Tag Archives: WikiLeaks

Chris Hedges ~ The Judicial Lynching Of Bradley Manning

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TruthDig June 10 2013

AP/Patrick Semansky ~ Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted out of a courthouse at Fort Meade, Md., on Wednesday after the third day of his court-martial.

FORT MEADE, Md.—The military trial ofBradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.” And this is what has happened.

Manning is also barred from presenting to the court his motives for giving the websiteWikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of his motives and potentially harming national security can be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it will be too late.

The draconian trial restrictions, familiar to many Muslim Americans tried in the so-called war on terror, presage a future of show trials and blind obedience. Our email and phone records, it is now confirmed, are swept up and stored in perpetuity on government computers. Those who attempt to disclose government crimes can be easily traced and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Whistle-blowers have no privacy and no legal protection. This is why Edward Snowden—a former CIA technical assistant who worked for a defense contractor with ties to the National Security Agency and who leaked to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian the information about the National Security Council’s top-secret program to collect Americans’ cellphone metadata, e-mail and other personal data—has fled the United States. The First Amendment is dead. There is no legal mechanism left to challenge the crimes of the power elite. We are bound and shackled. And those individuals who dare to resist face the prospect, if they remain in the country, of joining Manning in prison, perhaps the last refuge for the honest and the brave.

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Matt Taibbi ~ As Bradley Manning Trial Begins, Press Predictably Misses The Point

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RollingStone June 6 2013

Well, the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the government couldn’t have scripted the headlines any better.

In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there’s a reporter character named “Sam Miller” played by actor Troy Garity who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you’re doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting much opposition from people up on high, then you’re probably eating Chumpbait.

There’s an obvious Chumpbait angle in the Bradley Manning story, and most of the mainstream press reports went with it. You can usually tell if you’re running a Chumpbait piece if you find yourself writing the same article as 10,000 other hacks.

The Trials of Bradley Manning

The CNN headline read as follows: “Hero or Traitor? Bradley Manning’s Trial to Start Monday.” NBC went with ”Contrasting Portraits of Bradley Manning as Court-Martial Opens.” Time magazine’s Denver Nicks took this original approach in their “think” piece on Manning, “Bradley Manning and our Real Secrecy Problem”:

Is he a traitor or a hero? This is the question surrounding Bradley Manning, the army private currently being court-martialed at Fort Meade for aiding the enemy by wrongfully causing defense information to published on the Internet.

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Stephen Lendman ~ We’re All Bradley Manning

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SteveLendmanBlog June 5 2013

On June 3, trial proceedings began. They’ll last well into summer. What’s ongoing reflects much more than Manning alone. We’re all in this together. Freedom in America is on trial.

Post-9/11, it’s been on the chopping block for elimination. Convicting Manning of anything compromises what is too important to lose.

He deserves praise, not prosecution. His fate is ours. That’s what’s fundamentally at stake. Everyone stands to win or lose with him.

In his February plea statement, he said he wanted to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Americans have a right to know the “true costs of war,” he stressed. He called war logs given WikiLeaks “some of the most important documents of our time.”

He chose ones he believed “wouldn’t cause harm to the United States.” Washington’s “obsessed with capturing and killing people,” he said.

He was sickened by the “Collateral Murder” video he saw. US helicopter pilots gunned down innocent civilians. They murdered anyone trying to help them. Manning called doing so “bloodlust.”

He exposed lawlessness. He reflects justifiable resistance. Francis Boyle calls it “our Nuremberg moment US government officials are the outlaws,” he says.

Marjorie Cohn calls Manning’s heroism “uncommon courage.” He “fulfilled his legal duty to report war crimes,” she said.

“Enshrined in the US Army Subject Schedule No. 27-1 is ‘the obligation to report all violations of the law of war.’ “

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Chris Hedges ~ ‘We Steal Secrets’: State Agitprop

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TruthDig June 2 2013

Alex Gibney’s new film, “We Steal Secrets,” is about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. It dutifully peddles the state’s contention that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate publisher and that Bradley Manning, who allegedly passed half a million classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, is not a legitimate whistle-blower. It interprets acts of conscience and heroism by Assange and Manning as misguided or criminal. It holds up the powerful—who are responsible for the plethora of war crimes Manning and Assange exposed—as, by comparison, trustworthy and reasonable. Manning is portrayed as a pitiful, naive and sexually confused young man. Assange, who created the WikiLeaks site so whistle-blowers could post information without fear of being traced, is presented as a paranoid, vindictive megalomaniac and a sexual deviant. “We Steal Secrets” is agitprop for the security and surveillance state.

Rebels are typically a bundle of contradictions and incongruities. They are often difficult people whom the dominant systems of power abused at a young age. They have the intelligence needed to dissect the workings of power, and to devise mechanisms to fight back. German Jewish intellectuals in the Nazi era such as Hannah Arendt, writers such as James Baldwin, who was gay as well as black, and the revolutionary Frantz Fanon, a black writer and psychiatrist raised in the French colony of Martinique, all were outsiders, even outcasts. Like these three, Manning and Assange rose out of personal troubles to ask the questions traditional rebels ask, and they responded as traditional rebels respond.

“The initial presentation of the story was that Bradley Manning was a pure political figure, like a Daniel Ellsberg,” Gibney told The Daily Beast in an interview in January. “I don’t think that’s a sufficient explanation of why he did what he did. I think he was alienated; he was in agony personally over a number of issues. He was lonely and very needy. And I think he had an identity crisis. He had this idea that he was in the wrong body and wanted to become a woman, and these issues are not just prurient. I think it raises big issues about who whistleblowers are, because they are alienated people who don’t get along with people around them, which motivates them to do what they do.”

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Worldwide Protests Ahead Of Bradley Manning’s Monday Trial

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End The Lie June 2 2013

Demonstrations are taking place all over the world in support of Bradley Manning, the US army private whistleblower who leaked intelligence to WikiLeaks.

Manning’s trail will start Monday at the Fort Meade military base in Baltimore, some three years after having been accused of the largest leak of classified materials in the history of the United States. Among other things, he has been charged with ‘aiding the enemy’ – which could potentially land him in jail with a life sentence without parole.

Already the stenographers who were meant to create daily transcripts of the trial have been denied press passes and will not now be at the trial.

The number of protesters at Fort Meade was over 3000 by Saturday with many of them shouting ‘We are all Bradley Manning!’ And globally, people are holding events in over 24 cities on four continents over the course of the weekend. Aside from American cities, people as far as Toronto, Berlin, Paris and even South Korea’s Seoul have joined in a chorus of support for Manning.

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Aaron Swartz’s Last Gift: Site Launches Whistleblower Safe House

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Common Dreams May 17 2013 (Thanks, Christina)

In era of “most aggressive government assaults on press freedom,” new open source dropbox provides “secure route” for leaks - Lauren McCauley, staff writer

Kevin Poulsen and Aaron Swartz working out the kinks of their open sourced safe house. (Photo via The New Yorker)One month before his January 11th suicide, web pioneer and creative commons architect Aaron Swartz completed one last project—an “opensource drop box for leaked documents along the lines of WikiLeaks.”

Launched Thursday, Deaddrop is the brainchild of former hacker turned Wired editor, Kevin Poulsen, who approached Swartz with the idea. Swartz built the code for the project—one last gift to journalists and whistleblowers worldwide and the open-source internet community.

“He agreed to do it,” writes Poulsen, “with the understanding that the code would be open-source—licensed to allow anyone to use it freely—when we launched the system.”

As the Obama Administration continues their dogged pursuit and prosecution of press sources and whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and while the news of the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press records continues to swirl, newsrooms are frantically reevaluating their security procedures.

“With the risks now so high,” said Poulsen, “it’s crucial that news outlets find a secure route for sources to come to them.”

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Alcuin Bramerton ~ War For Profit. War For Theft. War For Torture. The Fetid Excrescence Of US Militarism

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Alcuin & Flutterby March 8 2013

A detailed new compilation of evidence by the Guardian newspaper (London) and the BBC Arabic Service (London) has brought up fresh material to support the emerging international view that the US government and its AIPAC/Zionist corporate controllers now form the major engine of state-sponsored terrorism on the planet.

During the Bush Jnr presidency, the US Pentagon sent Colonel James Steele (58), an American veteran of its dirty wars in Central America, to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq which set up covert detention and torture centres to extract information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture reported during the US occupation and deliberately accelerated the country’s downward spiral into civil war. This civil war served the requirements of US business and diplomacy in the region.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the new fifty-minute London documentary, implicate US government advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed. David Petraeus has been directly linked through an adviser, Colonel James H Coffman, to this abuse. Coffman described himself as Petraeus’s eyes and ears out on the ground in Iraq. Steele and Coffman worked as a team and knew everything about the US-sanctioned torture programmes.

Each clandestine US detention centre in Iraq had its own interrogation committee. Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. These committees used various means of torture to make the detainees confess, including electricity, hanging them upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on their genitals.

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ The Institutionalization of Tyranny

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Paul Craig Roberts | January 19 2013

Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.

Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress’ assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal “security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.

But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.

Republicans have been fighting Social Security ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in the 1930s, and they have been fighting Medicare ever since President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965 as part of the Great Society initiatives.

Conservatives accuse liberals of the “institutionalization of compassion.” Writing in the February, 2013, issue of Chronicles, John C. Seiler, Jr., damns Johnson’s Great Society as “a major force in turning a country that still enjoyed a modicum of republican liberty into the centralized, bureaucratized, degenerate, and bankrupt state we endure today.”

It doesn’t occur to conservatives that in Europe democracy, liberty, welfare, rich people, and national health services all coexist, but that somehow American liberty is so fragile that it is overturned by a limited health program only available to the elderly.

Neither does it occur to conservative Republicans that it is far better to institutionalize compassion than to institutionalize tyranny.

The institutionalization of tyranny is the achievement of the Bush/Obama regimes of the 21st century. This, and not the Great Society, is the decisive break from the American tradition. The Bush Republicans demolished almost all of the constitutional protections of liberty erected by the Founding Fathers. The Obama Democrats codified Bush’s dismantling of the Constitution and removed the protection afforded to citizens from being murdered by the government without due process. One decade was time enough for two presidents to make Americans the least free people of any developed country, indeed, perhaps of any country. In what other country or countries does the chief executive officer have the right to murder citizens without due process?

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Julian Assange ~ WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Cypherpunks, Surveillance State [Video]

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Democracy Now | November 28 2012 | Thanks, Minty

In his most extended interview in months, Julian Assange speaks to Democracy Now! from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been holed up for nearly six months.

Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it.

On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks.

“Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. … Our rightful and natural growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade.”

Assange also speaks about his new book, “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.”

“The mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their cronies,” he says.

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Paul Craig Roberts ~ Don’t Vote For Evil

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Paul Craig Roberts | October 12 2012

Back during the George W. Bush neocon regime, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in his UN speech summed up George W. Bush for the world. I am quoting Chavez from memory, not verbatim. “Yesterday standing at this same podium was Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulfur.”

Chavez is one of the American right-wing’s favorite bogyman, because Chavez helps the people instead of bleeding them for the rich, which is Washington’s way. While Washington has driven all but the one percent into the ground, Chavez cut poverty in half, doubled university enrollment, and provided health care and old age pensions to millions of Venezuelans for the first time.

Little wonder he was elected to a fourth term as president despite the many millions of dollars Washington poured into the election campaign of Chavez’s opponent.

While Washington and the EU preach neoliberalism–the supremacy of capital over labor–South American politicians who reject Washington’s way are being elected and reelected in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia.

It was the Ecuadoran government, not Washington, that had the moral integrity to grant political asylum to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The only time Washington grants asylum is when it can be used to embarrass an opponent.

In contrast to the leadership that is emerging in South America as more governments there reject the traditional hegemony of Washington, the US political elite, whether Republican or Democrat, are aligned with the rich against the American people.

The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised to cut taxes on the rich, taxes which are already rock bottom, to block any regulation of the gangsters in the financial arena, and to privatize Social Security and Medicare.

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Washington’s Blog ~ In America, Journalists Are Considered Terrorists

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TheIntelHub | September 29 2012 | Washington’s Blog

We’ve previously noted that American journalists are an endangered species (click on the links for stunning details):

If they criticize those in power, they may be smeared by the government and targeted for arrest (and see this).

Indeed, because the core things which reporters do could be considered terrorism, in modern America, they could even targeted under counter-terrorism laws.

And an al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network.  And see this.

***

Experts who write about the truth – without any middleman – are also being harassed (and see this).

Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange could face the death penalty for his heinous crime of leaking whistleblower information which make those in power uncomfortable … i.e.being a reporter.

Former attorney general Mukasey said the U.S. should prosecute Assange because it’s“easier” than prosecuting the New York Times.  But now Congress is considering a bill which would make even mainstream reporters liable for publishing leaked information (part of an all-out war on whistleblowing).

Do you think that I am being melodramatic and over the top?  Think again …

Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday:

A US air force systems analyst who expressed support for WikiLeaksand accused leaker Bradley Manning triggered a formal military investigation last year to determine whether she herself had leaked any documents to the group.

***

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US Declares Assange An Enemy Of The State [Video]

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 | September 27 2012

On Wednesday night, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange spoke the United Nations General Assembly during a “Strengthening Human Rights” event. In his speech, Assange implored President Obama to do the right thing when it came to whistleblower Bradley Manning and criticized the administration for not practicing what it preaches when it comes to free speech. Shortly before Assange’s address, it has been learned through a Freedom of Information Act request that the US has declared the Wikileaks founder an enemy of the state and Kristinn Hrafnsson, Wikileaks spokesperson, joins us with the latest developments.

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Abby Rogers ~ NDAA Plaintiffs Say Obama Flipped Out When A Judge Blocked The Act Because He Was Already Detaining People

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The Jeenyus Corner | September 27 2012

The Obama administration might be coming for you, no matter who you are, according to a group of people fighting President Barack Obama’s indefinite detention act.

Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, and a whole host of others involved in the fight against the National Defense Authorization Act yesterday took to Reddit to answer questions about the act.

A federal judge permanently blocked the NDAA — which allows the government to indefinitely detain anyone even remotely related to terrorism — claiming it has a “chilling effect” on free speech.

But the Obama administration was quick to pounce, saying Judge Katherine B. Forrest overstepped her bounds in opposing the White House.

“Anyone who dissents is in threat,” Hedges wrote in response to a question about who should fear the act. “The legislation, as the dumped emails by Wikileaks from the security firm Stafford illustrated, allows the state to tie a legitimate dissident group to terrorism and strip them of their right of dissent.”

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