Turmoil surrounding case in Sweden: Julian Assange. Photo: AP
The top Swedish prosecutor pursuing sexual assault charges against Julian Assange has abruptly left the case and one of Mr Assange’s accusers has sacked her lawyer.
The turmoil in the Swedish Prosecution Authority’s effort to extradite Mr Assange comes as another leading Swedish judge prepares to deliver an unprecedented public lecture in Australia next week on the WikiLeaks publisher’s case.
The Swedish Prosecution Authority wants to extradite Mr Assange to have him questioned in Stockholm in relation to sexual assault allegations by two women.
Alleged victim: Political activist Anna Ardin.
Fairfax Media has obtained Swedish court documents that reveal high-profile Swedish prosecutor Marianne Nye has unexpectedly left Mr Assange’s case from Wednesday, and has been replaced by a less-experienced prosecutor, Ingrid Isgren. The reasons for the change have not been disclosed yet.
The lead Swedish prosecutor pursuing sexual assault charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is no longer handling the case, media reports revealed. Her departure comes as a top Swedish judge is set to speak publicly on the ‘Assange affair.’
Recent court documents have revealed that starting Wednesday, high-profile Swedish prosecutor Marianne Nye will no longer be at the helm of the case against Assange, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Nye will be replaced by her far less experienced colleague Ingrid Isgren; the reasons for her departure have not been disclosed.
However, according to a Swedish newspaper report, Nye “has not quit the Assange case formally rather that there is a new ‘investigator,’” WikiLeaks tweeted on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Anna Ardin, one of two women who accused Julian Assange of sex crimes, also moved to fire her controversial lawyer Claes Borgstrom late last month after she lost faith in his ability to represent her.
Ardin charged that Borgstrom was more interested in being in the media spotlight than providing her legal counsel, and has often referred her inquiries to his secretary or assistant. The court has approved Ardin’s new lawyer, Elisabeth Massi Fritz, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Borgstrom reportedly supported his former client’s decision, saying that “in cases concerning sexual offenses, it is particularly important that the plaintiff has confidence in the lawyer representing her,” Swedish tabloid Expressen quoted him as saying.
News of the legal shakeup in the Assange case comes less than a week before Swedish Supreme Court judge Stefan Lindskog’s lecture at the University of Adelaide on the “Assange affair, and freedom of speech, from the Swedish perspective.”
Assange blasted Justice Lindskog – who is chair of the Supreme Court of Sweden, the country’s highest court of appeal – for his decision to publicly discuss the case.
“If an Australian High Court judge came out and spoke on a case the court expected or was likely to judge, it would be regarded as absolutely outrageous,” he told Fairfax media.
Julian Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy since June 2012. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
Ecuadorean diplomats have raised the case of Julian Assange with the Labour party as part of attempts to lay the groundwork for a resolution of the diplomatic standoff between Britain and the South American state over the WikiLeaks’ founder.
As part of its continuing search for an end to the impasse, Ecuador has been seeking a commitment from the coalition that it would not support Assange’s onward extradition to the US should he choose to go to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.
In an indication that the Ecuadoreans are now also setting their sights on a possible change of government after the 2015 election, Ecuador’s ambassador, Ana Alban, raised Assange’s case during a meeting with the shadow foreign minister, Kerry McCarthy.
The meeting had been requested by Ecuador to discuss environmental issues and bilateral trade, and the Labour side were taken by surprise when the Australian’s case was raised by the Ecuadoreans towards the end of the meeting.
A Labour source was eager to distance the party from the issue, saying: “The meeting was on the basis of a discussion about other issues and was one part of a series of regular contact meetings with foreign governments in London.
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
Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy
Those concerned about “The New World Order” speak as if the United States is coming under the control of an outside conspiratorial force. In fact, it is the US that is the New World Order. That is what the American unipolar world, about which China, Russia, and Iran complain, is all about.
Washington has demonstrated that it has no respect for its own laws and Constitution, much less any respect for international law and the law and sovereignty of other countries. All that counts is Washington’s will as the pursuit of hegemony moves Washington closer to becoming a world dictator.
The examples are so numerous someone should compile them into a book. During the Reagan administration the long established bank secrecy laws of Switzerland had to bend to Washington’s will. The Clinton administration attacked Serbia, murdered civilians and sent Serbia’s president to be tried as a war criminal for defending his country. The US government engages in widespread spying on Europeans’ emails and telephone calls that is unrelated to terrorism. Julian Assange is confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London, because Washington won’t permit the British government to honor his grant of political asylum. Washington refuses to comply with a writ of habeas corpus from a British count to turn over Yunus Rahmatullah whose detention a British Court of Appeals has ruled to be unlawful. Washington imposes sanctions on other countries and enforces them by cutting sovereign nations that do not comply out of the international payments system.
Last week the Obama regime warned the British government that it was a violation of US interests for the UK to pull out of the European Union or reduce its ties to the EU in any way.
In other words, the sovereignty of Great Britain is not a choice to be made by the British government or people. The decision is made by Washington in keeping with Washington’s interest.
CNN host Erin Burnett on Wednesday suggested that the National Rifle Association (NRA) had not crossed the line by targeting President Barack Obama’s daughters in an advertisement.
The NRA advertisement released on Tuesday branded the president an “elitist hypocrite” for opposing armed guards in schools while his own daughters were being protected by the Secret Service. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney slammed the ad as “repugnant and cowardly” because “a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight.”
Speaking to Burnett on Wednesday, CNN contributor Roland Martin agreed that the NRA was “weak and cowardly.”
“There’s no need to invoke the president’s daughter’s in this conversation,” Martin insisted. “I can guarantee you that had anybody invoked the daughters of President George W. Bush in a similar ad attacking him, folks on the right would be just as upset. It makes no sense.”
“But what about the fact that politicians use their kids when they want to politically all the time?” Burnett wondered. Read Full Article and Watch Video Here
In a speech from a balcony at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he said the files to be published in 2013 would affect “every country in this world”.
It is six months since he sought asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault claims, which he denies.
He fears being sent to the US and being punished for leaking diplomatic files.
A crowd of some 80 supporters gathered outside the building, in Knightsbridge, to listen to the 41-year-old Australian – whose website published a mass of leaked cables embarrassing a number of countries.
In his statement, Mr Assange said the US Pentagon had recently described the existence of Wikileaks as an “ongoing crime”.
Addressing supporters – some of whom carried candles – the Australian said: “While that remains the case and while my government will not defend the journalism and publishing of Wikileaks, I must remain here.
“However, the door is open, and the door has always been open, for anyone who wishes to use standard procedures to speak to me or guarantee my safe passage.”
He also said 2012 had been a “huge year” for the organisation.
During the speech, Mr Assange saluted journalists who reported arrests around the world, adding: “It is from the revelation of the truth that all else follows… our civilisation is only as strong as its ideas are true.”
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
Convicted: A jury took two hours to find Christopher Weatherfield (pictured outside court in January) guilty for his part in a hacking campaign
A leading British member of the ‘Anonymous’ hacking gang was today convicted for a series of devastating cyber-attacks on some of the world’s biggest companies..
On one occasion ‘hacktivist’ Christopher Weatherhead helped target PayPal because it would not process donations for the fundraising arm of Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, costing it £3.5million.
The self-confessed ‘idealist’ boasted online he would ‘rape’ and ‘kill’ the companies Anonymous attacked.
Today the 22-year-old remained impassive as the unanimous guilty verdict was returned for his part in distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, which made the victim’s website suddenly crash.
The DDoS attacks paralysed computer systems by flooding them with an intolerable number of online requests.
Victims would be directed to a page displaying the message: ‘You’ve tried to bite the Anonymous hand. You angered the hive and now you are being stung.’
Weatherhead was studying at Northampton University when he joined the cyber campaign which also attacked sites including MasterCard, Visa, Ministry of Sound, the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Weatherhead, who used the internet name Nerdo, also discussed the idea of attacking Lily Allen’s website in retaliation for her public anti-piracy stance.
Prosecutor Sandip Patel said: ‘Christopher Weatherhead, the defendant, is a cyber-attacker, and that he, and others like him, waged a sophisticated and orchestrated campaign of online attacks that paralysed a series of targeted computer systems belonging to companies, to which they took issue with for whatever reason, that caused unprecedented harm.’
Mr Patel said ‘Operation Payback’ had originally targeted companies involved in the music industry and opponents of internet piracy, but was later ‘broadened’ to include new objectives, including PayPal.
Julian Assange has made a name for himself by co-founding the website WikiLeaks and revealing sensitive governmental information. Now Assange is facing the consequences for his actions where he has been held up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for months and he speaks to RT on governments are intercepting entire nations through the Internet.
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.
Turmoil surrounding case in Sweden: Julian Assange. Photo: AP
Alleged victim: Political activist Anna Ardin.
Convicted: A jury took two hours to find Christopher Weatherfield (pictured outside court in January) guilty for his part in a hacking campaign
