Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Why Is Chelsea Manning Prohibited
From Having Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair Issue & The Senate Torture Report?
The "prohibited" items taken from Chelsea Manning's
jail cell
included
copies of Caitlyn Jenner’s
Vanity Fair
cover issue, a book by Pakistan human rights activist Malala
Yousafzai,
and an expired tube of toothpaste. (Image: ACLU)
For Chelsea Manning the last five years have been a fight to
survive. She has faced the death penalty
and endured the brutal torture
of solitary confinement in Kuwait and again while awaiting trial at
Quantico in Virginia. She has come out
as a trans woman and fought for her voice and her health care.
She still fights for both as she also continues her long legal fight for
freedom.
Through it all she has continued to
. Her voice has become central to our movements for government
transparency and transgender justice.
But she is now facing another fight that threatens to silence
her.
At the time, Chelsea was not informed why these items were
taken. Her cell was searched, and they were removed when she was placed in
solitary confinement for 24 hours following an investigation into allegations
that she was “disrespectful” to an officer.
For almost a month, Chelsea, an ACLU client, awaited clarity
about the charges and requested that her reading materials be returned to her.
But the military denied those requests.
Now Chelsea will go before a disciplinary board on Tuesday,
during which she will face charges for disrespecting an officer, misusing
medication, and possessing prohibited items.
But the more details
that emerge about these charges, the more concerning this all
becomes. The alleged encounter that prompted the “disrespect” charge involved
Chelsea requesting a lawyer when she realized that she was being accused of
wrongdoing. As for “misusing medication,” that charged is based solely on
possessing toothpaste that expired in April of this year. And the “prohibited”
property she had in her possession included, among other things, issues of
Vanity Fair, OUT magazine, the Advocate, and the Cosmopolitan issue that
included her own interview.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, the possible punishment for these
alleged infractions includes
indefinite solitary confinement.
Since supporters learned of these charges and started a campaign
to have them dropped, the military has responded with assurances that Chelsea’s
treatment will be “
.” But subsequent to that statement Chelsea was inexplicably
to the law library as she prepares to go before the disciplinary
board. Because she is not entitled to have counsel present at her board, this
access is especially important.
Hopefully with public pressure and increasing scrutiny, the charges
against Chelsea will be dismissed, and she will not be subjected to the torture
of solitary or any other punishment that further restricts her access to public
engagement and the support systems that she has cultivated from prison.
But regardless of the ultimate outcome, the fact that she has
had to face this discipline at all is a concerning reflection of how our
incarceration systems attempt to isolate and dehumanize those held behind
prison walls.
Incarceration is itself a form of isolation — a mechanism for
cutting people off from their families and support systems and taking them out
of the community. Within that isolation, the added disruption and harms that
flow from solitary and other disciplinary mechanisms cannot be overstated. For
Chelsea, her books, magazines, and reports are a part of her and they help
build her voice. And this voice is her connection to a network of people who
uplift her and are uplifted and inspired by her.
If Chelsea loses her reading materials permanently, or if she is
sent to solitary, or if she is otherwise disciplined because she asked for a
lawyer or had old toothpaste or wanted to read about Caitlyn Jenner or the
Senate Torture Report, then we all lose. We lose a piece of her voice in our
public discourse, and we lose another fight against a disruptive and
dehumanizing system of so-called justice.
© 2015 ACLU
Chase Strangio is a staff attorney at the ACLU.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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