Not super up to speed with Chelsea Manning’s particular case but this is the type of situation that it is good to be aware of: comrades or left-adjacent activists who have been institutionalized should be treated with care as they may have been compromised.
This was a common concern in many resistance movements including the French Resistance and Black Panthers.
Would you mind expanding at all on what you mean by compromised? This is a subject really interesting to me specifically surrounding the black panthers- I’ve read from old panthers that Huey Newton sorta became a problem in his later years as he was generally the face of the party and one of the first people that one would look to learn about them and his later writings were just kinda weird and off focus from the real struggle.
I’m wondering if we really know what went down, did they torture them with things like solitary confinement to just try and screw them up permanently to make them not threat? Were people paid by the state to say certain things in exchange for getting free?
Well the panthers really gets murky because the US still hasn’t released all their records on this. It is hard to find credible sources that speak directly on these things and if you do find credible sources they are indirect and cagey. And as to French resistance you can read the memoirs of resistance fighters and they are full of this kind of stuff where the nazis only released someone if they’d inform (my personal as of yet unproven suspsicion is that the OSS people dropped into france to “help” the resistance were really there to undermine the french communists who were gaining massive popular support and really made up almost the entire resistance).
But I would say the type of people we’re referring to (panthers) are not gonna be bribed, but rather tortured or brainwashed. I think people who fully write off project monarch as fancy are doing themselves a disservice. Rather look at how guantanamo bay works to break down people who are often not even convicted of crimes and tortures the shit out of them and remember that MK ultra and other projects yielded tons of useful data. I just assume that all the torture we see at places like gitmo are very easily and often complimented by application of LSD and other psychedelic drugs.
There is actually a paper I found a while ago where a Cal berkeley professor talks about this (and he was involved in prison “rehabilitation”) and it is literally like clockwork orange drugs+torture+exposure therapy - I can’t link it because I found it in a college library archive.
The main takeaway though is that in prison the enemy has unrestricted access to this person 24/7 and who knows what the fuck they were doing and talking about or threatening them with.
This is a bit of an aside, but much like with MK-Ultra, Project Monarch experiments were given a home in Canadian medical institutions where they quickly became tools used as trans conversion therapy. The thought being that children with gender dysphoria could be induced to dissociate from their trans identity through sexual assault.
Project Monarch definitely is a much farther-reaching atrocity than the little public discourse led people to believe.
Edit: removed a bit of this after doing some searching and seeing that it could lead to identifying information.
And then she immediately paid for a ticket to some right wing, libertarian party talm bout “I’m gatecrashing!” The fuck you are; that was about the moment I was certain she was irreparably compromised.
I thought she was still in prison
Looks like she was released in 2020
Not super up to speed with Chelsea Manning’s particular case but this is the type of situation that it is good to be aware of: comrades or left-adjacent activists who have been institutionalized should be treated with care as they may have been compromised.
This was a common concern in many resistance movements including the French Resistance and Black Panthers.
Would you mind expanding at all on what you mean by compromised? This is a subject really interesting to me specifically surrounding the black panthers- I’ve read from old panthers that Huey Newton sorta became a problem in his later years as he was generally the face of the party and one of the first people that one would look to learn about them and his later writings were just kinda weird and off focus from the real struggle.
I’m wondering if we really know what went down, did they torture them with things like solitary confinement to just try and screw them up permanently to make them not threat? Were people paid by the state to say certain things in exchange for getting free?
Well the panthers really gets murky because the US still hasn’t released all their records on this. It is hard to find credible sources that speak directly on these things and if you do find credible sources they are indirect and cagey. And as to French resistance you can read the memoirs of resistance fighters and they are full of this kind of stuff where the nazis only released someone if they’d inform (my personal as of yet unproven suspsicion is that the OSS people dropped into france to “help” the resistance were really there to undermine the french communists who were gaining massive popular support and really made up almost the entire resistance).
But I would say the type of people we’re referring to (panthers) are not gonna be bribed, but rather tortured or brainwashed. I think people who fully write off project monarch as fancy are doing themselves a disservice. Rather look at how guantanamo bay works to break down people who are often not even convicted of crimes and tortures the shit out of them and remember that MK ultra and other projects yielded tons of useful data. I just assume that all the torture we see at places like gitmo are very easily and often complimented by application of LSD and other psychedelic drugs.
There is actually a paper I found a while ago where a Cal berkeley professor talks about this (and he was involved in prison “rehabilitation”) and it is literally like clockwork orange drugs+torture+exposure therapy - I can’t link it because I found it in a college library archive.
The main takeaway though is that in prison the enemy has unrestricted access to this person 24/7 and who knows what the fuck they were doing and talking about or threatening them with.
This is a bit of an aside, but much like with MK-Ultra, Project Monarch experiments were given a home in Canadian medical institutions where they quickly became tools used as trans conversion therapy. The thought being that children with gender dysphoria could be induced to dissociate from their trans identity through sexual assault.
Project Monarch definitely is a much farther-reaching atrocity than the little public discourse led people to believe.
Edit: removed a bit of this after doing some searching and seeing that it could lead to identifying information.
And then she immediately paid for a ticket to some right wing, libertarian party talm bout “I’m gatecrashing!” The fuck you are; that was about the moment I was certain she was irreparably compromised.