Campaigners occupied the steps of St Martin's-in-the-Field church for the London vigil as Chelsea, who is serving a 35-year sentence after leaking hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars while stationed in Iraq as a US military analyst, spent her fifth birthday in jail.
"I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price for living in a free society," Chelsea said last year when her lawyers appealed the heavy sentence handed down after she was convicted of violations of the Espionage Act and other offences.
Whistle-blowers Tell Us What We Need to Know
Nancy Hollander, lead counsel for Chelsea in her appeal in the US military courts, told Sputnik News that vigils not only provide moral support for Chelsea, but they "tell people around the world what happened to Chelsea and why whistle-blowers — who bring to the public information that they need to know — are so important."
"One of the things that Chelsea brought to the public were human rights violations that the US was involved in. We see in the torture report severe human rights violations that the public did not know — and still doesn't, because 6,000 pages are still classified. The photographs are still classified. We've seen a little bit of it, and it's horrifying. But without this coming out, the public has no way of knowing what the government is doing. And a government that acts in secret is not a government where we have a free society — those two are incompatible."
"We'd be much worse off without this information," agrees Lyndsey German, Convener at Stop the War, one of the London vigil's organisers.
"It's told us a great deal about US foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the way the US and other countries have behaved," she told us. "We have, on the admission of the US Congress itself, evidence of CIA torture, and that this involved the UK government at different stages and there are calls to involve Tony Blair and Jack Straw.
"You can't believe that this would have come to the public knowledge if we didn't have whistle-blowers who have made it clear that these things exist. Otherwise you wait 20, 50, 100 years for these things to become officially released. "
Government: Secrecy and Transparency
Manning herself spoke out in a December 16 interview with Amnesty International about the value of whistle-blowing: "In an ideal world, governments, corporations, and other large institutions would be transparent by default," she said. "Unfortunately, the world is not ideal. I think the term ‘whistle-blowers' has an overwhelmingly negative connotation in government and business. Very often policies that supposedly protect such people are actually used to discredit them."
Lyndsey German says there's a "fairly high" anti-war sentiment in both the UK and the US, so whistle-blowing of the type carried out by Manning does help to create awareness of "the secret state, the secrecy of the US and allied governments and how they operate."
Democratic accountability is virtually non-existent, she says: "Who decided we were going to render prisoners to various countries? Who decides who stays in prison and who doesn't? Who decides there's a US torture base in Poland? It's not decided by anybody democratically in this country or the United States."
‘Unconstitutional' Espionage Act
Manning was convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act which Hollander says is "unconstitutional and in fact dangerous for a free society, interpreted the way the courts are interpreting it."
"We have to stop the Espionage Act in its tracks and Chelsea is the hope and way to do that. The Act was originally passed to prosecute spies during WW1. It was not intended to prosecute people who act in the public interest, but the way it's been interpreted by the courts, the only intent that's required is the intent to disclose national security information. The government does not have to prove — and did not prove in this case — that Chelsea wanted to harm the US or aid the enemy. Regardless of that, she was convicted."
One of the things that Chelsea brought to the public were human rights violations that the US was involved in, says Hollander, adding that the public still doesn't know the full extent, because 6,000 pages of the torture report — including the photographs — are still classified.
"We've seen a little bit of it, and it's horrifying. But without this coming out, the public has no way of knowing what the government is doing. And a government that acts in secret is not a government where we have a free society — those two are incompatible."
