© Jose Luis Magana/ReutersU.S. Army Pfc. Bradley (Chelsea) Manning
The US military prison has blocked delivery of printed articles on prison censorship to jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning, citing copyright laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sent the articles, suspects something else was behind the ban.
The American digital rights group sent printouts of six articles - four of its own and another two by Buzzfeed and
Harvard Business Review - addressed to Manning, who is serving a 35-year term at the US Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
However, Manning was denied the delivery because the package contained "printed Internet materials, including email, of a volume exceeding five pages per day or the distribution of which may violate US copyright laws," the military prison's staff said in a notification to the WikiLeaks whistleblower.
The EFF's Dave Maass said he suspected that the USBD's staff was not genuine in its reasoning.
"It is possible that the Army withheld the documents because they were longer than five pages. However, we believe this to be unlikely since the documents it did deliver were far longer than any of the other materials and exceeded five pages," he wrote in a post on the
EFF website.
Manning did receive a 65-page handbook titled 'Inmate Admission and Orientation' and the Bureau of Prisons' eight-page guidebook on 'Combating Inmate Facebook Usage.'
"That means that it was potentially copyright concerns that resulted in Manning's mail being censored," Maass wrote.
Comment: Despite this improvement, the fact that roughly 40% of Americans see Russia as a 'critical threat' shows the utter disconnect between the US and reality. Thank the corrupt Western media for this.
Further reading: