September 25, 2017

Harvard: Picking Sean Spicer over Chelsea Manning

Intercept- Shortly after Harvard publicly rescinded whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s visiting fellowship, the dean of her would-be school called her personally to break the news.

According to Manning, Douglas Elmendorf, the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, began by reading what she later learned was a statement the school had already posted online. But as Manning pressed for more of an explanation, and noted some of the other controversial fellows at the school, he told her simply that “Sean Spicer has something to contribute to American policy,” and “you can’t really bring that to the table.”

... Manning said that after hearing that, she hung up the phone.

One hundred and fifty-nine Harvard faculty members signed a letter protesting the decision, saying that Harvard “accepted as true the account of … prosecuting attorneys and acted at their behest.” Several hundred alumni also signed a petition calling on Harvard to rescind Spicer and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s fellowships.

The events have also sparked a debate about how elite schools court U.S. government officials to teach, despite their dark histories. John Yoo, the author of many of the Bush administration’s torture memos, is a tenured professor of law at UC Berkeley. And John Negroponte, who oversaw the CIA’s brutal dirty war in Nicaragua and death squads in Honduras, is a distinguished fellow of “grand strategy” at Yale. Fordham’s decision to name former CIA Director John Brennan as a fellow has prompted backlash from students and faculty who object to his past statements on torture.

While serving as an Army intelligence analyst, Manning sent scores of documents to WikiLeaks, exposing a higher civilian death count in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush administration lies about Guantánamo Bay, and evidence of war crimes.

Manning was arrested in 2010 and released from detention earlier this year, after former President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year sentence.

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