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Yeah, good morning.
I hope you are up and running and
mentally online,
this next talk is something that
touches my heart very deep.
Sorry for that.
It is about a person
who.
He followed her heart in two ways,
one is.
Realizing being transgender,
the other one has political influences
and leaking documents
and taking all the risks,
paying a very high price, and she
did what she had to do.
So this talk is about her
and as part of
her.
Our panel today concerns an
honorary member of the CCC
who is imprisoned right now by
the US military in Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas.
Her name is Chelsea Manning.
She's a young trans US Army
whistleblower convicted to 35 years
in prison in the summer of 2013
for disclosing documents to a media
organization.
Many of the victims of crimes
and wrongdoing revealed in the documents
that Manning disclosed, are not
members of a Western electorate.
Her revelations do not affect
the bottom lines of Silicon
Valley tech firms.
But they created the age that we live
in and had impact from
Tunisia to Berlin.
Despite however effective US
propaganda has been concerning Manning,
and it has been very effective.
The US Department of Defense's own
comprehensive review of every single
document released by her determined the
disclosures to be low to moderate risk.
The allegations that she dumped
documents irresponsibly is false.
She was convicted under the
Espionage and the Computer Fraud Abuse
Acts for portions of
two hundred and forty documents.
A significant portion of those are
unclassified.
Over half a million U.S.
government employees and federal
contractors had access to the documents
that Manning released, one of the
documents that put Manning away in prison
for 35 years relates
to malaria updates in Kingston, Jamaica,
four years later.
No one has been harmed.
Her releases revealed or confirmed
mass civilian casualties by U.S.
forces in Afghanistan, U.S.
complicity in the torture
of detainees by Iraqi security forces,
the existence of more children than we
knew being held
and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay prison
camp, the training of death
squads in Bangladesh by the U.K.
and so much more.
Manning trusted us with her life when she
appealed to the public conscience,
and she also created her own hope.
Our own lives, I believe,
depend on the hope that we create
for her.
I'm very honored today to be able to
discuss her two pending
legal matters
with her attorneys.
And they're going to come up on Skype
now, hopefully.
Nancy Hollander, who is currently
coming back to us, is a preeminent
American criminal defense attorney who
specializes in national security cases.
She represents prisoners held at
Guantanamo Bay and has argued before the
Supreme Court in the United States.
Ahmed Gapper is a renowned American
law professor who specializes in the
intersection of technology and national
security.
He directs a litigation clinic at
UC Hastings that addresses
constitutional issues that arise from
espionage, counterterrorism and
computer hacking cases.
Cooper is also the attorney to the
imprisoned American journalist Barrett
Brown, currently awaiting sentencing in
Texas January 22nd.
Everyone should make sure to show their
support.
Chase Strangio is a
staff attorney with the ACLU,
LGBT and AIDS Project.
He specializes in the litigation
of incarcerated trans people
like Chelsea Manning.
I see that Nancy is is having a bit of a
technical difficulty. So I'm going to
actually chase I'm
going to actually ask you, can you
explain what it means to say that
Manning is trans and that she's suing
the Department of Defense to get adequate
medical treatment?
Oh, hold on.
So we continue, we can't hear
you, so let's figure out what's going on
with that.
Can you hear us?
Oh, God.
Just to
open, it controls
the line.
This is.
So can somebody.
Can you say something? No.
Can you say something, please?
This.
Thank God.
Can you hear?
I can hear. Chase, Chase, please tell us,
what does it mean when Manning says that
she's a tramp, she's trans and
that she's suing the Department of
Defense for adequate medical care.
So Chelsea
and her entire life, it means
that even though she was assigned
the sex of male at birth, that she
has been always a female
and that she
has a female gender identity and
that incongruence between her male
sex assigned sex at birth and her female
gender identity has caused her
significant distress
and continues to cause her significant
distress. And the condition, the medical
condition that she has been diagnosed
with is called gender dysphoria.
And even though this is a widely
recognized medical condition with
accepted standards of care,
the military has continued and
persist on not recognizing
that Chelsea need for treatment.
Now, the military first diagnosed her
with gender dysphoria in 2010
and has since diagnosed her over seven
times with gender dysphoria.
So when the day after she
was sentenced and she came out publicly
as transgender and indicated
that she would be requesting treatment
for gender dysphoria, even though this
was her first big public announcement
about this, the military had known for
over three years that she was
transgender.
Sorry, some distractions here, but
she she
so soon, when she arrived at Fort
Leavenworth in Kansas, the first
thing she did was request treatment for
gender dysphoria and that included for
her access to hormone therapy
to bring her body into alignment
with her female gender and access
to the ability to grow her hair
and dress and groom
in accordance with female grooming
standards. Now, the military from
that day forward took the position that
they would not treat her gender
dysphoria, despite the fact that courts
in the United States have continually
held that failure to treat gender
dysphoria is a violation of
the right of prisoners to be free from
cruel and unusual punishment.
It was clear from the start that the
military was going to take a position,
one that we consider to be
unconstitutional, that they would not
provide Chelsea with treatment, even
though they knew for at this point
over four years that she had this medical
condition and she
continued to fight for her treatment.
The first thing she did when she arrived
at Leavenworth is asked for treatment.
We were in touch with her from the from
the very beginning. Upon her arrival, she
filed grievances.
She did everything in her power to
try to get the treatment initiated,
something that she considered to be
central to her survival while she served
her thirty five year sentence and
something that, in her words, with
the single most important thing to her,
even more so than her appeal beginning
from the day she was sentenced.
And she continued
to fight for it. And when it was clear
that the military was not going to budge,
they were not going to take her medical
condition seriously.
She reached out to the ACLU
and we decided that we would need to
formally represent her in a lawsuit
against the Department of Defense.
So we Chelsea
initiated the contact and we began
the preparations to file a lawsuit.
And we are now suing the Department of
Defense, including officials
from Hagel to
the
individuals who are administering her
medical care at Fort Leavenworth,
requesting that she be provided with
medically necessary treatment in
accordance with the Army's obligation
under the Constitution.
Can you can you help educate?
Can you help educate us how does Manning
wish to be represented?
How does she wish to be referred
to?
Can you just help clarify that for the
public? Because there seems to be a bit
of confusion generally.
Yeah, I think the most important
thing from Chelsea's perspective, and
this has been true for a very long time,
is that she is a woman and
sort of recognizing that core part of
her identity, which is as fundamental as
anyone's gender is to them as
a woman, is absolutely critical to her
survival.
I mean, she's looking at being
incarcerated now for decades potentially.
And she
every time her picture
or any likeness of her is presented
as male or any time anyone refers to
her by her former name or with male
pronouns, it's a further
erasure of who she is as at
her core. And I think there was
a lot of reports when she was
during her Court-Martial about one
of her greatest fears when she was
arrested was that for the rest of
her life, images of her as
a boy would be circulated globally.
And that is absolutely something that
just pains her and causes her so
much distress. And I think what we can do
to honor her is continue to recognize her
as the woman that she is and make sure
that our narratives overcentralized that
part of her identity.
Thank you for telling.
Thank you for telling us that.
All right, Ahmed,
you are going to help us to understand,
I just spent a month traveling
through Spain with amnesty, trying to
raise awareness about Manning's
trial, the
unfair nature of her trial, the
prejudicial.
Oh, thank you.
The the fact that she was convicted to
thirty five to thirty five years in
prison for
essentially leaking low level battlefield
reports that over half a million U.S.
government employees had access to.
Talk to me about the use of the
Espionage Act in political
prosecutions and prosecutions
in the United States, generally speaking.
So I think, thanks
to begin with, thanks for having us
and I'm going to try to talk
as slow as possible just because, Nancy,
I see her trying to connect every once
in a while and she'd kill me if I said
something wrong.
But let me just let me just talk about
what the Espionage Act is supposed to do
in very broad terms.
The Espionage Act is supposed to punish
folks for spying, for the enemy,
for selling state secrets, for personal
gain, for trying to undermine
the democratic fabric that enables
our way of life.
Now, I will pass it along to Nancy.
It's just
we're so glad you're here, Nancy.
Thank you.
All right. Something up and ate at my
place.
That's that's fine.
I was just talking to us generally
about the Espionage Act and how it's used
in political prosecutions.
Good to say what
is supposed to be used for, so now I'm
handing it off to you now.
Well, what it's supposed to be used for,
I don't know how far you got, but it was
obviously intended for spies.
It was written during World War One,
maybe had already told you that
it was a bad law when it began
and it's a worse law.
Now, the problem the
main problem with the Espionage
Act is not so much the
act, if you read it,
but the way the courts have interpreted
it and the way the courts have
interpreted it, not just in Chelsea
Manning's case, but in many previous
cases, is that
the crime is committed when
one discloses intends
to disclose.
National security information,
so it doesn't have to hurt
the United States, it doesn't have to aid
a foreign country, it certainly doesn't
have to aid an enemy.
It just is the act of disclosure.
So it becomes what we call
a strict liability crime,
and there doesn't have to be any
bad intent.
There are two problems with this going
in two directions.
Obviously, it means that any one
there is no defense
for public interest.
There's no defense for
telling the public something the public
needs to know.
So there's no way an insider
can ever disclose anything without
getting caught up in this act.
If the government decides
that it's a national security
issue or disclosed that discloses
national security information,
that's much broader than just
classified information.
It's whatever the government decides at
that time is national security
information. And I want to
give you an example
that is just recently
happened. There were five people
from Guantanamo who were exchanged
for a US
prisoner.
We were told in the world
that these particular five men who
were supposedly members of the Taliban
could never leave Guantanamo.
They were what's known as forever
prisoners because national security
would be harmed if they were ever
released. And then all of a sudden
they're released and national security
is OK. So it's that's
a moving target
and you never know where it is.
So the person is
caught up in that.
And that's what makes this
law so dangerous.
It's so broad from both directions.
It's unconstitutional.
It's a violation of free speech
and we have to stop it.
That's the bottom line on
the Espionage Act.
Ahmed, is there anything you want to add
on that?
Well, I would just add just
underscore the potential for abuse
here and essentially
the whole purpose of the laws is to
be written in such a way that it
doesn't allow the government to do
exactly what Nancy is saying that
they're doing. And and
the Espionage Act is not supposed to be
used as a vehicle for retaliation
against whistleblowers.
Of course, it doesn't
stop there. Right.
The Obama administration, what they've
done is systematized the criminalization
of whistleblowers.
And I don't say that merely because only
about a dozen people in American history
have been charged with espionage for
leaking classified information.
And seven or eight of them under the
Barack Obama administration.
I say that because most recently, the
administration has brought them into the
long war.
And what I mean by that is that the
Obama administration has designated a new
national security threat, the insider
threat.
And categorizing it as a threat
means that you've now
got a broad line of power to play around
it.
And the same way you can cast a wide net
to find the next terror threat, the
government will do the same and
disclosure to prevent the next public
embarrassment, because we can't tell
every government employee out there,
we'll just put pressure on journalists
and
leak and generally transfer
privacy and transparency advocates,
advocates.
And that's why there's a push to get
Congress to pass legislation amending
the Espionage Act and allowing the
defenses such as public accountability
and necessity.
But as things stand,
we're basically screwed, and
the Obama legacy will forever be
known as the presidency of secrecy.
I want if
I want to talk to you about what kind of
recourse Manning has.
I mean, she's been convicted of thirty
five years. She's currently being held
in a military prison in Kansas.
What kind of recourse does she have
at this point?
Well, of course, she can always ask
for a pardon. We'll continue to always
do that.
She has parole possibility
and about I think it's now about six
or seven years.
And of course, we will do that.
But the main focus for
me and for my
partner, Vince Ford and
the lawyers and the students, armed
students who are working with us and her
detailed counsel is her appeal.
The the appeal is to the
court of Appeals for the Army.
Then there's another appeal court
appeals to appeal forces,
and then there's an appeal to the US
Supreme Court. And then we start actually
the habeas petition.
But our focus on first
court is to raise
every issue.
Espionage is only one of them that we
believe has merit.
And we will be writing briefs.
We read the transcript.
This is the longest transcripts in
military history.
So hold.
It's huge.
It's one hundred and eleven volumes.
Each one is three hundred and thirty
pages.
So it is a huge
record. It's going to take us time to get
it all read, read all the exhibits,
some of it's classified,
classified. We have to go to Washington
to read.
But that's our real focus is to write
the very best appeal to
argue. I'll be arguing this case,
to argue this case and convince the
judge it's that Chelsea did not
receive a fair trial, which she clearly
didn't because of the Espionage
Act and because of a host of other
reasons.
Do you have what are some possible
appellate issues other than the Espionage
Act?
Well, some of the obvious ones
are the pretrial confinement
issues.
The the UN rapporteur
considered some of her pretrial
confinement to actually rise to the
level of torture.
It was clearly cruel
and inhumane treatment, the way she was
treated at Quantico
excuse me, and in Kuwait,
there was one point where she was forced
to stand naked at attention.
There was no purpose to that other
than to demean her.
She was put on suicide watch
when she clearly was not a suicide
risk. And the psychiatrist kept saying
that. But the prison did it.
That's a big issue.
There's a speedy trial issue.
Did it take too long to have her
trial? This is a bigger issue
actually in the military.
And the law is stronger for the
defendant in the military than
it is in our federal courts.
And that's probably because people move
around a lot in the military.
But there are some military laws
that are helpful to her
in that argument and.
There are other issues, there was not
that she didn't have witnesses she should
have had the military
gets to decide which witnesses
are necessary and relevant
and the prosecution even gets to chime
in on that, which I find somewhat
absurd. But that's the way they do it in
the military.
So there were
lots of witnesses she didn't get to
have.
That's a big issue.
There are there were discovery issues.
There are issues of what was
the value of
what she took?
Was it under a thousand dollars or over
a thousand dollars?
And how did they value it in all of these
things?
Add it up to charges
that added up to time.
So we have a lot of issues
and others.
Then we'll be deciding which ones
are the ones that we want to include in
our brief.
And that'll happen as we go along.
Ahmed, tell me, why did you
what brought you to this case?
The U.S. you're the litigation
clinic that you direct at UC Hastings
is actually now working with the defense,
the appellate attorneys.
Tell me how you came to this case and why
you think it's important.
Well, I can't I can't the case obviously
everybody knows about this case and
Nancy and I work together.
I can't say how long it would reveal
how young I am, but
four years.
And it
really is it's a great place for students
because it's an appeal and we can really
digest all of the issues.
It's also the kind
of case that encompasses everything that
the clinic does and the clinic at
UC Hastings.
Basically, it's meant to
to focus on the future of security, which
is technology in the future of
technology, which is security.
And we see it. The first real case
to encompass all that in the United
States, I think, is that is Chelsea's
case, the first
real broad
dragnet type of investigation
to to to to follow
up on that is the WikiLeaks
investigation.
So hopefully we'll be doing some work on
that, too.
I think this is probably one of the most
important cases around right now,
period, for
a vast number of reasons, not only
because of the the unconstitutionality
of the application of the Espionage Act,
but also because of
the sort of the sort of message
that it was meant to send to folks
like Edward Snowden.
And luckily, that
message fell on deaf ears.
Chase, I wanted to ask you, you know,
Nancy was talking about Manning's
pretrial treatment at Quantico
and in the public record, there is
examples of prison officials referring
to her underwear that they took from her
as panties,
homophobia, certainly
transphobia.
In your opinion, did Manning being
transgendered or did transphobia
in general impact her Court-Martial?
And how so if it did.
Well, I think, first of all, the
the mistreatment of
detainees and prisoners by the United
States government is certainly not
limited to transgender individuals,
but I think transgender individuals
in custody do experience
particular hardships, in particular
cruelty that I think Manning herself
was subjected to.
Now, again, even though we didn't know
publicly or most people didn't know that
Manning was transgender until
after her sentencing, the military did no
as far back as 2010 and did know through
her entire court martial.
And so I think this affected her in a
number of ways.
The first of which was that she was
forced to really
minimize a critical part of her identity
for a long period of time that had
incredible challenges
for her, that created a significant
amount of distress through the court
martial, which just impacted her ability
to continue to be an advocate for
herself. Now, that's not to say that she
wasn't an incredible advocate, did not
survive unbelievably horrific conditions,
but she did.
And then the other way is, of course,
that the military used that
to to further dehumanize
her and to mock her and to belittle her
in what were already horrific conditions.
And I think this is something that
transgender people in prison and
outside of the experience all the time.
And this was something that Chelsea
herself experienced throughout
the horrible time that she was detained,
particularly at Quantico.
And I think what's important to remember
is that she
this part of her identity was so
important and that she has taken
on unbelievable risk
in continuing to fight for her fair
treatment as a transgender person in a
context, in an environment where
transgender people are not taken
seriously. And she fights her appeal.
The fact that she is willing to sort of
stand up for transgender people and put
herself out, there is an incredible
testament on top of everything else that
she had done to the kind of person that
she is.
I just want to interject here.
I have never seen a more
earnest and thoughtful
and reasoned
person under
that amount of stress.
I mean, she's an extraordinary individual
and she deserves every person's support.
I wanted to talk to you on that about
your other client there, Brown
wasn't charged with the CFA
sorry, the computer fraud and Abuse Act
like Manning, but he was charged
sort of similarly in the sense with
hacking statutes that sort of
ended up being part of a larger
dragnet. Can you talk to me?
First of all, what is the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act?
So the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act is the federal anti hacking law.
Among other things, the law criminalizes
unauthorized access of a computer.
Of course, the law doesn't explain what
without authorization means.
So initially the purpose,
while initially the purpose was to combat
cyber terrorism, believe it or not, which
is the hacking of computers that the
federal government has the way
and things go, the criminal conduct
covered by the statute has broadened
significantly.
And so what we have now is
a CFA or
Computer Fraud Abuse Act, where creative
prosecutors can take
advantage of the confusion and bring
criminal charges that aren't really about
hacking a computer at all,
that essentially criminalized behavior
that prosecutors don't like.
So, for example, the
government has claimed by violating a
private agreement or corporate policy
amounts to a hacking violate or see if a
valid violation in
the manner in case the guy essentially
argued that writing the script
to do something efficiently was exceeding
authorized access.
In this case, the script of the program
was Woodgate,
and this shouldn't be the case.
So, of course,
there's a joke about the military being
inefficient in there, but I'm not going
to make it.
But compounding the problem is the
sentencing issues with the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act, because
you can get anywhere.
The prosecutors can seek anywhere between
five and 10 and 20 years and even life
depending on the amount of damage or
financial loss that was caused,
which, of course, is
disastrous.
As for Barrett's case, so there was not
a hacker at all. He has absolutely no
computer skills.
Everybody in the world knows that he was
a journalist that happened to cover
what one might call the accidental cyber
cyber war between the US government and
anonymous. Of course, there was no such
war and there is no such
group as Anonymous.
It's just a collective as opposed to
like the Taliban or something.
So by way of background,
at the time of the conduct
that was alleged, she found a
collaborative Web publication called
Project Pen.
Project RPM's Purpose was to bring people
together to conduct research
on publicly available materials that were
put forth into the public sphere
by whistleblowers, leakers, hackers
and so on.
Project RPM's reports came to focus on
the military and intelligence contracting
industry.
In December of 2011, about
five thousand emails from Stratfor Global
Intelligence were infiltrated
by Jeremy Hammond,
among others,
and by others I mean including the FBI,
because SÃ¢rbu was involved and he was
an FBI informant who essentially ran
many of those operations.
But that's a whole other story.
So the files contained revelations about
close and inappropriate ties
between the government, security agencies
and private contractors.
The emails, I should also mention are
available now on WikiLeaks.
So among the millions of Stratfor files
were data containing credit card
information and other security codes,
part of the vast trove of the
internal company documents that Stratfor,
of course, forgot to encrypt.
The credit card data was no interest
to Barrett because
that's not really what he's into.
But it was of great interest to the
government because in December
of 2012, he was charged with 12 counts
related to identity theft.
I should mention that the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act initially was called
something like the Computer Fraud
and Identity Theft Act or something.
It essentially
incorporated the two statutes
that come before it and
they were passed around the same time.
So it is a hacking violation
that was initially charged with
he was charged with 12 counts related
to identity theft for cutting and pasting
hyperlinked.
That led to the
the public website that contained
a GZ file
containing that the dump of the hack.
Of course, since then, we've challenged
the charges on grounds that linking
to information that is already in the
public sphere is nothing more than pure
newsgathering activity and
that the government, in essence, was
criminalizing journalism.
Two days after we filed a motion to
dismiss the government
on their own, dismissed 11 out
of the 12 charges, and he
will if he was to be sentenced
a few days ago.
But the judge has delayed sentencing for
a month.
So very, very long way to describe
an even longer case that's been going on
forever.
Manning's case, you had
someone who used to get
to download one hundred and sixteen
diplomatic cables.
And according I'm not a lawyer,
but according to my observation, the
trial the judge appeared to,
it was difficult to sort of know exactly
what her sort of legal thought was
because she didn't produce what was
called a special findings.
But from her pretrial orders,
she appeared to sort of rule that
it was because Manning
exceeded her,
violated her terms of service for the DOD
network that the Department of Defense
network by using get
that, she also violated
her security clearance.
And she there was an automated sort
of process of using get
to download one hundred and sixteen
cables.
It seems to me, though, that the
government was trying to sort of
fabricate a hacking charge where it
didn't exist. Is the CFA always
used to
prosecute hackers or
to I'm sorry, the act
of hacking, or is it used actually to
prosecute publication or disclosure?
I mean, that's that's a really
good question, and the problem is it
all turns on the confusion.
So whenever the government has a statute
or a law that contains a confusing term
or a confusing
sort of idea or deals with some
sort of confusing or difficult or
technical concept like computers,
they can get really creative and they can
tell a judge, well, you know, this thing
called wget or we get or
you get is really an automated process
to exfiltrate information from a
server.
And it's not it's just a way to
automate it.
It's like a script that automates a task
of go and collect something and come
back. And it's completely legal.
But when you put that
kind of narrative in front of a judge
that was born before
the idea of a computer ever existed,
you you get into situations
where there's an unfortunate
reliance just on whatever
the assertions are on the flip
side, and this isn't necessarily
talking about the Manning case, but
generally, I mean, we see these kind of
things in all all types of cases dealing
with hacking and sort of
technical crimes, but also in the
national security crimes of terrorism,
because you just call somebody my name.
That doesn't make me a terrorist.
But if you all of a sudden
parse the conversation I had with my
parents where I said a whole bunch of
stuff in Arabic, and then you put that
before a judge and you said, well, judge,
these words in Arabic are
code.
And neither the judge or the prosecutor
or the or the FBI understand what any of
this stuff means.
The next thing you know is you've got a
conviction. And it's strange that you see
these parallels with the hacking cases.
I would I would like to give the audience
a lot of time to ask questions,
you should start lining up now.
I just wanted to give you a heads up,
because a lot of people have lots of
questions about the Manning trial and
there's a lot of things
they need to to know about it.
So go ahead and do that.
I wanted to ask Chase,
the ACLU actually pays for
your representation of her and all the
costs associated with her case against
the Department of Defense.
Is that correct?
That's correct. OK, how
can people support Manning in
her suit against the DOD?
So I think one of the critical ways
and I'm saying the same thing over and
over again here, but one of the critical
ways to support Chelsea, I think,
in general is to continue to tell her
story publicly as much as possible
and to do so, centralizing
the fact that she is Chelsea, that she
is a woman as sort of part of her
narrative, because we really don't want
that to be lost. So that's something
that's just generally an important way to
support her and sort of continue to give
her the hope and the
optimism that she needs to continue
to fight this for a long and potentially
a long time.
Now, the other thing that people can
do is to sort of organize campaigns
and to continue to call
on the Department of Defense and the
new secretary of defense when
when that person is confirmed
to to provide Chelsea with the treatment
that she needs. Now, this there's
nothing stopping the DOD and the
officials at Leavenworth from treating
her. They know that they should they know
it's consistent with medical standards,
but it's essentially a political issue
that they don't want to
give in to her need for treatment, in
part because people don't think
transgender people are legitimate and
they don't take gender dysphoria
seriously, but also in part because they
don't like Chelsea.
And I think we need to continue to call
on them and show that the public is going
to continue to pressure them to provide
her treatment. That is essentially a
basic rudimentary treatment
that is provided for all sorts of other
conditions that would pose no cost
or risk to the government,
but not to continue to withhold it simply
because they don't take it seriously and
they don't like Chelsea. And I think the
public has a ton of power in this regard
and not losing sight of that and
continuing to call on the DOD
and Secretary of Defense Hagel
or Carter, if Carter is confirmed,
that's really going to be critical to her
survival in the long term.
And we can't lose sight of that.
I, Nancy, I,
I know that
I urge people to donate
to me and to Manning's legal defense
fund.
I mean, it's very expensive to be
prosecuted and convicted by the U.S.
government for espionage and computer
fraud and abuse when you're a
whistleblower and you can do that at
Chelsea Manning. Doug, what can people
do, Nancy, to support Manning
during this appellate process, whether
it's legally or financially
or emotionally?
Oh, I agree with Chase.
People can do all of those things.
We we work very hard
to keep Chelsea's case alive.
Alexa, you and I were just in Spain
for a week talking all over
the country about Chelsea.
Amnesty International
made Chelsea one of their main people
for this year so that she received
hundreds, maybe thousands of letters.
I was hoping there were enough letters
that the prison just was overwhelmed
with letters for her.
And she needs she needs that
support.
We need support.
Obviously, Vince, my partner,
Vincent Ward and I are
working on this case,
really is starting in the next
month or so, practically full time.
And we're private attorneys.
We can't we can't do this like
the ACLU does for free.
So we need that support.
This is a long case and we need to
keep her case alive.
We need to keep reminding people
that even though this is an appeal,
this is a viable appeal.
We have very important issues here.
We have issues that absolutely
need to be heard by the court and
Chelsea needs to win.
And that's only going to happen
if we can do our work and if people
help keep this case alive around
the world. So that's what I encourage
people to do.
Chelsea Manning dog is run
by the support committee.
We don't have anything to do with it,
but they are the ones who support
the our work and support Chelsea
and make sure that she has enough
money to she has
newspaper articles that she can read.
Chelsea also works really hard
and I don't want us to forget that
she works with us on our appeal.
She works with Chase
on their case.
She writes regularly.
She she works so hard sometimes
that she's overwhelmed by the amount
that we ask her to do and that the public
asks her to do.
But it's also important for her
to know that everyone
is behind her legally
and morally and ethically.
And so I hope all of you will do that
and continue to do that.
There's a question from number
four.
Yeah, Eric Holder has now
said that the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, that
the prohibition of sex discrimination
would also encompass discrimination based
on gender identity, including transgender
status.
Do you think that will be any help to
Chelsea Manning?
At the Civil Rights Act.
I should apply.
Nancy, do you want to take that or does
anyone want to take that or take I think
Chase take that, OK?
I mean, I can't speak for the
appeal, although I imagine that it's
probably not going to help too much on
the appeal it for for purposes
of her conditions of confinement case.
Unfortunately, legally,
it won't really make
a difference because the Civil Rights Act
won't apply to an Eighth Amendment
claim. But I think what is important
about that shift from the federal
government in recognizing that
discrimination against transgender
people amounts to sex discrimination for
purposes of federal nondiscrimination
protections, is that we're seeing a
shift, at least in sort of public
understanding of the fact that is
wrong under our federal
laws, at least, to discriminate against
people on the basis of their transgender
status or their gender identity and
expression. So I think it shows a shift
that is promising.
I do think, generally speaking, the
Eighth Amendment has been clearly
interpreted to apply to treatment for
gender dysphoria. So we should legally
be in a very clear position.
Of course, the courts don't necessarily
follow the law
when it comes to people who are
disfavored, and that's just the reality.
So I think, again, going back to the
public support, that's going to be
critical just as much as the litigation
is.
Chase, you want to explain what the
Eighth Amendment is to people who aren't
Americans?
So the Eighth Amendment to the United
States Constitution prohibits
cruel and unusual punishment to people
in custody.
And so it applies equally
to military prisons.
And actually the the military
has more expansive protection.
So that will be relevant for purposes
of the pretrial confinement aspects
of these conditions.
It won't be relevant for our case because
we are filing in federal district court
and not in military court.
So the Eighth Amendment than the
less expansive version of the Eighth
Amendment will apply in
our case.
But that has been held to apply to
medical treatment in addition to sort of
physical treatment and other forms
of cruelty
that are imposed on people in
custody in the United States and
have been held almost universally by
federal appellate courts to prohibit
bans on treatment for gender dysphoria.
So that's something that we're hoping
will be instrumental in forcing
the court to and then ultimately
the DOD to provide Chelsea with the
treatment that we that she needs now.
Hopefully it doesn't come to a court
order and the government will do the
right thing before we reach a final
resolution in court.
So we're continuing to pressure them from
all angles on that.
Thank you, number one, please.
I was just wondering, how
many years do you think this will
go until it reaches
maybe the Supreme Court, maybe higher.
So just how many years
do we, you know, does this
how many years are we looking forward
to for the fight?
This is a long fight, and
I can't tell you how many years I can
tell you that it's more than
one or two years we have two
appellate courts.
The process is we will file a brief
sometime in twenty fifteen
in the first court of appeals for the
for the army.
Then the government will file a brief.
They're going to take a long time because
they're going to argue that they have to
read this whole transcript and
that they haven't been doing anything
over the last year.
Of course, we'll try to demand that
they don't have as much time, but
then we get to write a third.
There was a third brief.
Then the court sets it for an oral
argument.
We will argue before the court and then
the court has to rule.
If we lose in that court or
even if the government loses, we can
request that the court of appeals
for the armed forces hear the case,
although that's a discretionary appeal,
it's very likely that that court would
take the appeal in this case because it's
such an important case.
And again, there's a series of briefs
written in that court.
And then if
if the case is not resolved there,
then it goes to the Supreme Court.
Again, that's discretionary.
The Supreme Court can decide whether
or not it wants to hear the case.
If we lost below, we
certainly will do everything we can to
try to get this case before the Supreme
Court. But to answer your question,
I can't tell you how many years, but I
can tell you it's more than one.
More than two.
I have a follow up question, is there a
difference between the U.S.
Army Court of Criminal Appeals, the first
appellate court and the Court of appeals
for the armed forces in terms of what
kinds of issues they'll consider?
Like is, for example, is the higher
military court for matters of
legal understanding, whereas the U.S.
Army, lower appeals court related
to sort of like evidentiary issues
or how the is there any distinction
between the two?
I don't think so.
I think that is just an appellate court.
If you lose in the first one, you can go
and ask that court to consider it.
Now, in all these cases, we are
bound by the record that was made
below.
That's the record we have.
We can't really we can't add
new facts.
We can we have that record.
And that's the record that that we
have to rely on, which is the record that
was made in the court below.
We can ask under some circumstances
for a remand back to
to the first court in some
instances. But whether we're going to do
that or not, we haven't decided, OK?
Sorry.
Thank you.
Number two, please.
And so this is going to be a quite
personal question about Chelsea.
So if you believe she doesn't want
this answered, please don't answer.
But I'm going to ask anyway.
Uh.
You said that she does not
get the treatment she needs
during her arrest.
Did you actually have any of this
treatment before her arrest or
is that something that just wasn't
possible while in the service?
I'm assuming this is a question about
treatment for gender dysphoria.
She said she
did not seek out
treatment prior to her arrest
in central part because
the United States military continues
to bar service by
transgender individuals and in fact,
criminalizes under
the military code of criminal justice,
any cross gender expressions, which
would include all treatment for gender
dysphoria. So if she had
sought treatment while she was in
the military, she she faced not only
discharged, but also criminal
liability. And so her ability
to come to terms with her transgender
identity was greatly diminished by being
in the service and the ban
on trans people serving openly.
And that's something that has affected
her and continues to affect so many other
people who are serving in the United
States military who are transgender.
Thanks.
Other than the questions from from the
net.
Yes, there are some questions,
the first one is referring to
discrimination of transgender people.
Did the support for Chelsea Manning
change after her coming out as a female?
You know,
I'm just that picture changed
everything,
you know, Nancy, they know more about
how this port has changed over time.
I think that one thing that
did happen is that the LGBT
community became more supportive of
Chelsea, I think, after she came
out as transgender.
And that was sort of part of her public
narrative. And I think it's unfortunate,
actually, that the LGBT community wasn't
more supportive during her Court-Martial
and that she was an out gay person
during that time.
And she
was also someone who was
a critically important person for the
for the United States and for the entire
world. So I think it's a shame that the
LGBT community didn't step up to
be a real, true advocate for her
until after she came out as transgender.
But I do think that's a community where
we saw increased support for her.
And I think there's been some
misunderstanding about her female
identity from her supporters.
And that's something to continue to sort
of centralize in her narrative.
But I do think overall we've seen
consistent support for Chelsea and
hopefully that support will only grow
over time.
I want to just add something here from
the court record that it was really
interesting.
Now that you filed this
department of the suit against the
Department of Defense, a lot of sort of
puzzle pieces are fitting together from
the court martial, like, for example,
one of the documents found in
Manning's dorm, sort of a military
dorm. It was called Achu in Iraq,
was a scholarly treatise on
written by a U.S.
Army sorry, U.S.
Air Force doctor.
It was a study that was called
Flight into Hypermasculinity.
And in this particular study, this
U.S. Army Air Force doctor
argued that the proportion of transgender
people was higher in the military than
in the general population because
trans women who identify
as women but were assigned male at birth
actually will join the military to try
to deal with their experience
with gender dysphoria.
So there's all these kinds of when
you say that Manning wasn't treated
for it, she was diagnosed with it before
her arrest, though.
Yeah, that is correct.
And she was diagnosed repeatedly every
single time she saw a medical
professional in the military.
And did she find herself
trying to express her femininity
while she was in Iraq or
during that time period?
Yes, you did, and I think
there's different ways to sort of look
back on that time, she talks a lot about
Aliev she took while she was deployed in
Iraq, in which time was the first time
she really publicly lived as
a woman and sort of outwardly expressed
her gender as such. But I think, as you
note, it's important to also recognize
all the way she she expressed her female
identity that weren't sort of outwardly
recognized as being feminine
or female and sort of understanding her
condition.
And also, it can't be sort of understated
the extent to which she was an
effeminate presenting person.
She was a gender nonconforming person.
She was always sort of identified
and sort of recognized as such.
And she also
existed under don't ask, don't tell.
She, too, was someone who was constantly
living under these conditions in the
military. And she sought out
ways to to express that and come
to terms with who she is as a woman, as a
transgender person.
And so that included things like dressing
up as a woman when she was on leave
and sort of trying to consolidate her
identity, but also doing extensive
research, trying to understand her
condition, trying to figure out ways that
she would be able to get treatment either
before she left the military or after.
And that is something that is very
much there in the record and very much
part of her story.
And it shows how much the military
was aware of her need for treatment for a
very long period of time.
I have a question from the European
perspective to you guys,
what can we do
for Chelsea?
I mean, you told from from the American
perspective that writing
to the military, OK, donating,
that's something we can do.
But what can we do
from here to support
your case, to support Chelsea?
But.
You can continue to talk about the case
as you are now, you can continue
to educate people about the case,
about the problems that
the whistleblowers have in the United
States, that it's it's virtually
impossible now for anyone
who has access
to any information that the US government
considers to be national security,
to bring this to the public if,
in fact, that person finds
human rights abuses, as Chelsea did,
if that person finds that the government
is misusing the classification
process.
It's a it's illegal
to classify evidence in the
United States for the purpose of avoiding
embarrassment of the government.
It's right in the executive order
from the president that it cannot be used
to avoid embarrassment.
And yet that is how it's
used. And we saw that in the torture
report, obviously.
And there's not one
there's a there's an actual process
that someone who has access
to classified information that that
person believes shouldn't be classified.
There's a process within the law
to go up the chain
and say this shouldn't be classified and
it's never been successful ever.
And that that's part of the
problem. So making this public,
continuing to make it public that
people have to be treated fairly, that
Chelsea needs to be treated fairly
in prison, that Chelsea didn't have a
fair trial.
All of that is supportive of
her as we go
forward in this appeal, the world
needs to keep this case in focus
because it's so important if we have
a government in the United States
that can protect its secrets, we can't
have a free society.
And that's just the bottom line.
And everyone in the world needs to
be concerned about that.
Thank you very much.
So we have five minutes, we
have to think.
Yeah, number four, please.
I would like each and
every one. I mean, Nancy Arment
and Cheese to answer
me this truthfully and honestly.
Honestly, just a yes or no.
And this is a personal quiz question.
After all of what
you have witnessed, do you
still believe in justice?
That's a good question.
And it started know.
OK, I'm the oldest, and I'm going to go
first your
name and first
look how young they are, both of them.
But I believe that
there can be justice.
I mean, I certainly believe in justice.
I believe that I want
justice for all people everywhere.
Do I believe that there can
be justice
anywhere?
Certainly in the United States?
I'm not so sure.
I've been a criminal defense lawyer for
over thirty five years.
I've seen a system
that I did believe in that I do believe
is on paper a really
good system. I believe that the jury
trial system is a good system.
I believe our system
that requires confrontation
of witnesses, which is different than the
European system, is a really
good system.
But I've seen
too much now and I'm
not sure that most
that people who have issues,
gender issues, national security
issues, anyone who's
Muslim in the United States, anyone
who is a minority in the United States,
I'm not sure any of those people
get justice as
the system exists today.
And that's that's very distressing.
I continue to work for it and I will
continue to work for it.
And we just have to continue that
struggle because we're
lawyers particularly have tremendous
power and we have the power to create
change. And that's what
we have to continue to do, is
to use that power.
Thank you.
We have a very last question because we
are running out of time.
Number two, please, please keep a shot.
So it's somewhat related to the last one.
But so you spend some
time telling us about the Espionage Act
and things like that, that Chelsea
Manning was treated unfairly so.
And yet you're trying to help her through
legal means again.
So what makes you think it will work this
time?
I don't have any choice.
I mean, you got some other idea?
No, I don't, but.
I know I don't have any choice,
we have to rely on public,
the public, the court of public
opinion is a very important court.
And there there have been cases
in the US Supreme Court that have said
the court of public opinion is important.
And that's why we're here and that's why
we're talking to all of you.
But we have we have no choice.
We have to go through the legal system
and we that's what we'll do.
Have to have something else you can say
to that.
Thank you very much.
I want to thank you guys for your
time today. This has been really
an awesome honor.
So thanks a lot, guys.
I think it is fair
enough to to thank you for your
awesome thank you for for
your rival for Chelsea,
and I think it is
OK if we say all.
All the energy and all the laughter tells
you absolutely all the
energy and all the love to Chelsea.