achieved. When WikiLeaks was awarded Australia’s most prestigious journalism award last month, the awarding foundation described how these disclosures created “more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime”.

By exposing some of the worst atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq, the documents prevented the Iraqi government from agreeing to ongoing legal immunity for US forces, and thus helped bring about the end of the war. Even Bill Keller, the former New York Times executive editor and a harsh WikiLeaks critic, credits the release of the cables with shedding light on the corruption of Tunisia’s ruling family and thus helping spark the Arab spring.

In sum, the documents Manning is alleged to have released revealed overwhelming deceit, corruption and illegality by the world’s most powerful political actors. And this is why he has been so harshly treated and punished.

Despite pledging to usher in “the most transparent administration in history”, President Obama has been obsessed with prosecuting whistleblowers; his justice department has prosecuted more of them for “espionage” than all prior administrations combined.

The oppressive treatment of Manning is designed to create a climate of fear, to send a signal to those who in the future discover serious wrongdoing committed in secret by the US: if you’re thinking about exposing what you’ve learned, look at what we did to Manning and think twice. The real crimes exposed by this episode are those committed by the prosecuting parties, not the accused. For what he is alleged to have given the world, Manning deserves gratitude and a medal, not a life in prison.

Glenn Greenwald is a Constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at Unclaimed Territory. His forthcoming book, How Would a Patriot Act: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok will be released by Working Assets Publishing next month.

© 2011 The Guardian All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153451/

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November 22, 2011

A recurring theme in criticism of the students pepper-sprayed at UC Davis last week is that in forming a ring around police and their fellow activists they were violating the principles of nonviolent resistance. “A fundamental tenet of civil disobedience is to accept arrest when protesting injustice,” Berkeley Daily Cal columnist Casey Given wrote yesterday, and so the UC activists of today have no right to “compare … their struggle to … the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s.”

Casey Given is right that civil rights activists mostly submitted to arrest willingly (though one of the movement’s greatest unsung heroes did not). But to invoke the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as an example of this supposed rule of nonviolence is a deeply strange choice.

The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was christened on September 30, 1964, at a sit-in following the citation of eight students for violating the university’s leafleting policies. The very next day, on the morning of October 1, the university administration escalated the conflict by arresting former student Jack Weinberg for tabling in support of the civil rights movement in SproulPlaza.

When police told Weinberg he was under arrest, he refused to move, and the officers were forced to call for backup. As they waited, the crowd grew. Eventually a squad car arrived. As police carried Weinberg into the car, the students standing nearby spontaneously sat down, blocking it from leaving Sproul. Police ordered them to move. They refused. Soon Mario Savio climbed onto the roof of the car and declared a noon rally at that location.

Savio was granted a meeting with university administrators not long after, at which he declared that the students surrounding the police car would disperse if and only if the administration released Weinberg, dropped charges against him and the eight students cited the previous day, and opened serious negotiations on campus regulations. Several hundred students spent that night surrounding the car, many of them in sleeping bags. (The demonstrators continued to use the car’s roof as a podium, denting it severely. They also deflated its tires.)

It was not until the following evening, after the administrators had accepted most of their demands, that the students allowed the police car to exit the plaza.

This is the history of nonviolent student protest at Berkeley. It is the history of peaceful student organizing, yes, but it’s also a history of students disrupting police business, refusing to submit to arrest, damaging police property, even holding police hostage.

That is the history of the students of the University of California. That is the inheritance of the student activists of today.

http://studentactivism.net/2011/11/22/nonviolence-resisting-arrest-and-the-student-movements-of-the-sixties-and-today/

March 3, 2011

Yesterday was the fifty-sixth anniversary of the day that Claudette Colvin was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused. When Rosa Parks did the same thing nine months later, she sparked a movement that would change America.

But Claudette Colvin is worth remembering too.

In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2 of that year, on her way home from school, she was told to move to the back of the bus to allow a white person to take her seat.

Like Rosa Parks, she refused. Like Rosa Parks, she was arrested.

So why do we know Parks’ name and not Colvin’s?

Because where Parks was a 42-year-old civil rights activist, Colvin was a 15-year-old schoolkid.

Because where Parks was a respectable married woman with a good job, Colvin was poor … and would shortly become pregnant by an older, married man.

Because where Parks responded to injustice with quiet dignity, Colvin responded with noisy anger.

(When the bus driver told Rosa Parks that he would have to call the police if she didn’t get up, Parks replied, with extraordinary self-possession, “You may do that.” When the police arrived, she went without resistance. When the cops came for Claudette Colvin, she yelled at them that they were violating her rights, and refused to move. They dragged her from the bus. When they kicked her, she kicked them back.)

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes. Claudette Colvin is another.

And there’s another part of the Claudette Colvin story that’s worth telling. I first discovered it in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, and it’s stuck with me.

In November 1952, a black Montgomery high school student named Jeremiah Reeves was arrested and charged with the rape of a married white teenager.

It was widely believed in Montgomery’s black community that the two had been having an affair, but police were able to extract a confession from him by threatening him with the death penalty if he pled not guilty — they even had him sit in the electric chair where they said he’d be executed.

Reeves was quickly charged with raping or attempting to rape six white women, and brought to trial just weeks later. He was convicted by an all-white jury that included one of the police officers who had participated in the investigation. The jury deliberated for just 38 minutes, and — despite the police’s promises — sentenced him to death.

Jeremiah Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin’s at Booker T. Washington High School, and a neighbor. He was a senior, she was a first-year. He was handsome, popular, a talented drummer, a friend. Colvin rallied in his support, raised money for his defense, wrote him letters in jail. His arrest was, she later said, “the turning point in my life,” the moment when she really began to think critically about racism and injustice.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered that Reeves be given a new trial. He was, but the result was the same — and the jury’s verdict came even quicker. In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin sat down on a Montgomery bus and refused to give up her seat.

In 1958 Jeremiah Reeves was executed in the same electric chair in which he had been threatened with death six years earlier.

http://studentactivism.net/2011/03/03/remembering-claudette-colvin/

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November 20, 2011

1. The protest at which UC Davis police officers used pepper spray and batons against unresisting demonstrators was an entirely nonviolent one.

None of the arrests at UC Davis in the current wave of activism have been for violent offenses. Indeed, as the New York Times reported this morning, the university’s administration has “reported no instances of violence by any protesters.” Not one.

2. The unauthorized tent encampment was dismantled before the pepper spraying began.

Students had set up tents on campus on Thursday, and the administration had allowed them to stay up overnight. When campus police ordered students to take the tents down on Friday afternoon, however, most complied. The remainder of the tents were quickly removed by police without incident before the pepper spray incident.

3. Students did not restrict the movement of police at any time during the demonstration.

After police made a handful of arrests in the course of taking down the students’ tents, some of the remaining demonstrators formed a wide seated circle around the officers and arrestees.

UC Davis police chief Annette Spicuzza has claimed that officers were unable to leave that circle: “There was no way out,” she told the Sacramento Bee. “They were cutting the officers off from their support. It’s a very volatile situation.” But multiple videos clearly show that the seated students made no effort to impede the officers’ movement. Indeed, Lt. Pike, who initiated the pepper spraying of the group, was inside the circle moments earlier. To position himself to spray, he simply stepped over the line.

4. Lt. Pike was not in fear for his safety when he sprayed the students.

Chief Spicuzza told reporters on Thursday that her officers had been concerned for their safety when they began spraying. But again, multiple videos show this claim to be groundless.

The most widely distributed video of the incident (viewed, as I write this, by nearly 700,000 people on YouTube) begins just moments before Lt. Pike begain spraying, but another video, which starts a few minutes earlier, shows Pike chatting amiably with one activist, even patting him casually on the back.

The pat on the back occurs just two minutes and nineteen seconds before Pike pepper sprayed the student he had just been chatting with and all of his friends.

5. University of California Police are not authorized to use pepper spray except in circumstances in which it is necessary to prevent physical injury to themselves or others.

From the University of California’s Universitywide Police Policies and Administrative Procedures: “Chemical agents are weapons used to minimize the potential for injury to officers, offenders, or other persons. They should only be used in situations where such force reasonably appears justified and necessary.”

6. UC police are not authorized to use physical force except to control violent offenders or keep suspects from escaping.

Another quote from the UC’s policing policy: “Arrestees and suspects shall be treated in a humane manner … they shall not be subject to physical force except as required to subdue violence or ensure detention. No officer shall strike an arrestee or suspect except in self-defense, to prevent an escape, or to prevent injury to another person.”

7. The UC Davis Police made no effort to remove the student demonstrators from the walkway peacefully before using pepper spray against them.

One video of the pepper-spray incident shows a group of officers moving in to remove the students from the walkway. Just as one of them reaches down to pick up a female student who was leaning against a friend, however, Lt. Pike waves the group back, clearing a space for him to use pepper spray without risk of accidentally spraying his colleagues.

8. Use of pepper spray and other physical force continued after the students’ minimal obstruction of the area around the police ended.

The line of seated students had begun to break up no more than eight seconds after Lt. Pike began spraying. The spraying continued, however, and officers soon began using batons and other physical force against the now-incapacitated group.

9. Even after police began using unprovoked and unlawful violence against the students, they remained peaceful.

Multiple videos show the aftermath of the initial pepper spraying and the physical violence that followed. In none of them do any of the assaulted students or any of the onlookers strike any of the officers who are attacking them and their friends.

10. The students’ commitment to nonviolence extended to their use of language.

At one point on Thursday afternoon, before the police attack on the demonstration, a few activists started a chant of “From Davis to Greece, fuck the police.” They were quickly hushed by fellow demonstrators who urged them to “keep it nonviolent! Keep it peaceful!”

Their chant was replaced by one of “you use weapons, we use our voice.”

Six and a half minutes later, the entire group was pepper sprayed.

Monday Update | One of the most common criticisms of this post in comments has been the claim that because the UC Davis protesters encircled police in an attempt to (at least symbolically) prevent the arrest of their fellow students, their protest cannot be considered nonviolent. I’ve addressed this question in a followup post this morning.

If you’d like to stay in the loop as I continue to cover this story, please feel free to follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the blog’s Facebook page.

http://studentactivism.net/2011/11/20/ten-things-you-should-know-about-fridays-uc-davis-police-violence/