Update: Edited podcast is posted.
The long-awaited release of the Guantanamo Files. More than 10,000 cables in the Cablegate release now posted—2000 of them from Canada and just out before the country's election. The Grand Jury beginning to issue subpoenas in its investigation of WikiLeaks. The media getting an out-of-the-ordinary tour of Ft. Leavenworth with the consent of the Department of Defense.
There was much to talk about this week.
With so much to discuss, Trevor Timm, the person behind the Twitter account @WLLegal, joined the program to talk about the latest news on WikiLeaks. Timm helped to make possible a great Personal Democracy Forum event called, “WikiLeaks & the Law" just over a month ago. [Go here for video of the full panel.] He also appeared on the show just over a month ago.
To listen to the recorded "This Week in WikiLeaks" podcast, click on the widget below:
Please note: Reportage on IrishLeaks and other leaking platforms should not be read as an endorsement by WL Central - prospective leakers are urged to satisfy themselves of the trustworthiness of their intended recipients and to take precautions to ensure their own anonymity.
Today marks the launch of IrishLeaks, an implementation of the Wikileaks model for anonymous leaking platforms in the Republic of Ireland. The platform has received some coverage in domestic Irish news in recent days. IrishLeaks is apparently unaffiliated with Wikileaks in any way. The site now claims to be operational, and open to submissions.
IrishLeaks is the latest in a string of regional Wikileaks-style anonymous whistleblower platforms that have been set up since Wikileaks began to garner international attention, the most active of which has been Balkanleaks. WL Central listed some of these organizations here.
The "About" section of the site reads:
The White House is denying, contrary to reports, that it was seeking to blacklist the San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Carla Marinucci.
WL Central reported yesterday how the White House was seeking to punish the San Francisco news organization for reporting on a protest against the inhumane pretrial incarceration of alleged military whistleblower Bradley Manning, during a fundraiser for President Obama on the 21st of April.
It had been reported that the journalist Carla Marinucci's use of video from the event was being viewed as a transgression against the regulations covering "print-pool" invitations to White House events, and that this was to be used as the pretext for her exclusion from future events.
Now, the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has issued a statement denying that any such punishments were being issued to the press for reporting on an issue of legitimate public interest:
The San Francisco Chronicle violated the coverage rules that they -– and every other media outlet –- agreed to as part of joining the press pool for that event. If they thought the rules were too restrictive they should have raised that at the beginning. However, no reporters have been banned from covering future presidential events and the White House of course would have no problem including any reporter who follows the rules in pool-only events.
Co-authored by Alexa O'Brien
WL Central's Heather Marsh spoke this week to Dennis Edney, the Canadian defense counsel for Guantanamo inmate Omar Khadr. Following is an excerpt from the interviews.
Photo credit: Colin Perkel / The Canadian Press
Transcript:
Have you read the Wikileaks release ... the Guantanamo file on Omar Khadr?
Yes.
Do you have any observations on that?
Of course. I do. What is it that I should say about that? Well, the one thing that is striking is how unreliable the evidence is to keep people in Guantanamo Bay. So much of the evidence relied upon and detaining people in Guantanamo Bay is second-hand hearsay, unreliable, and not the kind of evidence that would stand up in any court of law, proper court of law.
What a lot of people got ... or a lot of the media got out of Omar Khadr's report is that he was being treated not so much as a criminal, but as an intelligence asset because of his family.
Which is quite ... Absolutely. And what does it suggest? What intelligence does a fifteen year old boy have? What it was is that he was being held there because of his father. So, that's what they were looking for ... information about his father ... and so, his son has been left to rot in Guantanamo Bay because the Americans want to know about the father.
Just in time for the federal election in Canada, Wikileaks has released 2222 cables about the Canadian government. With two days until the election, this is a crowd sourcing job.
Wikileaks has asked people to post their findings on reddit or you can tweet them with the following hashtags (in order of importance): #Elxn41 #wlcan #Cdnpoli
Or you can add them to the comments below.
Canada has a federal election on May 2. While there is nothing new in that, there have been four called in the last seven years, this is already easily the most interesting one of the four. It started when MPs voted 156-145 to find the government in contempt of Parliament, a first in the history of the Commonwealth. They brought down the government on March 25 to force another election, something Prime Minister Harper called "a dangerous and unnecessary exercise." Harper's Conservative Party of Canada, a coalition between Canada's old right leaning conservative party and the newer and much farther right leaning Reform Party, has been governing with a precarious minority since 2006. Harper prorogued Parliament for three months in 2008 to avoid a vote of confidence, and once in 2010 to cripple the Afghan detainee investigation, and the government was still brought down twice.
Michael Ignatieff, the leader of Canada's Liberal party, frequently referred to as "the natural ruling party of Canada" due to their time spent in power, said "There are only two alternatives here. More of this disrespect for democracy, more of this contempt for the Canadian people, or a compassionate, responsible Liberal government." That seemed a reasonable statement, considering that some form of the Liberal or Conservative parties (and once a coalition of the two) have governed Canada since confederation. So reasonable that he used it to rebut his opponents in the leadership debate; "But Jack, at least we get into government," he replied, although no one really was expecting anything other than another Harper minority or perhaps a Harper majority. (Harper renamed the government of Canada "the Harper Government.")
The best situation the people who hate Harper could envision was another minority government which would then be brought down again, but hopefully this time the opposition would form a coalition. People have turned to creative ideas for the Anyone But Harper campaign, including vote swapping and a huge amount of grass roots campaigning on social media and other venues. The Canadian and international media alike have decreed that voting for a party other than the big two was downright irresponsible as it would 'split the vote' and give Harper a majority. Harper is campaigning, not to be elected, but for a majority, and his attacks are directed primarily against a coalition.
The Telegraph has released a new searchable database where you can sort through all Guantanamo detainees by nationality, current situation (released or still in Guantanamo) and at last, "Type of Detainee" which will tell you if they are Extremist, Innocent or Terrorist. If only the US Department of Defense had used this database years ago.
While most will be pleased to know that no 'Terrorists' have been released, there are 15 of them apparently in Guantanamo, all awaiting trials which are apparently no longer necessary. Abdul Qadir Yousef Hussein is declared innocent but still in Guantanamo. All of the other innocent detainees have, in the Telegraph's judgment, been released.
Polish public broadcaster TVP reports that an investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons on Polish territory may have yielded first results. According to a source, Polish investigators have evidence on the exact date prisoner Abu Zubaida was transferred to and from Szymany airport. He is said to have arrived in December 2002 and departed in September 2003.
Files recently released by Wikileaks may help to shed light on the fate of various other prisoners, in particular Abd al Nashiri. Warsaw prosecutor Robert Majewski confirmed that all relevant files will be translated and taken into account.
Read more on TVP.
For other WL Central coverage on the topic please see here.
“We are getting into classified and unclassified. All this is just about me proving what I did. If I did the things I did, I would admit that I did. Things I didn’t do, I will say clearly I didn’t do them. But if the Tribunal is saying there are more classified things, classified information – they have to prove that – I am not asking to see the witnesses, if you have any. I need just their names to prove that your documents are true. I think this is not justice; it is not right. It hasn’t been witnessed in the whole human history. If you base your judgments or the accusations against me on classified information, then there is no need to continue. Let’s just stop it right here.” – Faris Muslim al-Ansari, Guantanamo Detainee (ISN #253) at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in September 2004
Seventeen years old when captured in December 2001, Fais Muslim Al Ansari (ISN:253) went before a tribunal and had his status as an enemy combatant reviewed. In his testimony, it is apparent al-Ansari, who at the time was twenty years old, understood the injustice of the system he was being subjected to at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. This understanding likely led him to participate in a hunger strike with over one hundred other detainees, many of which would be force fed as they attempted to protest detention conditions and their inability to adequately dispute their continued detention.
WL Central will be updating news on Bahrain, with new items added at the top. All times are ET in USA. You can contact me on twitter @carwinb or by email at carwinb@hushmail.com. Don't send media when links available. Most email is not encrypted and not anonymous. I cannot guarantee anyone's safety in transmission.
Current time and date in Manama, Bahrain:
Send Arabic #firstaid images by MMS/SMS/email or print as fliers usng http://bit.ly/gv3tS #Bahrain.
Amnesty calls for halt to execution of four young men who were protesters sentenced to die tomorrow by firing squad. Three others sentenced to life in prison.
[CORRECTION] My sincere apologies for the error in today's report. I regret any pain the headline may have caused. Please see revised headline and subtitle. - @carwinb
*Picture via @a340aviator
Death Sentence:
Life Sentences:
Excerpt from Amnesty International:
Authorities in Bahrain must not allow the execution of four protesters sentenced to death by a military court over the killing of two police officers in anti-government demonstrations last month, Amnesty International said today...
...“In this case, the accused were tried before a special military court, although they are civilians. It also appears that the trial was conducted behind closed doors. As well, those sentenced have no right of appeal except to another special military court, raising great fears about the fairness of the entire process.”
The court sentenced Ali Abdullah Hassan al-Sankis, Qassim Hassan Matar, Saeed Abduljalil Saeed and Adbulaziz Abdulridha Ibrahim Hussain to death on 28 April.
Three other defendants tried with them, Issa Abdullah Kadhim Ali, Sadeq Ali Mahdi and Hussein Jaafar Abdulkarim, were sentenced to life in prison by the same court. All seven accused are reported to have denied the charges. (Source: Amnesty International
UK fighting for Guantanamo detainee Shaker Aamer's release
Foreign Secretary William Hague will raise the case of Shaker Aamer with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she comes to the UK in May. Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt has told the BBC that dealing with the US on the issue is "frustrating". "We believe we are doing the very best that we can by trying to meet any objections the United States might have and putting the case for Shaker Aamer to return to the United Kingdom."
The US State Department will not comment on the diplomatic negotiations involving Aamer, except to say that "discussions on the case are ongoing". Aamer has never been charged and he has been approved for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations, but 'legal expert' Benjamin Wittes told BBC "It's not, just to say you'll let that person roam around freely."
But sources close to the case say the sticking point is that the US wants Mr Aamer sent to his homeland of Saudi Arabia where it is argued he would be less able to speak out.
via @Asher_Wolf
Obama guilty of unlawful command influence
Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told NBC News that Obama's statement "He broke the law," regarding Bradley Manning "is unlawful command influence," which includes an assumption of guilt. "The president shouldn't have said it. He should have been more circumspect."
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WL Central will be updating news on Iran, with new items added at the top. All times are ET in USA.
You can contact me on twitter @carwinb or by email at carwinb@hushmail.com. Don't send media when links available. Most email is not encrypted and not anonymous. I cannot guarantee anyone's safety in transmission.
Current time and date in Tehran:
For WL Coverage of Iran see March and February.
TUESDAY, April 26
*With research assistance from Heather Marsh
Pakistani national Naqib Ullah (also Naqibullah) was 14 years old and out doing an errand for his father when he was kidnapped from his village in Khan, Afghanistan by 11 men that called themselves, “Samoud’s people.” The men, according to Ullah, “forcibly raped him at gunpoint”. He was taken back to the men’s village encampment and “forced to do manual work.”
Ullah was in the camp for three days when, in December 2002, US forces raided the camp. The group had been forewarned. They ordered Ullah and others to stay behind and fight US forces. He was captured and had a weapon but it had not been fired. He was transported to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in January 2003 because the military believed he might have knowledge of “Taliban resistance efforts and local leaders.”
This teenager is just one of twenty-two juveniles who wound up in Guantanamo. And, with the release of the Gitmo Files by WikiLeaks, more details on the capture, transfer, detention and release of juvenile detainees are becoming known.
Article 1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”
David House tweets Wikileaks grand jury subpoenas are being issued
Bradley Manning friend and supporter David House tweeted Subpoenas are being issued in the WikiLeaks grand jury. Violations of Espionage Act. No further comment at this time. two hours after tweeting "Are you now, or have you ever been, a WikiLeaks supporter?"
Julian Assange's defense attorney Mark Stephens retweeted the subpoenas comment, but followed up with @lockean how do you know? and was answered by House @MarksLarks FBI is making house calls
And now from Wikileaks: Fresh subpoenas are being issued in the WikiLeaks Alexandra, VA secret grand jury in relation to the espionage act.
Write to Bradley Manning
Jonathan Getzschman has obtained the following information for anyone wanting to write to Bradley Manning. A large and ongoing volume of mail would remind his new home that we are still watching.
Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
Letters will be rejected if they contain any of the following:
Over the past year, the Wau Holland Foundation received roughly 1.3 million Euros in donations for Wikileaks. Around 400,000 Euros were paid out, the majority for the salaries of Wikileaks staff (ca. 100.000) and campaigns (ca. 140.000), and rather modest amounts for travel, legal assistance and technical infrastructure. Moreover, Paypal received 30.000 Euros in fees.
"Campaigns" also involve the work of external contractors such as journalists and specialist editors.
The average donation amounted to 24.70 Euros. The highest amount received was 3.500 Euros in April 2010.
Read the full report here.
Kevin Rudd
Minister Foreign Affairs
PO Box 6022
House of Representatives
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
AUSTRALIA
Dear Minister
1) Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
Firstly I would like to say that the international community who support Julian Assange would undoubtedly thank you for your support of him on the issue of his legal rights in the UK and scotching the threats made by your colleagues the prime minister Ms Gillard and attorney general Mr McClelland to cancel his passport late last year. Your support of human rights in relation to Julian Assange is to be commended, including the intercession of our diplomats on his behalf asking certain questions of Swedish authorities (1) which it is assumed emanated from your good offices.
More could be done for example to point out to the European Union that their European Arrest Warrant System is disgracefully flawed and subject to serial abuses by member states (especially Poland) now that showing a prima facie case has been removed entirely from extradition procedures in the European Union’s EAW system. Australia as you would likely be aware, did not extradite without the applicant nation showing a prima facie case up until 1985 when the “no evidence” and “dual criminality” provisions became available to applicant nations under amended legislation.(2) Where subjected to abuse, prima facie requirements should be reinstated.
As you are also no doubt aware the US Department of Justice is leaving no pebble unturned in their vengeful attempts to find - or more likely - manufacture some evidence against Julian Assange for a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage.
This is happening despite First Amendment protections which the DOJ’s epigones are attempting to undermine as they engage in polemical arguments using gymnastic semantics in the US media, in an exercise to assert he is not a journalist as a means to preclude those rights, contrary to the US constitution.
Julian Assange told the Times of India Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, that the Swiss banking data that was handed to him on January 17 of this year has not been released because the source, Rudolf Elmer, gave the data to Assange publically and was immediately arrested pending a criminal investigation. Assange told Goswami, "We have had an indirect offer through a third party that if we return what they believe to be the data then they will work to acquit Mr. Elmer to be free. So my ability to talk about this subject is of course limited by the fact that the Swiss bank has a hostage."
Assange also stated that India seems like it is losing per capita much more tax money than Germany.
A statement from the Pentagon was published just after 9 pm ET on April 24th, no more than an hour or two after the New York Times had posted their package covering the Gitmo Files they had not obtained from WikiLeaks. The statement was posted on NPR and the Times website. Yet, again, it seems this is an instance of complete collusion between the press and government.
Michael Calderone reports "representatives from NPR and the Times visited the White House and spoke with Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell and members of Joint Task Force Guantanamo." And, "The news organizations agreed to some redactions requested by government officials but not all of them."
Recall, in February, it was found out that the Times had met with the State Department prior to their release of the US State Embassy Cables. Marcy Wheeler over at Firedoglake highlighted NYT’s close cooperation with the State Department:
Because of the range of the material and the very nature of diplomacy, the embassy cables were bound to be more explosive than the War Logs. Dean Baquet, our Washington bureau chief, gave the White House an early warning on Nov. 19. The following Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.
The release of the files should draw attention to the reality that, despite US President Barack Obama’s promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, the prison is still open. In fact, El Pais has posted analysis to complement coverage of the Guantanamo Files, which details how “legal and political setbacks” prevented Obama from closing the military prison:
Barack Obama criticized George W. Bush for orchestrating, executive order, a labyrinthine detention center that sent hundreds of terror suspects after the attacks of [September 11th] , condemning them to oblivion and without the right to a fair trial in civil court. Obama has perpetuated the shame of Guantánamo to the president's decision, also through an executive order to reinstate the military commissions created by Bush and formalize the system of indefinite detention, which offers the only solution to many of the 172 inmates who reside in the prison to rot within its walls.
There is no other solution. And there is none because the invention was conceived Guantanamo from violating the most basic principle of humanity and legality rules for governing the United States and the developed democracies for centuries. To send to whom the administration of George W. Bush considered suspected of violating U.S. and be soldiers of Al Qaeda, the legal architects of the "war on terror" was invented the concept of unlawful enemy combatants, thus bypassing the safeguards offered by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war . Detainees in secret CIA prisons anywhere in the world began to land in Guantanamo in January 2002, hooded and shackled hand and foot.
It should draw attention to each of the individual reports and place them in the context of information that journalists have already reported. It should help us further understand what has been going on in the dark and murky military prison that has become so notorious and perhaps further color the world's understanding of documents the ACLU and other organizations have managed to obtain in the past years.
But, the New York Times has published coverage of the documents and did not obtain them from WikiLeaks. Also, according to Greg Mitchell, who has been covering WikiLeaks for TheNation.com with a daily blog since Cablegate began, “"WikiLeaks abruptly lifted the embargo Sunday night, after the organization became aware that the documents had been leaked to other news organizations, which were about to publish stories about them."
McClatchy Newspapers writes “the US military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo,” the Washington Post details new classified military documents obtained by the “anti-secrecy organization” present “new details” of detainees whereabouts on Sept 11, 2001 and afterward and the Daily Telegraph reports that it has exposed “America’s own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world’s most dangerous terrorists.”
Months after news organizations reported the Guantanamo Files might be WikiLeaks’ next release, the files are now posted on the WikiLeaks website. Nearly 800 documents, memoranda from Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), the combined force in charge of the Guantanamo Bay prison to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida.
The memoranda do not detail torture or how detainees were interrogated. The reports from between 2002 and 2008 show how JTF-GTMO justified when to keep detainees and also when it chose to release detainees. In cases of detainees “released,” that detainee’s “transfer” is detailed to “the custody of his own government or that of some othergovernment.”
The reports represent not just JTF-GTMO but, according to WikiLeaks, they also represent the Criminal Investigation Task Force created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations and the Behavioral Science Teams (BSCTs) consisting of psychologists who had “a major say in “exploitation” of [detainees] in interrogations.”
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