Washington might hope that it has Julian Assange cornered, but despite the man’s inability to physically move anywhere, it would seem that it is he who is doing all the cornering. He explained to an Argentinian paper how US intervention in Ukraine had led to civil war, how the West had helped ISIS, and why Israel supported Hamas.
The United States has spent “A lot of time Trying to Bring Ukraine to the West,” the WikiLeaks Founder said in an Interview to Pagina / 12, Argentinian newspaper on Monday. The intervention of Western countries in the Middle East had also led to the creation of the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), an Islamist group that is currently gaining a massive following across the wider Middle East and Africa, Assange said. “The IS is A Direct result of the adventurism of the West,” Said Assange.
He says the “adventurism” of Western countries has already destroyed the Libyan and Syrian society and now is “destroying Iraq for oil and other geopolitical reasons.” He said that most people are aware of the fact that arms are being funneled into Syria, and that the same agitators who provide these are also focused on reducing Iran’s influence on Iraq. But “what we don’t know is that in recent years in recent years Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have increased their power and managed to gain certain independence form the US.” As a result, Washington stopped being “the only geopolitical actor “pushing developments in the Middle East, claims Assange.
Assange claims that Israeli authorities had supported the Hamas group at its early stages in order to divide the Palestinian resistance. “Our cables reveal that Israel supported Hamas in its infancy, that Hamas was used as an instrument to divide the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] and the Palestinian resistance,” Assange said.
U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning could face punishment of indefinite solitary confinement for having an expired tube of toothpaste, an issue of Vanity Fair in which transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner describes her new life living openly as a woman, the U.S. Senate report on torture and other "prohibited property" in her cell at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence for leaking U.S. government cables to WikiLeaks. On Thursday, an Army spokesperson said it is committed to "a fair and equitable process" in Manning’s case, which is now pending before a disciplinary board.
Today, in response to the sentencing of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement.
We are outraged that a whistleblower and a patriot has been sentenced on a conviction under the Espionage Act. The government has stretched this archaic and discredited law to send an unmistakable warning to potential whistleblowers and journalists willing to publish their information. We can only hope that Manning’s courage will continue to inspire others who witness state crimes to speak up.
This show trial was a frontal assault on the First Amendment, from the way the prosecution twisted Manning’s actions to blur the distinction between whistleblowing and spying to the government’s tireless efforts to obstruct media coverage of the proceedings. It is a travesty of justice that Manning, who helped bring to light the criminality of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is being punished while the alleged perpetrators of the crimes he exposed are not even investigated. Every aspect of this case sets a dangerous precedent for future prosecutions of whistleblowers – who play an essential role in democratic government by telling us the truth about government wrongdoing – and we fear for the future of our country in the wake of this case.
We must channel our outrage and continue building political pressure for Manning’s freedom. President Obama should pardon Bradley Manning, and if he refuses, a presidential pardon must be an election issue in 2016.
The Justice Department used a secret search warrant to obtain the entire contents of a Gmail account used by a former WikiLeaks volunteer in Iceland, according to court records released to the volunteer this week.
The search warrant was issued under seal on October 14, 2011 by the Alexandria, Virginia federal judge overseeing the WikiLeaks grand jury investigation there. The warrant ordered Google to turn over “the contents of all e-mails associated with the account, including stored or preserved copies of e-mails sent to and from the account, draft e-mails, deleted e-mails [...] the source and destination addresses associated with each e-mail, the date and time at which each e-mail was sent, and the size and length of each e-mail.” The warrant also ordered Google not to disclose the search to anyone.
The target of the search was Herbert Snorrason, an Icelandic activist who helped manage WikiLeaks’ secure chat room in 2010. Snorrason was one of the WikiLeaks volunteers who resigned from the organization en masse in September 2010. But that evidently didn’t stop the government from grabbing Snorrason’s email a full year later.
The search is the first confirmed case of the government obtaining the contents of a WikiLeaks-connected e-mail account. The government won a public court battle in January 2012 to obtain non-content metadata from the Twitter accounts of three WikiLeaks associates: Seattle coder and activist Jacob Appelbaum; Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s parliament; and Dutch businessman Rop Gonggrijp. The feds also got metadata on Appelbaum from Google and the ISP Sonic.net.
In those cases, the government got the records under 18 USC 2703(d), a 1994 amendment to the Stored Communications Act that allows law enforcement access to non-content internet records, such as transaction information, without demonstrating the “probable cause” needed for a search warrant.
Digital files obtained during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden can be used to determine whether Wikileaks’ leaker Army Pfc. Bradley Manning “aided” Al Qaeda, a judge ruled during a pre-trial hearing Wednesday. Manning pled guilty to leaking classified information, but denied aiding the enemy, the most serious charge leveled against him.
As Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola reported from Fort Meade, Judge Denise Lind rejected a motion from Manning’s defense to disallow files obtained from Bin Laden’s compound on the basis that “evidence of circumstances surrounding receipt is relevant to whether he did give it to the enemy.”
According to court documents Tweeted by independent journalist Alexa O’Brien, the defense argued that such files are “not relevant” and serve “unfair prejudices” and “confusion of the issues.” Part of their argument rests on the question of “receipt.” As Gosztola notes, whether Bin Laden accessed files leaked by Manning does not prove the soldier personally passed them along to Al Qaeda: No evidence has been presented yet to indicate that Manning gave information to WikiLeaks and then someone within WikiLeaks turned around and passed that information to an Al Qaeda member. The government is making its entire argument on the fact that it was published to the Internet and accessible to the “enemy” and, therefore, Manning “aided the enemy.”
WikiLeaks strikes again. The whistleblowing website has released 1.7 million cables dating from 1973-1976 that shine a bright light on U.S. foreign policy.
WikiLeaks says the documents were obtained from Freedom of Information requests and the State Department’s “systematic declassification review.” WikiLeaks is calling it the Public Library of US Diplomacy. The organization has now published the cables on their website in a searchable format, saying it is “the world's largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications.”
Many of the files deal with U.S. foreign policy under the helm of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He wrote some of the cables published on the WikiLeaks website. The files also expose diplomatic documents on American dealings with authoritarian regimes and the 1973 war between Israel and Arab states.
“The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on Earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published,” said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a statement.
Abby Martin talks to Icelandic MP, and former Wikileaks member, Birgitta Jonsdottir, on the 3rd anniversary of the Wikileaks' release of the collateral murder video, about, justice for Bradley Manning, Julian Assange's Case, and the Icelandic Revolution.
A short film featuring Bradley Manning's voice.
Downloads, embed code, and transcript for full audio, as well as excerpts: Press Freedom Foundation
A leaked audio recording has emerged of the statement Army whistleblower Bradley Manning delivered at his pre-trial hearing in military court late last month. Manning acknowledged he gave hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, saying he wanted to show the American public the "true costs of war" and "spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan." This is the first time Manning's voice has been heard publicly since he was arrested nearly three years ago. We air excerpts of his remarks, hearing Manning describe in his own voice the moment he decided to release the documents, and the outrage he felt at the "Collateral Murder" video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq.
Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of the biggest unauthorised disclosure of state secrets in US history, has pleaded guilty to being the source of the leak, telling a military court that he passed the information to a whistleblowing website because he believed the American people had a right to know the "true costs of war".
At a pre-trial hearing on a Maryland military base, Manning, 25, who faces spending the rest of his life in military custody, read out a 35-page statement in which he gave an impassioned account of his motives for transmitting classified documents and videos he had obtained while working as an intelligence analyst outside Baghdad.
Manning said: "We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day."
World wide support for Manning as trial of alleged Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond takes bizarre twist.
A federal judge has refused to recuse herself from the closely watched trial of jailed computer hacker Jeremy Hammond, an alleged member of the group "Anonymous" charged with hacking into the computers of the private intelligence firm Stratfor and turning over some five million emails to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Hammond’s lawyers had asked Federal Judge Loretta Preska to recuse herself because her husband worked for a client of Stratfor, and himself had his email hacked. Hammond’s supporters say the Stratfor documents shed light on how the private intelligence firm monitors activists and spies for corporate clients. He has been held without bail or trial for more than nine months.
The man on the frontline of the information battle, Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, has given a Christmas address. He has delivered his speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he's been ensconsed for six months, after being granted political asylum - More on RT
Not long after WikiLeaks began publishing leaked diplomatic cables in November 2010, the anti-secrecy organization ran into trouble raising money.
Increased government scrutiny and criticism from lawmakers prompted several companies, including MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, to stop processing donations to the non-profit organization. WikiLeaks eventually suspended publication due to the "bank blockade."
On Sunday, a group of journalists and press freedom activists launched the Freedom of the Press Foundation as a way to crowd-source funding for WikiLeaks and independent journalistic organizations that expose government corruption and advocate for transparency.
"Since WikiLeaks became a front-page news story, secrecy has gotten worse in the U.S," said Trevor Timm, co-founder and executive director for the Freedom of Press Foundation.
The Real News interviews Michael Ratner is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and Chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. He is currently a legal adviser to Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
The subject of this proceeding was the government or United States and military's treatment of Bradley Manning during the two and a half years he's been in custody. And it was particularly over the first year of his custody to year and a half when the allegations are that he was tortured in custody, or at least treated with cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. There's been a lot of substantiation of that treatment. The rapporteur for the United Nations, Mendez, basically said he was treated contrary to the Convention against Torture. And this was a trial in which that conduct was going to be talked about.
On Oct. 26 2012, in Santa Monica, CA, Graham Nash of "Crosby, Stills and Nash" fame played for over an hour at a benefit for accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower PFC Bradley Manning. The video contains his live performance of "Almost Gone," as well as discussion of his support for Bradley Manning. Visit www.bradleymanning.org to learn more about Bradley's case,
WikiLeaks has begun releasing the 'Detainee Policies': more than 100 classified or otherwise restricted files from the United States Department of Defense covering the rules and procedures for detainees in U.S. military custody. Over the next month, WikiLeaks will release in chronological order the United States' military detention policies followed for more than a decade.
The documents include the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of detention camps in Iraq and Cuba, interrogation manuals and Fragmentary Orders (FRAGOs) of changes to detainee policies and procedures. A number of the 'Detainee Policies' relate to Camp Bucca in Iraq, but there are also Department of Defense-wide policies and documents relating to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and European U.S. Army Prison facilities. [read the full press release here]
In U.N. Address, WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Urges Obama Admin to End "Regime of Secrecy". Speaking via videolink from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed a side meeting of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday evening. In his remarks, Assange gave thanks to the United Nations for its treaties on political asylum and denounced the U.S. treatment of alleged Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. Assange also accused President Obama of exploiting the Arab Spring, and called on the U.S. to end its persecution of WikiLeaks and its supporters. We air Assange's address.