Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Palestinians, Genocide - the international communities should all be prosecuted for their human rights abuses

CounterPunch 6 January 2020

The Government is Torturing Chelsea Manning! Does Anyone Give a Damn?

by Howard Lisnoff

Photograph Source: Mattia Luigi Nappi – CC BY 4.0

Chelsea Manning is being tortured for her refusal to testify before a federal grand jury. She already has told a military court as a whistleblower while in the Army about documents pertaining to alleged war crimes that were committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She has already been tortured and imprisoned for releasing that information once (“Collateral Murder” video, for example), but here in the US, the land of the free and the home of the brave, readers must be protected from reading and viewing documents about the horrors of the endless wars the US fights. Some journalists and publishers must be brought into line when disclosing information to the public about our endless wars.

War is seldom defensive these days, but rather, more about killing people deemed enemies by the government, about massive profits, and about empire.

Thinking about Manning’s plight, I recall the little-known book, Fort Dix Stockade: Our Prison Camp Next Door  by Joan Crowell (1974), about how imprisonment and torture was used against those in the stockade at Fort Dix, News Jersey who protested the Vietnam War while in the military.  Some accounts of Manning’s first imprisonment in a Marine Corps stockade recall the treatment that recalcitrant and protesting soldiers received at the hands of their guards, some of whom were returned Vietnam veterans. Manning was not beaten by the Marines, but her treatment amounted to torture.
Readers need only look to the masses of US citizens and immigrants, including immigrant children, locked up in the US prison system and detention “camps” to get the picture of the kinds of grotesque abuse that untold numbers of people suffer while incarcerated. If a nation gets away with the imprisonment and abuse of incarcerated children, just how far behind can a political system of general or selected  repression be?

Here’s what the UN special rapporteur on torture had to say about Manning’s current treatment: “an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (“Top UN official accuses US of torturing Chelsea Manning,” Guardian, December 31, 2019).

I guess ii’s only a certain cohort of troops and veterans that we as a nation support.
Democracy Now’s New Year’s Day program was dedicated to the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt “First Lady of the World: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Impact on New Deal to U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.”

 “War destroys all human rights and freedom,” Roosevelt said. Roosevelt is adamant in that position in the segment’s opening and knows firsthand that human rights die with the onset of war.

Where are the patriots like Roosevelt? Where are the patriots in the media who have published some of Manning’s revelations? Where are those who will stand up and do something about the torture and harassment of those who bring sunlight to the dark corners of power and the dark corners of the empire? Those at the highest levels of power don’t like Manning for what she represents and does and they’ve made her pay dearly.

More articles by:Howard Lisnoff

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).

March 23, 2017 CounterPunch

BDS, Women’s Rights, Human Rights and the Failings of Security States

by Howard Lisnoff

Photo by Kate Ausburn | CC BY 2.0

Dr. Jeff Halper, a co-founder and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was detained in the West Bank in the middle of leading a tour of an Israeli “colony” there. Halper, an Israeli, who immigrated to Israel in the early 1970s from the U.S., was allegedly detained for possessing materials from the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS).

Two laws passed by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, one recent, affects the BDS movement. The first allows Israeli companies to sue BDS protesters for compensation. To date, that law has not been used against those who support the BDS movement. The second bans supporters of the BDS movement from entering Israel. There are no such laws that apply to Israelis who distribute BDS materials, or support the BDS movement in Israel, but official sanctions are not always the most effective kind. In Israel, those who oppose the occupation of the Palestinian territories are often harassed and threatened.

With the right-wing Trump administration in power, the right-wing government of Israel has received a green light to continue building settlements. Over the last several years, aid from the U.S. continued to flow into Israel uninterrupted, even despite the obvious dislike between former President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As the end of the Obama administration neared, the U.S. agreed to provide Israel with $38 billion of new military aid over the next decade.

Halper was conducting a tour of the Ma’ale Adumin colony in the West Bank when he was detained. That settlement is not small, with 40,000 residents and a substantial infrastructure. Jerusalem can be seen in the distance from the settlement. He was detained for “incitement,” by simply possessing materials about the BDS movement (“BDS Activist Speaks About His Arrest by Israeli Police,” The Real News Network, March 17, 2017). In other words, he was being an obvious thorn in the side of consensus politics in Israel and taking part in a movement for justice that most Israelis do not support.

“It was only when Haaretz did a story about it, Haaretz Newspaper that they contacted the police. And the police told them that I was detained for incitement, that’s what it was. It wasn’t so much BDS per se.”

Halper believes that Israelis “don’t know anything when it comes to these kinds of issues… occupation, Palestinians, war, peace, and so on, human rights, are completely non-issues in Israel.” Halper believes that the issue of BDS has “impacted the American Jewish community much more than Israelis” (The Real News Network). He believes the latter is true because of the general nature of liberalism among the Jewish community in the U.S.

The attacks against the civil liberties of BDS supporters in Israel isn’t the only human rights issue that’s pressing there. Recently, Sarah Moody, a young woman studying to become a rabbi, was “knocked to the ground” while attempting to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site. She was attacked by a mob of zealots who yelled taunts of “evil-doers” and “anarchists,” as the bruised rabbinical student got back on her feet (“Banned and barred, Israel’s women stand up to religious hardliners,” The Guardian, March 18, 2017).

“Over the last decade in different parts of Israel, women have been barred from sections of buses, banned from speaking at cemeteries, blocked from pavements, physically attacked for their clothing choices, airbrushed from newspapers and magazines and removed from the airwaves and photos” (The Guardian).

Segments of the ultra-Orthodox community have been behind these assaults against women. Courts in Israel have stood for the rights of women, but the enforcement mechanisms on the streets of Israel are sometimes missing in defense of women’s rights.

Although a comparison is very imperfect, it merits noting that one of the reasons touted by the U.S. in its presence in Afghanistan after the beginning of the war in 2001 was to improve the rights of women. Strange that one of our strongest allies in the Middle East, Israel, has not come to terms in some ways with this most basic of human rights.

In December 2016, the Brookings Institute published a poll that showed 60 percent of Americans favored economic sanctions against Israel for its occupation of the Palestinian territories. The figure of support among those  Republicans polled was 31 percent (“Nearly half of Americans support sanctions on Israel, poll finds,” +972 Magazine, December 3, 2016).  Compare the support for sanctions among those polled in the U.S. with the fact that 22 U.S. states now have legislation “that punishes companies for answering the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.”

National security states, whether republican democracies or not, can give rise to some destructive and hateful outcomes. The other, or dissident, can easily be cast into the domestic enemy in the service of power.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.