The tenth episode of "This Week in WikiLeaks" features Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord and Bradley Manning Support Network Steering Committee member Kevin Zeese. McCord and Zeese have both appeared on "This Week in WikiLeaks." They are part of this week's episode because I recorded them talking at an event in New York City organized by World Can't Wait to promote a new short documentary, "Incident in New Baghdad."
Run time is about 1 hour for the episode.
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Rally for Bradley Manning
A rally is being planned at Leavenworth on June 4 "to protest the indefinite detention and unconstitutional torture of Bradley Manning." The Facebook page is here.
Obama spokesman denies Obama expressed the view he expressed
White House spokesman Tommy Vietor denies that US President Obama was "expressing a view as to the guilt or innocence of Pfc. Manning specifically" when he said, regarding Bradley Manning, "He broke the law."
Regarding Obama's further statement that he has to abide by the laws as well as Manning, Steven Aftergood, a classified information expert at the Federation of American Scientists, agreed with the point made earlier by WL Central, “There are rules and procedures governing the de-classification process, but those rules also are based in presidential authority. The president has supreme authority over what is classified.”
While the White House is playing down the significance of the president's statement, Manning supporters are not. UK Friends of Bradley Manning writes: It is not surprising that the White House is keen to play down this incident. Military case law indicates that “pretrial publicity itself may constitute unlawful command influence” (United States v. Simpson, 58 MJ 368) and, if this is raised at court martial, the US Government will have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the case has not been prejudiced. (United States v. Reed, 65 M.J. 487) Should unlawful command influence be proven, incidentally, then dismissal of the case is possible “as a last resort.” (United States v. Douglas, 68 M.J. 349)
A new short documentary called, “Incident in New Baghdad,” premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City on Sunday. The film tells the story of Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, a soldier who appears in the “Collateral Murder” video rescuing two wounded children.
The director, James Spione, attended an event at Revolution Books in NYC on April 21, 2011. He talks about his initial reaction to the video WikiLeaks released and how he was horrified. But, then he began to pay attention to the media response and found it was pretty much the same on every channel.
It didn’t matter if it was Fox, ABC, CNN, CBS or MSNBC. It really didn’t matter. For the most part, each media channel’s response was “let’s find two people with opinions we know in advance and we’ll have them argue about this and they’ll say things we already know they are going to say and we’ll say that we were journalists and we did our job. And, it’s bullshit.”
Spione was doing research on the Internet and he found an interview with McCord. He thought it was interesting that he had actually been on the scene and wondered why the media was not talking to him about the incident. So, he decided to fly out and spend some days in Wichita, Kansas meeting McCord, shooting and doing an extensive interview for the film.
Oral hearing for Wikileaks Twitter appeal cancelled
Today's hearing of oral arguments has been cancelled in the appeal of last month's order over whether the US government has the right to access the online information of three Twitter users in aid of its WikiLeaks investigation, and also whether they can be informed of what other internet companies have turned over their information without notifying them. The three, Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, US citizen Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp of the Netherlands, were all notified by Twitter of the order against their data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have been assisting the three users with their challenge.
EFF earlier wrote "cooperating counsel John Keker of Keker and Van Nest will urge the court Friday to require the government to protect the First Amendment freedoms of speech and association of the Twitter users and the Fourth Amendment rights of the users in their locations. ACLU attorney Aden Fine will ask the court to unseal all documents related to other requests for private data".
US District Court Judge Liam O'Grady canceled the hearing and will instead issue a ruling after reading both sides' written briefs.
Obama on Manning: “He Broke the Law”
At a fundraiser for President Barack Obama at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, a group of progressive supporters of Bradley Manning paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend and disrupt the event. Oakland activist Naomi Pitcairn personally paid for tickets so people from her group could attend. The group sang a song with lyrics they wrote expressing their disgust with the way the Obama Administration has responded to Manning’s inhumane treatment.
Someone with the group also managed to confront President Obama on Manning. Obama’s handlers may have been preoccupied because in this clip that runs about a minute Obama opens up about what he thinks about what Manning did.
“People can have philosophical ideas about certain things,” President Obama explains. “But, look, I can’t conduct diplomacy on open source.” He then goes on to add that he has to abide by certain classified information rules or law and if he had released material like Manning did he’d be breaking the law.
Now, here is the remark that deserves the most attention: “We’re a nation of laws. We don’t individually make our decisions about how the laws operate.” He adds, “He broke the law.” Finally, before removing himself from the conversation, he says Manning “dumped” information and “it wasn’t the same thing” as what Daniel Ellsberg did because what Ellsberg leaked “wasn’t classified in the same way.”
"We don’t believe the government anymore. All their decisions are just ink on paper for us." - Omar Ali, a Kurdish-Syrian activist.
Thirteen human rights groups have signed a press release condemning the Arab League's support of Syria's bid for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. The regional group for Syria has the same number of nominations as they have seats available, so at this point Syria seems guaranteed a seat. While the human rights groups feel that support for Syria's bid is an "an insult to the UN body and its mission", a quick glance at the current membership shows Syria, who have killed some 220-250 of their own citizens in recent weeks and detained and tortured close to a thousand, should feel right at home. While Libya was recently suspended, the council still has Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Gabon, Nigeria, Cameroon and enough other countries with sordid human rights records to constitute a jury of their peers. They need support from half of the members, when the vote takes place on May 20.
SANA state news agency today published the decrees on ending the state of emergency, abolishing the Supreme State Security Court, and regulating the right to peaceful demonstration, signed today by President Bashar al-Assad. Opposition activist Haitham al-Maleh told Reuters the move was "useless", and "The problem is that the ruling elite and the security have put their hands on the judiciary, and that other legislation they had introduced exempted the security forces from being held accountable to law."
Abdel Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president based in Paris told BBC Arabic: "The crisis in Syria has nothing to do with the presence or absence of the state of emergency. It is not the state of emergency that arrests people and takes them to jail and it is not the state of emergency that fires on people. ... Assad has exposed himself completely before the people, through the crimes committed by his security apparatus. This has created a deep feeling among Syrians that the continuation of the regime would be a catastrophe. The depth of the rift between the regime and the majority of the people... will lead to the collapse of a regime desperately struggling to survive."
Yesterday protests continued unabated by the announcement, as the country gears up for what both sides are expecting to be a huge demonstration with huge retaliation. This week has seen a concentration on government crackdown on students and universities, with many arrested and beaten. Security is readying for Friday, when protests are expected in 40 or more cites, by deploying armed security in plainclothes everywhere protests are expected. Tanks are reported in Tahrir Square in Homs.
Defense attorneys for Canadian child soldier Omar Khadr, filed a motion yesterday requesting that Khadr's sentence be reduced from eight years to four. Defense claims that prosecutors had misled them into believing Khadr's plea bargain would be thrown out if they challenged the prosecution's star witness, a psychiatrist named Dr. Michael Welner. According to the motion, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, the judge presiding over Khadr’s case, joked that “Dr. Welner would have been as likely to be accurate if he used a Ouija board”.
Dr. Welner, who was called to assess the future danger to be expected from Khadr, wrote in his response to the clemency request, “I encountered.... an area where no systematic guidelines are chronicled and no actuarial measures are available.” Khadr’s lawyers write that Dr. Michael Welner's testimony was “unscientific” and “designed solely to inflame and mislead the jury.”
Welner's testimony, based on a brief interview with Khadr, covered a great deal of territory, including statements that Khadr's family was a big influence on him (he was captured at 15 and spent the ensuing eight years in Guantanamo), and simultaneously that because he had been imprisoned without trial in maximum security torture facilities for eight years, he had been "marinated in jihad" and could not be "deradicalized". Despite the statement that he was radicalized at Guantanamo, he could not be released to Canada because of insufficient "deradicalization" programs in Canada. Welnar also stated that a devout Muslim would not fit in in Canada.
The Pentagon’s decision to transfer the alleged whistleblower to WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, caught Manning’s defense by surprise. Manning’s move was not reported to his defense counsel until “twenty minutes before the Pentagon’s press briefing.” The way his defense learned of the move was the same way most citizens of the world did: by reading the information that was leaked to the Associated Press just before the briefing. Supporters of Manning are now watching closely, planning to call attention to any new violation of his rights that might occur.
David E. Coombs, Manning's lawyer, says the Pentagon had been thinking about moving Manning for a long time. So, the timing of the move did not surprise Manning’s lawyer David E. Coombs. He blogged:
The defense recently received reliable reports of a private meeting held on 13 January 2011, involving high-level Quantico officials where it was ordered that PFC Manning would remain in maximum custody and under prevention of injury watch indefinitely. The order to keep PFC Manning under these unduly harsh conditions was issued by a senior Quantico official who stated he would not risk anything happening “on his watch.” When challenged by a Brig psychiatrist present at the meeting that there was no mental health justification for the decision, the senior Quantico official issuing the order responded, “We will do whatever we want to do.” Based upon these statements and others, the defense was in the process of filing a writ of habeas corpus seeking a court ruling that the Quantico Brig violated PFC Manning’s constitutional right to due process. See United States ex. rel. Accardi v. Shaughnessy, 74 S.Ct. 499 (1954) (violation of due process where result of board proceeding was predetermined); United States v. Anderson, 49 M.J. 575 (N.M. Ct. Crim. App. 1998) (illegal punishment where Marine Corps had an unwritten policy automatically placing certain detainees in MAX custody). The facts surrounding PFC Manning’s pretrial confinement at Quantico make it clear that his detention was not “in compliance with legal and regulatory standards in all respects” as maintained at the Pentagon press briefing.
The Bradley Manning Support Network, which formed to “provide prisoner support” during his imprisonment, put out a press release indicating concern over the move. Kevin Zeese, an organizer with the Support Network, says his “transfer from Virginia to Kansas limits his access to his civilian attorney David Coombs of Rhode Island. It also severely limits visitation opportunities by his East Coast family and friends.” Jeff Paterson of Courage to Resist and the Support Network says, “It wasn’t a secret that we were preparing to rally one to two thousand for an upcoming DC-area pre-trial hearing.”
Is it possible he is being moved because the Bradley Manning Support Group has been successfully mobilizing people to protest his detention at Quantico? On March 20, a day that was declared Bradley Manning International Support Day, hundreds turned out for a protest at Quantico, just one day after the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Reports from Firedoglake indicated “the ratio of police to protesters was disproportionate.” About one hundred regular police officers were present, six on horseback. Dozens of riot police with police dogs and then about a half-dozen military officers with gas masks carrying automatic weapons and tear gas were there. And, prior to the protest, the base the director of operations raised “the specter of infrastructure damage, vandalism or harassment to USMC personnel” through a “Threat Advisory” issued just prior to the planned protest.
The Syrian government today passed a bill that lifted the country's 48 year old emergency law as well as abolished the state security court for political prisoners and approved a law allowing 'regulated' peaceful protests requiring Interior Ministry permission. In a country with 10,000 political prisoners, walking into the Interior Ministry to obtain permission for a protest does not seem risk free. Neither can a protest be peaceful when Syrian security are firing at it as has been the case in the current protests. There is also a total ban on political gatherings, and the Interior Ministry today called the current protests a mutiny by armed Salafi militants who it promised to 'punish with the strongest penalties.'
The Ministry said it will not be lenient with such terrorist acts and it will work strictly to enhance security and stability all over Syria and pursue terrorists everywhere to bring them to justice.The Ministry called on the citizens to tell about the whereabouts of terrorists and suspects and not allow them to exploit the freedom atmosphere to shed blood and corrupt public and private properties.
Assad's government has so far released political prisoners and detained many more, replaced the government while retaining the Assad family and friends who control all government, military, intelligence and economy, and lifted the emergency law while retaining all of the other laws that allow the Assad government to operate as it pleases, such as guaranteed immunity for crimes committed in the line of duty for the secret police. Protesters were once again unimpressed by the reforms and promised to continue protesting.
Bradley Manning moving to Fort Leavenworth
'US officials' say private Bradley Manning is being moved to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas according to the Associated Press. An announcement is expected tomorrow at the Pentagon. "The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not yet been made public."
Fort Leavenworth is home to the United States Disciplinary Barracks, the U.S. military's only maximum-security facility, which houses male service members convicted at court-martial for violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. According to Wikipedia, only enlisted prisoners with sentences over five years, commissioned officers, and prisoners convicted of offenses related to national security are confined to the USDB. Manning is still awaiting trial. Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility, opened October 5, 2010, is also on the Fort Leavenworth site and may be the one Manning is headed to.
Press briefing at the Pentagon contained the following:
The European Court of Justice, the highest court in Europe, today gave its preliminary opinion on the appeal case between artists’ rights agency Sabam (Société Belge des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs) and ISP Scarlet Extended. Sabam won a court order in 2007 in Brussels Court which would force the ISP (then called Tiscali) to block users from illegally downloading copyrighted material and gave it six months to install the approved system Audible Magic music fingerprinting system. The ISP said the spying on its customers this entailed would be illegal.
In the preliminary opinion, which is usually the basis of the final ruling, Advocate General Cruz Villalón considers that the installation of that filtering and blocking system is a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data, both of which are rights protected under the Charter of Fundamental Rights. By the same token, the deployment of such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The Advocate General also objected to the system on the grounds that it would operate “…in abstracto and as a preventive measure, which means that a finding would not first have been made that there had been an actual infringement of an intellectual property right or even that an imminent infringement was likely.”
Vancouver native Marc Emery, was today denied a transfer to Canada to serve the final four years of his five year sentence. Emery's lawyer Kirk Tousaw said US authorities told his client that the US government refused his transfer on April 6 despite a recommendation from his sentencing judge that he be transferred and despite his meeting all the requirements, due to the “seriousness of the offence” and “law enforcement concerns.”
Marc's serious offense is selling marijuana seeds by mail to the US, a serious offense on the US side of the border, where the law equates one marijuana seed to one plant to 100 kilos of marijuana, but almost never prosecuted in Canada where seed shops are common, and the last conviction was against Emery in 1998 when he was fined $2,000. In fact on Wednesday, an Ontario court struck down Canada's laws that prohibit the possession and growing of marijuana as unconstitutional. The judge suspended his ruling for three months, to give the federal government time to appeal or respond; if they are unsuccessful, marijuana will be legal to possess and cultivate in Ontario in three months, which will set precedent for all of the other provinces. That would explain why the US has "law enforcement concerns," as Emery in Canada would have no chance of being in jail, much less serving repeated solitary confinement. According to the US - Canada Extradition Treaty, extradition applies only in cases where the “offenses are punishable by the laws of both Contracting Parties by a term of imprisonment exceeding one year.”
Following a lengthy legal battle, Zurich prosecutors now have to look into claims that in 2004 Julius Baer hired private investigators to intimidate and harass Rudolf Elmer and his family. So far, only Elmer himself and the alleged perpetrators had been heard. According to the Supreme Court verdict, prosecutors now have to interview Elmer's neighbours as witnesses.
Elmer says that he forwarded data on Julius Baer to Wikileaks in 2008, and in January 2011 he handed over two CDs to Julian Assange at a London press conference. He was subsequently sentenced for violating bank confidentiality in January 2011. He was also found guilty of intimidating and threatening Julius Baer employees. He appealed the decision.
Read more on NZZ.
New Zealand's Minister of Justice and Minister of Commerce Simon Power pictured left.
Email: s.power@ministers.govt.nz
Phone: (04) 817 6803
Fax: (04) 817 6503
Update:
An internet buzz was caused by an MP of the currently governing National Party of New Zealand who posted the following tweet just hours before giving a speech in support of the new amendment.
Her response to the online reaction below:
Well, it depends. Is her composer friend also the copyright holder? Besides the strangeness of phrasing the friend's own work as "a compilation of K-pop", her speech shows, as pointed out at Torrent Freak, her understanding of the copyright laws she endorsed appears to be questionable, as does her innocence of copyright infringement. As the burden of proof has been passed to the accused by the law she endorsed, a more clear response is in order.
Her speech is also notable for claiming great losses of income by the entertainment industry due to file sharing, while at the same time giving a history of what she calls the multi - billion dollar Korean movie industry which she says was created by illegal file sharing.
New Zealand's Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill was passed yesterday as part of the emergency legislation dealing with the Christchurch earthquake, and will come into effect on September 1 of this year. It was passed by 111 votes to 11, and was supported by all parties except the Greens and independent MPs Chris Carter and Hone Harawira. The controversial amendment allows for internet accounts to be suspended for up to six months after the user is accused three times of copyright infringement, as well as providing "an efficient, low-cost process to hear illegal file-sharing claims" and awards of up to $15,000 to the copyright owner.
Terry Coles, the Managing director of one of New Zealand's top internet service providers (EOL) describes the law as "effectively useless" since it did not take into account hotspots, shared IP addresses and legal file sharing. Coles also said the ISPs should have been spoken to before the bill was passed, since they were the ones who would be approached by copyright owners and would have to divulge the identity of the accused customer.
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), which some believe could establish and require Internet users to have ID on the Internet, was unveiled today at the US Chamber of Commerce. NSTIC aims to establish "identity ecosystems," what the National Institute for Standards in Technology describes as a "a user-centric online environment, a set of technologies, policies, and agreed upon standards that securely supports transactions ranging from anonymous to fully authenticated and from low to high value."
Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke delivered the following remarks:
"I'm optimistic that NSTIC will jump-start a range of private-sector initiatives to enhance the security of online transactions. This strategy will leverage the power and imagination of entrepreneurs in the private sector to find uniquely American solutions. Other countries have chosen to rely on government-led initiatives to essentially create national ID cards. We don't think that's a good model, despite what you might have read on blogs frequented by the conspiracy theory set. To the contrary, we expect the private sector to lead the way in fulfilling the goals of NSTIC. Having a single issuer of identities creates unacceptable privacy and civil liberties issues. We also want to spur innovation, not limit it. And we want to set a floor for privacy protection that is higher than what we see today, without placing a ceiling on the potential of American innovators to make additional improvements over time. "
What might this mean for the Internet as citizens of the world know it today? As the US government, in cooperation with the private sector, works to preserve cyber infrastructure or networks that it considers to be “strategic national assets,” how might this protection of assets fundamentally alter key characteristics of the Internet, which many have grown to appreciate? In the age of WikiLeaks and Anonymous, in an era where the US government has been unable to prevent the Chinese government and military from stealing usernames and passwords for State Department computers, it seems that this strategic plan could transform the Internet into a realm that requires you to prove your identity with an approved and issued identification card every time you move in to a new website.
Violence has escalated significantly in the past month between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Itamar attack, which involved the stabbing of five members of a Jewish family by two individuals whom were believed to be Palestinians, and arms found, which Israel believed were being smuggled from Iran, inflamed tensions further. As some suggest Operation Cast Lead II has begun, Haaretz, Yedioth Ahronoth and Al Akhbar have begun to release US State Embassy cables on Israel from WikiLeaks.
Haaretz reports on Hamas and the Gaza Strip. According to a November 2009 cable, Israel has no clear or consistent policy and Israel has refused US requests to “allow more goods into Gaza to assist the population.” Also, months after Operation Cast Lead, Embassy Tel Aviv reported, “Israelis are enjoying the best security situation since the outbreak of the second intifada [in 2000], the result of Israeli intelligence successes in destroying the suicide bombing network in the West Bank as well as good security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority’s security forces.”
This cable [09TELAVIV2473] features Major General Yoav Galant, the Israel Defense Forces general responsible for Gaza and southern Israel, commenting:
They are starting to celebrate in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi as the news of the decisions taken at the meeting of the Libya International Contact Group earlier today in Doha, Qatar began to filter in. They see most of the decisions taken are supportive of their struggle to overthrow the 42 year old regime of Mummar Gaddafi and they expect that soon many more nations will join France and Qatar in recognizing the Transitional National Council as the sole legitimate government of Libya.
At the end of the one day summit, the group issued a statement calling for Gaddafi to step down. "Gaddafi and his regime has lost all legitimacy and he must leave power allowing the Libyan people to determine their own future," it said. The meeting which was hosted by Qatar and chaired by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and the Qatari prime minister, Hamed bin Jassem included representatives of NATO countries, Middle East and African countries and a number of international organizations. Ban ki Moon represented the United Nations. At this meeting were representatives of the Transitional National Council that has emerged as the leadership of the Libyan rebels. For many in the contact group it was their first opportunity to meet with the rebel leadership. Also in Qatar, ahead of the talks was Moussa Koussa, Libya's former foreign minister who became the most prominent member of Gaddafi's regime to deflect when he fled to London last month. Just how he got to Doha and what he was doing there remains something of a mystery. He had no formal role in the summit and the opposition Transitional Nation Council said they had no connection to him but he was reported to be having some meetings outside the summit.
According to a March 19 article on Magdeburger Nachrichten, the owner of the German WikiLeaks domain, Theodor Reppe, had been accused of facilitating access to child pornography, and accessing it himself through his Tor server. All charges were dropped as he could demonstrate that he only forwarded Internet traffic to WikiLeaks, but did not himself maintain the site. (WikiLeaks published an Australian Internet blacklist which also contains links to child pornography sites.) Moreover, he could prove that the Tor server was used by many other individuals, rather than just by himself. Thus, the IP of his Tor server could not be linked to his own Internet activities.
Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak will be detained for 15 days, according to the facebook page of Egypt's prosecutor general, on accusations of corruption and abuse of authority. The facebook statement says the investigation will cover the orders to open fire on demonstrators (covered here on WL Central) as well as any abuse of the president's authority for personal gain.
Earlier today Mubarak was reported by state TV to be taken into intensive care after suffering heart problems following questioning over the killing of protesters and embezzling of public funds. Mubarak's sons sons Alaa and Gamal have also been detained for investigation regarding corruption and violence.
The announcement is a victory for protesters who early on Saturday filled Tahrir Square with hundreds of thousands for one of the biggest protests since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted. Protesters demanded a more thorough removal of the corrupt old regime and a transfer of power from the military council to civilian rule. Thirteen people are reported wounded and two dead from an attempt by the army to clear the protesters. "All of us, the people, the army and the government, feel regret for the events of last Saturday," the Egyptian prime minister, Essam Sharaf said on state TV on Monday.
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