Podcast: Emma Cape on building the Chelsea Manning campaign

Emma Cape: I think one time I was with my family in the car, and my phone rang, and I picked up. I just said loudly, “Hey, Chelsea.” Everybody in the car would understand why I had to interrupt and get on the phone. I definitely remember getting on the phone with her in different scenarios, and then people’s eyes were wide. Then they would nod at me and say, “Is that Chelsea Manning?”

Eric Klein: Emma Cape is one of eight people that Chelsea Manning had on her list of close friends and family that she could call from prison. Those were the rules. Only eight people. Emma Cape, who was the campaign manager for the Chelsea Manning Support Network at the time, was the direct link that the campaign had with Chelsea.

This is the Courage to Resist podcast. My name is Eric Klein. Chelsea Manning was released from prison, military prison, on May 17th, 2017. A few days after that, I spoke with Emma. I asked Emma Cape for her reaction to Chelsea being released from prison, and she began by telling me about her memory of just a few days prior, to back when President Obama officially commuted Chelsea Manning’s sentence, when stories were first leaking out of the Obama White House suggesting the possibility that there could be a conclusion to Manning’s time in military prison.

Emma Cape: When I first saw that news story, I was filled with incredible anticipation, because I knew if they said that much publicly, that that meant that had to mean the president was seriously considering this. The day the news broke, I basically just screamed and ran around my apartment [inaudible 00:02:01] for two minutes. I was just so excited. That was incredible.

A couple of years previously, I helped launch a Pardon Chelsea Manning website with a petition and a letter from Amnesty International and the ACLU. Ultimately, the commutation that President Obama granted was based on Chelsea’s own petition, which was calling for clemency as opposed to a pardon, but she has been through a lot, and based on what I know, I think she was very deserving of that.

None of us knew what was going to happen. I would say it was definitely one of the most exciting moments of my life. I was very happy.

Eric Klein: Yeah. Say more. Why was it one of the most exciting moments of your life, Emma?

Emma Cape: I think both as somebody who had worked in organizing around this issue for years and as somebody who talked to Chelsea, probably especially as someone who had talked to Chelsea over the phone, we talked weekly for over a year, I just felt very personally connected and invested. I felt like what happened to Chelsea in terms of being a very young person who was 21, who did something that she thought at the time … She had not intended to hurt the U.S., like she said many times publicly, and there was no strong evidence presented that she had hurt the U.S. It just felt like such an injustice that she would be sentenced to 35 years, whereas it just seemed very disproportionate compared to other sentences people in the military have received for other crimes.

From my experience talking to her on the phone, where again, a young person who I think some of her feelings about government and policy evolved over time, but she was always such a person who so much wanted what was best for the world, and wanted to help people. It just seemed like such an injustice that she would be in prison for that long, when I actually think she has a lot of positive things to contribute to the world.

I was so happy for her personally, because that means she gets to live her life. She gets her life back, but I think she’ll also still be able to contribute positively to the world. I know she’s interested in being an advocate around transgender issues. I know she’s still very much interested in freedom of information. I think the world is absolutely a better place for having Chelsea Manning finally freed.

Eric Klein: Tell me about what it was like in the part of your life when you were talking on the phone with Chelsea Manning while she was in prison.

Emma Cape: Usually I was at home, but sometimes I was at work. She always called me, and that was because that was the only way we could talk. Prison rules dictated she could only have I think it was eight people on her call list at any given time, and she could only call out. The only people who could call in her were legal counsel. I guess this was further complicated because she had a job where she worked about 50 hours a week, like other U.S. prisoners do, and don’t get paid anything. Her schedule would change. Sometimes, she would be on call and would have to work at unexpected hours. She would often have to dial my number multiple times before we connected.

For the first several months we talked, a lot of what we talked about was the work that the Chelsea Manning Support Network was doing, what she wanted to say to the media, if they had questions for her, that sort of thing. Then over time, when we got a PR firm doing pro bono work for her, our discussions became more personal I think. We talked some about things that are public now about being transgender, and how that was difficult for her, and being in a men’s military prison, her appeals, and how she was feeling optimistic, how she would spend hours in the library every day, both working on her appeal with her legal team and also just reading.

She was really excited to be able to finally enroll in college. She found this college where she could take courses that were completely remote, with no Internet, because she didn’t have access to Internet. She was very interested in science and politics and freedom of information and government, and said her goal was to learn one new thing every day, and that was how she was going to continue to develop herself while he was in prison. When I said I was very impressed with her perseverance, those sorts of things are what I’m referring to.

Then other weeks were hard for her, and I could tell. I would be surprised if they weren’t. I can only imagine being a young person in prison like that, with an uncertain future, extremely. Most of us, I’m sure, could hardly imagine what it would be like to be in that position.

For me, I guess I was glad that I got to talk to her and hear how she was doing. At the beginning, it seemed like her connections were limited to family members and people she’d known very well. I thought it might be nice for her to be connected to more people who were transgender or dealing with some of those issues, so I also put her in touch with a couple of people who were friends of friends who she formed friendships with, ultimately, through letters and over the phone. I think over time, she became maybe … It’s hard to say, but I think more comfortable with, like I said, communicating with the public and supporters, and her position.

Eric Klein: Yeah.

Emma Cape: I was always left feeling like … We knew our phone calls were recorded, so I was limited in what I could say, and she was limited in what she could say about the experience that she was having in the prison, so there was always this very serious boundary in place. I always wished I could do more to support her in a personal sense. That’s beyond the Chelsea Manning issue. That’s a how the U.S. treats its prisoners issue, but yeah, for me that was one of the more I guess emotionally moving parts of the work.

Eric Klein:  Again, this is the Courage to Resist. My name is Eric Klein, and this is an interview with Emma Cape, whose work on behalf of Chelsea Manning began about a year after Manning’s arrest, when Emma herself was hired as a paid intern to help out with administrative tasks. Soon after that, she was promoted to be an organizer and as the staff of the Chelsea Manning Support Network, which was fiscally sponsored by Courage to Resist. As the support network grew, Emma Cape became the lead organizer and campaign manager. Emma worked throughout Manning’s trial and then continued after the trial, talking to Chelsea on the phone, but it all started when she responded to the job posting on the Internet.

Emma Cape: I just saw it in an ad on Craigslist, but I felt when I looked at this name, Bradley Manning, which was the first time I had heard about his case, I guess the story resonated with me. I got my start in community organizing when I was in high school, when the U.S. was invading Iraq. I had my best friend who went and joined the military. We were from a small town where a lot of people joined the military to try to go to college, which is something Chelsea Manning in part did. I found myself very concerned about the lack of transparency in the U.S. media around the impact on civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I started organizing students. I was a student organizer for a while.

When I graduated, I knew I wanted to go into community organizing. Then I read about the case of then Bradley, now Chelsea Manning, and it resonated with me. That’s why I wanted to get involved.

Eric Klein: Then you stumbled upon a Craigslist ad?

Emma Cape: Then I stumbled upon a Craigslist ad for an intern who was supposed to basically stuff envelopes while learning a little about political organizing. It was a six month contract position, because they expected the trial to be over in six months. I never would have guessed the interesting journey I wound up being on for the next three and a half years.

Eric Klein:  Yeah. I want to jump, so let’s smash cut from Emma Cape, paid intern, to Emma Cape, campaign manager for the Chelsea Manning Support Network. What stands out to you as a significant … Clearly, time. You’re older at that point, but what else did you now know when you’re doing the big work?

Emma Cape: I learned a lot. By the end, when I was managing a team of staff who I helped hire after the organization had grown and more people around the world had heard about I guess Chelsea Manning and started donating, I was managing field organizing and event organizing as well as media outreach and digital organizing. Basically, all the different elements of a campaign.

It was really an amazing grassroots effort, how we were able to grow this campaign to the point of having multiple staff. To me, that was pretty powerful, to see the way that Chelsea had inspired so many people to get involved and how we were able to harness that energy to actually build the campaign.

Eric Klein: I understand that the campaign went through a number of phases before, during, and after the trial. Throughout all those years of work, it wasn’t until the trial had ended that the campaign finally had direct contact with Chelsea.

Emma Cape: For this whole three years leading up to the trial, we had been building a campaign based on quotes we had of hers from some Internet chat logs, maybe what friends or family said about the type of person she was. This was our first opportunity to really talk to her directly and see what she thought of our work, how she wanted her story to be told. We knew that that might change things, but I felt like it was important to be in touch with her.

I think at first, she’d just been through this devastating trial, and I think we were both nervous to talk to each other on the phone, not really knowing what to expect. I think over time, just having more connections with the outside world gave her a better sense of why people were supporting her and how she could both develop her own image while also thanking supporters. I helped her put some articles out. The first article she published was actually in the New York Times, which was a big deal, to tell her story.

I guess Chelsea, she really impressed me with her perseverance, I think above all else, because while I was talking to her, she went through some tough moments, but she always maintained generally a positive attitude about the future and about her desire to keep fighting for her ability to express her gender, for her appeal process. That was one of the things that impressed me the most.

Eric Klein: What changed for you when that transition took place from working on behalf of a stranger to working on behalf of a friend?

Emma Cape: It definitely changed the dynamic. Lots of organizations had supported Chelsea before the trial for their own … There were lots of different anti-war organizations that supported her, which had their own missions. I guess the organizing I was doing before I talked to Chelsea was largely based around figuring out messages that would appeal both to the organizations that were already supporting her and to the wider public.

Once I started talking to Chelsea in person, for me it became much more about the obligation to make sure that we were doing things that this person whose life had been affected in this profound way was comfortable with, and to make sure that she felt like she was being accurately represented. Not sure how much I can say about that, to be honest. There were some changes, but at the same time, it was very powerful for this person who had been unable to speak for herself for four to five years that she’d been imprisoned because of the risk of jeopardizing her legal case, to finally be able to write and have people read her own words for the first time.

I think that was, for her, obviously a good thing, but also for … I guess it began the transition of people getting to know the real Chelsea. Nobody knew at the beginning how it was going to end up, but I think she continued to gain support during that time period ultimately, so that was a positive step.

Eric Klein: Yeah. What do you see during the work that you were doing, what do you see as one of the turning points?

Emma Cape: One of the more significant things we did that was very behind the scenes at the time, so probably not terribly evident to most of the public, was during Chelsea Manning’s legal proceedings, the military had created this interesting dynamic where reporters and media covering the trial were in a separate room from the general public, who was also allowed to watch the trial. There was very limited opportunity for interaction between the two entities.

The military had put a media spokesperson who could answer questions the media asked, but of course it was mostly from the perspective of the prosecution. One of the things that the Chelsea Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist, we had been maintaining a blog for years so that when there wasn’t a lot of new information coming out of the news about Chelsea Manning’s case, we were able to continually update the public about the defense’s side of the story and about updates regarding Chelsea Manning.

Based on that work, we’d been doing a lot of writing of that case. We then applied for official media credentials and we were granted them, which was a pleasant surprise to me. Then we began, during the hearings and during the trial, to send a couple of representatives at a time from the Chelsea Manning Support Network into the media room to talk to members of the press directly. When they had a question then, they weren’t just hearing from the prosecution about their answer to the question. They were also hearing from us. We were trying to more accurately reflect the defense’s side of the story.

At the end of that summer, the New York Times editorial board published an article calling for Chelsea’s sentence to be commuted to time served, or to be reduced. It’s my belief that us just being there and talking to members of the press directly really helped foster relationships and make sure that they were hearing both sides of the story.

I think there’s a similar dynamic, and this was separate from all of the public organizing we were doing to get media stories about the fact that there was this movement backing Chelsea Manning. Organizations like Amnesty International and ACLU had sent representatives to the trial to observe the trial, because they were going to decide if they wanted to say anything publicly or not. By simply attending the trial every day, members of Courage to Resist and the Chelsea Manning Support Network were able to talk to these representatives and tell them about anything they’d observed over time about what was happening to Chelsea during the prosecution. I feel like those relationships we fostered made a big impact when, at the end of the trial, I reached out to those groups and asked them, “Will you say something publicly condemning this lengthy sentence?” I think it’s part of basic organizing. It really all comes down to relationships. I think that was something that made a difference.

Eric Klein: Who were the people? You just mentioned I think you said two people got press credentials from the support blog. Was that right?

Emma Cape: Yeah. Nathan Fuller, who worked for Courage to Resist and the Chelsea Manning Support Network, he also spent years working with us. He had been a journalism student and was a terrific writer. Nathan Fuller did a lot of writing to help cover the trial for the general public. He was following along on our blog.

There was also Mike McKee, who had worked with the Chelsea Manning Support Network as an office coordinator but also started writing for our blog. They both, along with myself, spent time in the media room.

Eric Klein: What was that room like? Was it a trailer? Was it a cinder block building? Was it old? Was it new?

Emma Cape: It was like an auditorium. The media would watch the trial on a big screen at the front of the auditorium, and there were a couple of representatives from the military lined up against the walls who were there at all times. The media was allowed to type notes on their computers, but they weren’t allowed to record anything. There was Internet, but they were only allowed to use it I believe during breaks. There were all these restrictions on how they could get information out about the trial.

Yeah, and on many days, there was maybe a handful of people. There was a woman from the Washington Post who was there every day. Associated Press was often there, but most days of this trial, given its significance, there just weren’t representatives from most of the major news sources there. I think an exception would be the day Chelsea Manning testified for the first time. We had put out a press release as soon as we learned Chelsea Manning was going to be testifying, to help make sure media knew and that they were there. The next day, there was 80 people in the courtroom. It was just packed.

Eric Klein: Were you there that day?

Emma Cape: I mean, in the press room. Yeah, I was. I was there, but it was interesting to see that media was trying to cover this case without really having a ton of information. It gave me an appreciation for how busy the media is, but also how much can get lost when they’re publishing stories about very complex issues like this.

Eric Klein: Yeah. I have a lot of empathy and a lot of, I don’t know, cynicism about that job, how it’s really, really hard. You have to be really, really smart. You’re never given as much time as you should be given, generally speaking, to fully comprehend something that you’re now authoritatively writing about. Yet that’s what they sign up for, and they should do a very good job once they do it. What did they get wrong?

Emma Cape: One thing that the military or the prosecution said often about the case is, “Chelsea endangered lives.” That was a key part, I think, of the prosecution’s case, was the potential to endanger lives. One thing that did not initially get reported on widely in the news media, though, was that they at least during the open portions of the court session never presented any evidence of anyone being actually hurt by the releases. In addition to that, the judge basically prevented the defense from presenting any evidence of war crimes that had been committed that may have motivated the release.

Obviously it’s a complex case, but in our view, from the public’s ability to understand what happened, those were pretty important points and they just weren’t widely reported on maybe until the end, when Amnesty International and ACLU finally got involved and decided to say something publicly.

Eric Klein: Tell me a little bit about the daily experience of going into this media room. Did you have to … You traveled from a hotel room, I’m assuming. You traveled to a military base, right?

Emma Cape: Yeah, that’s right.

Eric Klein: Tell me about how that works.

Emma Cape: During court hearings that had been taken place over the course of about a year and a half, we stayed in hotels, and then the trial itself was almost three months long, so we actually rented a house in Maryland, where I lived with my staff team. Owen, who did a lot of digital work. Sara was our person who did more field organizing. Jeff Paterson visited sometimes. In the morning, we would leave the house, and we often would go to a vigil in front of the base before the court proceedings even began. We would get up there at 6 a.m. At the time, I think I was maybe a little skeptical of whether it was worth getting up at 6 a.m. to go have a vigil with 10, 20, sometimes maybe 50 people, depending on how many people we got to come that day.

Eric Klein: Where is this vigil standing?

Emma Cape: This was at the front gate [to Fort Meade, on the way] to the courtroom, so that people who would get up and attend the court proceeding would have to drive by it on their way, and media that were attending would see it. This was something that our steering committee thought was important, to have a very visible presence for people attending the proceedings.

The reason I mention I was skeptical was that one day, I think I was proved wrong when an image of the vigil showed up on the front page of the Washington Post, to show that there were supporters of Chelsea Manning who were attending this.

Then, when it was time, when we had stopped giving interviews, if anybody wanted to talk to us, and when it was time to go into the court proceedings, there were a couple of security checkpoints. There was one getting into the base, where they’d search your car, and then you’d drive through the base for a couple of miles and you’d get to these trailers. They had another security checkpoint set up at the trailers, where they would search all of your belongings. If you were attending as a member of the public, they would make sure that you did not have any electronic devices on you. You were only allowed to carry in a notebook. If you were a member of the media, you’d go around to the other side, and you were allowed to carry a laptop.

Inside the courtroom, there were a couple of men with some sort of automatic weapon. I’m not a weapons expert, but it was relatively intimidating looking. Then you were just inside, and then you just waited for the court proceedings to begin. Most days, they were probably around eight hours, but some days they were 12 hours. It was the longest trial in military history in the U.S., so they were lengthy.

Not being legal experts, we would often take notes and then go back at the end of the day and spend a lot of time doing research to make sure that we understood everything that had happened during the trial. Again, Nathan Fuller was the journalist for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, and we felt that since other members of the media weren’t necessarily there every day, it was really important that we document every single day what had been said.

Yeah, and that was the typical day in our lives while this court martial was going on.

Eric Klein: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I just want to acknowledge how some people get paid by the Washington Post or the New York Times or other media organizations to report a story, but the individual that spends the most hours in the room, it doesn’t matter what the size or even existence of the paycheck is. That writer can often be the one who knows what’s going on.

We’re talking mostly about the trial right now. During the trial, what other work are you doing at this time?

Emma Cape: At the beginning of the trial, we organized the largest protest that we had ever had. Over the course of my time with Courage to Resist, my primary job or one of my primary jobs was organizing events, showing public displays of support for Chelsea Manning. We had had hundreds of events around the world. It was pretty amazing. We even had one I think in Afghanistan, a vigil in Afghanistan for Chelsea Manning at some point, to just see how inspired people were by this story.

The first day of the trial, we wanted to have some sort of story in the media about people who supported Chelsea. We hired a handful of local organizers, so a combination of people who received some support and people who were doing it on a volunteer basis also. There was Ryan Harvey in Baltimore, [Sergei Kostan 00:32:53] in Washington, D.C., and I believe in eight cities people organized buses to come to Fort Meade on the first day.

We ultimately had at least 1,000 people, although there were some people who couldn’t get out of their cars because of the police. We had speakers come in like Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, Lieutenant Dan Choi, who had been a big anti-don’t ask, don’t tell activist, and we basically marched along the base. People in D.C. had made a lot of artwork. We hung 300 Nobel Peace Prizes on the gates symbolically, because Chelsea had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a few times. We had a lot of press, I think. New York Times, Associated Press, Washington Post were all there. We did things like that just to keep the story alive in the news, but also to show that we were having these veterans’ groups, freedom of information groups, anti-war groups, all of whom were coming together to support this person. That was a big part of what we did to try to keep that story alive.

Eric Klein: Right. To me, I’m really fascinated by this long-term campaign, part of the anti-war movement, part of the left, that is not supported by mainstream politics, not supported by television news, outside of the lanes of what’s acceptable political discourse. It succeeded, and it was a long and uphill struggle that had many setbacks, but it didn’t fall apart. It didn’t fall into infighting or factions pulling against each other. I like that a lot, and I’d love to just hear a little more about how you guys worked together.

Emma Cape: If you look at things like our social media pages and our email list, the number of people subscribing to follow news about Chelsea Manning did grow significantly over time, and the number of people donating to support her legal case did grow significantly over time. If I had to look at a very top-line level of things that I think helped to grow support for Chelsea, I would say it was a combination of messaging and how we told her story, and also just old-fashioned grassroots organizing, and just getting out there and talking to people.

On the messaging side of things, one of the things I did in my role was I brought together many of the people who’d been contributing to her case as activists. There was David Solnit who helped make our banners and worked on many different leftist causes. The staff, I’ve mentioned. The steering committee of Courage to Resist that we had at the very beginning, before we started doing too much organizing, talked about what are the primary messages. What do we want people to understand about this person?

While some of the groups that some of our members had been active with previously had a certain orientation toward the government in general, one of the things that I thought was important about this case was I thought fundamentally, based on what we knew about Chelsea Manning, she was a patriot. She was somebody who believed very strongly in democracy, who wanted our democracy to be stronger, wanted people to be more involved in our government, and that fundamentally that was a very patriotic ideal. The patriotism is one of the things that a broader cross-section of our country can relate to, and I do think the U.S. is special in that way, the number of people who hold these patriotic ideals.

I also felt that in all of the messages we put out, we really needed to leave room for someone like President Obama to be the hero of this story. We shouldn’t come out swinging against every member of the government. We needed to tell this story about a young person, who I think in many ways had a typical millennial experience of joining the military because she hoped to go to college, because she hoped she would be helping to save lives, and then went through a period of disillusionment but still really believed in her country.

We wanted to continuously call on President Obama to step in and do something about the case, so we tried to create this story that could be maybe moving to people both on the left and on the right, and in the middle of our country. We did actually find that there were some conservatives, especially libertarians, who were very vocal Chelsea Manning supporters.

Then, when it came to organizing, there were already networks that Courage to Resist was involved with, like Veterans for Peace,  Iraq Veterans Against the War, and there were some other groups that helped found the Chelsea Manning Support Network, like CodePink, and there were different freedom of information activists. When we first started organizing public events to educate people and to have national days of action, first against solitary confinement and then calling for her release more generally, we started with those relationships that already existed, and over time we were able to add the organizations and individuals supporting Chelsea. We were able to add to that over time as people saw us out there doing things publicly and they became more aware of her case.

I think those two things were important when it came to how we grew the campaign, if that makes sense.

Eric Klein: Yeah, it does. It’s really interesting to me to make a decision to cast a wide net and try to gather in support from a broad range of people.

Emma Cape: Yeah, exactly. Like I said, I think when you look at the people I worked with most closely, I wanted it to be a democratic organization in terms of how we organized ourselves. There were leaders in many cities nationwide who were very involved in organizing local events, and I had regular conference calls with them. Before I was working at Courage to Resist, there were volunteers who were holding these conference calls. Once they hired an organizer, I had more time, so I was often leading them. There was Andy Sayer in Chicago. There was a big group of very active people in Los Angeles, in New York, in Washington, D.C., and many of them were from the left.

Eric Klein: Yeah, of course.

Emma Cape: Some of them were not from our traditional groups. Actually, when Occupy became a big thing in the U.S., I think we created a fact sheet that was basically geared toward people involved with Occupy talking about some of the documents Chelsea released that talked about corporate corruption. It was an interesting thing, but it shows Occupy was the zeitgeist of the day, and we wanted to try to work with Occupy as another existing network. We actually wound up having a lot of organizers who came from the Occupy movement who saw Chelsea as someone who similarly wanted to have a stronger democracy, where more people were able to be involved in the government, who actually saw overlap there. That was interesting, but that actually resulted in a lot of big public events that again got a lot of media attention.

Eric Klein: Again, you’ve been listening to the Courage to Resist podcast, and we’ve been speaking with Emma Cape. Emma Cape worked as the lead organizer of the Chelsea Manning Support Network. Her paid time at the Chelsea Manning Support Network was about three and a half years, though she worked as a volunteer even after that time. Here on the podcast, I think her main goal for the interview was just to make sure that everybody who worked for the campaign, Emma wanted to emphasize that she wanted to thank everybody.

Emma Cape: There were just so many people who worked on this case. I think it remains to be seen how history will remember the reason that Chelsea Manning was released and what her case represents. There’s so many people who played a role that I just feel like I couldn’t possibly thank all of them, although I hope to write something eventually to thank them. I hope that Chelsea’s case will ultimately take on the significance of being a moment where the U.S. and its people moved forward on figuring out how we could use technology to create more government transparency. I think recent news shows that we need that now as much as ever, and I hope ultimately that will be one of her legacies. I think it will take the work of more people to make that happen, but I think if you look at all the people that contributed to helping release Chelsea, it gives me reason for optimism.

Eric Klein: Thank you again for listening to the Courage to Resist podcast. My name is Eric Klein, host and producer of these episodes. If you haven’t yet heard the previous episode, an interview with Chelsea Manning’s civilian defense attorney David Coombs, I highly recommend you listen to that one. Prior to that, we spoke with Rainey Reitman, who was a co-founder of the Chelsea Manning Support Network, and then in an episode prior to that, we spoke with Jacob Bridge, who was a Marine officer turned conscientious objector. There’s other episodes on the way. If you’d like to learn more, of course please go to the website couragetoresist.org. You can also subscribe to the podcast anywhere where you subscribe to podcasts. Thank you so much for listening.