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Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
Photo by: joanneleon. July, 2013.
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The prosecution did their closing arguments yesterday in the Bradley Manning trial. Fein apparently droned on for 7 hours, offering many unproven statements and painting Manning as something he wasn't, all for the benefit of a clueless media who have not followed the details of the trial closely. There are many tweets from parties who were there that tell the story. And one aspect of that story about the journalists covering the trial is very troubling. The judge ordered a clamp down in security, and the journalists in the media room were patrolled and watched by armed soldiers looking over their shoulders the whole time, a higher level of security than before. In addition, at Fort Meade, perhaps the most high tech, power sucking bandwith sucking place on the entire planet, the internet connectivity in the media room for the trial was so bad (and it was Comcast, apparently, wtf?) that the crowd funded court stenographers were having trouble uploading their information and such. God knows how many billions we spend on Ft. Meade but they can't provide a decent connection for the media at military trials there. The connectivity has been bad all along, from what we're told but yesterday (and recently?) it has been terrible.
To get the vibe of what was happening yesterday, it really requires reading the tweets of a number of different people -- the things they were saying in real tine (when they were allowed to send out tweets) but there are a few stories written about it too and it wasn't just the blogger journalists who were intimidated by the armed guards over their shoulders, they were doing it to Charlie Savage of the NYT too. Brilliant to do this to one of the largest media orgs in the world, US military! And worse, I think it was Gosztola who, when he turned around and looked at one of these guards in the back of the room who was guarding from journalists sending out any tweets at the wrong time, had an iPhone in his own hand and was looking at it. Closing arguments by the defense begin today at 9:30am. They've also filed a motion for mistrial which will be heard Monday, I believe.
This is from Xeni at boingboing.net, who was in contact with the journos at the trial. Go read the whole thing.
Journalists at Bradley Manning trial report hostile conditions for press
@carwinb, @kgosztola, @nathanLfuller, and @wikileakstruck have tweeted about armed guards standing directly behind them as they type into laptops in the designated press area, being "screamed at" for having "windows" open on their computers that show Twitter in a browser tab, and having to undergo extensive, repeated, invasive physical searches.
Xeni again.
Bradley Manning trial judge increased press security "because of repeat violations of the rules of court”
Huffington Post reporter Matt Sledge read my Boing Boing post earlier today about reports from the Bradley Manning trial of dramatically-increased security measures for press. Those measures including armed military police standing behind journalists at their laptops, snooping on their screens.
[...]
Armed military police peering over journalists' shoulders, no Internet access in the remote media room, Army staff frisking everyone for phones -- those weren't the only obstacles for reporters covering the trial today. The military also refused to publish key documents the government used to build its closing argument.
This needs to be read in full. It's by Kevin Gosztola. The prosecution went to great lengths to try to refute Manning's own statement in his own words.
In Closing Argument, Government Casts Bradley Manning as ‘Anarchist,’ ‘Hacker’ & ‘Traitor’
After more than four and a half hours of proceedings, the government wrapped up its closing argument in the trial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier being prosecuted for disclosing information to WikiLeaks. Prosecutors called him an “anarchist,” a “hacker,” and a “traitor” before the argument was over.
[...]
Quoting chat logs between hacker and government informant Adrian Lamo and Manning, Major Ashden Fein said that he expected “worldwide anarchy” would occur after releasing the diplomatic cables and these were not the “words of a humanist but the words of an anarchist.” He also said he was a “hacker” and not a humanist.
[...]
Showman also had said Manning had no allegiance to the United States. Fein repeated this and said that these were “similar words to those who are an anarchist.” He said Manning was an “anarchist whose agenda was made ultimately clear almost immediately when he deployed to Iraq.”
The government argued that Manning had the knowledge and ability and desire to harm the United States in its war effort. “He was not a whistleblower. He was a traitor.”
These terms—”anarchist,” “hacker,” “traitor”—all were clearly charged terms used to pejoratively with the intent that this would undercut the way the defense has tried to present Manning as a kind of conscientious and idealistic soldier who found it was necessary to blow the whistle and reveal certain documents.
Hat tip to Garrett for this NYT excerpt. He has a good diary about it
here. Do read it. I wish I had more time to expand on this. We have people under cover inside humanitarian organizations that do land mine clearing. That will put genuine volunteer workers in the region in danger for god knows how long. These disguised special forces -- it reeks of a joint CIA/JSOC dirty war operation. And how can they operate under the laws of war if they are disguising themselves as the enemy all the time?
Tales of ‘White Taliban’ Sketch a New Legend
But out in the Arghandab Valley of Kandahar Province, one of the most volatile regions in the country, locals talk about a different breed of American Special Operations forces who settled in around 2005. They are said to drive civilian vehicles, wear local clothes, speak good Pashto – and yes, sport thick beards.
They are so good at blending in that the locals have taken to calling them “Spin Taliban” – Pashto for White Taliban – because of their resemblance to the actual Afghan Taliban, including the trademark black, puffy turbans.
I first heard about the White Taliban from an Arghandabi relative who was visiting my family in Kabul. He told me about a day he was out working in his pomegranate orchard and mistook one of the bearded Americans for an actual Talib.
“I saw one of them getting out of white Corolla, wearing white shalwar kameez and a black paj turban,” he told me.
Still paying the price every day of our wars of choice and worse yet, actions of choice during wars of choice.
4 decades after war ended, Agent Orange still ravaging Vietnamese
“I could see the differences in myself and others right away,” she recalled. “When I was a small child, I felt pain inside my body all the time. My parents took me to the hospital, and the doctors determined that I had been affected by Agent Orange.”
When her daughter Ly was born, “we knew right away” Agent Orange was to blame, Le said.
The Vietnam Red Cross estimates that Agent Orange has affected 3 million people spanning three generations, including at least 150,000 children born with severe birth defects since the war ended in 1975.
I have an idea for a jobs program. Repeal the f'ing White House designed sequester! In one stroke, 1.6 million jobs are saved. God only knows how much money this speaking tour about jobs Obama is doing this summer will cost. Save the money on the tour and get rid of the sequester, primarily the domestic cuts. Immediately create jobs.
A very, very good DemocracyNow! interview with Jeremy Scahill on the release of Abdulelah Haider Shaye. A must see.
Yemeni Reporter Who Exposed U.S. Drone Strike Freed From Prison After Jailing at Obama's Request
Abdulelah Haider Shaye has been released from prison after being held for three years on terrorism-related charges at the request of President Obama. Shaye helped expose U.S. cruise missile attack on the Yemeni village of al-Majalah that killed 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children in December 2009. Then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced his intention to pardon Shaye in 2011, but apparently changed his mind after a phone call from Obama. In a statement, the White House now says it is "concerned and disappointed" by Shaye's release. "We should let that statement set in: the White House is saying that they are disappointed and concerned that a Yemeni journalist has been released from a Yemeni prison," says Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation, who covers Shaye's case in "Dirty Wars," his new book and film by the same name. "This is a man who was put in prison because he had the audacity to expose a U.S. cruise missile attack that killed three dozen women and children." We're also joined by Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American activist who co-founded the Support Yemen media collective and campaigned for Shaye's release.
The Guardian ran a liveblog yesterday on the "fallout" from the Amash-Conyers amendment vote the evening before
House vote on NSA amendment: privacy advocates hail near miss – live
• ACLU legal challenge to NSA clears hurdle; timetable set
• Pelosi: 'I don't want anybody to misunderstand' my no vote
• Fight shifts to courts as ACLU presses lawsuit against NSA
• Diverse coalition of legislators joined to challenge surveillance
Good morning and welcome to our live blog coverage of the fallout from last night's groundbreaking vote in the US House of Representatives challenging the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
[...]
This morning, Spencer is in Washington at a conference on whistleblowers and the media featuring top analysts such as Julian Sanchez of the Cato institute, NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney and Thomas Drake and many interesting others – we'll have updates from the scene.
Also today: the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill attends a preliminary hearing in an ACLU lawsuit charging that the NSA phone records collection program violates constitutional protections.
Hmm, this is new this morning. This could be a very big hearing, next Wednesday, organized by Grayson. I think it will get a lot of media coverage. That's July 31 and Congress is itching to get out of town. Will Keith Alexander hold more top secret lobbying meetings? No doubt NSA and the White House are in a panic again in anticipation of this hearing.
NSA surveillance critics to testify before Congress
Democrat congressman Alan Grayson says hearing will help to stop 'constant misleading information' from intelligence chiefs
Congress will hear testimony from critics of the National Security Agency's surveillance practices for the first time since the whistleblower Edward Snowden's explosive leaks were made public.
Democrat congressman Alan Grayson, who is leading a bipartisan group of congressman organising the hearing, told the Guardian it would serve to counter the "constant misleading information" from the intelligence community.
The hearing, which will take place on Wednesday, comes amid evidence of a growing congressional rebellion NSA data collection methods.
How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Surveillance Program
The obituary of Rep. Justin Amash's amendment to claw back the sweeping powers of the National Security Agency has largely been written as a victory for the White House and NSA chief Keith Alexander, who lobbied the Hill aggressively in the days and hours ahead of Wednesday's shockingly close vote. But Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment's defeat goes to someone else: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. It's an odd turn, considering that Pelosi has been, on many occasions, a vocal surveillance critic.
But ahead of the razor-thin 205-217 vote, which would have severely limited the NSA's ability to collect data on Americans' telephone records if passed, Pelosi privately and aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment, a Democratic committee aid with knowledge of the deliberations tells The Cable.
James Bamford.
They Know Much More Than You Think
Still, the US intelligence agencies also seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness,” he wrote, “while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was asked at a Senate hearing in March whether “the NSA collect[s] any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper’s answer: “No, sir…. Not wittingly.”
Three months later, following the revelations of the phone-log program in which the NSA collects telephone data—the numbers of both callers and the length of the calls—on hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper switched to doublethink. He said that his previous answer was not a lie; he just chose to respond in the “least untruthful manner.” With such an Orwellian concept of the truth now being used, it is useful to take a look at what the government has been telling the public about its surveillance activities over the years, and compare it with what we know now as a result of the top secret documents and other information released by, among others, the former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden.
[...]
One man who was prescient enough to see what was coming was Senator Frank Church, the first outsider to peer into the dark recesses of the NSA. In 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat to privacy it poses today with UPSTREAM, PRISM, and thousands of other collection and data-mining programs, Church issued a stark warning:
That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
9/11 Commission chairmen published an op-ed in Politico. Even they think this needs to be reined in.
It's time to debate NSA program
Every day, it seems, brings disturbing new revelations about the National Security Agency’s program to collect phone and email metadata, raising serious questions for our country. Reports indicate that the NSA is gathering metadata on millions of people in the United States and around the world, targeting diplomatic missions of both friends and foes.
The NSA’s metadata program was put into place with virtually no public debate, a worrisome precedent made worse by erecting unnecessary barriers to public understanding via denials and misleading statements from senior administration officials.
Four more PRISM slides were released in Brazil.
Unpublished NSA slides air on Brazilian television
Four new slides detailing the U.S. National Security Agency’s international surveillance operations were aired by a Brazilian television station.
Two weeks ago, the Brazilian network Rede Globo ran an interview with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to blow the whistle on the agency’s controversial intelligence gathering programs.
Charlie Savage from the NYT.
In Closing Argument, Prosecutor Casts Soldier as ‘Anarchist’ for Leaking Archives
While Major Fein made his arguments, reporters watched the trial on a closed-circuit feed at the media center. Two military police officers in camouflage fatigues and armed with holstered handguns paced behind each row there, looking over the journalists’ shoulders, which had not happened during the trial. No explanation was given.
Major Fein spoke from late morning until nearly 6 p.m., going over each batch of documents in detail and repeatedly returning to the theme of what he said was Private Manning’s recklessness and betrayal.
He argued that Private Manning’s “wholesale and indiscriminate compromise of hundreds of thousands of classified documents” for release in bulk by the WikiLeaks staff, whom he called “essentially information anarchists,” should not be portrayed as an ordinary journalistic leak but as a bid for “notoriety, although in a clandestine form.”
Leaking to “established journalistic enterprises like The New York Times and The Washington Post would be a crime,” Major Fein said, but “that is not what happened in this case and under these facts.”
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Glen the Plumber and some other Kossacks have started a new community diary called "Kitchen Table Kibitzing" that publishes at 5pm Pacific and had its inaugural post last night.
Kitchen Table Kibitzing
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