Bin Laden raid member can be witness in Manning court-martial
Patrick Semansky/AP – Judge rules Bin Laden raid member can testify as part of prosecution’s effort to link al-Qaeda leader to material leaked by Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, pictured.
A military judge ruled Wednesday that a member of the team that raided Osama bin Laden’s compound would be allowed to testify at the court-martial of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, part of the prosecution’s attempt to link the slain al-Qaeda leader to material leaked by the soldier.
Manning, who pleaded guilty to some charges last month, is scheduled to face a court-martial in June for leaking 700,000 documents and other materials to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
Prosecutors, who have alleged that Manning’s actions damaged national security, say digital media found at bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan show that the terrorist leader received access to some of the WikiLeaks material through an associate.
Manning’s defense team has argued that evidence obtained from the raid was not relevant to the charges against Manning, which include aiding the enemy. But on Wednesday, Army Col. Denise Lind disagreed, ruling that the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the “enemy received” the material.
The witness, identified as “John Doe” and as a “DoD operator,” will testify in a closed session at an undisclosed location, Lind said, and will appear in “light disguise.”
It is presumed that the witness is a member of the Navy SEAL Team 6 that raided bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. Only one member of the raid team has been publicly identified — Matt Bissonette, who was named shortly after publishing an account of the raid under a pseudonym.
ON March 17, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, sending B-52 bombers over the border from South Vietnam. This episode, largely buried in history, resurfaced recently in an unexpected place: the Obama administration’s “white paper” justifying targeted killings of Americans suspected of involvement in terrorism.
President Obama is reportedly considering moving control of the drone program from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Defense Department, as questions about the program’s legality continue to be asked. But this shift would do nothing to confer legitimacy to the drone strikes. The legitimacy problem comes from the secrecy itself — not which entity secretly does the killing. Secrecy has been used to hide presidential overreach — as the Cambodia example shows.
On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page “white paper,” Justice Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield. They cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by John R. Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department, following the United States’ invasion of Cambodia.
Since 1965, “the territory of Cambodia has been used by North Vietnam as a base of military operations,” he told the New York City Bar Association. “It long ago reached a level that would have justified us in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the territory of Cambodia. However, except for scattered instances of returning fire across the border, we refrained until April from taking such action in Cambodia.”
In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.) So the Obama administration’s lawyers have cited a statement that was patently false.
To be sure, the administration may have additional arguments in support of its use of drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other countries. To secure the confirmation of John O. Brennan as the C.I.A. director, it recently showed members of the Congressional intelligence committees some of the highly classified legal memos that were the basis for the white paper. But Mr. Obama has asked us to trust him, and Cambodia offers us no reason to do so.
Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We’re Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets
POSTED: March 22, 10:53 AM ET
I went yesterday to a screening of We Steal Secrets, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s brilliant new documentary about Wikileaks. The movie is beautiful and profound, an incredible story that’s about many things all at once, including the incredible Shakespearean narrative that is the life of Julian Assange, a free-information radical who has become an uncompromising guarder of secrets.I’ll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secretscomes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we’re headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.
We’ve seen the battle lines forming for years now. It’s increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.
This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks – and especially the realsubject of Gibney’s film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death sentence.
There’s also the horrific case of Aaron Swartz, a genius who helped create the technology behind Reddit at the age of 14, who earlier this year hanged himself after the government threatened him with 35 years in jail for downloading a bunch of academic documents from an MIT server. Then there’s the case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian computer programmer who allegedly stole the High-Frequency Trading program belonging to Goldman, Sachs (Aleynikov worked at Goldman), a program which prosecutors in open court admitted could, “in the wrong hands,” be used to “manipulate markets.”
Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was convicted, had his sentence overturned, was freed, and has since been re-arrested by a government seemingly determined to make an example out of him.
And most recently, there’s the Matthew Keys case, in which a Reuters social media editor was charged by the government with conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to alter a Los Angeles Times headline in December 2010. The change in the headline? It ended up reading, “Pressure Builds in House to Elect CHIPPY 1337,” Chippy being the name of another hacker group accused of defacing a video game publisher’s website.
Keys is charged with crimes that carry up to 25 years in prison, although the likelihood is that he’d face far less than that if convicted. Still, it seems like an insane amount of pressure to apply, given the other types of crimes (of, say, the HSBC variety) where stiff sentences haven’t even been threatened, much less imposed.
A common thread runs through all of these cases. On the one hand, the motivations for these information-stealers seem extremely diverse: You have people who appear to be primarily motivated by traditional whistleblower concerns (Manning, who never sought money and was obviously initially moved by the moral horror aroused by the material he was seeing, falls into that category for me), you have the merely mischievous (the Keys case seems to fall in this area), there are those who either claim to be or actually are free-information ideologues (Assange and Swartz seem more in this realm), and then there are other cases where the motive might have been money (Aleynikov, who was allegedly leaving Goldman to join a rival trading startup, might be among those).
But in allof these cases, the government pursued maximum punishments and generally took zero-tolerance approaches to plea negotiations. These prosecutions reflected an obvious institutional terror of letting the public see the sausage-factory locked behind the closed doors not only of the state, but of banks and universities and other such institutional pillars of society. As Gibney pointed out in his movie, this is a Wizard of Oz moment, where we are being warned not to look behind the curtain.
What will we find out? We already know that our armies mass-murder women and children in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, that our soldiers joke about smoldering bodies from the safety of gunships, that some of our closest diplomatic allies starve and repress their own citizens, and we may even have gotten a glimpse or two of a banking system that uses computerized insider trading programs to steal from everyone who has an IRA or a mutual fund or any stock at all by manipulating markets like the NYSE.
These fervent, desperate prosecutions suggest that there’s more awfulness under there, things that are worse, and there is a determination to not let us see what those things are. Most recently, we’ve seen that determination in the furor over Barack Obama’s drone assassination program and the so-called “kill list” that is associated with it.
Weeks ago, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul – whom I’ve previously railed against as one of the biggest self-aggrandizing jackasses in politics – pulled a widely-derided but, I think, absolutely righteous Frank Capra act on the Senate floor, executing a one-man filibuster of Obama’s CIA nominee, John Brennan.
Paul had been mortified when he received a letter from Eric Holder refusing to rule out drone strikes on American soil in “extraordinary” circumstances like a 9/11 or a Pearl Harbor. Paul refused to yield until he extracted a guarantee that no American could be assassinated by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime.
He got his guarantee, but the way the thing is written doesn’t fill one with anything like confidence. Eric Holder’s letter to Paul reads like the legal disclaimer on a pack of unfiltered cigarettes:
Dear Senator Paul,
It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the president have the additional authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer is no.
Sincerely,
Eric Holder
You could drive a convoy of tanker trucks through the loopholes in that letter. Not to worry, though, this past week, word has come out via Congress – the White House won’t tell us anything – that no Americans are on its infamous kill list. The National Journal‘s report on this story offered a similarly comical sort of non-reassurance:
The White House has wrapped its kill list in secrecy and already the United States has killed four Americans in drone strikes. Only one of them, senior al-Qaida operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was the intended target, according to U.S. officials. The others – including Awlaki’s teenage son – were collateral damage, killed because they were too near a person being targeted.
But no more Americans are in line for such killings – at least not yet. “There is no list where Americans are on the list,” House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers told National Journal. Still, he suggested, that could change.
On February 28th, Army private first class Bradley Manning pleaded not guilty to the charge of aiding the enemy for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks in 2010. After more than 1,000 days in prison, Manning may be America’s most famous political prisoner – but he’s far from the only one. From environmentalists to hackers to whistleblowers, the U.S. government has made a policy of charging and convicting a wide range of activists across the country. To the FBI, an information transparency activist like the late Aaron Swartz is apparently more dangerous than the men who ruined the nation’s economy, and an environmentally-minded economics student poses a greater threat than the oil companies polluting America’s natural resources. The government insists that such harsh penalties are necessary to protect national security – but as hacker Jeremy Hammond said in a recent letter from prison, this misleading rhetoric ultimately “enables the politically motivated prosecution of anyone who voices dissent.”
THE CHARGE:Rolling Stone‘s Janet Reitman profiled this radical hacker in November 2012′s “Enemy of the State.” In December 2011, while working with Antisec – a group of hackers connected to Anonymous – Hammond allegedly accessed the servers of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm, and stole client lists, credit card information, and millions of emails. Wikileaks later published the data.
THE CHARGE: For years, Weev was most infamous as an Internet troll, using his hacking skills for provocative, often racist and homophobic ends. He once told The New York Times Magazine that he makes “people afraid for their lives.” But that’s not why he’s in trouble with the law. In June of 2010, Daniel Spitler, Auernheimer’s co-defendant, discovered that AT&T was not protecting its web database of iPad user accounts. Auernheimer and Spitler wrote a computer script that collected customer email addresses and names, and Auernheimer then shared that information with the website Gawker in order to expose the hole in AT&T’s data security.
THE CHARGE: Brown, a self-proclaimed spokesman for Anonymous, faces multiple indictments since his arrest in September 2012 – for allegedly threatening an FBI agent in a rambling YouTube video, for posting a link to emails obtained from the 2011 Stratfor hack (the hack for which Jeremy Hammond faces decades in prison) to a chat room and for allegedly concealing evidence about another Anonymous hacker when FBI agents raided his apartment in March 2012.
THE CHARGE: In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended an auction at which the U.S. government was selling oil and gas drilling rights. While he initially intended merely to make a speech, DeChristopher ended up bidding on more than 22,000 acres of land, throwing the auction into turmoil. For what was essentially a prank, DeChristopher was charged with two felonies.
THE CRIME: John Kiriakou is a former CIA agent who led the team of agents that found Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He was also a frequent source for journalists covering national security. Kiriakou emailed the name of a covert CIA officer to a reporter; the reporter never published the officer’s name.
THE CHARGE: McDavid and two others, Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner, were arrested in January 2006 and charged with conspiracy over plans to bomb several locations in California.
Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com
Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
(updated [Friday])
In December, 2011, I wrote an Op-Ed in the Guardian arguing that if Bradley Manning did what he is accused of doing, then he is a consummate hero, and deserves a medal and our collective gratitude, not decades in prison. At his court-martial proceeding this afternoon in Fort Meade, Manning, as the Guaridan’s Ed Pilkington reports, pleaded guilty to having been the source of the most significant leaks to WikiLeaks. He also pleaded not guilty to 12 of the 22 counts, including the most serious – the capital offense of “aiding and abetting the enemy”, which could send him to prison for life – on the ground that nothing he did was intended to nor did it result in harm to US national security. The US government will now almost certainly proceed with its attempt to prosecute him on those remaining counts.
Manning’s heroism has long been established in my view, for the reasons I set forth in that Op-Ed. But this was bolstered today as he spoke for an hour in court about what he did and why, reading from a prepared 35-page statement. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman was there and reported:
“Wearing his Army dress uniform, a composed, intense and articulate Pfc. Bradley Manning took ‘full responsibility’ Thursday for providing the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks with a trove of classified and sensitive military, diplomatic and intelligence cables, videos and documents. . . .
“Manning’s motivations in leaking, he said, was to ‘spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general’, he said, and ’cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.’
“Manning explain[ed] his actions that drove him to disclose what he said he ‘believed, and still believe . . . are some of the most significant documents of our time’ . . . .
“He came to view much of what the Army told him — and the public — to be false, such as the suggestion the military had destroyed a graphic video of an aerial assault in Iraq that killed civilians, or that WikiLeaks was a nefarious entity. . . .
“Manning said he often found himself frustrated by attempts to get his chain of command to investigate apparent abuses detailed in the documents Manning accessed. . . .”
Manning also said he “first approached three news outlets: the Washington Post, New York Times and Politico” before approaching WikiLeaks. And he repeatedly denied having been encouraged or pushed in any way by WikiLeaks to obtain and leak the documents, thus denying the US government a key part of its attempted prosecution of the whistleblowing group. Instead, “he said he took ‘full responsibility’ for a decision that will likely land him in prison for the next 20 years — and possibly the rest of his life.”
Bradley Manning says U.S. ‘obsessed with killing’ opponents
Soldier: Leaks meant to enlighten on U.S. policy
By Richard A. Serrano This post has been corrected, as indicated below.
LA Times
February 28, 2013, 9:39 a.m.
FT. MEADE, Md. – Army Pfc. Bradley Manning pleaded guilty Thursday to 10 charges that he illegally acquired and transferred highly classified U.S. materials later published by WikiLeaks, saying he was motivated by a U.S foreign policy that “became obsessed with killing and capturing people rather than cooperating” with other governments.
“I felt we were risking so much for people who seemed unwilling to cooperate with us due to the mistrust and hatred on both sides,” Manning said, reading a 35-page, hand-written statement describing his angst over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I began to become depressed with the situation we had become mired in year after year,” he added.
In a plea arrangement with military prosecutors, Manning agreed to serve a 20-year prison sentence in exchange for pleading guilty to 10 lesser charges. But he also pleaded not guilty to 12 more serious criminal charges, including espionage, and will face a court-martial in June. If convicted, he could face a life sentence.
Manning, now 25, was posted as a low-level intelligence analyst at a base outside of Baghdad until his arrest three years ago.
He said was angered at one point when 15 Iraqis were arrested as protesters, yet none were known terrorists or involved in anti-government activities. When he complained to his superiors, he said, “no one wanted to do anything about it.”
In this photo taken Dec. 22, 2011, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted from a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md. An Army officer is recommending a general court-martial for Manning, a low-ranking intelligence analyst charged in the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) PATRICK SEMANSKY / ASSOCIATED PRESS
By DAVID DISHNEAU
Associated Press
FORT MEADE, Md. — An Army private suspected of sending reams of classified documents to the secret-sharing WikiLeaks website was illegally punished at a Marine Corps brig and should get 112 days cut from any prison sentence he receives if convicted, a military judge ruled Tuesday.
Army Col. Denise Lind ruled during a pretrial hearing that authorities went too far in their strict confinement of Pfc. Bradley Manning for nine months in a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., in 2010 and 2011. Manning was confined to a windowless cell 23 hours a day, sometimes with no clothing. Brig officials said it was to keep him from hurting himself or others.
Lind said Manning’s confinement was “more rigorous than necessary.” She added that the conditions “became excessive in relation to legitimate government interests.”
Manning faces 22 charges, including aiding the enemy, which carries a maximum sentence of life behind bars. His trial begins March 6.
The 25-year-old intelligence analyst had sought to have the charges thrown out, arguing the conditions were egregious. Military prosecutors had recommended a seven-day sentence reduction, conceding Manning was improperly kept for that length of time on highly restrictive suicide watch, contrary to a psychiatrist’s recommendation.
Lind rejected a defense contention that brig commanders were influenced by higher-ranking Marine Corps officials at Quantico or the Pentagon.
Second only to Julian Assange, Bradley Manning is the most important figure in the Wikileaks controversy; his is alleged to have handed over hundreds of thousands of secret US war files and diplomatic cables. But, while the world watches Assange’s trial with baited breath, Manning is already wasting away in solitary confinement; this is the story of his daring intelligence heist. We hear the only recording of Bradley Manning’s voice and we listen to the logs of alleged conversations with the man who ultimately betrayed him. Brought to you by Journeyman Pictures: http://www.youtube.com/user/JourneymanVOD?feature=mhee
WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning should not have been held in such harsh conditions, his psychiatrist says. Photograph: AP
The psychiatrist who treated the WikiLeaks suspect, Bradley Manning, while he was in custody in the brig at Quantico has testified that his medical advice was regularly ignored by marine commanders who continued to impose harsh conditions on the soldier even though he posed no risk of suicide.
Captain William Hoctor told Manning’s pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade that he grew frustrated and angry at the persistent refusal by marine officers to take on board his medical recommendations. The forensic psychiatrist said that he had never experienced such an unreceptive response from his military colleagues, not even when he treated terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo.
“I had been a senior medical officer for 24 years at the time, and I had never experienced anything like this. It was clear to me they had made up their mind on a certain cause of action, and my recommendations had no impact,” Hoctor said.
The psychiatrist was testifying at Manning’s court martial for allegedly being the source of the massive leak of hundreds of thousands of confidential US government documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The 24-year-old soldier, who worked as an intelligence analyst until his arrest in Iraq in May 2010, faces 22 counts and possible life in military custody.
Manning’s defence lawyers are attempting to have the charges thrown out or any eventual sentence reduced by seeking to prove that the soldier was subjected to unlawful pre-trial punishment at Quantico. During the nine months he was in custody at the marine base in Virginia he was put on suicide watch and a “prevention of injury” order, or PoI, that kept him in solitary confinement and exposed him to extreme conditions that were denounced by the UN and Amnesty International as a form of torture.
Hoctor began treating Manning from the day after he arrived at Quantico on 29 July 2010, seeing him initially every day and then later once a week. At first he recommended that the soldier be put on suicide watch – the most stringent form of custody – given that he had mentioned killing himself while previously held in Kuwait and that nooses that he had made were found in his cell.
But within a week of seeing Manning he changed his recommendation, reporting to officers that in his medical opinion the soldier could be put on the lesser PoI status. His advice was ignored for a couple of weeks, Hoctor told the court. “At Quantico they often did not immediately follow, or sometimes did not follow at all, my recommendations.”
The failure to act on the doctor’s recommendation was an apparent violation of the instructions under which marine installations operate. The regulations state that “when prisoners are no longer considered to be suicide risks by a medical officer, they shall be returned to appropriate quarters.”
By 27 August 2010, Hoctor testified, he had spent enough time with Manning to recommend a further easing of conditions. From then on he advised in a regular weekly report that Manning should be taken off PoI altogether and returned to the general brig population.
“I was satisfied he no longer presented a risk. He did not appear to be persistently depressed, he was not reporting suicidal thoughts, in general he was well behaved.”
Specifically, Hoctor was convinced that Manning no longer needed to be subjected to restrictive conditions that included: no contact with other people, being kept in his cell for more than 23 hours a day, being checked every five minutes, sleeping on a suicide mattress with no bedding, having his prescription glasses taken away, lights kept on at night, having toilet paper removed.
Only on two occasions did Hoctor report that Manning appeared upset and should be put temporarily under close observation. The first incident occurred in December 2010 when Fox News erroneously reported that Manning had died, and the second in January 2011 when the soldier broke down in tears while in the exercise room.
Yet the psychiatrist’s recommendation that other than these isolated incidents Manning should be treated like other inmates was consistently ignored. The soldier was kept on PoI throughout the rest of his time at Quantico.
Bradley Manning steps out of a security vehicle as he is escorted into the courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
After 917 days in military captivity, the world finally heard on Thursday from Bradley Manning, the army soldier accused of being the source of the largest leak of government secrets in US history.
In a dramatic opening half-hour of testimony on the third day of the pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning spoke at length for the first time about the period after his arrest in May 2010.
Manning detailed the trauma he experienced at the hands of the US military while he was incarcerated for having allegedly handed hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.
His defence lawyer, David Coombs, drew a life-sized representation on the courtroom floor of the 6ft by 8ft cell in which Manning was held at the Quantico base in Virginia after he was brought to the US.
Manning seemed initially nervous but relaxed into his subject. He described a breakdown he had in Kuwait in the days after his arrest. “I was in a pretty stressed situation,” Manning said. “I had no idea what was going on with anything. I was getting very little information.
“I began to really deteriorate. I was anxious all the time about not knowing anything, days blend into night, night into days. Everything became more insular.”
Manning described how his guards stopped taking him out of his cell, preventing any interaction with other detainees. “I didn’t have a good understanding of the reasons. Someone tried to explain to me but I was a mess. I was starting to fall apart.”
He claimed that two or three times a day his guards would give him a “shakedown”. This involved taking him out the cell, then tearing apart everything he had in the cell.
Coombs asked Manning whether he had any recollection of an incident on 30 June 2010, when he had lost control of himself to the extent that doctors had to intervene. “He was screaming, babbling, banging his head against the cell,” said Coombs.
Manning replied: “I knew I had just fallen apart, everything is foggy and hazy at that point.”
The soldier said he thought he would die in Kuwait. “I remember thinking I’m going to die. I thought I was going to die in a cage,” he told the hearing.
WikiLeaks has been financially blockaded without process for 694 days. Julian Assange has been detained without charge for691 days. - 131 days at the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Bradley Manning has been in jail without trial for 888 days. Jeremy Hammond has been in prison without trial for 238 days.
A secret Grand Jury on WikiLeaks has been active for 774 days.
WikiLeaks News:
WikiLeaks released five more Detainee Policies which focus on Camp Bucca.
The Pentagon has warned WikiLeaks against releasing information about their military prisons, saying it threatens national security and undermines relationships.
It is a threat to our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems,” said a Defense Department spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity to EF
It is a threat to our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems,” said a Defense Department spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity to EF
WACA put out a press release detailing the U.S. Consulate sit-in in Melbourne supporting WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning. Consulate officials refused to talk to the protestors and ordered the police to remove them. Video is also available.
A recorded livestream is available of the “Enemies of the State” WikiLeaks support action held in New York City.
An article in Darker Net discusses the NDAA and who it targets, including supporters of WikiLeaks.
Julian Assange News:
Ecuadorian Ambassador Ana Alban stated that Julian Assange is currently in good health and spirits, and being regularly visited by a doctor. She also said he was recently visited by Yoko Ono and John Cusack.
A new e-book is available entitled “Julian Assange in Sweden – What really happened”.
Bradley Manning News:
Bradley Manning’s October 30 pretrial hearing has been delayed until November 7 due to a hurricane. The November 1 Fort Meade protest has been cancelled, and the October 30 London vigil has been postponed.
Cryptocat developer Nadim Kobeissi tweeted the following: “Just spoke with Eric Holder regarding Bradley Manning; he said he had not heard of many facts I related to him, said will investigate.”
An article in AlterNet discusses a recent performance by Crosby, Stills, & Nash and how they voice support for Bradley Manning during performances.
WikiLeaks has been financially blockaded without process for 695 days. Julian Assange has been detained without charge for692 days. - 132 days at the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Bradley Manning has been in jail without trial for 889 days. Jeremy Hammond has been in prison without trial for 239 days.
A secret Grand Jury on WikiLeaks has been active for 775 days.
WikiLeaks News:
WikiLeaks’ finance report for January to June 2012 shows that they spent €246,619.70, while receiving €32,838.11 in donations, only 13% of the expenditures.
WikiLeaks linked to one of their archived articles which discusses how the Mormon Church attempted to gag WikiLeaks from publishing their secret bible.
WikiLeaks released all emails to and from the Syrian Minister of Awqaf (Religious Endowments).
Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola hosted a Q&A with Andy Greenberg about his new book, “This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists are Freeing the World’s Information”.
Julian Assange News:
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa stated that he stands by his decision to grant asylum to Julian Assange and that the entire situation could have been avoided were Sweden to agree to question Mr Assange in the UK.
Designer Vivienne Westwood commented on her visit with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy saying he seems well, but needs fresh produce. She called Mr Assange a “real hero”, “very brave”, and “a noble adventure figure like Robin Hood”.
In an interview from last month, Julian Assange discusses why he believes Americans should vote for Mitt Romney, saying that it would ‘make the Democrats get serious about civil liberties’.
Actor/writer John Cusack put out the following tweet: “Yes its true i Met with Julian assange in London -had a great long substantive talk – more on that –and more from him soon –”.
An article in The Guardiancompares the villain in new James Bond film “Skyfall” with Julian Assange, mentioning similarities as to the leak of classified information and the light colored hair.
DVD of Australian telemovie “Underground: The Julian Assange Story” will be available on November 7.
Bradley Manning News:
An article in PressTV discusses how the U.S. will also be on trial during Bradley Manning’s trial for its horrendous treatment of the alleged whistleblower and the crimes which were exposed through WikiLeaks.
Photos are available of the Bradley Manning information booth which was set up on the backside of the American Embassy in Berlin.
WikiLeaks has been financially blockaded without process for 696 days. Julian Assange has been detained without charge for693 days. - 133 days at the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Bradley Manning has been in jail without trial for 890 days. Jeremy Hammond has been in prison without trial for 240 days.
A secret Grand Jury on WikiLeaks has been active for 776 days.
WikiLeaks News:
WikiLeaks released 5 more Detainee Policieswhich cover Camp Bucca, including policy for detainee medical care and military working dogs.
The Justice Campaigntweeted their findings in some of the earlier Camp Bucca releases.
U.S. firm Blue Coat Systems Inc. acknowledged the use of its technologies by the Syrian Government in order to censor internet activity. These technologies were detailed in the Spy Files, and the use of such by Syria was detailed in the Syria Files.
WikiLeaks released all emails to and from the Syrian General Authority for the Book.
A panel at Från Internetdagarna 2012 in Stolkholm discussed the international implications of freedom of speech in relation to WikiLeaks and the U.S. The panelists were Media & Communications Professor Christian Christensen, Jillian C. York of the EFF, writer Afrah Nasser, and Swedish political advisor Olof Ehrenkrona, with moderator Hans Rosén of Dagens Nyheter.
WACA posted an open letter to President Obama regarding WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning.
Julian Assange News:
CNN released more of their recent interview with Julian Assange in which he discusses how the Obama Administration was ‘corrupted’. He also discusses alleged WikiLeaks sources Bradley Manning and Jeremy Hammond, and well as The Pirate Bay co-founder anakata.
Bradley Manning News:
Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner discussed the latest in Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearings, including the continued battle for public access to his court records.
Jeremy Hammond News:
The Rolling Stone published an in-depth profile on Jeremy Hammond, detailing his life from childhood all the way up until his arrest for allegedly hacking into Stratfor.
In response to the above article, former Anonymous member Peter Fein detailed his personal encounter with Jeremy Hammond.
FILE – In this June 25, 2012 file photo, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, right, is escorted out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md. Lawyers for Julian Assange argue before the U.S. military’s highest court for public access to legal documents in the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with aiding the enemy for allegedly giving hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. documents to Assange’s secret-busting website WikiLeaks. (Patrick Semansky / AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military’s highest court is asking WikiLeaks to explain why the military justice system, rather than civilian courts, is the proper venue for seeking routine judicial documents in the court-martial of an Army private charged with giving classified information to the secret-spilling website.
The jurisdictional issue was the first question raised by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces during an hour of oral arguments Wednesday in Washington. The panel of five civilian judges heard arguments on the main dispute but made it clear that the court must first be convinced it has jurisdiction.
Lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and the government said they would submit briefs before the end of the month on that question. The New York-based civil-rights group is representing WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange and several left-leaning pundits and publications including The Nation magazine and the broadcast operation Democracy Now.
The Associated Press is among 30 news organizations supporting the appeal in a brief filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. They agree with the appellants that the First Amendment requires timely public access to written documents such as motions and rulings in Pfc. Bradley Manning‘s court-martial.
Such records are generally available in civilian courts on the day they are filed. The military is more restrictive. It contends that records of such proceedings are controlled not by the court-martial judge but by the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the military’s legal branch.
Army Capt. Chad M. Fisher, representing the government at Wednesday’s hearing, said anyone can request court-martial documents using the Freedom of Information Act. That can be a lengthy process, though, unless the request is quickly granted. In Manning’s case, the military has denied such requests, including one by the AP, citing exemptions for disclosures that could interfere with law enforcement and the fairness of the proceedings.
The judges peppered the lawyers with questions Wednesday, rarely letting either side complete a sentence throughout the unusually long session. It was scheduled for 40 minutes.
Judge Margaret Ryan asked Fisher why the military doesn’t take what she called a “commonsense” approach to disclosing routine court filings.
“Instead of making a constitutional issue out of it, why don’t you just make it available?” she asked.
Appellants’ attorney Shayana Kadidal said reporters’ lack of access to written filings makes it hard for them to cover Manning’s case, which is scheduled for trial in February.
“It’s almost impossible to understand what’s happening, even if you have access to the courtroom,” he said.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment mandates public access to criminal trials. The high court hasn’t ruled that court records must be readily available but lower civilian court rulings favor that position.
Manning is charged with aiding the enemy, an offense punishable by life in prison, for allegedly sending hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks while serving as an intelligence analyst in Iraq.
The police bill for staking out the embassy where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is evading justice has already reached more than £1million.
Scotland Yard confirmed it is costing £11,000 every day to ensure the Australian does not flee his bolthole at the Ecuadorean Embassy.
The final bill could be much more as the 41-year-old continues to defy extradition to Sweden where he is suspected of sexually assaulting two women.
Hefty bill: A phalanx of Scotland Yard police officers surrounds the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge as he evades sex assault allegations
Officers have been watching the property in Knightsbridge, west London, since Mr Assange breached his bail and claimed asylum in June. They have been told to arrest him if he puts ‘one toe’ outside.
Ecuadorean foreign minister Ricardo Pinto has warned Mr Assange he could be in the embassy for a decade if he is not allowed to leave Britain.
Critics have called on the Metropolitan Police to end the costly stakeout.
Last week, Foreign Secretary William Hague admitted there is ‘no sign of any breakthrough’ after meeting Mr Pinto at the United Nations in New York.
The comments came after the hacking activist accused the U.S. of persecuting WikiLeaks and torturing Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leaking classified documents.
24/7 surveillance: Officers have been watching the property in Knightsbridge since Assange (pictured) breached his bail and claimed asylum in June
At least four Met officers guard the embassy, on the second floor of a block of flats behind Harrods in Knightsbridge, West London, around the clock.
They have set up a £250,000 mobile command station on the doorstep of the building and occupy positions outside and in surrounding properties.
Officers from every London borough, specialist police units and undercover squads have been brought in to join the open-ended stake out.
One colleague said: ‘The officers are being moved around every three or four days to stop the boredom setting in.
‘There are certainly plenty of other things these officers could be doing than standing there around the clock.’
Time well spent? At least four Met officers guard the embassy, on the second floor of a block of flats behind Harrods, around the clock
London Mayor Boris Johnson confirmed the policing bill between June 20 and September 10 was £905,000.
If the costs continued at the average of £11,000 a day the total would now be over £1.1million.
Critics called on the Met to end the stand-off but sources said the force cannot step back from its responsibilities to arrest Mr Assange for breaching his bail.
Jenny Jones, a Green politician in the capital who sits on a committee that oversees the Met’s work, called for the officers to go back on the beat.
She said: ‘It is ridiculous at a time when the Met is stretched as never before that so many officers are waiting around the Ecuadorian Embassy for Assange to attempt an escape.’
Lib Dem Caroline Pidgeon, who also sits on the London Assembly, added: ‘For 100 days Assange has been evading an arrest warrant for the alleged offense of rape and trying to escape the fair judicial process of Sweden.
‘At a time when police counters are closing across London his actions are a gross waste of valuable resources.’
Hefty bill: A phalanx of Scotland Yard police officers surrounds the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge as he evades sex assault allegations
24/7 surveillance: Officers have been watching the property in Knightsbridge since Assange (pictured) breached his bail and claimed asylum in June
Time well spent? At least four Met officers guard the embassy, on the second floor of a block of flats behind Harrods, around the clock
