Whistle Blower Threatened with 35 Years in Prison, Warns of Developing Tyranny. Bradley Manning vs the US military - Listening Post. It has been more than 17 months since Private Bradley Manning was arrested for allegedly leaking classified US military documents to Julian Assange and his whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Since his detention, there has been news of torture, solitary confinement and mistreatment by prison guards. The information leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks made front page news around the world. But Manning's case and the grim conditions of his detention have not attracted as much press. In this week's News Divide, we look at the case of Bradley Manning and the implications it could have on whistleblowers in the US.
Quick hits from the media world in our Newsbytes: an update on bloggers in detention in Syria and Egypt; a controversial media law in Hungary is partially blocked by the country's constitutional court; Iranian state TV airs an alleged confession by an alleged US spy; and the media spectacle from North Korea - the masses mourn the death of Kim Jong-Il. The story behind news pictures.
Private Manning’s Humiliation by Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler. Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking US government documents to Wikileaks. He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral. For nine months, Manning has been confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. During his one remaining hour, he can walk in circles in another room, with no other prisoners present.
He is not allowed to doze off or relax during the day, but must answer the question “Are you OK?” The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. Private Manning has been designated as an appropriate subject for both Maximum Security and Prevention of Injury (POI) detention. The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates. Bruce Ackerman Yale Law School New Haven, Connecticut. In Support of Imprisoned Wikileaks Whistleblower Pvt. Bradley Manning.
August 8, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. These brief remarks published below were given by Ray McGovern at the rally for Bradley Manning on Sunday, August 8 in Quantico, where he is imprisoned. The rally was sponsored by Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and The Courage to Resist. CNN and other media covered the event. In times like this we must be careful to keep our bearings, lest we come to love the chaos that passes for reality. This is why we need to honor our brother Bradley Manning. The principalities and the powers, including the Fawning Corporate Media, have no hold on citizens like Private Manning, who refuse to live in a moral vacuum. Bradley Manning dared to mock the falsity parading as reality after our country had a nervous breakdown as a result of 9/11 and the efforts of those who would use 9/11 to stoke our fear.
THAT false "reality" has lost its power, because it cannot live in the light of truth. Lessons from Manning's transfer out of Quantico - WikiLeaks. Nation of They. [2010] The Bradley Manning leaks. Pvt Manning proves 'slippery slope' Bradley Manning deserves a medal | Glenn Greenwald. After 17 months of pre-trial imprisonment, Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old US army private and accused WikiLeaks source, is finally going to see the inside of a courtroom. This Friday, on an army base in Maryland, the preliminary stage of his military trial will start. He is accused of leaking to the whistleblowing site hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, war reports, and the now infamous 2007 video showing a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad gunning down civilians and a Reuters journalist. Though it is Manning who is nominally on trial, these proceedings reveal the US government's fixation with extreme secrecy, covering up its own crimes, and intimidating future whistleblowers.
Since his arrest last May in Iraq, Manning has been treated as one of America's most dastardly traitors. The UN's special rapporteur on torture has complained that his investigation is being obstructed by the refusal of Obama officials to permit unmonitored visits with Manning. Obama’s War on Whistleblowers. Many comedians consider stand-up the purest form of comedy; Doug Stanhope considers it the freest. “Once you do stand-up, it spoils you for everything else,” he says. “You’re the director, performer, and producer.” Unlike most of his peers, however, Stanhope has designed his career around exploring that freedom, which means choosing a life on the road.
Perhaps this is why, although he is extremely ambitious, prolific, and one of the best stand-ups performing, so many Americans haven’t heard of him. Many comedians approach the road as a means to an end: a way to develop their skills, start booking bigger venues, and, if they’re lucky, get themselves airlifted to Hollywood. But life isn’t happening on a sit-com set or a sketch show — at least not the life that has interested Stanhope. He isn’t waiting to be invited to the party; indeed, he’s been hosting his own party for years.
The campaign against whistleblowers in Washington. Washington, DC - On January 23, the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects. His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort. Kiriakou's plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don't go together. By now, there can be little doubt that government retaliation against whistleblowers is not an isolated event, nor even an agency-by-agency practice. The number of cases in play suggests an organised strategy to deprive those in the US of any knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does.
How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy. Kiriakou, in particular, is accused of giving information about the CIA's torture programmes to reporters two years ago. Take a Stand for Whistleblower Protections: Tell Your Rep. to Defend Robert MacLean: Jane Mayer on the Obama war on whistle-blowers - Glenn Greenwald. In a just released, lengthy New Yorker article, Jane Mayer — with the diligence and thoroughness she used to expose the Bush torture regime — examines a topic I’ve written about many times here: the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers generally, and its persecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake in particular (Drake exposed massive waste, excess and perhaps illegality in numerous NSA programs).
Mayer’s article is what I’d describe as the must-read magazine article of the month, and I encourage everyone to read it in its entirety, but I just want to highlight a few passages. First, we have this: When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.”
But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. The WH Loves Aggressive Journalism — Abroad — Today’s Q’s for O’s WH — 2/22/2012. Feb 22, 2012 2:29pm (Note: White House press secretary Jay Carney began today’s briefing by praising journalists who have died covering the unrest in Syria: Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik as well as Anthony Shadid.) TAPPER: The White House keeps praising these journalists who are — who’ve been killed – CARNEY: I don’t know about “keep” — I think - TAPPER: You’ve done it, Vice President Biden did it in a statement. You’re — currently I think that you’ve invoked it the sixth time, and before the Obama administration, it had only been used three times in history. CARNEY: Well, I would hesitate to speak to any particular case, for obvious reasons, and I would refer you to the Department of Justice for more on that.
I think we absolutely honor and praise the bravery of reporters who are placing themselves in extremely dangerous situations in order to bring a story of oppression and brutality to the world. TAPPER: So the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here? -Jake Tapper. Meet John Kiriakou by Kelley B. Vlahos. WASHINGTON — Meet John Kiriakou. A married father with a baby and two small children at home, he once had a fulfilling job as a CIA operations officer and spent his early post-9/11 days “hunting down [al] Qaeda figures” in Pakistan for his country. If only he kept his mouth shut. Take a good look at Kiriakou because it is likely you won’t see him the same way again, at least not for a long while, because he’s been charged with disseminating classified information under the Espionage Act, in addition to disclosing the name of a covert CIA operative to a New York Times reporter, and making false statements in order to describe a classified interrogation technique in his 2010 memoir, The Reluctant Spy.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou (AP) All told, Kiriakou faces 30 years in prison for the charges leveled against him. “He is being charged under the Espionage Act … (which is) a World War I-era law that is incredibly heavy-handed and confusing and meant to go after spies,” she said. Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake. On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen.
A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” Jesselyn Radack | When whistle-blowers suffer. The case of Thomas A. Drake, a former official indicted last week on charges of providing classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter, is painfully familiar.
In 2002, I became the target of a leak investigation stemming from America's first post- terrorism prosecution. FOR THE RECORD: Libby: An Op-Ed article on April 27 about whistle-blowers stated that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby unmasked covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in the case, not for leaking her name. — As a Justice Department ethics attorney, I had inadvertently learned of a court order for all copies of Justice's internal correspondence about the interrogation of the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. I resurrected the missing e-mails from the bowels of my computer archives, gave them to my boss and resigned.
I submit that Drake, the former NSA official, did not leak. WikiLeaks, whistleblowers and wars. San Francisco, CA - On February 24, the Washington Post ran a prominent story on a "top-secret" State Department cable that warned of Pakistani safe-havens for militants that were allegedly putting the "US strategy in Afghanistan in jeopardy". The cable was so secret, the Post reported, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan "sent it through CIA channels rather than the usual State Department ones". Yet somehow, it still ended up on the pages of one of the biggest newspapers in the United States of America. While many might have assumed this was the work of WikiLeaks and their alleged source Bradley Manning, it wasn't. "Several" US officials described the cable's contents to the Post in a seemingly coordinated effort to affect Afghanistan war policy.
Will those "several officials" be investigated, arrested and aggressively prosecuted for leaking such highly sensitive information? "There just seems to be disconnect here," Tapper remarked.