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Hi, it's it's a real
honor to be here today, having
spent the last three years witnessing,
documenting and reporting on the secret
prosecution of Chelsea Manning, I
feel I have a great responsibility to
impart to the public the facts
and circumstances of her unprecedented
trial.
Manning was tried by court martial at
Fort Meade, Maryland, home of the NSA,
on 22 offenses, including
aiding the enemy, espionage,
exceeding authorized access, stealing
U.S. government property, wanton
publication and failures to
obey lawful general regulations.
She was later found guilty of 20 of
those offenses and sentenced to 35
years in prison.
The trial record totals about
45000 pages,
believed to be the longest in U.S.
military law, yet 18
months into the legal proceeding.
The public was still forbidden access
to more than 30000 pages of
court filings and rulings
during the pretrial military.
Prosecutors often waived oral
arguments in open court
or at trial, moved the court
to conduct its business in closed
sessions, further concealing
their case from public scrutiny.
Military prosecutors even used my
Web site to justify
the closure of the test.
One witness to instruct the court on
how it would handle classified testimony
at trial.
I recently discovered this in the
recent documents that were released by
the military district of Washington.
By the way, this DSS agent's
name is Ronald Rock.
On the first day of her trial
on the charges, the public did
not even have an official copy
of Manning's formal plea to 10
lesser included offenses, one
of which included different dates
than those alleged by military
prosecutors at trial.
I will explain to you later why this was
very important.
The failure to allow contemporaneous
access to court documents caused
irrevocable harm to the public's
right to understand and scrutinize the
conduct case law,
arguments and opinions of both
trial and defense counsel and
the presiding military judge.
Even with unofficial transcripts provided
to the public by the Freedom of the Press
Foundation or myself, most
of the critical evidence at trial is
still hidden under black redactions
or in 200 unreleased court
exhibits
for those who apathetically
condemn Manning to her fate
because she was a low level soldier in
the U.S. military.
I remind you that the charge of aiding
the enemy is one of two punitive
articles under the Uniform Code of
Military Justice that applies to any
person and not just military personnel.
This fact alone is all the more reason
the public has a right to access to court
documents.
While the presiding military judge,
Colonel Douglas Lind, acquitted Manning
of aiding the enemy for which she faced
life in prison,
she rejected two defense motions
to dismiss the charge altogether.
Manning's prosecution for aiding the
enemy set a chilling precedent for
future whistleblowers and journalists
who write about national security issues,
according to defense witness Yochai
Benkler, Professor Yochai Benkler
of the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard Law School.
Lynn's failure to dismiss the enemy, the
aiding the enemy charge, established a
broad legal precedent
when Lynn asked the prosecution if
it would have acted the same way had the
organization in question been the New
York Times and rather than WikiLeaks,
the prosecution replied, Yes, ma'am.
Leaking classified documents to
newspapers can by
itself be legally sufficient to
constitute the offense of aiding the
enemy if the leaker
was sophisticated enough about
intelligence and how the enemy uses
the Internet, Benkler said.
In other words, all a prosecutor
will have to use in any future
legal case against a national security
whistleblower is that the accused knew
the enemy or foreign adversary of the
United States use the media organizations
platform to collect intelligence.
The impact of that not guilty
ruling for Manning
for aiding the enemy is somewhat
negligible because in pronouncing
Manning guilty on 20 other counts,
including six Espionage Act offenses
and one Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
defense, she condemned Manning
to 35 years in prison, and
by doing so, she rubber stamped
the Obama administration's inquisition
of the press and its sources.
Lynn ruled that Manning's motive
and the lack of actual damage
from the disclosures was not
relevant at trial.
Such evidence then could not
be used to mitigate the accusation
drawn from the language of the Espionage
Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act
that Manning had, quote, reason
to believe such information
could be used to the injury
of the United States and to the advantage
of any foreign nation.
Military prosecutors were only required
to prove at trial that the information
charged under the Espionage Act
was related to the national defense
and closely held, meaning it
was not already lawfully in the public
realm prior to Manning's disclosures
and that the information could
cause damage, not that it did
cause damage.
Military prosecutors called witnesses
that they're called original
classification authorities at trial
from each of the victimized agencies
to testify.
These witnesses, all of which who
were lifelong federal employees or
defense contractors, testified
that the charged information was properly
classified at the time of its release
and that its disclosure could
cause damage, not that it did
cause damage.
Manning's civilian defense attorney,
David Coombs, argued that
the was the original classification
authority and their classification
reviews failed to cite
specific examples within
the charged documents that could
actually cause damage.
Instead, he said, they use general
generalities and buzzwords.
So again, Manning was convicted on a
probable harm standard.
Not actual harm, and she was
sentenced to 35 years in prison
on expected risk
and not actual damage,
the fact that most of the charge
documents were legally classified
and still are legally classified, despite
a defense request to declassify
them for trial, prevented Manning's
lawyers from citing them openly in court.
It also limited the defense's abilities
to call witnesses, since any
potential witness was required
to have a security clearance to handle
the classified but publicly available
information.
Although Manning disclosed approximately
seven hundred and twenty five thousand
six hundred and forty seven documents.
Oops, sorry.
And that's the breakdown from the four
larger data sets.
Plus, 18 documents are
approximately 18 documents from smaller
releases, which total
seven hundred and twenty five thousand
six hundred and forty seven documents,
she was only tried and convicted
under the Espionage Act language.
In other words, the reason to believe
such information could be used to the
injury of the United States or
to the or the advantage of any foreign
nation. For 222 documents
from the four larger datasets
containing the Iraq and
Afghanistan cigarette's
the diplomatic cables and
the Guantanamo detainee assessment
briefs. So the Gitmo files.
So that plus the 18 documents
means Manning was charged in the
Espionage Act language for only 240
documents.
The OCA's and other government witnesses
also testified that enemies and foreign
adversaries could use the large datasets
to conduct pattern analysis.
Yet technically, Manning was charged
under this reason to believe language
found in the Espionage Act and the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for
only two hundred and twenty two
of the four larger data sets.
Military prosecutors failed to argue
how 222 charge documents
could be used for any potential pattern
analysis conducted by foreign adversaries
or enemies, if military prosecutors
wanted to use that argument in court,
they should have charged Manning under
the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act for more than two hundred
and twenty two documents.
I have a few more carefully chosen words
later for anyone, and I don't really care
who they are, but especially those
journalists, public intellectuals
and academics who frankly should know
better, who either recklessly or
pejoratively refer to publication
of Manning's primary source documents as
dump's.
This is what a dump is.
Manning's conviction for the
unprecedented offense of wanton
publication, which is not tied to
any existing punitive article under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice
or any federal criminal violation is
intended to interdict interdict
the future leak of large datasets capable
of being mined or modeled for revelations
by digital journalists and organizations
like WikiLeaks.
When asked by the military prosecutors
if mass document leaking is somewhat
inconsistent with journalism, Benkler
from the Harvard Center for
Internet and Society
said that the large data sets, like the
Iraq war logs, provided insight
that cannot be found in one or two
documents containing a smoking gun,
the Iraq war logs added.
Benkler provided an alternative
independent count of casualties based on
formal documents that allow for the
analysis that was uncorrelated
with the analysis that already came
with an understanding of its political
consequences.
I read
the documents also contain the lives
of human beings.
Valuable information about the
detainees of America's war on terror.
The children and the human beings that
have been slaughtered by America's wars.
And at a symposium on
WikiLeaks held at the University of
Southern California in 2011, Professor
Derek Shearer of Occidental College,
who served as ambassador to Finland
during the Clinton administration, cited
the Tunisian revolution as a positive
outcome from the publication of the
diplomatic cables.
The revelation of the U.S.
government's negative view of dictator
Ben Ali is believed to have fueled anger
towards the Tunisian regime.
Some of this Frank speaking, he says,
of not secrets, but just frank
descriptions of a country that
had a positive outcome.
But these cables are not the secret level
in which the government operates.
We have a whole separate system of much
more secret reporting that comes to the
intelligence officers in the embassies.
And then we have a whole other channel,
the defense intelligence operations
defense attachÃ© reporting.
So the notion that some vital secrets of
America were compromised by WikiLeaks, I
think is not the case.
I spoke to somebody recently at The
Washington Post who told me
they refer to WikiLeaks publications
every single day.
And Benkler testified at trial that
WikiLeaks was a new mode of journalism
that fit the distributed model of
engagement, news gathering and
dissemination in the Internet age, what
he termed the networked fourth estate.
And if WikiLeaks is part of the networked
fourth estate, then so is Manning and the
and the releases and the types of
releases that she
executed.
The root problem today is not the style
of Manning leaks, it's the pervasive
propaganda, and it's the control
of the media by the few.
Jeremy Scahill is book Dirty Wars relies
heavily on WikiLeaks sourced documents
which were disclosed by Manning
Dirty Wars, is a perfect example of the
long term public benefit
of both substance and methodology of
Manning's disclosures and WikiLeaks
publications.
On July 28, 2010,
Robert Gates, the secretary
of defense at the time, directed
the director of the Defense Intelligence
Agency, Ronald Burgess, to establish
an information review task force
to lead a comprehensive Department
of Defense review of classified documents
posted to the WikiLeaks website on
July 25th, 2010,
and other associated materials.
Gates directed the ATF
to complete a report containing
any released information with immediate
force protection implications,
and he released information concerning
allies or coalition partners that may
negatively impact foreign policy.
Any military plans, any
intelligence reporting, any
released information concerning
intelligence sources and methods, any
information on civilian casualties not
previously released, any derogatory
comments regarding Afghan culture or
Islam, any related data
that might also have been released
to WikiLeaks but not yet posted?
The task force, led by
counterintelligence expert Brigadier
General Robert Carr, was made up of 80 to
125 people, including intelligence
analysts and counterintelligence experts
from the CIA, Pacific Command,
Central Command, the undersecretary of
Defense for intelligence, which is
responsible for managing the ongoing
Department of Defense investigation
of WikiLeaks.
Other interagency partners included the
FBI and the Army Criminal Investigation
Command car eventually
testified for the prosecution during the
sentencing portion of Manning's court
martial in a closed session or by
classified stipulation
in the summer of 2010.
So months before the release of
diplomatic cables, the Department of
State began working with the ATF
to review any purported state material
in the releases and to provide an
assessment, as well as a summary of
the overall effects the WikiLeaks
releases would have on
relations with host countries.
And that's according to the ambassador,
Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, who's the
undersecretary of management and
is a central figure in the WikiLeaks
investigation.
He's probably the most central of
all the public officials in the US
government,
which, of course, begs the question, the
statement by Patrick Kennedy and
the fact of the ATF
review by the State Department in the
summer of 2010, followed
by the Chiefs of Mission Review at the
State Department that came,
you know, following that, why
it took the State Department months to
shut down the netcentric diplomacy
database.
And they did it with such hysterical
fanfare the day after WikiLeaks
began publishing cable gate.
If they believed that the threat was an
actual if they believed the release was
an actual threat to national security, I
would imagine that they would have shut
it down much earlier than that.
But more on the State Department later.
According to the military prosecutors,
the DEA, ATF
was specifically stood up and relates
to all the charges against
Chelsea Manning for which Manning was
found guilty and for which she was
acquitted of
the review.
They review the Sydney, Afghanistan and
Syria and Iraq cigarette's the
Guantanamo Files CENCOM videos,
documents related to a May 2009
U.S.
cluster bombing in the Garani village
in the Farah province of Afghanistan
that had mass civilian casualties
and diplomatic cables.
The diplomatic cables.
The Defense Department reviewed them for
their impact on Department
of Defense, military to military
relationships and forces.
Carr also testified that the ATF did
not review any of the litigation
regarding Guantanamo detainees to see if
that information was already contained
in the WikiLeaks disclosures.
So CENTCOM has released a lot of
material about detainees through FOIA
requests and habeas cases.
So the desire to never check whether
or not there was this information was
already in the public realm.
In the summer of 2010, Gates
wrote a letter to the chair of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl
Levin, stating that the initial
assessment of the ATF in no
way discounted the risk to national
security.
However, the review to date
has not revealed any sources
and methods compromised by this exposure.
The final DIA
report is one hundred pages.
It's classified has not been released.
John Q. Cougher, who was the deputy
in charge of the DIA ATF,
testified regarding the DIA damage
assessment as follows.
We did not use the term damage.
We were very careful.
That's a statutory authority within the
on sex. This office of the National
Counterintelligence Executive.
We were just. To look at the impact
on DOD,
Brigadier General Robert Carr, the
counterintelligence expert who directed
the DIA who was appointed
by Burgess, is currently corporate
lead executive for Northrop Grumman
Business in the Fort Meade in Aberdeen,
Maryland, area.
Despite CA having testified
that the impact of the disclosure
continued to this day.
So he said that the impact was
continuing.
He also testified that no assessment
has ever been made to quantify
the impact of the disclosures on, for
example, cooperation between Iraqi
or Afghanistan, Stani nationals
and U.S.
service members of military personnel.
Carr testified that the disclosures did
not contain direct references to
HUMINT or human intelligence sources.
The Afghan CEGEPs car testified
contained around 900 names.
But Carr also testified that many of
those names were of people who were
already dead or had died at
some point on the battlefield.
William Arkin from The Washington Post
was recently at the CIA and he tweet
that the
damage assessment for the ATF,
which was hyped up
in the press for years and years
now that Manning's been convicted to 35
years, it's it's revealed that it was low
to moderate.
Today, we at least know
the titles of approximately
two hundred and thirty eight
of the two hundred and forty charged
documents under the Espionage Act
and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has
that Espionage Act clause reason to
believe it could come to the injury
of the United States. So when I say
Espionage Act offenses, I'm referring to
both.
Manning was charged under the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act for all the State
Department material.
And then everything else that was related
to the U.S. military was under the
Espionage Act
that was stealing U.S. government
property stuff. But that's I don't want
to complicate the issue.
We do not know the names of
two of the Guantanamo
files. So two of the five Guantanamo
files, we do not know the names of
10 or 11 of the hundred and one charge
cigarets from
Iraq and Afghanistan.
We do not know the name of military
prosecutors failed to actually provide
defense with the identity
of ten of the hundred and one dissidents
charged against Manning, despite multiple
defense requests for them to do so.
Why do I say the identity of 10 or 11
cigarets are still unknown because
an unclassified declaration
of the classification review for the
cigarets has a duplicate name
in one of the entries.
So that's why I say 10 or 11.
It's unclear.
We know the actual substance
of 198 charge documents
out of the 240 because they are published
on the Internet, 76
of the 101 cigarets from Iraq
and Afghanistan.
We can actually view on the Internet.
One hundred and sixteen diplomatic
cables. So all the diplomatic cables
charged other than Reykjavik
13, because Manning
pled to a lesser included offense in the
government, accepted it so that that's
not espionage.
So one hundred and sixteen cables
from the two hundred fifty one thousand
roughly from the netcentric diplomacy
database.
Three of the five Gitmo
file that were charged
in the Espionage Act, we know
we know about the 2008 you say sick memo
against WikiLeaks and we know about the
two CIA red cell memos.
So we have the titles
but do not have access to copies of
24 of the 101
cigarets charged against Manning.
That means that I couldn't find them on
WikiLeaks, as far as I can tell,
approximately 15 to 18
CENTCOM documents, official documents
pertaining to mass casualties
from a major 4th 2009
U.S. cluster bombing in the FA province
of Afghanistan were also
never published by WikiLeaks.
So let's talk about the cigarets.
There are 101 that are charged against
Manning.
They're all classified as secret,
62 of them.
So 62 of the 101 charged under
the Espionage Act have
information that was already in the
public realm at the time
of its disclosure.
Before deploying to Iraq, Manning had
worked on worldwide intelligence briefs
for the commander of the 2nd Brigade
Combat Team at Fort Drum in upstate
New York, home of the 10th Mountain
Division of the U.S.
Army.
The 2nd Brigade formed part of the Army's
Global Response Force on
call in case troop surges were needed
anywhere in the world.
In the Garrison Intelligence Shop,
Atkins' Manning's commanding officer
tasked Manning with rebuilding
the incident tracker.
This required Manning to back up hundreds
of thousands of military field reports
called significant activity, or cigarets
from the wars in Afghanistan,
where the 2nd Brigade was expected to
deploy after Manning's unit
was reassigned to forward operating
base hammer in eastern Baghdad.
She followed suit and created another
backup of cigarets from the wars in Iraq.
The back ups were made on rewritable CDs
and stored in the intelligence shops
shared conference room at FOB Hammer.
Analysts could access the backups during
periodic interruptions to network
connectivity that occurred during
deployment signals
or normally housed on U.S.
Central Command database called the
Combined Information Data Network
Exchange, or Sedney, which
is accessible on a Department of Defense
classified network called Supernet.
Supernet, contained information
classified up to the level of secret.
Almost all the information the military
presents to the White House and to
Congress about the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan originates in the Sydney
database.
Thousands of military personnel,
government employees and federal
contractors have access to Sydney's
various types of reporting, including
human intelligence reports, or HUMINT, as
well as cigarette's.
Manning disclosed four hundred and
eighty three thousand five hundred sixty
three cigarets from the Sydney, Iraq
and the Sydney, Afghanistan databases.
WikiLeaks later published the material
as the Iraq war logs and the Afghan
war diary.
Manning did not, however, disclose
the other kinds of reporting
from the Sydney database, like HUMINT
or human intelligence.
Which contained actual intelligence
sources and methods.
This suggests that Manning disclosed
military prosecutors admitted at trial
only represented 24 percent of Sydney.
Manning told Lindh that she believed that
the classification determination of the
six, most of which were marked
secret, was based primarily
on their being housed on Supernet.
While she knew that the reports were
sensitive at the time of their creation.
She told the court that she believed that
their sensitivity decreased within
48 to 72 hours
as the information was either publicly
released or the unit involved
was no longer in the area and under
threat.
Man Manning regularly researched
and reviewed the ground level accounts of
events in Iraq and Afghanistan during
her launch long shifts at FOB
Hammer and she became deeply troubled
by them.
The cigarets that Manning uploaded to
WikiLeaks are filled with references to
the ubiquity and seeming triviality
of death in wartime Iraq.
At her trial, Manning said that she
released the cigarets
because she believed that a detailed
analysis of data
over a long period of time by different
sectors of society might
cause society to reevaluate
that the need or even the desire
to engage in counterterrorism
and counterinsurgency operations
that ignore the complex dynamics
of people living in the affected
environment each day.
She further testified in attempting
to conduct counterterrorism
or CTY and counterinsurgency
coin operations, we became obsessed
with capturing and killing human targets
on lists and not being suspicious
of and avoiding cooperation
with our host nation partners and
ignoring ignoring the second and third
order effects of accomplishing short
term goals and missions.
I believe that if the general public,
especially the American public, had
access to the information contained
within Sydney, Iraq and Sydney,
Afghanistan, this
could spark a domestic debate on the role
of the military in our foreign policy in
general as it related to Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Manning remove the rewritable CDs.
Backup's from the conference room
in her containerized housing unit.
She transferred the files to an SD card
and transported them home on her mid tour
leave.
Prior to uploading the material to
WikiLeaks, she called The Washington
Post.
She spoke with reporter who expressed
skepticism about Manning
Manning's claims and said she would have
to check with the Post's senior editors.
Manning then called the telephone number
for the public editor at The New York
Times in Wasilla and left a voicemail.
I actually just found out who had like
which position at The Washington Post
actually got the call from for Manning.
But, you know, Manning
downloaded documents between February and
April in 2010 and uploaded them
to WikiLeaks at various times in
the same period, both during her mid tour
leave and while at FOB Hannum.
OK, the titles
of 37 SIG acts
are contained in an unclassified
declaration concerning the unreleased
classification review, those 37
SIG acts charged against Manning cover
period from October 2006 to
November 2009,
the identity of 32 of
the charge Afghans to Gex are available
on the Internet.
Most of them, at least 15 of them,
concern IED explosions for
the years 2008 and 2009.
Incidentally,
20 of the six charged against Manning for
Iraq also concern IED explosions.
It's probably the largest category
of the hundred and one.
We have access to 90
of the cigarets, the names, and I know
where they are.
So 20 of those pertain
to IEDs.
Adam Class filled with courthouse news
who covered Manning's trial has written
the allegations of expected damage
from government officials during
sentencing portion of Manning's trial
do not correlate to the public data
around IEDs.
Class rights overall, these numbers
reflect a steady decline in the last few
years in the number of U.S.
fatalities resulting from IED attacks
in the aftermath of the leak,
though, injuries rose slightly in 2011.
They dropped to nearly half a
year later.
One of the more interesting
of the 101 acts and
after you've just listed, we go through
the ETF, you go,
this is your reward.
Charged against Manning under the
Espionage Act concerns the kidnaping
of a U.S. Army soldier, Bowe Bergdahl,
from Utah, from a from Idaho.
Bergdahl is allegedly still in the
custody of his captors.
So one of the six of the hundred
and one suspects concerned
the kidnaping of a U.S.
soldier who is still in custody.
His family said that they received a
letter from him this summer, actually
during Manning's trial.
Manning wasn't mentioned in the article.
I mean, it's two separate issues,
but
nevertheless, that that's what happened.
According to a report a year earlier by
the late Michael Hastings in a
Rolling Stone magazine, Bergdahl
became a pawn in the Pentagon's
negotiations to end the war in
Afghanistan.
In Bergdahl's last email home to
his parents before he was captured, he
wrote the following.
The future is too good to waste
on lies and life is
way too short to care
for the damnation of others
as well, to spend it helping fools with
their ideas that are wrong.
I have seen their ideas and I am
ashamed to be an American.
The honor of the self-righteous arrogance
that they thrive on it is all revolting.
His email continues.
And the U.S. Army, you are cut down for
being honest.
But if you are conceited, if you
are a conceited brownnosing shit bag,
you will be allowed to do whatever you
want and you will be handled,
handed your higher rank.
The system is just wrong.
I am ashamed to be an American and
the title of U.S.
soldier is Just the lie of Fools.
The U.S. Army is the biggest joke in the
world and the world has
to laugh at it.
It is an army of liars, backstabbers,
fools and bullies.
The few good sergeants are getting out as
soon as they can, and they are telling us
privates to do the same.
These people need help get.
What they get is the most conceited
country in the world, telling them that
they are nothing and that they are stupid
and that they have no idea how to live.
Hastings writes that Bergdahl's parents
believe that their sons witnessing of an
Afghan child being run over
by a mine resistant ambush patrol vehicle
is what might have caused their
son to snap and desert the U.S.
Army before being captured
in Afghanistan.
We don't we don't even care when
we hear this is he's riding home to
his parents. We don't even care when we
hear each other talk about running their
children down in the dirt with our
armored trucks.
Bergdahl wrote, We make fun
of them in front of their faces and laugh
at them for not understanding.
We are insulting them.
Bergdahl responded to his son's last
email message before he deserted
and then was captured with a subject line
entitled Obey Your Conscience.
Dear Beau, his dad wrote
in matters of life and death and
especially of war, it is never safe
to ignore one's conscience.
Ethics demands obedience to
our conscience.
It is best to have a systematic
oral defense of what our conscience
demands.
Stand with minded men when possible,
Hasting concludes in his article about
this. This particular soldier, ordinary
soldiers, especially raw recruits, face
comment for the first time and respond to
the horror in all sorts of ways.
Some take their own lives.
After years of seemingly endless wars
and repeat deployments, active duty
soldiers in the U.S.
Army are currently committing suicide
at a rate of
25 percent higher than the regular
population, the civilian population.
Other soldiers last lash out with
unauthorized acts of violence.
The staff sergeant charged with murdering
a 17 Afghan civilians in their homes
last March.
The notorious kill team of U.S.
soldiers who went on a shooting spree in
2010, murdering civilians
for sport and taking part in the
corpses for trophies.
Many come home permanently traumatized,
unable to block out the nightmares.
Bowe Bergdahl.
Hastings, right, had a different
response. He just walked away.
And Manning had a different response as
well, Panetta and Hillary.
One senior official told Hastings, don't
give a shit about Bowe Bergdahl.
They want to be able to say that that
they coined their way out of Afghanistan
or whatever.
So it doesn't look like they're cutting
and running.
We, the public, are still waiting for the
military district of Washington to
release the court ordered unclassified
and redacted, quote, expedited, unquote,
transcripts of the closed sessions.
A similar problem arises when military
prosecutors and their witnesses argue at
trial and during the sentencing phase
that the information Manning disclosed
could potentially be used in future
propaganda efforts by the enemies of the
United States.
Elizabeth Goitein of the
Brennan Center for Justice at New York
Law School has written that the absence
of a limiting principle to the U.S.
government's expanding justification
for classification and its prosecution
of whistleblowers who disclose it
is alarming.
The government's new justification for
secrecy, she writes, will be strongest
when its conduct most clearly violates
accepted international norms.
So the diplomatic cables is the second
largest set,
I should sort of clarify something, the
cigarets and the the cigarets
are sort of counted together.
There are two different data sets.
So the State Department cables would be
the third data set and then the fourth
one would be the Guantanamo files.
This database contained two hundred and
fifty one thousand two hundred and eighty
seven documents.
For the complete disclosure
from the complete disclosure, 130000
of those documents were unclassified.
Hundreds. 100000 of them were labeled
confidential and then 15000
were classified at secret.
None of the documents were top secret.
Manning was charged under the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for 116
cables when the State
Department initially gave the cables
to military prosecutors.
The prosecution had to go back to the
State Department and ask them to
please give them more because they
needed more for the court martial.
So they provided, I
believe, the number and I have to double
check on this, but I think it was
somewhere between 50 and 75
diplomatic cables to the military
prosecutors and said, OK, you know, try
him on the computer fraud and abuse act
for these. And the military prosecutors
like we need more.
So that sort of tells you where
that was at
when the State Department initially gave
them those cables.
Sorry, the number of individuals actually
moved by the WikiLeaks persons at risk
group is actually classified that number.
But the number ranges somewhere between
20 and 30 people.
Firstly, the State Department was
aware for months that WikiLeaks was
in possession of the cables from the
netcentric diplomacy database,
WikiLeaks offered the State Department
to privately elect, quote, specific
instances, record numbers or names
where it considered the publication of
information would put individuals
or persons at significant
risk of harm that has already not been
addressed.
The State Department legal adviser,
Harold Koh, responded with a letter
stating that the diplomatic cables
were provided in violation of U.S.
law.
And as long as WikiLeaks was holding such
material, the violation
is ongoing.
The letter, as many of you may know,
is the basis for the suspension of
service by people
and other American service
providers, the former vice president
of PayPal, Osama Batur, said
on December 8th, 2010 that PayPal's
decision to suspend service to
WikiLeaks was a result of QoS
letter to
Assange.
Batur described the letter as stating
that WikiLeaks activities were deemed
illegal by the United States
in September 2011, the AP
conducted an unofficial review of the
State Department cables published by
WikiLeaks.
The AP found several of them comfortable
with their names out in the open
and no one fearing death.
Others already did their names cited as
sensitive in the context of long, long
resolved conflicts
or situations.
Some have publicly written or testified
at hearings about the supposedly
confidential information that they
provided to the US government.
The AP also reported that the total
damage appeared limited and
that the State Department had steadfastly
refused to describe any situation
in which they felt a source's sources.
Life was a danger.
Some have sorry, they said.
A handful of people had to be relocated
away from danger, but won't provide
any details on who those few cases are.
One cable charged against
Manning.
Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is
entitled 087 Kingston,
Jamaica Malaria Update,
so these are the kinds of documents that
ultimately put Manning away for 35
years in prison.
This this one this is relates
to this this cable.
But this particular cable has left
a lot of commentators very confused
as to the national defense.
Matter or how it was useful to the
enemy when I asked national security
commentator Marcy Wheeler about the
Kingston Cable, she noted
that an October 2007 update
on the outbreak of malaria in Jamaica
was removed from the Center for Disease
Control website on January
14th, 2011,
around the time the diplomatic cables
were being published by WikiLeaks.
Wheeler speculates that the cable might
have been charged against Manning Manning
because military prosecutors wanted to
argue that it gives a roadmap for
how a country would respond to an act of
bioterrorism.
Military prosecutors called witnesses to
testify that the leaks affected
diplomatic reporting
and relationships with foreign
governments, Manning's defense
maintained that any impact on bilateral
relations was short term and temporary.
Reuters reported that government reviews
of the release of diplomatic cables
caused only, quote, limited damage to
U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama
administration's public statements
to the contrary, unquote.
A congressional aide briefed by the State
Department was quoted saying the
revelations were, quote, embarrassing but
not damaging, unquote.
The quote continues, Obama administration
felt compelled to say publicly
that the revelations had seriously
damaged American interests in order to
bolster legal efforts to shut down
WikiLeaks website and to bring charges
against the leakers.
OK, so now we're going to talk about the
Guantanamo files.
The worst of the worst.
I mean, the brilliant American
intelligence leaked out onto the
Internet. I don't know what we're going
to do, but.
The south the South com database contains
seven hundred and seventy nine detainee
assessment briefs
called the Gitmo files, but
there are memoranda from
Gitmo and Manning
was charged under the Espionage Act for
five of them.
So out of the 779,
we know that three of them
are the Tipton three, which are
there are three British citizens from
Tipton, England, who were held
at Guantanamo for two years
and then released without trial or
charges.
They are Shafiq Rasul,
Raoul Ahmed and Asif Iqbal.
Some of you may remember how
a former Gitmo guard in
Iraq named Brandon Neely
flew to the U.K.
in January 2010 to make amends
to Ahmed and Rasul.
Some of you may also remember
that they've made
films of anti Guantanamo Bay
documentaries.
Well, the U.S.
government considers all three of them
terrorists, recidivists
because they are former detainees
involved in anti-American propaganda or
criticism.
So now
we go to the FERA documents, we don't
have access to these documents, they were
never published, but they they all
concern the mass casualties
and the U.S.
government and the military's policy
for dealing with those mass mass
casualties that related from three
strikes. This one, these documents
pertain specifically to the Garani air
strike, which is separate from the charge
related to the Grainey air strike video
which Manning was found not guilty of.
We know their names.
And it's
interesting because just September
a, 2013, two months ago,
The Nation published an article about
some of these documents that had been
released after Manning was convicted
and the rationale.
So all of these documents that Manning
released here will show you,
according to this nation article,
although they don't really tie it to
Manning, exactly why
the U.S. government established the two
fragos and how
this FRAGO, these two fragos,
were causing major divisions
within the military because
people weren't following them and they
weren't stopping the hemorrhaging
of mass casualties by U.S.
cluster bombing in Afghanistan at the
time. So there's a rationale to this
week for Manning.
I want to talk to you about
the Garani airstrike.
This is these documents relate, this is
a burn victim from the grainy airstrike.
So these dots, these this picture relates
to both the grainy airstrike video which
Manning was found not guilty of and then
the documents which she was found guilty
of. The interesting
thing about the grainy airstrike is that
the government wanted to allege that
Manning had disclosed it
in a basically
in November, trying to push the
date as close to the time that Manning
arrived in Iraq.
And then when I talked about earlier that
Manning pled to different dates,
a major part of the drama of the trial
was the fact that Manning said, no, I
leaked these documents and
the videos in April.
The reason why government prosecutors,
they didn't have the forensic evidence
and Manning was found not guilty
is because the grainy airstrike
video ties to the U.S.
grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and
seven civilians.
That is continuing today.
So I just want to quickly go through
actually, the grand jury started before
many people allege in the press alleges
it was actually up and operational
in September 2010 as
this email that was recently released
by military prosecutors details.
And the
you know, the eastern district of
Virginia is commonly understood to be
and is in fact responsible
for the grand jury impaneled,
they're investigating civilians,
including Julian Assange and the
founders, owners, managers of WikiLeaks.
But the investigation also goes into the
southern district of New York.
And this document that was recently
released details
these attachments.
We don't have the attachments.
And if you see the whole document, it's
just black, completely blacked out.
But these are actually more sealed orders
for other electronic communication orders
if you look under attachments that relate
to the grand jury.
So, you know, the Twitter
is an issue. Twitter 23d, you
know, Jake Appelbaum, Brigitta Johnson,
these are more of them.
And here are some more
and some search warrants to.
This is the classified,
weirdly enough, the Manning Lamo chat
logs are actually classified, if you can
actually believe it.
So one thing that we don't have access to
in the court,
I.
I wanted to say that, you know, Manning
is confined to the U.S. disciplinary
barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
Her case must be reviewed and approved
by the convening authority, Major General
Jeffrey Buchanan.
This process is referred to as taking the
action on a case.
Buchanan has the power to disapprove
any conviction and or to reduce Manning's
sentence once Buchanan takes action.
The case will be automatically reviewed
by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals.
Such a review by A.
could take years.
Manning's defense attorney has filed an
application seeking a presidential pardon
from President Obama.
King says it is unlikely that the request
will be granted.
Obama has only granted nine pardon
requests during his presidency, and he's
never granted a pardon for someone who
has previously said was guilty.
I wanted to say something else just about
the grand jury.
The National Security Division of the
Department of Justice is responsible
with EVA, the Eastern District of
Virginia, for the WikiLeaks grand jury.
And why that's important to know is that
in order to decline a prosecution,
once you've established an investigation
that is a national security
is categorized as a national security
investigation and that
it is in the national security vision in
and of itself is shows that it's a
national security investigation,
requires the approval
of the assistant
attorney general of the national security
division, the counterespionage section,
or higher ups.
So when you see this, you know, stuff
going on in the press about the grand
jury and, you know,
this is a very serious matter.
This is not a joke here.
There there are real forces at play in
the United States and it's an interagency
investigation. It is being
it's been a coordinated partnership
between the Department of State, the
Department of Justice and the Department
of Defense, the CIA, the NSA
on six and other government
agencies. It is the largest criminal
investigation ever conducted into a
publisher and its source.
It presents a tremendous danger
to democracy and the rule
of law that it's being allowed to
continue and that members of the press
and the public are in this like gossip
fest about it.
I mean, this is a serious criminal
investigation.
And, you know, the U.S.
government considers WikiLeaks to be
a national security threat.
James Clapper, the director of national
intelligence, said so in front of two
high level Senate Intelligence and
Armed Services Committees.
So I just wanted to end with
saying that I think that Manning's
story is fundamentally like
the greatest war story of our generation.
It's are all quiet on the western front.
I am young, I am 20 years old,
yet I know nothing of life but despair,
death, fear and
fatuous superficiality cast over
an abyss of sorrow.
I see how people are set against one
another and in silence, unknowingly,
foolishly, obediently, innocently
slay one another.
It is our thin red line.
Maybe all men got one big soul.
Everybody is a part of it.
All faces are the same man
and it is our catch 22.
It was miraculous.
It was almost no trick at all.
He saw turned vice into virtue
and slander, into truth, impotence,
into abstinence, arrogance, into
humility, plunderer, into philanthropy,
thievery and to honor arrogance
into humility,
sorry, blasphemy to wisdom, brutality
and to patriotism and sadism
into justice.
Anybody could do it.
It is it required no brains at all.
It required merely no character
and.
Bradley Manning, I'm sorry, Chelsea
Manning is story is
actually also our trial.
This is a entry into a
multi-page document concerning
her behavior every two minutes
at the Quantico brig.
So I'll end with that.
Thank you.
We now have eight minutes for Q&A.
So if you have a question, there are four
mikes, one, two there and two there.
And you can also go on the AC on
probably on Twitter.
So we'll just go ahead
and start with you, number one.
Hello. Uh, first off, I want
to say thank you for being a demanding
trial when other journalists
around.
I wanted to ask about
closed sessions, part of the
trial.
Do you think
there are stuff talked about that we
don't know about, like
things that weren't leaked yet?
Or was it just the
usual ridiculous secrecy
around us?
It's I suspect it's the
unusual, the usual secrecy around
this that, you know, is poor
and part and parcel with the US
government right now.
Defense has said
that nothing was said in the session that
caused them any alarm, that it was all
just generalities and buzzwords like IED
explosions, but they never really talked
about how it actually caused damage.
Number two, please.
So thanks for your talk.
Was really great. And thanks for the work
that you're doing. You're the only
journalist in the whole world that's
actually covering this in depth.
I had one one correction and one
question. OK, so the correction is that
WikiLeaks is not a national security
threat. We're a national security
promise.
And second of all,
I think that it would be really useful to
try to organize a lot of FOIA Privacy
Act requests, and there are a lot of
people whose lives have been destroyed by
this grand jury.
I've been targeted by it like 10
people in this audience that I've seen.
I'm pretty sure we're also targeted by
it. So is there a way that we can work
with you to try
to get as many documents as we possibly
can to show the sort of new McCarthyist
crackdown on WikiLeaks and people who
care about these topics?
I have about 200 photos out right now,
and I'm actually going to be suing the
government next week, but I don't want to
announce what I'm suing them over.
So, yes, there is something that's going
on. I mean, the important thing with this
is also to kind of
lay down low, like I'm pretty.
I know the documents for the Manning
trial and I'm going to get everything out
of the government that I can.
And I'm going to I have an attorney to
help me do that. So so should we
approach you to, like, some privacy
act? Yes, things like that.
Exactly. So if you want
your information sought and you believe
that you're related to this and we can
talk about it privately,
I will give you documents that I need to
get in order to get files from you,
files about you from government agencies
so you can find me on Twitter at
Khawam dot net and we can move from
there somewhere else or come
up to me while I'm here.
Thank you.
OK, we have questions from the Internet.
Yes, there are two questions
when I see. The first one is
how does the mening case inform us
about what might happen to Snowden?
Well, I think that
Snowden has said himself that he
was inspired by
Manning, but also
learned from Manning, I think what's
important here, though, is to come
back to this idea
of Manning as the victim of poor
Manning's away in prison.
We're going to get Manning out of prison.
You know, that is
how I feel about it.
We're going to get Manning out of prison
because it is an abomination that Manning
is in prison.
And part of that is characterizing
her leaks and WikiLeaks publications
in an accurate light.
And defending freedom of the press,
freedom of the press, I mean, it costs
nothing to publish today on the Internet
and there's a power in that and
not letting that be taken away because we
think we have to rely on a billionaire in
order to publish useful
information has a great
public benefit anyway.
One more from the Internet, please.
Yes, the question
is, can you tell us if Chelsea
Manning gets mailed books and all the
other stuff being sent to her and
thus should care about it?
Well, from what I don't you know, I don't
speak for Manning, but from what
her defense attorney tells me and from
people around her, the Private
Manning Support Network and Nathan Fuller
and people like that, she
actually really enjoys the mail that
she receives and
has I know of that.
She has a couple of very robust
pen pal ships with very strong
public intellectuals who
are also very protective of her.
And I'm very happy for her that she has
that.
Are you number three, are you is this a
question? OK, go ahead.
Hello and thank you for
this amount of information.
There's a lot to process,
and
I was wondering the whole time
about what's happening
on the American street after Snowden
and after Manning, because actually we
don't get a lot if something is changing.
And I would be curious also
to know whether there
is some movement
on the street. So, I mean,
if things
happen, like
what happened to Manning and
people still relate to that kind of
political systems and this kind
of institution, then there is
actually a need to change that.
And my question is, is there
a slight change on the American street
or is that a long shot?
The way I look at Manning's leaks in the
power of Manning's leaks, that the reason
why I'm very protective of her personally
is she leaked documents about people
who don't have a vote, who are victims
of America's wars, who
are faceless and nameless and
nothings.
And to me,
that is the power of that publication.
So does the is American conscious
of Manning's leaks?
Weirdly enough, I mean, I think that the
Hollywood movies have sort of
come sideways influenced people.
They're aware of Manning in the context
of a Hollywood narrative.
I don't know if they're aware of the
spirit of her leaks
and her actions.
I can't say.
OK, OK, thank you.
We're out of time, so please give Alexis
another round of applause.