Rosenbergs’ son backs Bradley Manning

Robert Meeropol is one of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 as alleged “atomic bomb” spies during the period of the 1950s U.S. McCarthyite anti-Communist witch hunt. Meeropol now directs the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which supports the children of imprisoned U.S. political activists.

On June 30, Meeropol posted a statement on the Rosenberg Fund website that read:

“Last week, I joined the Advisory Board of the Bradley Manning Support Network. I sought them out not only because it is an honor to join a Board that includes Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, as well as Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and filmmaker Michael Moore, among others, but also because I believe it is imperative for as many people as possible to raise their voices in support of Manning.

“Private First Class Manning is accused of being the source of the huge number of secret diplomatic cables, field intelligence reports, and at least one military video published by WikiLeaks. He was held without charge for nine months in the brig at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, isolated for 23 hours a day in ‘Maximum Custody and under Prevention of Injury Watch.’

“I believe that the conditions of his imprisonment, including the Abu Ghraib-style humiliation of being forced to strip and surrender his clothing nightly, amounted to torture. Manning’s rights were violated further when President Obama, the military’s commander in chief, declared Manning guilty. Since Manning faces a possible court martial by military officers, all of whom are under Obama’s command, this makes it impossible for him to receive a fair trial.”

Explaining his reasons for supporting Manning, Meeropol further stated: “Since 2001, the burgeoning ‘national security state’ has made it almost impossible for voters to make informed choices. The people’s right to know what their government is doing has been at the core of my activism for almost four decades. It was no accident that my brother and I chose to sue under the newly toughened Freedom of Information Act when we commenced our campaign to reopen our parents’ case in 1974. ...

“My brother and I spent 10 years of our lives fighting that case in the name of the public’s right to know. The attack on Manning is an assault upon this right and must be resisted. Also, I am virtually certain that the cruel and inhumane conditions Manning was subjected to in the Marine Base brig were designed to coerce him into testifying against Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks community. In other words, the government wanted Manning to become the David Greenglass of the WikiLeaks case.

“In my parent’s case, the government offered Greenglass a deal in return for falsely testifying that my parents engineered Greenglass’s theft of what the government called ‘the secret of the Atomic bomb,’ even though my parents did not participate in that theft and there was no such secret. Similarly, the government sought to use Manning as a pawn to spark a conspiracy trial against Assange and his associates in order to expand the security state and inflame public fear that hackers threaten our national security.

“Finally, it is reported that Manning may be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and face the death penalty if he is convicted. That’s the same penalty my parents received for violating that act. “Under such circumstances, how could I stay away.”

Exposing government repression

In 2010, Wired.com published portions of instant-message chats in which Bradley Manning allegedly confessed to a former hacker named Adrian Lamo that he had leaked secret information to WikiLeaks. Wired.com has now published the entire chat logs, which contain important context that should have been disclosed at the first publication.

Among them is Lamo’s promise to Manning: “I’m a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) and enjoy a modicum of legal protection.” Lamo again promised Manning: “I told you, none of this is for print.” Lamo betrayed his promise of confidentiality by turning Manning over to law enforcement and handed the full logs to Wired.com. ?

On July 25, 2010, WikiLeaks published online a collection of 77,000 classified documents it calls “Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010.” Like the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 during the Vietnam War, this was a massive leak of information the government wanted kept secret.

Back then, the “leaker” was Daniel Ellsberg, who smuggled out and gave to the media copies of a 7,000-page secret Pentagon report that showed the public had been lied to about the war and concluded that it couldn’t be won. In retaliation, he was charged with treason.

The Pentagon sent a covert squad it called “the Plumbers” to burgle Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in the hope of getting dirt on him. But the robbery was discovered and the ploy boomeranged. On Aug. 3, 2010, Rep. Mike Rogers, a member of the House Select Intelligence Committee and a former FBI special agent, told MSNBC that the U.S. should have executed Ellsberg for treason. His remarks were in the context of calling for capital punishment in the case of Pvt. Manning and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

After his parents were executed, Robert Meeropol and his brother were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol. It was Abel Meeropol who many years earlier had written the words and the music for the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by the singer Billie Holliday, which protested the lynching and terror committed against African Americans.

In the 1960s and 1970s, after the Black Panther Party declared their constitutional right to bear arms to defend themselves against attacks from racist cops, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Panthers the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. Hoover launched a reign of terror against the Panthers that included murders of Panther leaders and trumped-up conspiracy charges, many of which carried the death penalty.

What is the appropriate response to the U.S. government’s attacks and threats against those who struggle for the rights of the workers and the oppressed, including the right to know the truth about the government’s crimes against the people? As August Spies, one of the Haymarket martyrs who inspired the international workers holiday of May Day, said to the judge who sentenced him to death in 1886:

“If you think by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement ... the movement from which the down-trodden millions, the millions who toil in want and misery, expect salvation — if this is your opinion then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in front of you and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.”