This morning, I get to pretend I’m 1/3 my age, when I didn’t think much of getting up early to ride halfway across the world for a good cause. (Above: 18-year-old me in Washington, D.C., at the 1981 Women’s Pentagon Action. I’d traveled there from Binghamton, New York.)
In this case, I’m catching a ride to Augusta, Georgia, with some fervent supporters of Reality Winner. And tomorrow, we’ll be in a courtroom on James Brown Boulevard, while Winner’s defense counsel argues that since the FBI never informed her last June of her Miranda rights, none of what they learned that day should be admissible in court.
My housemate’s dad, a former Air Force JAG and Vietnam-era veteran,told me this was a law-school exercise, in earlier times. But those were times before the Patriot Act, the revival of Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act prosecutions. Before “9/11 changed everything,” meaning that some people lost their danged minds. Before Chelsea Manning could tell me, with a straight face, that she can’t comment on Winner’s case from her own experience, because that experience is now classified.
So is Winner’s experience, apparently, as explained at the Columbia Journalism Review: “Because the court has said her lawyers can only look at news reports containing classified information in secure facilities, they cannot even Google basic news stories from their office or discuss them with their client.”
Since I’m interested in Winner’s AF experience, I asked the PA folks at Fort Gordon if I could come for a tour, to see where she worked before 2015. I was referred in no uncertain terms to the NSA, which has come a long way since people whispered “No Such Agency.” Though it makes sense when you think about what Winner was doing back then: helping plan drone strikes. I wonder if Winner’s lefty dad made sure she’d seen this video of Smedley Butler, famous for saying “War Is a Racket,” that he had been a servant of empire.
Butler had by then helped prevent a coup against FDR; I’m guessing Reality Winner might have felt a kindred spirit.
Right now, it’s time to summon my inner Marine, as well as that fearless girl who stood in the snow and cried at the Pentagon. More later, i hope.
I Ain't Marching Anymore 