On March 8, Chelsea Manning was sent to jail after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating Wikileaks.

When served with a subpoena to appear before the grand jury, she issued the following statement: “The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago, and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events.”

“I stand by my previous testimony. I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”

District Judge Claude Hilton brushed off a request from Manning’s lawyers that she be sent to home confinement due to medical complications, and she was held in solitary confinement for 28 days in a brutal attempt to break her resolve.

She was eventually released from jail on May 9 when the grand jury that served her with a subpoena expired, then promptly re-incarcerated a week later after defying a subpoena from a new grand jury.

This time around, Manning will face a $500 daily fine beginning on June 15, which will increase to $1,000 a day on July 15. Considering that she is unlikely to budge and Julian Assange is unlikely to be extradited anytime soon, these fines will add up to a significant sum.

In my first post addressing Manning’s imprisonment, I called for the repeal of the Espionage Act — an archaic law primarily used to prosecute whistleblowers who should be rewarded for performing a public service.

In my second post, I pointed out that the precedent set by the Plame affair had a chilling effect on news organizations’ willingness to publish classified information, leaving Manning with far fewer options than Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

In my third post, I argued that by refusing to testify, Manning is denying the Justice Department a key witness in the case against Assange, and doing more to defend the 1st amendment than any journalist in the US today.

I quoted Noam Chomsky, who summed up the whole situation as “efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didn’t want the rascal multitude to know about.”

He also said, “Some of you may recall when Mussolini’s fascist government put Antonio Gramsci in jail. The prosecutor said, ‘We have to silence this voice for 20 years. Can’t let it speak.’ That’s Assange.”