Hacker group Anonymous on Friday vandalized the website of a major US prison contractor in the latest salvo in an anti-police campaign.
Anonymous subgroup “Antisec” took credit for replacing The Geo Group website home page with a rap song dedicated in part to convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal and a message condemning prisons and policing in the United States.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose birth name is Wesley Cook, is a former Black Panther and radio journalist serving a life sentence for the 1981 shooting death of a police officer in Philadelphia.
Activists around the world have rallied in support of the former Death Row inmate, who they contend fell prey to racism in the justice system.
“As part of our ongoing efforts to dismantle the prison industrial complex, we attacked one of the largest private prison corporations in the US - Geo Group,” Anonymous said in a message posted at the Geo Group website.
“We are acting in solidarity with all those who have ever been wrongfully profiled, arrested, brutalized, incarcerated, and have had all dignity and humanity stripped from them as they are cast into the gulags of America.”
The Geo Group manages prisons, mental health facilities, or detention centers in Australia, Britain, South Africa, and North America. The corporation reported $77.5 million in net profit on $1.6 billion in revenue last year.
Anonymous took credit Thursday for an online raid of the Los Angeles Police Canine Association and the posting of personal and potentially embarrassing information.
“Over the past three weeks, we in the cabin have been targeting law enforcement sites across the United States,” hackers said in a message atop a file at Pastebin.com containing officers’ addresses, phone numbers and more.
“Be it for injustices they have allowed through ignorance or naivety, taken part in, or to point out the fact that their insecurity failed to protect the safety of those they took an oath to serve,” the group said of its motives.
The hackers claimed to have gotten the addresses of more than 1,000 officers along with information from police warrants and court summonses as well as about informants in their weeks-long series of attacks on police computers.
Anonymous law enforcement targets in recent weeks have included the websites of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Framing of Kevin Cooper, on San Quentin’s Death Row
–An interview with J. Patrick O’Connor
By Hans Bennett, Prison Radio
On February 20, San Quentin Prison (just North of San Francisco) was the site of a groundbreaking “Occupy San Quentin” demonstration linking Occupy Wall Street with the anti-prison movement. Inside on San Quentin’s death row is a man named Kevin Cooper, whose case for innocence is widely considered to be one of the most compelling today. Indeed, when the Ninth Circuit Court ruled against Cooper’s final appeal in 2009, Judge William A. Fletcher wrote in his 101 page dissenting opinion that “the State of California may be about to execute an innocent man.”
Kevin Cooper’s controversial 1985 conviction and death sentence is the subject of a new book by veteran journalist J. Patrick O’Connor entitled, Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper. O’Connor is the editor of www.crimemagazine.com and the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Lawrence Hill, 2008). He has previously worked as a reporter for UPI, editor of Cincinnati Magazine, associate editor of TV Guide, and editor and publisher of the Kansas City New Times.
For several years, O’Connor researched the brutal 1985 murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes inside the Ryen’s Chino Hills home in San Bernardino County, CA, for which Kevin Cooper was convicted. Scapegoat chronicles how despite abundant evidence that the murders were actually committed by three white men, the District Attorney instead targeted a prison escapee named Kevin Cooper, who had been hiding out inside a nearby house at the time of the murders. O’Connor concludes that Kevin Cooper is innocent, and he argues that the police and prosecution orchestrated a rather sloppy frame-up that has nonetheless been upheld by the federal appeals courts.
Last week, while on a book tour in the San Francisco Bay Area (view schedule here). O’Connor sat down for a video interview with Prison Radio, where he discussed aspects of this story not addressed in the text interview below (watch video here). Marking the book release, Prison Radio has recorded a special message from Kevin Cooper himself (listen here). To learn more about Cooper’s case and what you can do to help, visit www.savekevincooper.org.
Prison Radio:How did you get involved in Kevin Cooper’s case?
J. Patrick O’Connor: During the fall of 2008, I was in the Bay Area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. During the tour, supporters of Kevin’s approached me at various venues and asked me to consider writing a book on Kevin’s case.
PR:How did you go about writing this book?
JPO: I took on this project with no preconceived notions of Kevin’s guilt or innocence. Each case is different, radically so.
My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over 8,000 pages. I then read all the police reports, witness interviews, and various newspaper accounts. I reviewed the most shocking crime scene and autopsy photos I’ve ever seen — and those I will never forget. The autopsy reports on the four victims spoke of an incredibly frenzied killing field inside the Ryens’ master bedroom.
Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings. By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Kevin’s trial and his subsequent appeals.
PR:What’s the main obstacle to researching a case that is 25 years old?
JPO: The biggest problem is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have died, have retired, or have simply forgotten important factual details.
Another obstacle is that, because Kevin technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County D.A.’s Office refused to discuss the case with me. Nonetheless, I was able to interview Kevin’s trial attorney, his investigator, and the lead prosecutor at his trial as well as many other people familiar with Kevin’s trial and appeals. For important background on the Ryens, I was able to interview Peggy Ryen’s half-sister and Doug Ryen’s sister.
PR:Did you ever interview Kevin Cooper?
JPO: I visited with Kevin for nearly three hours at San Quentin in the summer of 2009. During this intense interrogation — I was in the process of deciding whether to take on this book possibility — I could sense Kevin felt a number of my questions were intrusive, if not insensitive. There were things about his past and about his stay at the hideout house, and his fleeing to Mexico that I simply had to know to be able to go forward.
By the end of the interview I was taken with his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders. Over the next two years, I was able to pose many other questions to Kevin in written form, through his defense team at the Orrick law firm.
PR:What convinced you that Kevin was innocent of these crimes?
JPO: A lot of different things. To just cite one here: The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin — evidence that was so exculpatory to him that had it been revealed Kevin would not have even been on trial for these murders.
PR:Can you provide some background on Kevin Cooper’s case?
JPO: Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985, and has been on death row at San Quentin since then. Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper, shows how the sheriff’s office and the district attorney’s office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders and how the justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process.
If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper – with no appeals remaining – would have been executed by now. It is expected the moratorium will not be lifted until at least 2013.
Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family’s hilltop house. Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff’s department established that Cooper had hid out there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.
From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff’s department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.
PR:What eyewitness testimony is there pointing to other perpetrators?
JPO: The only survivor of the attack, 8 1/2-year-old Josh Ryen, told ER personnel and a sheriff’s deputy that his assailants were three white men. Cooper is black.
Around midnight on the night of the murders, a couple, attempting to exit a driveway in their truck, saw three, young white men driving rapidly down the only road that leads away from the Ryens’ house in a station wagon that it turned out was stolen from the murdered family.
Shortly after that sighting, two women in a nearby bar saw two young white men, one wearing coveralls, with blood splatter on their faces and clothing.
Four days after the murders, another woman turned into the sheriff’s office bloody coveralls her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had left on the floor of her closet. The woman stated she had other information that implicated her boyfriend in the murders but wanted to be interviewed by homicide detectives. She would have told them that her boyfriend’s hatchet was missing and that he no longer had the tan T-shirt he wore the Saturday of the murders.
PR:What aspects of the crime scene challenge the case against Cooper?
JPO: The murders were committed with at least three, and probably four, weapons: a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two knifes. The theory that one perpetrator could or would use three or four weapons, is fundamentally counterintuitive. At trial the prosecutor argued that Cooper was ambidextrous, which he is not.
Nor could one person control two able-bodied adults and three children running around the house, one of whom, Jessica, made it outside the house during the attack. The adult victims were each fit, 41-year-old chiropractors and both were mobile during the onslaught and fought hard for their lives, sustaining numerous defensive wounds to their hands and arms.
The crime scene evidence, according to the medical examiner, showed that the mother was cradling the daughter before the mother died, which meant one of the attackers had brought Jessica back into the house. More than anything else, this meant there had to be more than one assailant because each parent kept a loaded gun in the master bedroom where the assault occurred.
There was an uncommon viciousness to the attack as though the killers meant not only to murder but to send a message of payback or retribution. The medical examiner counted 144 wounds on the four murder victims, including 28 fractures and two amputations. While Cooper’s trial was in progress, an inmate in a California prison told prison authorities and a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective that his cellmate had confessed to the Chino Hills murders, stating it was an Aryan Brotherhood hit but the three killers had gone to the wrong house.
PR:What about the destroyed evidence you cited earlier?
JPO: During Cooper’s preliminary hearing, the sheriff’s office destroyed the bloody coveralls. The sheriff’s office claimed it never conducted any tests of the coveralls and admitted it never sent homicide detectives around to interview the woman who had turned them in.
The sheriff’s office also destroyed a bloody blue T-shirt discarded not far from the bar. Coupled with a tan T-shirt found the next day near the bar, the two bloody T-shirts were strong proof that at least two assailants had murdered the Ryens and Chris Hughes. Testing of the tan T-shirt showed the blood on it matched the blood profile of Doug Ryen and no one else.
PR:You also said that evidence was planted?
JPO: Years later, in 2002, as Cooper was attempting to prove his innocence with DNA testing now afforded death row inmates by the California Legislature, his blood was now found on the tan T-shirt. To Cooper and his appeal attorneys, this showed rank tampering and planting of evidence, a belief that was greatly reinforced when it was revealed in 2004 that the vial containing Cooper’s blood, taken from him when he was arrested and kept all those years in the crime lab, was discovered now to contain the DNA of at least one other person.
A hatchet sheath and a bloody green button from a prison jacket were found at the hideout house a day after two detectives had searched the house and found nothing of evidentiary value. Under oath one of the detectives denied looking in the bedroom but crime scene technicians lifted his fingerprints from the door of the closet where Cooper slept. It would be established at Cooper’s trial that when Cooper escaped he was wearing a brown jacket, not a green one.
PR:In 2004, Cooper came within hours of being executed before an extremely rare en banc ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed his execution and granted him a successive habeas corpus hearing in federal district court in San Diego. Can you explain more about this 2004 ruling?
JPO: In particular, the Ninth Circuit ordered the district court to conduct DNA testing on the numerous blonde or light brown hairs found clutched in Jessica’s hand and other similar hairs deposited on other victims.
The Ninth also ordered EDTA testing to determine if Cooper’s blood had been planted on the tan T-shirt. EDTA is an anti-clotting substance used in crime labs to preserve blood in vials, to prevent it from coagulating and breaking down. If tests conducted showed high levels of EDTA on the blood attributed to Cooper on the T-shirt, it would establish tampering. If tampering were established, it would call into question all the forensic evidence the prosecution used to link Cooper to the crime scene.
It seemed that Cooper, after nineteen years of asserting his innocence from death row, would be vindicated. At a minimum, the district court would have had to order a new trial or exonerate him outright.
Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Huff was not going to let that happen. She had turned down both of Cooper’s previous habeas appeals, finding evidence of his guilt “overwhelming.”
PR:How did Judge Marilyn Huff treat Cooper’s third habeas appeal?
JPO: Over a period of a year, Judge Huff periodically held evidentiary hearings. As she did, she methodically thwarted Cooper’s attorneys at every turn, refusing to allow Cooper’s experts to participate in the EDTA testing. When the private lab the court hired to test Cooper’s blood on the T-shirt found elevated levels of EDTA, Judge Huff allowed the lab to retract its findings three weeks later on the grounds the lab itself was contaminated with EDTA during the testing.
Judge Huff dispensed with any further EDTA testing by ruling that the EDTA testing of the tan T-shirt conducted was not conclusive and that EDTA testing in general was an unproven science and of no value. She was wrong on both counts: both Cooper’s expert and the private lab found high levels on EDTA on the samples tested from the tan T-shirt and EDTA testing is a proven science.
The extreme bias against Cooper that Judge Huff displayed with impunity throughout the evidentiary hearings was at its most obvious when it came to the DNA testing of the hair clutched in various victims’ hands ordered by the en banc Ninth Circuit. When a portion of those hairs had been tested in 2002, they were found to have no antigen roots, denoting that the hairs had fallen out rather than been yanked out during the assault. Those hairs, the tests showed, were either from the victims themselves or were dog hairs.
There could be no purpose in retesting those hairs. However, over half of the hairs in the victims’ hands or adhered to their bodies had not been tested in 2002 and may well have contained antigen roots. If the mitochondrial testing of those hairs resulted in a DNA that excluded all the victims and Cooper, there would be proof positive that someone other than Cooper was a perpetrator. Judge Huff, incredibly, ordered testing only of the already tested hairs.
PR:Did anything new come out at this point?
JPO: During the evidentiary hearings, Cooper’s lawyers inadvertently learned for the first time about the bloody blue T-shirt found not far from the bar. How could Judge Huff get around the implications of a bloody blue and a bloody tan T-shirt found one day apart near the bar?
In addition, the prosecution’s not disclosing the blue T-shirt to the defense was a major Brady violation that was so exculpatory to Cooper on its own that it mandated a new trial.
Judge Huff’s way around this inconvenient hurdle was to find that the blue T-shirt was in reality the tan T-shirt, even though the blue shirt was found the day before the tan shirt in a different location from the bar and the woman who found the bloody blue shirt testified at the hearing that the shirt she found was blue.
Judge Huff’s handling of Cooper’s habeas proceedings led Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Fletcher to write, “There’s no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and flouted our direction to perform the two tests.”
PR:Judge Fletcher also made a strong statement about Cooper’s case, as a guest speaker at Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010.
JPO: Yes, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, holding that the problems with the administration of it are widespread and endemic rather than merely regional or local.
To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating “The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways. The murders were horrible. Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be – and in my view probably is – innocent. And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”
Judge Fletcher, a Rhodes Scholar who roomed with Bill Clinton at Oxford University, said what happened in the Cooper case “is a familiar story. It is by no means the usual story. But it happens often enough to be familiar. The police are under heavy pressure to solve a high profile crime. They know, or think they know, who did the crime. And they plant evidence to help their case along.”
PR:A closing thought?
JPO: Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with. He is, in a word, a scapegoat.
—-Prison Radio first began recording prisoners in 1990. Our mission is to challenge unjust police and prosecutorial practices which result in mass incarceration, racism, and gender discrimination by airing the voices of men and women victimized by an unjust criminal justice system. Our website www.prisonradio.org features Mumia Abu-Jamal’s essays and much more, including the latest news about his case. To receive our email newsletter, please sign up on the bottom of our website’s front page.
Make plans now to be at court on Wednesday, Feb. 29, gathering at 9 am
at Worth St entrance to the Federal Court for the 10 am Appeals Hearing
Second Circuit Oral Argument for the courageous 72 year old human rights attorney Lynne Stewart
This appeal hearing will be heard in 9th Floor, Federal Court, 500 Pearl Street at 10 am
Support Actions for Lynne Stewart:
Tues., Feb. 28:Tom Paine Park — Foley Square, NY for an all night vigil with Ralph Poynter, along with poets, speakers, drummers, rappers, gospel singers and dancers from Tuesday, February 28, starting at 6pm thru Wednesday, February 29. Come by for a while or stay all night.
Wed. Feb 29: 500 Pearl St. 9 am Rally at Worth St entrance to the Federal Court in lower Manhattan
Then10 am attend the Appeal Hearing for Lynne Stewart in 9th Floor, Federal Court, 500 Pearl Street. NY, NY.
Since Lynne’s arrest 10 years ago on April 9, 2002 she has fought false accusations and government frame-up. Lynne spent her life defending poor and unpopular defendants.
Originally sentenced to 28 months in prison, in a unprecedented move her bail was suddenly revoked and on July 10, 2010 Lynne Stewart was resentenced to 10 years in prison for showing a lack of remorse after her initial sentencing.
The jailing of Lynne Stewart is an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers, and install fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism, seek to help Arabs and Muslims being prosecuted for free speech and defend the rights of all oppressed people.
Come and show your love and solidarity with our sister Lynne Stewart
at the Tuesday, Feb. 28 Vigil and Wed Feb 29 Hearing.
Manning defers plea after being formally charged with aiding the enemy
UPDATE: (2:12 PM EST) Manning defers plea after being formally charged with aiding the enemy
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning in this December 21, 2011 file photo. (REUTERS/Benjamin Myers/Files) The Guardianreports:
Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of spilling a massive trove of military secrets to WikiLeaks, has been formally charged with aiding the enemy at the first day of his court martial on Thursday.
At the 45-minute hearing, in a courtroom at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning deferred both his plea to the 22 charges against him and a decision over whether he wanted a military judge or a panel to hear his case.
Wearing his dress greens and heavy, dark-rimmed glasses, Manning sat though most of the proceedings with his hands clasped.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of leaking US military and diplomatic documents to the media website Wikileaks, is being arraigned today in Maryland.
Antiwar activists announced plans Wednesday for a “support vigil” beginning at 12:30 p.m. today outside the main gate of the Army base in Anne Arundel County.
If convicted of the charges, Manning, 24, could be sentenced to life in prison. Aiding the enemy is a capital offense, but Army prosecutors have said they will not seek the death penalty. [...]
Manning, who lived in Potomac and studied at Montgomery College before he enlisted in 2007, is accused of sending raw field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world and a video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad to be published online by WikiLeaks.
“If Manning had been a member of the U.S. Marine squad that admitted to systematically murdering two dozen innocent Iraqi men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq, he’d be walking free today,” Obuszewski said in a release. “Instead, he faces the real prospect of life in prison for telling the truth.”
Anti-war activists say the footage of the 2007 Apache helicopter attack, which left 12 dead, appears to show evidence of a war crime. In the video, released by WikiLeaks as “Collateral Murder,” the American helicopter crew can be heard laughing and referring to Iraqis as “dead bastards.”
If Manning released the materials, “He is a hero for blowing the whistle,” Baltimore activist Max Obuszewski said Wednesday.
“If Manning had been a member of the U.S. Marine squad that admitted to systematically murdering two dozen innocent Iraqi men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq, he’d be walking free today,” Obuszewski said in a release. “Instead, he faces the real prospect of life in prison for telling the truth.”
Members of the Icelandic parliament nominated Manning this month for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland. Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries. The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.
The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice. US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger. As Glenn Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined.
One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia. Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times.
Human rights’ advocates rightly point out that solitary confinement is designed to break down people mentally. Because of that, prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture. The conditions and practices of isolation are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination.
Medical experts say that after 60 days in solidary peoples’ mental state begins to break down. That means a person will start to experience panic, anxiety, confusion, headaches, heart palpitations, sleep problems, withdrawal, anger, depression, despair, and over-sensitivity. Over time this can lead to severe psychiatric trauma and harms like psychosis, distortion of reality, hallucinations, mass anxiety and acute confusion. Essentially, the mind disintegrates.
That is why the United Nations special rapporteur on torture sought to investigate Manning’s solitary confinement and reprimanded the US when the Army would not let him have an unmonitored visit.
History will likely judge Manning as heroic as it has Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
It is important to realize that tens of thousands of other people besides Manning are held in solitary confinement in the US today and every day. Experts estimate a minimum of 20,000 people are held in solitary in supermax prisons alone, not counting thousands of others in state and local prisons who are also held in solitary confinement. And solitary confinement is often forced on Muslim prisoners, even pre-trial people who are assumed innocent, under federal Special Administrative Measures.
In 1995, the U.N. Human Rights Committee stated that isolation conditions in certain U.S. maximum security prisons were incompatible with international standards. In 1996, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture reported on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in U.S. supermax prisons. In 2000, the U.N. Committee on Torture roundly condemned the United States for its treatment of prisoners, citing supermax prisons. In May 2006, the same committee concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”
John McCain said his two years in solitary confinement were torture. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” The reaction of McCain and many other victims of isolation torture were described in an excellent 2009 New Yorker article on isolation by Atul Gawande. Gawande concluded that prolonged isolation is objectively horrifying, intrinsically cruel, and more widespread in the U.S. than any country in the world.
This week hundreds of members of the Occupy movement merged forces with people advocating for human rights for prisoners in demonstrations in California, New York, Ohio, and Washington DC. They call themselves Occupy 4 Prisoners. Activists are working to create a social movement for serious and fundamental changes in the US criminal system.
One of the major complaints of prisoner human rights activists is the abuse of solitary confinement in prisons across the US. Prison activist Mumia Abu-Jamal said justice demands the end of solitary, “It means the abolition of solitary confinement, for it is no more than modern-day torture chambers for the poor.” Pelican Bay State Prison in California, the site of a hunger strike by hundreds of prisoners last year, holds over 1000 inmates in solitary confinement, some as long as 20 years.
At the Occupy Prisoners rally outside San Quentin prison, the three American hikers who were held for a year in Iran told of the psychological impact of 14 months of solitary confinement. Sarah Shourd said the time without human contact drove her to beat the walls of her cell until her knuckles bled.
When Manning was held in solitary he was kept in his cell 23 hours a day for months at a time. The US government tortured him to send a message to others who might consider blowing the whistle on US secrets. At the same time, tens of thousands of others in the US are being held in their cells 23 hours a day for months, even years at a time. That torture is also sending a message.
Thousands stood up with Bradley Manning and got him released from solitary. People must likewise stand up with the thousands of others in solitary as well.
So, stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning and fight against his prosecution. And stand also against solitary confinement of the tens of thousands in US jails and prisons. Check out the Bradley Manning Support Network, Solitary Watch, and Occupy 4 Prisoners for ways to participate.
Every week from now until the court martial the Bradley Manning Support Network will be asking supporters to write or call individuals and organizations influential to the trial.
Pfc. Bradley Manning, an alleged WikiLeaks whistle-blower, will be formally arraigned on the 23rd of February. While his presence in the courtroom will be brief, the arraignment sets in motion Manning’s court martial, which is currently expected to begin in May. With this in mind we are requesting that supporters write, email, and call their local representatives to express their outrage over the charges against, and the treatment of, Pfc. Bradley Manning. The military court proceedings have thus far been for show, but we can still ask our elected officials to protect whistle-blowers and to pressure the Obama Administration to drop all the charges against Bradley Manning.
1. It took a year and a half to get to the pretrial hearing, and once there the military selected an Investigating Officer from the same department investigating WikiLeaks. This is not justice.
2. Military officials are refusing to allow access to key witnesses and evidence. The only witnesses called by the defense who will be allowed to testify are those who have also been called by the administration. They have blocked critically important evidence — such as internal administration WikiLeaks impact assessments — from being considered in open court. This evidence could have contradicted the government’s ridiculous “aiding the enemy” charge.
3. Whistle-blowers are essential to a vibrant democracy. Secrecy is not the answer. Laws must be implemented to protect whistle-blowers. Blowing the whistle on war crimes should not be a crime. Why was this material classified in the first place? The classification of government documents should not be used to cover up crimes.
4. Eight months of solitary confinement is torture. The Obama administration has repeatedly denied the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, from access to a private visit with Bradley Manning. Why has Bradley Manning’s treatment been so severe? Why is Bradley Manning being denied a confidential visit with Juan Mendez?
Stop the retaliation against whistle-blowers. Drop all charges against PFC Bradley Manning! Call your local representative and ask them to raise the issue of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s unjust treatment. Tell them justice is not being served. Please write, tweet, email, call, and otherwise share your experience. Let us know how your representatives have responded. Bradley Manning’s supporters are listening, and it’s time for the government to do the same.
The phone number and contact information for your representative can be found by following the link below,
International supporters can raise the issue with the nearest US Embassy.
The National Lawyers Guild recently joined our call on the Obama administration to dismiss all the charges against Bradley Manning. “Manning’s prosecution is calculated to distract us from the real problem, that the U.S. government is once again hiding from the public proof of crimes committed in our name,” states David Gespass, NLG President. (read more…)
Read some of the statements from February 20th – National Occupy Day in Support of Prisoners including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Lynne Stewart, Khalfani Malik Khaldun, Kevin Cooper, Jane Dorotik,Krista Funk, Herman Wallace, Robert King, Steve Champion, Todd Ashker, and Pelican Bay Human Rights Movement Hunger Strikers in Solidarity (PHSS).
(Please note that there are more statements being submitted, please continue to check back for more! If you are having an action on February 20th, please feel free to incorporate these statements as part of your program. If you have a statement to submit please send to occupy4prisoners@gmail.com.)
►P a c k t h e C o u r t ! •
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning in this December 21, 2011 file photo. (REUTERS/Benjamin Myers/Files) The Guardian 
