|
FOCUS: The Truth I Know About Chelsea Manning |
 |
|
Sunday, 28 August 2016 11:08 |
|
Strangio writes: "Chelsea has been fighting for that 'realness' - to be seen, heard, understood. One of the many things that Chelsea has lost through her incarceration is her ability to publicly shape the narrative of who she is."
Chelsea Manning. (photo: AP)
The Truth I Know About Chelsea Manning
By Chase Strangio, Esquire
28 August 16
She is not a symbol. She is a person. We can't lose her.
 landed in Kansas City, Missouri, to visit Chelsea Manning exactly three years after she publicly disclosed her identity as a woman named Chelsea.
August 22. I remember the first August 22 that I became acquainted with Chelsea. It was the day her lawyer at the time, David Coombs, read her "coming out" letter on the Today Show?—?one day after she was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison.
"As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me," Chelsea wrote in that statement. "I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible."
Since that day, Chelsea has been fighting for that "realness"?— to be seen, heard, understood. One of the many things that Chelsea has lost through her incarceration is her ability to publicly shape the narrative of who she is. She writes beautifully and contributes to the public discourse on government accountability and transparency, trans rights, and justice for prisoners. But she is scrutinized and literally locked away and cut off from the world so her voice is always mediated through something or someone else. That doesn't make her voice or her contributions less real, but for a person as beautiful and thoughtful as Chelsea, these mediums don't do her essence justice.
On this August 22, I came to Leavenworth, Kansas, to meet Chelsea in person for the first time, wondering if perhaps I could get a better sense of the "real" Chelsea so that I could better understand how to support and fight for her. This Chelsea—the person who spends hours supporting her friends on the outside process life's complexities, who sends letters of support to trans kids who write to her about their pain, who by 28 has lived through and survived enough pain for a dozen lifetimes?—?is so much more than any one identity characteristic or one action.
I already knew these parts of Chelsea well, but there is something different about sitting across from someone and connecting in-person. When Chelsea attempted suicide last month, I was reminded of how tenuous our connection to her is and the power of the many forces she is up against. It shouldn't have taken the possibility of her death to remind me of the fragility of her life. But it did.
I wanted her to see, in person, that my love, support, and fight for her were unwavering. I wanted her to see me in all my messy humanness. Because that is what makes our support for people and human connection real.
We have been working together for the past few years?,?successfully fighting for her to receive hormone therapy, and now continuing to fight to ensure that she is treated as the woman that she is and not denied the health care that she needs to survive.
On calls recorded by the government, I have heard her cry, laugh, and rage against the injustices in the world. We talked at length after the government formally rejected her many requests to follow the hair-length and grooming standards applied to all other female military prisoners. Through her tears and the ones that I held back we worked through a plan. We spoke about queer organizing, resilience and tragedy on the Sunday after the Pulse nightclub shooting. We chat about books, politics, family, TV with both the levity and at times, intensity, of any friendship.
I know Chelsea but like so many people who love her, until yesterday I had never actually seen her. There are no current images of Chelsea or recordings of her voice or videos of her that we can see or hear or share.
She is, like so many people, held under the unrelenting control of our carceral regimes, locked away from public view.
The power of Chelsea is understated but undeniable. Her charm, charisma, and somewhat disarming earnestness is far more evident and captivating in person. So too are the pain and introspection that sit just behind her blue eyes and that smile. A smile that so strikingly reminded me of another friend and trans visionary, Dean Spade. Spade and Manning could be relatives?—?the shared mannerisms and facial expressions were striking. We talked about that and about how Dean had shaped both of our thinking.
I didn't ask if I was the only trans visitor that Chelsea has had. She is only allowed visits from attorneys and people who she knew prior to her arrest. It is a limited group, which means that many of the people who know her best and love her most fiercely may never see her.
After five and a half hours, my visit with Chelsea ended. No hugs allowed?—?another rule that serves to further the many invisible and visible mechanisms of government control and violence over the bodies of people in custody. I felt physically ill walking away from Chelsea. I wanted to stop time. To soak in her realness and to find a pathway to a world where she wasn't locked up?—?where no one was locked up. But that isn't our world and I drove away.
I feel sick writing this, thinking about Chelsea. Locked away.
The thing that always sits with me after visiting someone in confinement (prison, jail, detention, civil commitment) is that we are all responsible for this barbaric system. Our complicity, tax payments and votes, build this horror.
This is a system that descends directly from the chattel slavery that built this country. It is a mechanism of anti-Blackness that stretches into every corner of our national character. Our cages are our cages. We sit among them even as they are so strategically made invisible to most of us.
Leavenworth, Kansas, is hauntingly beautiful. But behind the corn fields and train tracks sit our most effective mechanisms of death.
Our captives can't take in that beauty and are instead served only rules designed to break them. Yet people so boldly and resiliently survive in the face of these systems designed to kill them.
I left Chelsea with thoughts of all my incarcerated community members. The many black and brown trans folks struggling, like Chelsea, to be seen. So many whose names we will never know?—?who may die by suicide, from neglect, through the slow administrative murder of our carceral systems.
It is for Chelsea and all those people whose names and stories will forever be kept from our consciousness that I resolve to keep fighting.
The real Chelsea is a human being just like the rest of us. She breaths life into our movements and is a gift to our advocacy and organizing.
We can't lose her.
Chase Strangio is an attorney who lives and works in New York City. He is lead counsel in Manning's lawsuit against the Department of Defense for denial of care related to her gender dysphoria.
 |
|
FOCUS: Bernie's Revolution Leaves Gaping Hole |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 28 August 2016 10:42 |
|
Weissman writes: "What Clinton or Trump would do, what Obama has done, and what Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have done, is exactly what al-Qaeda and Islamic State want the US to do. They want us to wage war on Muslims, enabling the jihadis to present themselves as defenders of the faith against Western Crusaders. Innocent civilians from Fallujah to Paris, Brussels, and Orlando have paid the price."
Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont talks to supporters during a rally at the University of Washington, in Seattle. (photo: Joshua Trujillo/Seattlepi.com)
Bernie's Revolution Leaves Gaping Hole
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
28 August 16
 avy Seals killed Osama bin Laden. US Special Forces, various Kurdish and Shia forces, airstrikes, and strained cooperation with the Russians appear to be pushing back the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. But, even with all this “success” in dismantling the Caliphate, many national security experts have given up on defeating ISIS. They seem to agree, “Nothing Trump or Clinton will do in Iraq and Syria will curtail terrorist attacks.”
What Clinton or Trump would do, what Obama has done, and what Dick Cheney and George W. Bush have done, is exactly what al-Qaeda and Islamic State want the US to do. They want us to wage war on Muslims, enabling the jihadis to present themselves as defenders of the faith against Western Crusaders. Innocent civilians from Fallujah to Paris, Brussels, and Orlando have paid the price.
“We are more vulnerable now,” said Khzir Khan, the father of a fallen soldier, who spoke at the Democratic Convention and whom Donald Trump made the mistake of attacking. “We have created a chaos.”
Why, then, do US troops continue to fight in Iraq and Syria? What, if anything, should they be doing there?
Bernie Sanders never convincingly answered these questions during the primaries, and his speech on Wednesday night launching Our Revolution completely ignored the issue. I can’t even find Iraq and Syria mentioned on the group’s website or list of issues.
Bernie’s revolution is half-empty – and only half-full.
I fully understand that Bernie has chosen to stress his domestic agenda because Americans suffer directly from economic inequality, racial injustice, and corporate power. Hearing him speak, I believed more strongly than ever that, working together, we can truly build a decent society. Tears of joy welled up in my eyes. My poor, overworked mouse sent another $27.
I was especially thrilled to see Bernie take on President Obama as “dead wrong” in wanting to pass the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through a lame-duck Congress after the November elections.
“What the TPP is about, and what previous trade agreements were about, are forcing American workers to compete against people who make pennies an hour,” Bernie explained.
“It is about corporations that go from country to country in search of the cheapest possible labor they can find. Our disastrous trade policies have cost us millions of good-paying jobs, and it is part of the race to the bottom. Instead of uplifting people all over the world, people are becoming poorer.”
Better than almost anyone I’ve read, and far more clearly than I, Bernie exposed the danger of the TPP’s Investor-State Dispute System. “Unbelievably,” he said, the dispute provision allows major multi-national corporations to “go to an international tribunal made up of three corporate lawyers if they believe that their future profits were harmed as a result of a governmental decision.”
“It is so crazy it is hard to imagine,” he said. “President Obama killed the Keystone Pipeline … because he understood that excavating and transporting some of the dirtiest fuel in the world would accelerate the crisis of climate change.” But, as a result of the “Investor-State Dispute System” in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Trans-Canada, the owner of the Keystone Pipeline, “is suing the tax-payers of the United States for fifteen billion dollars because they believe that decision impacted their future profits.”
“The idea that a major multi-national corporation can sue us for fifteen billion dollars because the president made the decision that he thought right tells you what trade agreements are all about. They are designed to protect corporate profits and to hell with the environment, human rights, health care, or the needs of the people. And that is why the TPP has got to be defeated.”
Bernie’s second example showed the insanity of the dispute system even more dramatically. In Uruguay, the government put together a very strong anti-tobacco campaign, requiring cigarette packages to display “really ugly stuff about diseased lungs or diseased lips, making it very clear that if anybody wanted to buy that package of cigarettes they were endangering their health bigtime.” The campaign succeeded in cutting back smoking.
“Well, guess what happened,” said a wonderfully animated Bernie. “Philip Morris was very upset. They make money by poisoning children and people and creating cancer for those people. And Philip Morris was very upset that their profits were being impacted because they could no longer cause cancer to the people of Uruguay.” Long story short, they are now in one of NAFTA’s dispute tribunals seeking a financial settlement from the country “because the government of Uruguay tried to protect their children.”
With his passion and straight talk, the grumpy old Democratic Socialist from Brooklyn, the University of Chicago, and Vermont has brought back to life an idealism that has not been on the national agenda since the early 1960s. Not since Michael Harrington wrote The Other America and the New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) worked to create “an interracial movement of the poor.” America’s war in Southeast Asia – and the spectacular growth of the anti-war movement – overwhelmed our domestic agenda while LBJ’s War on Poverty became an argument that Cold War liberals used to support neo-colonial intervention.
This history should make us wary about the danger of trying to ignore foreign policy the way Our Revolution is now trying to do. An endless war in the Greater Middle East will only strengthen the hand of Big Oil as it stands in the way of seriously combatting global climate change. An endless “war on terror” will further empower the military-industrial complex as it diverts resources needed for social reform. And a morally obtuse silence on murderous no-win wars will corrupt the idealism we need to build a decent world.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and
the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in
London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now
lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, Big Money
and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators
Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
|
Our United Strength and Action on Behalf of Jeffrey Sterling |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 28 August 2016 08:31 |
|
Kiriakou writes: "I recently wrote about the trouble getting necessary medical attention that CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling was encountering in prison. I asked readers to contact the warden of FCI Englewood, the prison where he is being held, and demand that Sterling be given the appropriate medical attention. Our united strength and action is pushing this case in the right direction."
Jeffrey Sterling. (photo: The Invisible Man documentary)
Our United Strength and Action on Behalf of Jeffrey Sterling
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
28 August 16
recently wrote about the trouble getting necessary medical attention that CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling was encountering in prison. Sterling, who has a history of atrial fibrillation, had collapsed twice and was being denied both routine medical tests to determine if he had a heart blockage or other cardiac problem and a visit to an outside hospital or cardiac specialist. I asked readers to contact the warden of FCI Englewood, the prison where he is being held, and demand that Sterling be given the appropriate medical attention.
Our united strength and action is pushing this case in the right direction.
A day after my original piece was published on August 10, I received a call from a well-known Hollywood documentarian whose father had been a federal judge for 37 years. A Carter appointee, the judge had read the article and wanted to convey the fact that federal judges take complaints like those Sterling was making very seriously. He asked his son to suggest that Holly Sterling send a letter to Judge Leonie Brinkema, who sentenced Sterling to prison in the first place, telling her about her husband’s medical predicament. Holly Sterling wrote that letter and sent it immediately.
Meanwhile, Arn Menconi, the Green Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Colorado, began a vigil outside the prison, demanding that Sterling be allowed to see a private cardiologist. Initially chased off federal property by the angry corrections officers on perimeter duty, he set up shop across the street and refused the polite and not-so-polite requests from the local sheriff’s office to just leave quietly. The entire thing was live-streamed on Facebook. Menconi soon attracted five or six like-minded individuals to help him keep up the vigil 24-hours-a-day for three days.
Finally, dozens of people wrote on Facebook, Twitter, and in the comments section of the original RSN article that they had called the warden’s office and demanded that Jeffrey Sterling be given appropriate medical care. I can tell you from firsthand experience that there is nothing that a prison administration office hates more than outsiders tying up its phone lines making demands for prisoners.
The pressure may have worked, although we’re not home-free yet. Holly Sterling emailed me earlier this week to say that Jeffrey had been called to the prison medical unit, where he was told that the warden had reversed her decision and would recommend to the Bureau of Prisons Regional Office in Denver that he be taken to an outside cardiologist for testing. (He will also undergo a preliminary exam by the prison doctor on Monday, August 29.)
What this means is that the warden will send a letter to the regional medical officer (RMO) asking that Sterling be taken to the outside cardiologist. The RMO will review the medical file and determine whether the appointment is a medical necessity and whether money exists for it in the budget. The RMO has the final word.
As an aside, the reason that it’s so important that Sterling see an outside cardiologist, rather than just the prison doctor, is that prisons are notorious dumping grounds for failed doctors. When the BOP finally attracts a decent doctor, he or she invariable leaves because the BOP leadership won’t let him actually treat prisoners the way they should be treated. That happened when I was at FCI Loretto. A good doctor was then replaced by a failed pediatrician.
Without getting ahead of myself, Sterling’s current situation looks to me like an at least preliminary success of broad action. Sterling is halfway to a cardiac specialist. The final decision will come down in the next three or four weeks. In the meantime, we have to continue to stand up and make sure that the BOP does the right thing.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former
senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2007
he publicly blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
Leslie Jones Faces Constant Abuse - Because That's How Racism Works |
|
|
Sunday, 28 August 2016 08:11 |
|
Carroll writes: "These actions make me think that racism is so integral, so regular a thing in this country, like water running from the kitchen faucet, that the majority of people see it as merely who and how we are. Racism: it's what we do."
'This all didn't happen just because she did a movie. It was because she is a statuesque dark-skinned black woman, sister in spirit and posture to Nina Simone.' (photo: Gregg DeGuire/WireImage)
Leslie Jones Faces Constant Abuse - Because That's How Racism Works
By Rebecca Carroll, Guardian UK
28 August 16
The hacking of the actor’s website is symptomatic of the culture we’ve built. If you want to take a stand, more than a tweet of sympathy is required
 hat else do people need to see before they realize that racism is a vile, vicious daily assault that faces black Americans today – in every sphere and on every platform, but egregiously so online?
Actor and comedian Leslie Jones has been attacked again – her website hacked, filled with racist images and stolen nude photos, along with pictures of her driver’s license and Harambe, the gorilla killed in an Ohio zoo earlier this year. These actions make me think that racism is so integral, so regular a thing in this country, like water running from the kitchen faucet, that the majority of people see it as merely who and how we are. Racism: it’s what we do.
Where is the practical response to this grotesque, debilitatingly mean-spirited violence? It’s one thing to offer her digital apologies for others’ racism. It’s another to actually take a stand to help eliminate it from our society.
Ostensibly, the initial attacks were the apex of ongoing negative reaction to Jones starring in the all-female remake of Ghostbusters. Trolls went after her looks, her skin, her body – everything that makes her who she is, and makes her black. She was called an ape. The attacks were unequivocally racist. Twitter issued a bland, cookie-cutter response.
But this all didn’t happen just because she did a movie. It was because she is a statuesque dark-skinned black woman, sister in spirit and posture to Nina Simone; elegant in her vocal command, towering with a feverish, ebullient talent that cannot be contained. It’s asinine to say that the racists who are targeting Leslie Jones are Ghostbuster purists, and that’s really what this is all about.
And while the New York Times reported that Jones “and her white cast mates have endured months of criticism since the announcement of a reboot of the blockbuster franchise,” those same white cast mates were not called a “big lipped coon”. What stopped one or all of these actors from saying during one of the myriad talk shows they appeared on: “You know what’s not cool? Racism. You know why? Because it targets and maims people we love and respect and live on the planet with.”
The film’s director, Paul Feig, did come to her defense, tweeting: “Leslie Jones is one of the greatest people I know. Any personal attacks against her are attacks against us all.” But again, if it really were an attack against us all – assuming he means himself and the rest of the mostly white cast – and it actually felt like an attack in the same way these feel like attacks to Leslie Jones, you can be sure he’d be doing more than tweeting about it. You’ll note he didn’t mention the R-word.
Here’s the thing: those who limit their allyship to tweeting their support when we’ve been targets of online racism have absolutely no idea how far removed they are, and yet how intricately tied they are to this thing that is killing us. Racism’s unceasing power lies in the way in which it can weaponise words: now, in 140 characters.
By all means up the Twitter support, which is all well and good, but then go deeper. Particularly those in positions of power or who have public platforms – call your friends, call your state representatives, send group emails and reply all to everyone; be vigorous in your accountability and encourage the same in those around you, call into radio shows, launch Kickstarter campaigns, think about ways you can help dismantle racism all the time. Because it is happening all the time.
|
|
