Happy Birthday Chelsea Manning
The Peter Tatchell Foundation sent out this email this morning:
"Chelsea Manning celebrates her 27th birthday today, behind bars in a US prison. She is a whistleblower, human rights defender and political prisoner who has been sentenced to 35 years in jail for releasing classified US documents to Wikileaks. These documents revealed war crimes and cover ups by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the contradictions between Washington’s public and private policies."
Dozens of supporters have sent all sorts of birthday greetings posted at The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/...
Dear Chelsea Manning: birthday messages from Edward Snowden, Terry Gilliam and more
The jailed whistleblower turns 27 this week. Supporters including Joe Sacco, Vivienne Westwood, JM Coetzee, Michael Stipe and Slavoj Žižek sent her letters, poems and drawings.
On Wednesday, Chelsea Manning – heroine, whistleblower and inmate – turns 27. She has been behind bars for four years and eight months, ever since her arrest for leaking classified US documents. There isn’t much prospect that she will be released any time soon. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence, with the earliest possibility of parole being in 2021. She has appealed to Barack Obama for a pardon. It seems unlikely he will grant it.
It is against this gloomy and unpropitious backdrop that leading writers, artists and public figures from around the world are today sending Chelsea birthday greetings. Their contributions include letters, poems, drawings and original paintings. Some are philosophical – yes, that’s you, Slavoj Žižek – others brief messages of goodwill. A few are movingly confessional.
All send a powerful reminder: that for millions in the US and beyond, Chelsea Manning is an inspiring moral figure who deserves our continued support. Her leaks, published in 2010, at a time when Manning was unhappily stationed with the US military in Baghdad, revealed the true nature of America’s twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also illuminated the gulf between Washington’s private thinking and its public diplomacy.
More @
http://www.theguardian.com/...