It
was no surprise, but no less a crime of U.S. military injustice, that
Pvt. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. And there is
no reason that the movement that supports this young soldier, whose
actions most of the world’s people consider heroic, should slow down its
actions to win Manning’s freedom.
Thus, it is encouraging that her legal defense is already appealing
for a presidential pardon, that the American Civil Liberties Union has
denounced the sentence, that Amnesty International has called on
President Barack Obama to commute it to time already served and that the
Center for Constitutional Rights — which just won an important legal
case against the racist “stop and frisk” police actions in New York City
— has called for a full pardon.
Workers World calls on its readers and supporters to back all the
efforts to stop punishing this exemplary soldier, who has shown the
world that right in the belly of the beast, in the heart of the empire,
in the very entrails of the Pentagon, the spark of solidarity with the
world’s oppressed can light a fire.
It is a telling sign that even the editorial board of the New York
Times found it necessary to distance itself from the harsh sentence,
which it found overly punitive and based on the imperialist state
apparatus’s perceived need to stop whistleblowers from exposing the
crimes of the empire. It is certainly true that the sentence has nothing
to do with law and justice as these ideas are taught in the
universities or expounded in ruling-class propaganda, which tries to
paint the United States as the pinnacle of freedom and justice. The
sentence has more to do with what those in power believe is necessary to
stop others from reporting the lies, crimes and murders they witness as
unwilling agents of the center of world oppression and exploitation.
From the point of view of the exploited workers of the world — and
all workers are exploited — who want independence for their nations and
want to fight for a decent life, it is important now to fight for
Manning’s freedom exactly because it will encourage others to follow the
private’s example.
How encouraging it is for all who love freedom, for all who identify
with the most oppressed, that a private first class, the lowest rung in
the U.S. military, was able to throw a wrench into the machinery of U.S.
imperialism. May Manning’s splendid example spread to tens, hundreds
and thousands of those in the U.S. military, to those civilian employees
of the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and other instruments of
oppression; and may they too identify with the workers and poor of the
world.
In another sign of the courage Manning has displayed throughout the
three years of incarceration, the private — the sentence removed the
“first class” from the title — announced her wish to live her life as a
woman and to be called Chelsea Manning. This adds another dimension to
her struggle; we salute her determination to live a life where truth is
more important than personal gain, and where the injustice of seeing
civilians gunned down in an Iraqi city by U.S. gunships awakens a need
to resist despite the risks.
Free Pvt. Chelsea Manning!
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