Jedi Mind Fuck

(11AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

(Cross-posted from The Free Speech Zone)

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement.  For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell.  Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions.  For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch).  For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs.  Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

http://www.salon.com/news/opin…

My thoughts below the fold…

As someone that’s been in jail many times for my “resistance” actions, I can tell you that even in standard detention the cops break the law kicking your ass and playing games with you for daring to oppose what they’re employed to defend.  Making “trouble” for them with your “un-American” activities.

I fear what we’re being told is only what we can find out.  Not the whole thing.  

I don’t cry at news like this, I feel a physical pain.  That’s how fucked up I am from my time served, however short, in this nation’s jails.  I learned not to cry, not because i’m “tough”, but out of self-defense.

You see, if you cry, they’ll keep doing it.  Ya get that?  If they see they can evoke an emotion out of you that signifies your suffering, they’ll continue to do so.  I learned that the first time I got thrown in a cell and cried at the fact that I had no way of getting justice for the actions that were being done to me by the guards.  

So what you do is you don’t cry, you focus on an object in the room.  Could be a desk, a t.v., a chair, anything.  You stare at it and think about something else.  Talking will only let them get inside your head and that might lead to crying so yeah, don’t talk either.  Just stare.  Think about something else.

In essence, you follow the laws of the Jedi.  You shall not feel fear, nor hate, nor love.  Each is a weakness that will lead to your downfall in this situation.  This is why it is my faith.

What I feel when I read about Bradley Manning’s details of his detention is the “Force”.  It’s a psychological feeling of pain that you hope is his pain being channeled to you and others that can feel it so that it alleviates the pain he’s going through, but you have no guarantee that this is so.  However, it’s not pain mentally, no, it is an actual physical pain as well.  You feel your chest and your arms and you can almost channel the emotion inside Manning as he sits and everyone forgets.  The hopelessness, the fear of not knowing what can happen because there is no “rule of law” or “due process”.  Just swift continual punishment until a Force greater than you reaches out and drags you from out of those conditions.  

For all I know what i’m feeling right now is just additional, physical pain that those who are inflicting it on Manning are getting the satisfaction of having reverberate through the entirety of “his kind”.  No alleviating his pain, just bonus points for the guards and government if stories of his detention reach those who have felt the cold hand of the “Dark Side” administer blow after blow to your humanity.  

Luckily for me, on numerous occasions, it has been activist defense lawyers and groups like National Lawyers Guild that’ll pay a poor kid’s bail as many times as he lands his ass in it.  But for Bradley Manning, there’s no bail to be set, no sentence handed down through due process, just incarceration until our government decides they’re “done with him” which might be never.

All I know now is that whatever happens to him, whatever happens to anyone, anywhere in this world where this is done, I feel it.  It’s why I do the acts that land me back in the cell, I can’t ignore it, especially after knowing what it’s like when I was held without due process under the Patriot Act.  

The way I see it, they’ll take me in the end, somehow, some way, they’ll get me on some bullshit that’ll land me in their longer than I expected.  But on such a day I hope that I can at least welcome it because, unlike Manning, I was pissing off the Empire constantly and on fucking purpose.