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Title: US judge orders the torture of Chelsea Manning
Source: [None]
URL Source: https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/ ... he-torture-of-chelsea-manning/
Published: Apr 6, 2019
Author: Martin Armstrong
Post Date: 2019-04-06 08:59:42 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 408
Comments: 18

One of the most ruthless and unconstitutional powers federal judges have is to throw people into contempt until they break. The press NEVER reports the truth about the US legal system; they ALWAYS defend the government no matter what. They love to throw you into solitary confinement where the vast majority of prisoners commit suicide. It takes a strong mind and an even stronger will to stand up to judges who have not a shred of humanity in their souls if they even have one still remaining. In my case, Judge Richard Owen kept joking about a Steven Schiffer who never appealed what he did to him, saying he was never over-ruled. When he kept making jokes about this fellow, I asked my lawyer, “Who was Schiffer?” They said you don’t want to know. I said, “Tell me!” Judge Owen took all his lawyers away, mentally tortured Schiffer, and he committed suicide. This judge thought it was funny.

Former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning is jailed also on pretend powers of contempt that are against every principle of liberty ever dreamed of by the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution. Courts have usurped this power of contempt under the theory that English judges had that power in common law. It is totally inconsistent with the fact that we had a revolution against such tyranny. Insult a judge and you go to jail. You must address him as “your honor,” pretending he is honorable when he does not even respect human rights.

US district judge Claude M. Hilton threw Chelsea Manning into solitary confinement, which is TORTURE, for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Chelsea Manning was thrown into a dark cell of solitary confinement where they can make the conditions so hot that wearing even underwear is too much, or so cold that you can see your breath. Judges always rule in their own self-interest of power that this is not torture like waterboarding. Of course, there are some judges who retain their humanity. Unfortunately, they are the minority.

If the government does not leave a mark on your body, they conveniently claim this is not torturing a person. Any normal person would consider torture to be (1) the action or practice of inflicting severe pain, mental or bodily, on someone, (2) to force them to do or say something, or (3) for the pleasure of the person inflicting the pain. Webster’s dictionary defines torture as:

Judge Hilton threw Chelsea Manning in contempt of court and ordered her jailed, yet she confirmed she has no intention of testifying based upon her political beliefs that should be protected by the First Amendment. She told the judge she “will accept whatever you bring upon me.”

Manning has refused to testify because she objects to the secrecy of the grand jury process, and already revealed everything she knows at her court-martial. Nevertheless, this judge said she will remain jailed in his torture chamber of horrors until she testifies or until the grand jury concludes its work, which could be years.

Manning turned over a vast trove of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks and it shows how the government violated the fundamental law of humanity and constantly lies to the people. WikiLeaks made those documents that exposed illegal activities public back in 2010. Chelsea served seven years of a 35-year military sentence and was freed after former President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. I have to admit that perhaps the only thing I find agreement with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the fact that she is calling for the release of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who has been in solitary confinement for 26 days after refusing to testify before a grand jury. She has stated the Manning’s current imprisonment was “torture,” and that the former Army intelligence analyst should be released on bail.

The point of this whole exercise is the judge can simply claim he does not believe you. You are not entitled to a trial by jury because they also claim they are not “punishing” you for a crime, they are “coercing” you and therefore since they do not call it a “crime” you have no constitutional rights to a trial by jury. They can keep you there until you die under the pretense it is coercion and not punishment.

In my case, not only did the court refuse to give me a list of what I was to turn over, but the judge put me in prison to stop the trial. After 20 years, part of the nearly $3 million in coins I could not find was bought by a dealer in Philadelphia for $6,000 cash. That dealer then stuck them in a safe deposit box and tried to sell them with the help of an auction house in Texas in 2017 when he thought enough time passed. Under the law of contempt, the person is supposed to refuse to do something. When I asked for a list of what it was I was supposed to do, they said they would take photos of what they had and I could tell them what was missing to regain my own freedom.

Of course, the court never provided any photographs. My case illustrates just how contempt powers can be abused for political purposes. I was never provided any specific order on January 14th, 2000, they never said, “Do this and you will be released.” It is not whether Chelsea Manning even has anything. She objects to the secrecy of the entire proceeding and could be thrown in prison until she dies. And this is a country that criticizes China for human rights violations?

In my case, there was never a trial or even a discussion of who owned any property. The receiver was simply given “custody,” and there was never a trial. I probably would have died in contempt of court had I not petitioned the Supreme Court. After 20 years, the nonsense over the coins for which I was held in contempt were sold for $6,000 cash by some worker to a Philadelphia dealer. This entire affair proves my contempt was bogus to turnover something they refused to define and which I believed had been stolen, to begin with.

The government is NOT the sovereign of this nation — we are. Therefore, any whistleblower is NOT committing treason since we are the sovereign, not the government. Indeed, people like Manning and Snowden are seeking to expose that the government is acting illegally AGAINST the true sovereign which is none other than we the people. This distinction has been stated by the Supreme Court very plainly stated in LEGAL TENDER CASES, 110 U.S. 421 (1884) (also referred to as Julliard v Greenman):

“… there is no such thing as a power of inherent sovereignty in the government of the United States. It is a government of delegated powers, supreme within its prescribed sphere, but powerless outside of it. In this country, sovereignty resides in the people, and Congress can exercise no power which they have not, by their constitution, entrusted to it; all else is withheld.”

These government agents pursuing Manning and Snowden are the real traitors to the people trying to protect the illegal actions of the government. We really should DEMAND that the power of contempt be eliminated from US law once and for all. It is an easy way to imprison people for political purposes. In my case, the bankers wanted Princeton shutdown because they argued we had more influence and they would lose money in their manipulations because we would expose them. When someone else stepped up and offered to rent Princeton to keep the forecasting going, the court refused. They demanded I turn over the source code to Socrates(1). ALL the statements made in the movie “The Forecaster” could not be made unless they were proven with documentation to satisfy Lloyds of London to provide insurance against slander.

I am asking everyone with a pen to write to Congress and Trump demanding Chelsea Manning be released and contempt powers be repealed by Congress. Judges should NOT have such a power that circumvents all human rights under the pretense of discretion. Now that Trump has gotten a taste of how corrupt the legal system is, perhaps he is ready to defend the Constitution and human rights against such outright abuse.

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#1. To: Ada (#0)

The government is NOT the sovereign of this nation — we are.

What nonsense! The government owns the media and is all powerful. Therefore, they can commit any evil. We are just powerless serfs.

DWornock  posted on  2019-04-07   5:14:09 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: DWornock, ghostdogtxn (#1)

Any idea how long the judge can keep Chelsea in prison on the contempt rap?

Ada  posted on  2019-04-07   10:29:26 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: Ada (#2)

"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson

ghostdogtxn  posted on  2019-04-08   19:02:22 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: Ada (#0)

"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson

ghostdogtxn  posted on  2019-04-08   19:04:10 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#5. To: Ada (#2)

Any idea how long the judge can keep Chelsea in prison on the contempt rap?

I believe the term of the grand jury which may be 18 months.

DWornock  posted on  2019-04-08   19:28:08 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#6. To: Ada (#0)

Chelsea Manning’s ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Moment

The former whistleblower has been in jail for a month after defying a federal subpoena to testify against Wikileaks.

Chelsea Manning in front of the U.S. District Courthouse in Alexandria, Va., in March before she was jailed. (NBC News screenshot)

Chelsea Manning, the Army whistleblower who released hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents to Wikileaks in 2011 and who called attention to war crimes committed by U.S. troops, is back in jail. In fact, she’s been there for a month—not that the mainstream media cares. What’s another whistleblower locked up?

But Manning isn’t being held in the federal lockup in Alexandria, Virginia, for providing classified information to the media. She was already sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for that. (She served seven years before President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.) This time, she’s been thrown behind bars for an indeterminate period of incarceration because she refused to testify before the Wikileaks grand jury. And to make matters worse, she was reportedly held in solitary confinement (or, as sheriff Dana Lawhorne called it, “administrative segregation”) until April 5.

While the hive media has been all but silent, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at least spoke out in support of Manning last week, calling her jail conditions “torture.”

What Manning is doing, in my view, is heroic for myriad reasons. There is no need to rehash what she—then Private First Class Bradley Manning—did in 2011. You don’t have to like Chelsea to acknowledge that she’s a whistleblower. There’s a legal definition of whistleblowing. It is bringing to light any evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or safety. That’s exactly what she did when she downloaded and delivered to Wikileaks thousands of pages of government documents that exposed the real truth about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most damning of these for the government were the “Collateral Murder” video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and the Guantanamo files.

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But the price that she has paid has been very high. Manning spent two of her seven years in prison in solitary confinement, a situation the United Nations has characterized as a form of torture. She twice attempted suicide the first time she was in solitary. And she was forced to remain naked for a year in solitary because she was a suicide risk. Authorities were afraid she would use her clothes to hang herself.

In early March, Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The media reported that the Justice Department’s prosecutors wanted her to testify about her relationship with Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange and how she was able to pass classified documents to him in 2011. Manning contended that she had already testified to those questions in her own trial in 2012, and that all the feds had to do was enter into the record the transcript of her trial.

The feds wouldn’t relent. But neither would Manning. She said she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Then the government offered her qualified immunity. Nothing she said before the grand jury would be used against her. (Except if she contradicted her 2011 testimony. That’s a trick the feds love to use to charge people with perjury or with making a false statement. More on that in a minute.) Manning held firm, however. Even with the qualified immunity offer, she said that she would invoke her First Amendment right to freedom of speech, her Fourth Amendment right against illegal search and seizure, and her Sixth Amendment right to due process. She wouldn’t budge, and the Justice Department asked the judge to hold her indefinitely in contempt of court. That is how Manning found herself behind bars again.

When Manning was arrested and charged with contempt of court, I tweeted:

I said this—and I believe every word of it—because Manning’s actions remind me of those of folk singer and legendary activist Pete Seeger, a personal hero of mine.

Pete Seeger was a member of the Communist Party USA from the early 1940s until 1949, when he split with the party over Josef Stalin’s atrocities. Still, he remained friendly with many party members. In 1955, Seeger, along with folksingers and members of his band The WeaversLee Hayes, Mil Lampell, and Ronnie Gilbert—were subpoenaed to testify before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where they were asked to name names. Hayes, Lampell, and Gilbert all pleaded the Fifth so as not to incriminate themselves. They urged Seeger to do the same. But he did not.

Instead, Seeger went before the HUAC and refused to answer any questions, citing his constitutional rights under the First Amendment. He told the Committee, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my associations, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

Seeger was charged with 10 felony counts of contempt of Congress—similar to Manning’s charge of contempt of court—convicted, and sentenced to 10 concurrent one-year terms in a federal prison. The conviction was overturned a year later on a technicality.

Like Manning, Seeger could have taken the easy way out. But he didn’t. He could have just taken the Fifth. He could have answered each question with “I don’t recall.” But he chose to make a political point, to take a stand. That was courageous in 1955 and it is courageous in 2019.

Seeger got caught up in the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s. The situation for Manning, though, is more sinister. Contrary to popular belief, President Obama did not pardon Manning in the final days of his administration. Instead, he commuted her sentence, simply releasing her from prison. The conviction still stands and Manning is still in legal jeopardy. Prosecutors could still decide to charge her with crimes related to the original charges. With that said, was Manning’s subpoena a ham-fisted attempt to get her to contradict herself in new testimony, thus inviting another felony charge for perjury or making a false statement? Were prosecutors trying to get Manning to implicate herself in some process felony? Or were they simply trying to force her to turn rat on Julian Assange?

Again, Manning could have simply answered each question with “I don’t recall.” She would have been home in time for dinner. Instead, she made a political point—one that all of us should want to emulate. That point is “Don’t tread on me.” That point is “I’m willing to jeopardize my freedom to protect yours.”

I say often that in my time at the CIA, I learned that CIA culture is such that employees are taught that everything in life is a shade of gray. But that is simply not true. Some things are black and white, right or wrong. This is one of those things. It’s the government that’s the enemy here, not Manning or Assange.

Remember, the American people own the information that Manning and Assange are accused of releasing. We have a right to know what our government is doing in our name. We have a right to know whether the government is covering up crimes. We have a right to know when—and why—those Americans who commit war crimes or crimes against humanity are not being prosecuted. The mainstream media doesn’t tell us. But Wikileaks does.

We wouldn’t know about some of the most egregious war crimes of the past two decades without Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to share their politics. You don’t have to want to go out and have a beer with them. But you do have to respect what they’ve done.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst and case officer and senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He served two years in prison (2013-15) for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. He is currently an activist, a radio host, and the author of the recent book The Convenient Terrorist: Two Whistleblowers’ Stories of Torture, Terror, Secret Wars and CIA Lies with Joseph Hickman.

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hondo68  posted on  2019-04-08   20:08:22 ET  (1 image) Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: hondo68 (#6)

reportedly held in solitary confinement (or, as sheriff Dana Lawhorne called it, “administrative segregation”) until April 5.

I wonder what is like being a he-she in prison? ;)

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke

BTP Holdings  posted on  2019-04-08   20:24:57 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#8. To: ghostdogtxn (#3)

Theoretically until the contempt is "purged" By testifying.

And if she never testifies, can she be held for the rest of her life?

Ada  posted on  2019-04-08   20:31:27 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#9. To: DWornock (#5)

I believe the term of the grand jury which may be 18 months.

Can the term of the grand jury be extended? Or a new one empaneled?

Ada  posted on  2019-04-08   20:39:21 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#10. To: Ada (#9)

Can the term of the grand jury be extended? Or a new one empaneled?

Yes, to both.

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken

Lod  posted on  2019-04-08   20:56:34 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#11. To: Ada (#8)

"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson

ghostdogtxn  posted on  2019-04-09   0:36:11 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#12. To: Ada (#8)

"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson

ghostdogtxn  posted on  2019-04-09   0:43:33 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#13. To: ghostdogtxn (#11)

Have you ever heard of a government tyranny restricting its own power? Not without substantial outside pressure.

All we need to recall is when the British marched on Lexington and Concord. The shots fired by the Minutemen were those heard round the world. ;)

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke

BTP Holdings  posted on  2019-04-09   6:26:32 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#14. To: BTP Holdings (#13)

"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson

ghostdogtxn  posted on  2019-04-09   19:35:03 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#15. To: ghostdogtxn (#14)

Poor Timothy, just another convenient patsy.

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken

Lod  posted on  2019-04-09   20:07:02 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#16. To: Lod (#15)

"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)‡

"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." -- Thomas Jefferson

ghostdogtxn  posted on  2019-04-09   23:52:27 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#17. To: Ada (#0)

Everybody needs to stop calling this freak a "she"....he's a man, with a mental defect.

“With the exception of Whites, the rule among the peoples of the world, whether residing in their homelands or settled in Western democracies, is ethnocentrism and moral particularism: they stick together and good means what is good for their ethnic group."
-Alex Kurtagic

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X-15  posted on  2019-04-10   4:15:02 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#18. To: Lod, ghostdogtxn (#15)

Poor Timothy, just another convenient patsy.

Yes Dave from the X22 Report interviewed the guy that set the charges in the Murrah Building. ;)

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke

BTP Holdings  posted on  2019-04-10   6:11:09 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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