An Insider's Guide to "Being Julian Assange" Part 3

My Steemit series of "Being Julian Assange" continues, with additional new content and insights. Enjoy!

Hi everyone!

This coming week is going to be another huge one for me so wanted to take a few minutes to get the next part of this series up now! You can check out Part 1 of this series here and Part 2 here if you missed them.

Both of the aforementioned essentially formed the introduction to the 23k+ word 'Being Julian Assange'. In Part 3 we begin to get into the investigative meat of the article, with a study of the history of WikiLeaks support for whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

At 1,792 words, the sub-section 'Bleaching The Record' would be considered a substantial stand-alone article in and of itself. As with the other parts, my comments and annotations appear in italics and brackets, after the below text.

Without further adieu, here is Part Three:

Being Julian Assange: Part Three

Includes Sub-section:

• Bleaching The Record

Linguistics:

Bleaching The Record

Part of undermining Assange and WikiLeaks (and indeed, any target) is to deny them any achievement. Narratives are developed and circulated to retrospectively strip them of their accomplishments, to reduce their significance.

We can see this in consistent attempts to diminish WikiLeaks' efforts to defend and organise in support of Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers.

But there are some smart exceptions who do not hesitate to give props where it is due.

Alleged UK hacker Lauri Love, who in a historic victory has defeated an attempt to extradite him to the United States, was swift to credit Julian Assange and the Courage Foundation:

Lauri's homage to those who dedicated years of their life to supporting him is laudable and the effort to emancipate him from the extradition threat has established an important legal precedent.

By contrast, much of the digital history detailing the genesis of the campaign to free Chelsea Manning has vanished. Many of the key contributions of her original supporters have been bleached from the record.

The Twitter accounts @freebradley & @savebradley have been suspended.

The original support campaign websites, standwithbrad.org & bradleymanning.org are both down. Freebradley.org looks like this:

Privatemanning.org looks like this:

Chelsea Manning's current official support network website has news archives only dating back to 2016. All prior updates have either disappeared or were never copied over to this new site in the first place. A loss of six years of supporter activities, bulletins, actions and updates.

And that's not all that has vanished. Short links to critically important information like the below, have also been broken. (Some are available through archive services; many are not)

The true story is on WikiLeaks' Twitter timeline. Starting from the very day that Manning, having been mercilessly betrayed by FBI-snitch Adrian Lamo, was arrested:

Sunshine Press is WikiLeaks' publishing organisation. Proof that from the very moment Manning was detained, WikiLeaks was already mobilising in support of her.

The Bradley Manning Support Network was soon established:

Within days of her arrest, WikiLeaks had launched the first letter-writing campaign in support of Manning - while she was still in a cage in Kuwait:

Within less than a week of her arrest, WikiLeaks was already debunking mainstream smears of Manning:

WikiLeaks exceeded what could be expected of any publisher, in its support for its beleaguered alleged source:

Something I've yet to see anyone else piece together: even in the same week in late August 2010 that Julian Assange was in the midst of enduring his own lawfare attacks and ensuing public vilification, WikiLeaks was still relentlessly tweeting out support announcements for Manning:

Corporate censorship of the Support Network kicked off early with WikiLeaks reporting in September of 2010 that the 10,300-strong Facebook group for Manning supporters had been blocked by the social media company.

Despite this, a mere three months after WikiLeaks' establishment of the Support Network, 20 cities were marching in solidarity with the whistleblower:

WikiLeaks' exemplary legal team spoke publicly in defence of Manning:

If you thought Paypal and/or Pierre Omidyar were evil for cutting off WikiLeaks' funding, you will likely be even more enraged to discover that they also subsequently cut funding to Manning's Support Network:

...three weeks after WikiLeaks had been coordinating calls to the White House to free Manning:

Manning's lawyer complained that she was not being treated like other prisoners.

The "special treatment" of Manning by the authorities, eerily foreshadows the case of Julian Assange. Years later, it would be revealed in emails of UK prosecutors obtained by the FOIA requests of Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, that they told their Swedish counterparts "please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request."

Meanwhile, the Guardian was busy incriminating Manning, long before the trial. Their justification for doing so was the prior betrayal of Manning's confidence by FBI-informant Adrian Lamo.

Once WikiLeaks began pushing the #freebrad hashtag, it soon spiralled into countless thousands of tweets. It took me several hours just to read through the 2011-2013 history of the hashtag. The sheer volume of content is overwhelming.

Shortly thereafter, Manning was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. WikiLeaks ingeniously kept her in the public consciousness by tallying every single day that she was spending in pre-trial detention.

WikiLeaks never misses a chance to achieve an ironic victory: by the end of 2012, they were encouraging people to vote for Manning to become the Guardian's Person of the Year. Sure enough, they were able to raise enough support for her, and she won:

By mid 2012, the Support Network was petitioning Obama directly:

Many of the citizen heroes, journalists, and NGO's who provided critical support to Manning in these early days have been conveniently forgotten. But in particular, the Twitter history shows that FireDogLake editor Jane Hamsher, reporter Kevin Gozstola, and a host of WikiLeaks satellite volunteers and supporters went above and beyond year in and year out in support of Manning.

Additionally of note was a continual flow of slick infographics and memes from pro-WikiLeaks designer SomersetBean, right up to the present day.

By January 2013, things were taking a sinister turn. While the Support Network was collectively investing themselves in this noble cause, the FBI were predictably undermining them at every opportunity:

However by February, the rising cacophony of support for Manning, directly attributable to the efforts of the network originally coordinated by WikiLeaks, had grown too loud to be ignored:

In April of the same year, Manning was again up for the Nobel Peace Prize, this time nominated by 36,000 supporters:

Devastatingly, on July 30th, 2013 Manning was convicted on 20 counts, regardless.

In total, the WikiLeaks main Twitter account sent over 800 tweets in support of Chelsea Manning between the date of her arrest in 2010 and the date of her conviction in 2013. The count only includes tweets containing the search term of the name by which she was known at that time, and only until the conclusion of her trial. References to her as Pfc, or similar, were not included in the search, and thus the calculation of the total. There have been countless hundreds of further supportive tweets by WikiLeaks since.

From what mainstream publication could we expect such a level of dedicated and consistent support for its sources? WikiLeaks' efforts to free Manning - a source it had not burned - are unprecedented in modern media history, yet this is seldom, if ever, recognised.

In the quasi conclusion to his recent hit piece on WikiLeaks, The Intercept's Micah Lee (ex-Electronic Frontier Foundation, currently with the Freedom of the Press Foundation) endeavoured to further distance Manning from WikiLeaks' by hammering home the oft-touted quote that Manning had preferred to leak to the New York Times or the Washington Post, rather than to WikiLeaks. Neither mainstream outlet had responded to her attempts to make contact with them.

However, it is highly dubious as to whether either of those organisations, even had they replied, would have achieved the level of reach and global impact for Manning's leaks that WikiLeaks did. It is equally doubtful that they would have gone out on such a limb to try to limit the damage wreaked upon Manning by the traitorous Lamo. Nor is it likely mainstream media outlets would have committed themselves and their financial resources to a multi-year campaign to build public support for the whistleblower. Likely as not, she would have been left to rot in that cage in Kuwait.

But WikiLeaks' relationship with Manning and her supporters is not the only legacy to be actively suppressed by Lee, and affiliates...

[Author's Note: The best part about writing 'Being Julian Assange' was that it was a huge learning experience. I had always known, from being a keen observer of all things WikiLeaks, that the organisation had been relentless in its support of Manning. But after raking through the full history of it, even I was amazed by the extent of how much so. That discovery really contextualised for me, the egregiousness of the attacks on them that had suggested otherwise. The agenda to separate these natural allies - Manning and WikiLeaks - from each other, became self-evident and I felt compelled to share those findings with the world. The more I reflected upon the public interactions and relationships between the other whistleblowers and WikiLeaks, the more the pattern of division seemed to repeat itself, and it is all too obvious to whom that benefits, and doesn't!.]

Part Four of Being Julian Assange will follow some time in the next week! I hope you enjoyed this third taste of the full article.

Love,
Suzie

By Suzie Dawson

Twitter: @Suzi3D

Official Website: Suzi3d.com

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