After 19 long months of detention, including solitary confinement, Private Bradley Manning has been brought before the court – sort of. His pre-trial proceedings which began on Friday 16th December will be heard by a military ‘investigating official’, the equivalent of a civilian court judge.The hearings are supposed to continue through this weekend. The proceedings are being held in Fort Meade, in the north-eastern state of Maryland, also home to the National Security Agency.
Bradley Manning was imprisoned for allegedly leaking more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables and two war footages to Wikileaks, including the July 2007 video that showed Americans gunning down Iraqi civilians in Baghdad from an Apache helicopter – among the victims of which were two Reuters journalists and two injured children.
This is the first time that Manning has been produced in any kind of judicial court. He has been slapped with 23 charges, the most serious of which is “giving intelligence knowingly to the enemy” – the ‘enemy’ being Wikileaks. The charge is serious because, if convicted, it carries the death penalty, although prosecutors have declared that they will not seek this ultimate punishment. They are seeking instead a punishment of life without parole.
The proceedings themselves, according to reports trickling out, would do a Stalinist regime proud, as they are tightly controlled, with several restrictions being placed on attending journalists. Live coverage is forbidden. The chargesheet itself has been released for the first time. Manning’s civilian defence lawyer, David Coombs, has raised several issues of unfair treatment with the investigating officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Almanza.
Firstly, according to reports, out of 48 defence witnesses requested by Coombs only two (another 10 are shared with the prosecution) have been allowed; whereas all of prosecution’s witnesses – many of whom as mentioned above were on Coombs’ list as well – have been granted.
Secondly, judge Almanza himself has worked for the prosecution in the US Department of Justice, which is currently pursuing its own case against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. Coombs asked Almanza to step down (the official term being ‘recuse’) citing conflict of interest. The demand has been rebuffed. Almanza will continue to preside over the hearings termed as Article 32, named after the article in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that lays down the procedure for such a hearing.
The outcome of the pre-trial hearings will be referred to a higher military authority in Washington DC, who will then decide if Manning should face a full court martial.
Brief Background to the Case
Private Bradley Manning, a US intelligence analyst, based around Baghdad during the Iraq war, was arrested in May 2010 and briefly held in a detention centre in Kuwait. Since July 2010 he has been held at a prison in Quantico, Virginia. This period of imprisonment has also included solitary confinement, and according to several reports along with that of Amnesty, severe psychological abuse.
The US prosecutors, either back then or at present, have not been able to demonstrate any links between Manning and Julian Assange, except the much-touted online chat. The chat took place between Manning and a hacker named Adrian Lamo to whom Manning is supposed to have revealed his minimal association with Assange and his act of leaking sensitive information. Lamo himself had had former links with Wikileaks, and he promptly delivered the information he is supposed to have received to the state officials.
So, the only real source of evidence the prosecutors have, from what we know so far, is the chat log and Lamo’s claims.
It’s all about realpolitik
Meanwhile, US’s true interest seems to be in Wikileaks. At present, the Department of Justice is trying to pursue Assange, to get him on charges of ‘conspiracy’. Observers say that the ploy might be to break Manning psychologically and get him to testify against Assange. At the moment Assange is fighting his extradition to Sweden on charges of rape and sexual assault. His supporters claim that these are trumped up charges. Assange is currently staying at a friend’s house in the UK.
There seems to be some basis for thinking that the United States government is trying ‘divide and rule’ technique with Assange and Manning, for Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, has complained that she has not been given full access to the Manning hearing, and is treated instead like the general public. This means that if the hearings go into the confidential mode, Robinson like other members of the public, will be asked to leave as well, despite her client’s indirect involvement in the case.
Public support for Bradley Manning
Manning, however, has been hailed as a ‘hero’ by all his supporters – and there are quite a few of them. Supporters held a vigil and a rally on December 16th and 17th outside the gates of Forte Meade. The attendees included general supporters, the Bradley Manning Support Network organizers, the Occupy protesters who came in coaches from New York and Washington, Iraq Veterans Against the War, as well as the Vietnam war whistleblower, Dan Ellsberg.
http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/2011/12/18/bradley-manning-wikileaks-and-judicial-farce/
This is the first time that Manning has been produced in any kind of judicial court. He has been slapped with 23 charges, the most serious of which is “giving intelligence knowingly to the enemy” – the ‘enemy’ being Wikileaks. The charge is serious because, if convicted, it carries the death penalty, although prosecutors have declared that they will not seek this ultimate punishment. They are seeking instead a punishment of life without parole.
The proceedings themselves, according to reports trickling out, would do a Stalinist regime proud, as they are tightly controlled, with several restrictions being placed on attending journalists. Live coverage is forbidden. The chargesheet itself has been released for the first time. Manning’s civilian defence lawyer, David Coombs, has raised several issues of unfair treatment with the investigating officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Almanza.
Firstly, according to reports, out of 48 defence witnesses requested by Coombs only two (another 10 are shared with the prosecution) have been allowed; whereas all of prosecution’s witnesses – many of whom as mentioned above were on Coombs’ list as well – have been granted.
Secondly, judge Almanza himself has worked for the prosecution in the US Department of Justice, which is currently pursuing its own case against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. Coombs asked Almanza to step down (the official term being ‘recuse’) citing conflict of interest. The demand has been rebuffed. Almanza will continue to preside over the hearings termed as Article 32, named after the article in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that lays down the procedure for such a hearing.
The outcome of the pre-trial hearings will be referred to a higher military authority in Washington DC, who will then decide if Manning should face a full court martial.
Brief Background to the Case
Private Bradley Manning, a US intelligence analyst, based around Baghdad during the Iraq war, was arrested in May 2010 and briefly held in a detention centre in Kuwait. Since July 2010 he has been held at a prison in Quantico, Virginia. This period of imprisonment has also included solitary confinement, and according to several reports along with that of Amnesty, severe psychological abuse.
The US prosecutors, either back then or at present, have not been able to demonstrate any links between Manning and Julian Assange, except the much-touted online chat. The chat took place between Manning and a hacker named Adrian Lamo to whom Manning is supposed to have revealed his minimal association with Assange and his act of leaking sensitive information. Lamo himself had had former links with Wikileaks, and he promptly delivered the information he is supposed to have received to the state officials.
So, the only real source of evidence the prosecutors have, from what we know so far, is the chat log and Lamo’s claims.
It’s all about realpolitik
Meanwhile, US’s true interest seems to be in Wikileaks. At present, the Department of Justice is trying to pursue Assange, to get him on charges of ‘conspiracy’. Observers say that the ploy might be to break Manning psychologically and get him to testify against Assange. At the moment Assange is fighting his extradition to Sweden on charges of rape and sexual assault. His supporters claim that these are trumped up charges. Assange is currently staying at a friend’s house in the UK.
There seems to be some basis for thinking that the United States government is trying ‘divide and rule’ technique with Assange and Manning, for Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, has complained that she has not been given full access to the Manning hearing, and is treated instead like the general public. This means that if the hearings go into the confidential mode, Robinson like other members of the public, will be asked to leave as well, despite her client’s indirect involvement in the case.
Public support for Bradley Manning
Manning, however, has been hailed as a ‘hero’ by all his supporters – and there are quite a few of them. Supporters held a vigil and a rally on December 16th and 17th outside the gates of Forte Meade. The attendees included general supporters, the Bradley Manning Support Network organizers, the Occupy protesters who came in coaches from New York and Washington, Iraq Veterans Against the War, as well as the Vietnam war whistleblower, Dan Ellsberg.
http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/2011/12/18/bradley-manning-wikileaks-and-judicial-farce/
e-mail:
Homepage:
Comments
Hide the following 11 comments
We've said it once and we'll say it again
18.12.2011 22:15
No-one except Assange and his accusers know for sure whether the rape allegations are true. But the allegations were made BY ACTIVISTS who care about the ideals that Wikileaks stands for, and who deserve support and solidarity. Or is it that only famous media darlings deserve solidarity?
Feminists have said this many times before and we're going to keep banging on until the rest of you take your fingers out of your ears: WE LIVE IN A CULTURE WHERE RAPE ALLEGATIONS ARE ROUTINELY, SYSTEMATICALLY, DISMISSED AND IGNORED. IF YOU DISMISS RAPE ALLEGATIONS OUT OF HAND, YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO A CULTURE WHERE RAPISTS ARE NOT HELD ACCOUNTABLE AND WHERE RAPE SURVIVORS ARE NOT BELIEVED.
Again, it doesn't matter whether Assange is actually a rapist or not, there are only three people in the world who could know that. This isn't even about Assange, it's about every single supposedly progressive dude who writes about Assange taking the attitude that the rape allegations are probably made up and aren't that important anyway. When you treat rape allegations as "probably made up" despite the fact that there is zero evidence to support that, YOU ARE PROMOTING RAPE. YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO A CULTURE WHERE NO-ONE TAKES RAPE SERIOUSLY. YOU ARE MAKING IT EASIER FOR RAPISTS TO RAPE PEOPLE.
Also, do you know what kind of people like to dismiss, minimize, ignore, or apologize for rape more than almost anyone else? Cops. If you dismiss and minimize rape allegations you are behaving exactly the way that cops behave towards rape survivors.
redr
@ redr
18.12.2011 23:54
every time i read yet another rape apologist writing about their hero assange, i die a little bit more.
reading your comment helped me enormously. knowing i am not alone and that others see through the bullshit, see it for what it is, means more to me than i can express.
thank you so much.
rape survivor
everybody takes rape very seriously
19.12.2011 01:01
The law industry works on the basis of the potential profit of a "win" set against the potential loss of a "lose". The industry doesn't really care about justice, only the bottom line.
This case is not the same as a normal case. Assange has so pissed off the state(s) that cost is no issue.
And as he is accused of something that has never been called 'rape' before, so it's new legal ground anyway.
The state(s) want to 1. fuck him over 2. git him into a new legal jurisdiction, and 3, get him to the USA. They are achieving 1 already, 2 and 3 seem not far away.
And what is happening in the activist community is trial by feminist he is a man so he's a target anyway, so people who would normally be defending him are turning a blind eye to the dogs taring him apart.
anon
Response
19.12.2011 05:55
The British left/ anti-war organiations/ anarchist scene has not mobilised for Bradley Manning who has not been slandered in the same way as Assange. It could be that there is just something terribly British about leaving people hung out to dry, the lynch mob, and the pantomime villan.
You march in your millions against the Iraq war,you pontificate, you grandstand, you implicity incite people like Manning and Assange to take risks against the war, then you abandon them as the state comes looking for blood....or like the Guardian you run a slander campaign against the dissident for fear of being caught - guilt by asociation - in the state's payback.
The war in Afghanistan was marketed as a liberal feminist war "to free the women of Afghanistan". NIce job there, ten years on and very little response by the Britih feminist scene to the continued slaying of Afghan women and children by your military and tax dollars.
Sad to see feminim co-opted by the state for its wars and diissident lynch mobs.
Solidarity with Manning and Assange
against the lynch mob
A few points
19.12.2011 09:59
2. The sentence "His supporters claim that these are trumped up charges" is factually correct.
3. you are right "This isn't even about Assange" it is an article about bardley manning and the us state.
Freedom Press
suspicions
19.12.2011 22:33
to me, putting your penis inside somebody's vagina without consent, equals rape.
tis true if he wasn't assange he would not be facing possible charges related to these acts, but nonetheless that does not mean he didn't do them.
i have a lot of problems with assange. he failed to properly support and protect bradley manning, or even to try to, and he has released identifying information about others which have led to their lives being in danger. he has made sexist and fucked up comments numerous times in public and in the media (by which i mean, into a microphone, i don't trust written media not to misquote).
but that's not the point. bradley manning is what this article is about. bradley manning is who we should all be focussing on right now.
I actively support Bradley Manning. I also support the activists who called out assange on his shitty behaviour. well done them, and well done Bradley.
now lets do all we can to get bradley out of jail, and let's stop wittering on about that idiot assange.
remember - wikileaks is not assange, and assange is not wikileaks.
another rape survivor
women against rape speak out on assange
19.12.2011 23:20
Letter to the Guardian by Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape, December 2010:
"Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations (Report, 8 December). Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased. On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported". They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.
"Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her children – he was granted bail while police investigated.
"There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst."
Katrin Axelsson
Women Against Rape
- - - - - - - - -
See also this interview with human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce on Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: You’re representing Julian Assange, and I wanted to ask how you’ve gone from representing Guantánamo prisoners to representing Julian Assange, as the Swedish government attempts to extradite him from Britain, where you’re based, where Julian Assange is right now, to Sweden.
GARETH PEIRCE: It’s a pretty easy trajectory, I think. If one is to make an equivalency between circumstances, there are individuals, over the decades and the centuries, who stand up to be counted, who are vocal, who do brave things to talk about what is uncomfortable and what others don’t want to hear. And history tells us that those individuals will, by the states who consider their voices should not be heard, be in some way attacked. And it’s part of the narrative that’s perpetuated, the false narrative that makes people an enemy, makes whatever the state remove their protections under due process, because they say, "This is an exception. This is an exceptionalist crime, of such severity that we can—it’s right that we take away what restricts us in confining them." And it’s not a million miles from men who were taken to Guantánamo or men who are being silenced by translating a text from Arabic into English, to people who think the world should know the dark secrets that are hidden and put them out on the internet. These are not enormous differences, but the way the state reacts, whether it’s your state or mine—the way the state reacts is actually identical in each case. It’s to perceive the person as the enemy and try to take them out.
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange has talked about being fearful that if he was extradited to Sweden, he could be extradited to the United States, and that he could be sent to Guantánamo. Is this a real fear?
GARETH PEIRCE: I think it’s not a real fear that he will be sent to Guantánamo. I think it is more than a real fear he will be subjected to extreme isolation and extreme punitive sentences, if convicted. And we have observed the situation of Bradley Manning and how he was confined and the extremities of the isolation he was subjected to. But we’ve also observed how there was something of an outcry about him, a protest, and that appeared to register, and his circumstances seem, just slightly, to have improved. And that informs us that it is right and appropriate to keep saying what is happening here is quite, quite wrong, intolerable, that people are punished as they attempt to assert a defense, attempt to argue back.
a woman against rape
no doubt
20.12.2011 12:25
however that does not mean he is not guilty.
the two things can be true at the same time, y'know.
the activists who were assaulted/raped by him still deserve our support. they were part of wikileaks too.
the way he has talked about them, and about what he did to them, is revolting. his supporters need to make that clear, to say that his behaviour was not okay. it's a complex case and they need to stop reducing it to false simplicity, they need to stop pretending he is a saint and inferring that the women are liars, or that what he did does not matter. it does matter.
two wrongs don't make a right. the authorities are wrong, but so is assange.
wikileaks is bigger than him. he is not wikileaks. you can support wikileaks, and support bradley manning, without having to support assange, or to belittle the experiences of the women he attacked.
another rape survivor
Say whaaaaa!
21.12.2011 11:02
The women who consensually slept with Assange did not go to the police station to make allegations they went to see if they could force a HIV test.
The state took that request manipulated them, painted them into a corner by leaking Swedish police reports to the Guardian and have run with it
The Guardian (or some of its reporters who worked on the WikiLeaks publising) are running scared they have trying to put as mch distance between Assange and themselves. They are scared of the wrath of the U.S.
TheGuardian has consistently run a "Assange is bad Maning is mad" line for the past year.
They have now deployed Leigh who wrote the character asassination on Assange (movie rights sold to Spielberg) to the Manning trial
The Brit government opposed bail in Dec 2010 (not the Swedes) in the hopes of keeping Asange offline and out of action...in isolation in Wandsworth.
The U.S. assumed they would break Manning under torture. But after 10 months under torture Bradley didn't break so this has dragged the process out. They wanted Bradley to fabricate a story and then offer him a plea bargain (Bradley's attorney refers to this in the opening speech last week)
The Swedes have a record of extraordinary renditons to the U.S., they have no jury system and Assange would not have a public trial IF charged, they have the "temporary surrender" shortcut for U.S. extradition and isolation in a U.S. gulag for life.
The handful of us in Britain who have been proactive on solidarity with Julian and Bradley for the past year are labeled "supporters" "devotees", "groupies". As thy say in Ireland "what do you expect fro a pig, but a grunt"....so no surpises there!
The reality is the bulk of those who marched against these wars and the Trot/ NGO groups that milked the phenomenon (brand enhancement, recruitment, cash into buckets...where did that go???)...do not support folks who resist the war....they isolate and marginalise them as potential "competitors in the anti-war market"............Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and anyone else who took serious anti-war resistance were hung out to dry. That's the state of play here.
There's a handful like Garteh Peirce who see through the bullshit and have integrity.
Say whaaaa!
Ever get the feeling you been here before?
22.12.2011 17:16
Assange isn't guilty of anything.
Fact 2.
The public prosecutor in Sweden has dropped the charges against him as without merit.
Fact 3.
Mr Assange is simply responding to the American need to disract the world from its crimes by releasing all sorts of garbage that the US can easily do without.
Daniel Ellsberg did this originally during the Vietnam war and Assange is just the patsy this time around.
I'm quite sure this was planned. Its just following the pattern of US intervention followed by apparent defeat.
You win...by losing.
US and UK have been doing this for years.
Freedom House.
Read the article
25.12.2011 11:10
wether Assange is guilty of rape or not is irrelevant to Bradley's situation ( or to the veracity of the information leaked) ifd assange is a rapist he needs to face the consequent
I can't abide conspiracy theories but when this thread is so heavily taken over by a side track i do start to wonder
SimonH
Homepage:
http://www.bradleymanning.org/