Chelsea Manning Thread

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Chelsea Manning Thread

Postby Montag » Sat Dec 04, 2010 4:23 pm

Shouldn't we be discussing this guy? With the international man of mystery sopping up all his ink?

WikiLeaks dump: Soldier Bradley Manning wanted to unleash 'worldwide anarchy'
by Helen Kennedy

November 29, 2010
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... with_.html

The vast document dump that WikiLeaks unveiled Sunday came from an Army intelligence analyst who copied tens of thousands of sensitive documents onto CDs labeled "Lady Gaga."

According to a computer chat log published in June by Wired News, soldier Bradley Manning bragged to Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned him in, that he was going to unleash "worldwide anarchy in CSV [comma separated value] format."

"Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public," Manning said. "Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed."

Manning, 22, has been in solitary confinement for the past seven months.

He had said he would come to work at an Army base outside Baghdad with rewritable CDs "labeled with something like Lady Gaga" and quietly transfer secrets to the CDs.

"No one suspected a thing," he said. "Kind of sad."

He said he passed the information to Julian Assange, the enigmatic head of WikiLeaks, a website devoted to publishing secrets.

Hours before Sunday's planned 4:30 p.m. info dump, the WikiLeaks reported that it was "under a mass distributed denial of service attack."

By 4 p.m., the site was back online. It was not clear who was trying to shut it down.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Montag » Sat Dec 04, 2010 4:29 pm

'A funny little guy' accused of leaking U.S. documents
by Araminta Wordsworth

December 2, 2010
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/ ... story.html
Son of a broken marriage between American father and a Welsh mother, the young Bradley Manning was teased for being a geek and gay.

In light of this, his choice of the U.S. military as a career seems unlikely but it appears he was attracted by the chance to expand his computer expertise. It was also a way of getting the army to pay for college.

Today, he's accused of being the man behind the WikiLeaks furor, a disgruntled squaddie in Iraq who downloaded thousands of sensitive U.S. documents and handed them over to the whistleblowing website.

"He was a funny little character, really on the ball, a really bright kid. [He] loved computers, absolutely loved them," said James Kirkpatrick, who knew him at school in Harverfordwest, Wales, his mother's hometown to which she returned after her divorce.

"Obviously the Army there has got very good technology and good training for computers so I can see why he may have joined it but you never would have expected him to do so," he told the BBC.

But Private First Class Manning, now 23, had a trigger-hair temper and would slam books on the desk in rage if fellow students didn't pay attention.

"It was probably the worst experience anyone could go through," said Rowan John, a former classmate who was openly gay, according to The New York Times. "Being different like me, or Bradley, in the middle of nowhere is like going back in time to the Dark Ages."

The youth dropped out of school at 16 and joined his father Brian, an army veteran, in Crescent, Okla., where he was born.

He was hired and quickly fired by a small software company. The owner said he was smart, but had the personality of a bull in a china shop.

Then his father kicked him out of the house after discovering he was gay. He even lived in his car while he worked in minimum-wage jobs.

With this background, entering the U.S. military seemed to promise stability and an education. Pvt. Manning enlisted in 2007.

He was granted a security clearance and trained as an intelligence agency at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., before being assigned to the Second Brigade 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. He shipped out to Baghdad as a computer specialist in October 2009.

Iraq quickly turned out to be a disappointment: Pvt. Manning was a poor soldier who was reprimanded twice, including once for assaulting an officer.

"Bradley Manning is beyond frustrated with people and society at large," he said in a Facebook posting on May 5, 2010.

The next day, he posted, "Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment."

Disaffected soldiers are common, but in the wake of 9/11, Pvt. Manning had access to some of the most secret information on the planet. Information-sharing between the U.S. intelligence services was opened up, making huge caches of documents available to those with minimal security clearance.

At some stage, the disgruntled GI started to chat and exchange emails with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker in California.

"Listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history," Pvt. Manning wrote, according to a transcript of their messages published on the Wired website.

Mr. Lamo says he went to the authorities with the messages.

Today, Pvt. Manning sits in the brig in Quantico, Va., charged with stealing secret information, while the documents he pilfered make headlines around the world. He faces 50 years in jail.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Montag » Sat Dec 04, 2010 4:35 pm

Profile: Bradley Manning
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11874276

excerpt:
US soldier Bradley Manning lip-synced to Lady Gaga while he downloaded thousands of classified documents from military servers, according to a computer hacker he befriended. Now, the 23-year-old is facing decades in jail.

As an intelligence analyst in the US Army, Bradley Manning was given access to a large amount of highly sensitive information.

But as a private first class, he was very low-ranking with a relatively meagre wage.

According to his friends, he had become frustrated with a military career that appeared to be stagnating.

And his personal life appears to have hit a downward spiral after he was posted to Iraq last year.

Pte Manning joined the army in 2007 after drifting through low-paid jobs.

He had been brought up in Crescent, a small town in Oklahoma. His father, Brian, had reportedly spent five years in the military.

But his parents divorced when he was a teenager, and he moved with his mother to Haverfordwest in south-west Wales.
'Funny little character'

Accounts emerging in the media in the UK and US portray his teenage years as difficult.

He was said to have been a hothead who was often teased for being a geek.

"He would get upset, slam books on the desk if people wouldn't listen to him or understand his point of view," a classmate from Oklahoma, Chera Moore, told the New York Times.

A friend from his schooldays in Wales, James Kirkpatrick, told the BBC he was a "funny little character, really on the ball" who was obsessed with computers.

"Obviously the [US] Army has got very good technology and good training for computers so I can see why he may have joined it, but you never would have expected him to do so," said Mr Kirkpatrick.

Some reports say he had a difficult time in Wales, and suffered abuse for being gay.

After finishing school, he returned to the US and joined the army. Friends say he enlisted to help pay for college.

He went to Iraq in October 2009. But messages he posted on Facebook suggest he was far from happy.

"Bradley Manning is beyond frustrated with people and society at large," his status read on 5 May 2010.

The next day, he posted: "Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment."

A week earlier, he had written: "Bradley Manning is now left with the sinking feeling that he doesn't have anything left."

Some of the postings appear to refer to a recent breakdown of a relationship.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Dec 04, 2010 4:41 pm

Yes, there should be a Bradley Manning thread. But all three of these stories are on the classic hit-piece template.

I have a suggestion. Why don't you edit to put a link his supporters' side of the story at the top of this thread?

http://www.bradleymanning.org/
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Montag » Sat Dec 04, 2010 4:47 pm

JackRiddler wrote:Yes, there should be a Bradley Manning thread. But all three of these stories are on the classic hit-piece template.

I have a suggestion. Why don't you edit to put a link his supporters' side of the story at the top of this thread?

http://www.bradleymanning.org/


That's what the thread is for. I've haven't paid much attention to the guy... I know next to nothing about him. I just found out he was gay (not that it matters much) something I didn't know at all.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby hava1 » Sat Dec 04, 2010 5:35 pm

Adding the israeli angle.

The "trend" to draft gay geeks to computer-cyber intel is prominent in Israel's 8200 famous unit. (and others). I personally dont see this as a "gay progress" or "integration", but as a form of sexual exploitation, I believe these young man are being exploited to use their sexuality in espionage, and they are more controllable.

Indeed, recently, two cases of pedo criminals in 8200, both I believe gay, were published in the press, one of them clearly indicating that the unit employed the pedophile man well after he confessed his problems to his superiors.

Military Intelligence , internet, and sexuality...I don't like the mix.
---

I hope this case causes a change in the policy, perhaps the gay movement will see it as set back, but i think its safer for the young men.

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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby 82_28 » Sat Dec 04, 2010 6:01 pm

Image

Image
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby 82_28 » Sat Dec 04, 2010 6:07 pm

There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Montag » Sat Dec 04, 2010 10:50 pm

Losing the Real Bradley Manning Story
by Ralph Lopez

November 26, 2010
http://warisacrime.org/content/losing-r ... ning-story

The Bradley Manning case is approaching. When we think of Bradley Manning, many of us tend to think of either a Wikileaks document dump or the attack in the video in which two Reuters reporters are killed after a group of Iraqi men are fired upon by an Apache attack helipcopter. Already dismissed as justifiable by many due to the presence of a rocket launcher found on the scene, these associations may be losing the essence of Manning's actions and his strongest defense. Manning was not shocked by the initial attack on the Iraqi men, and wrote to Adrian Lamo:

"At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter...No big deal ... about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.""

Unlike the intial attack, the follow-up attack captured in the Wikileaks video, "the van thing," was a strictly illegal and prohibited attack upon the wounded during wartime, which is why it was being buried in the military Judge Advocate General's office (JAG,) which is a military prosecutor. There is no other explanation for the video being stored there. It seals the case, in one clear, specific, and identifiable instance, that Bradley Manning was not committing a crime. He was reporting one.

Manning virtually predicts that given he will probably be held incommunicado and without a chance to speak for himself as he is tried in the media, his biggest problem to be to tell his side of the story. Adrian Lamo asked him in an email: "What would you do if your role [with] Wikileaks seemed in danger of being blown?"

Manning answered:

"Try and figure out how I could get my side of the story out, before everything was twisted around to make me look like Nidal Hassan (the Fort Hood shooter.)

Humane treatment of the wounded is one of the oldest laws of war. It came into being after a lifelong personal campaign by Henri Dunant, after the Battle of Solferino in 1859, during the Napoleonic Wars, after Dunant witnessed the horror of 40,000 wounded men dying upon the field. Dunant was founder of the Red Cross, and though he finished out his old age in ascetic poverty, he never lacked for people eager to care for him or take him into their villages across Europe. A poor but educated man, Dunant convinced the royal houses of Europe that a law of the wounded was in their own best interests. Observers remarked in later wars that wounded Frenchmen were often treated like royalty by all sides.

Article 12 of the Geneva Convention of 1864 states that,

"...Members of the armed forces and other persons (...) who are wounded or sick, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances. They shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Party to the conflict...Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated...".

The law extends to those attempting to evacuate them, to whom it is required that assistance be given if possible. The definition of wounded and sick for the purpose of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol 1) is:

"...persons, whether military or civilians, who, because of trauma, disease or other physical or mental disorder or disability, are in need of medical assistance or care and who refrain from any act of hostility."

Also from a Marine Corp study guide,Military Studies:

"Marines do not attack medical personnel, facilities, or equipment. Both friendly and enemy medical personnel are to be encouraged to come to the battlefield in safety to care for the wounded combatants."

I have perused Internet miltary sites, and the results are instructive. Although some shock at the first attack is expressed, most commenters identifiying themselves as Iraq and other war combat vets express little outrage at the first attack. But with respect to "the van thing," the words come up over and over, often with little elaboration: "war crime."

In the second attack a man is seen crawling upon the ground after the first attack, partially disemboweled, when a van pulls up with men who attempt to evacuate him. The Apache gunner in his bloodlust requests and receives permission to open fire, muttering the words "just pick up a weapon," even though no weapons are anywhere visible near the crawling man. It is in this attack that two children who are in the van are wounded, whereupon the gunner remarks "that's what they get for bringing their kids to the battle." These are the children saved by Spc. Ethan McCord, who runs with them to a Bradley vehicle after another soldier, upon discovering them, runs away vomiting.

It is critical that Bradley's side of the story get out. Please urge his defense team to point out the clear war crime, and post this widely.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Stephen Morgan » Sun Dec 05, 2010 9:05 am

Montag wrote:
JackRiddler wrote:Yes, there should be a Bradley Manning thread. But all three of these stories are on the classic hit-piece template.

I have a suggestion. Why don't you edit to put a link his supporters' side of the story at the top of this thread?

http://www.bradleymanning.org/


That's what the thread is for. I've haven't paid much attention to the guy... I know next to nothing about him. I just found out he was gay (not that it matters much) something I didn't know at all.


Presumably no-one asked.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Plutonia » Sun Jan 23, 2011 3:50 pm

Plutonia wrote:David House and Jane Hamsher have been blocked from seeing Bradley Manning and are currently being detained without explanation, vehicle searched and impounded.

Unfolding on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/#!/davidmhouse/statu ... 4249453568

http://twitter.com/#!/janehamsher
https://twitter.com/#!/davidmhouse

Glenn Greenwald is following:
https://twitter.com/#!/ggreenwald


Edit: moved from here viewtopic.php?p=379208#p379208
Last edited by Plutonia on Sun Jan 23, 2011 4:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Plutonia » Sun Jan 23, 2011 3:58 pm

Excellent CBC interview on the psychological deterioration of Bradley Manning, around the 9:45 mark:

http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Plutonia » Sun Jan 23, 2011 6:01 pm

Here is FDL's report on what happened today at Quantico - looks like their intent was to block Manning's scheduled visit with House.

Must've been pretty scary, sitting there not knowing, though.

Statement of Events: Bradley Manning’s Primary Visitor Detained at Quantico

By: Michael Whitney Sunday January 23, 2011 1:23 pm

Bradley ManningAt roughly 1:00 pm, upon driving onto the base at Quantico, David House and blogger Jane Hamsher were detained. House, who is on the Quantico Brig’s visitation list, has been visiting Bradley Manning in confinement since last September. In December 2010, House came forward with testimony that he witnessed a deterioration in Manning’s physical and mental state due to the conditions of solitary confinement. House traveled to the Quantico brig to check up on Bradley’s well-being after a week in which Manning’s lawyer filed an Article 138 complaint over Manning’s mistreatment at Quantico. House and Hamsher also planned to deliver a 42,000 signature strong petition calling for an end to the inhumane conditions that Manning is being held. Upon arriving to the main entrance at Quantico, House and Hamsher were stopped and detained by military police who provided no explanation of detainment asides from a statement that orders to detain had “come from the top.”

From 1:00 – 1:30 MP’s took their ID’s and made them sign a form that they could not deviate to the brig or else they would be trespassing. At this time, one of the MP’s asked for Hamsher’s insurance card. Hamsher attempted to produce a digital copy of the card, at which point MP Gunnery Sgt. Foster informed Hamsher that her car would be towed. House and Hamsher offered to drive away off the base but were denied, despite being detained only ten feet inside the base’s perimeter. The MP’s took the Social Security numbers, phone numbers and addresses of House and Hamsher.

Around 1:40 the tow truck arrived and MP’s instructed House and Hamsher to leave their vehicle, informing them that their vehicle would be searched. At 2:00 pm House observed military officers arriving and entering the MP outpost which oversaw his detainment. House expressed concern that he would miss Manning’s visiting hours but was informed that he could neither exit nor move forward to the base. No explanation for House and Hamsher’s detainment was provided until at 2:50 when they were informed they could leave the base. They were detained for two hours up until Manning’s visitation time period was set to expire at 3:00.

In past visits, Hamsher and House have had no problem driving onto the base to visit Manning. This is the first time House has been denied access to Manning. House and Hamsher’s detainment comes on the heels of Amnesty Intl calling for an investigation into the conditions of Manning’s confinement. The UN rapporteur has also announced that the UN will be starting an investigation and Manning’s attorney has filed an article 138 complaint citing inhumane and overly harsh conditions on part of the Brig. Now House, Manning’s primary visitor outside of his attorney, who has provided public testimony about Manning’s deteriorating conditions as a result to his solitary confinement, has effectively been denied access to Manning.
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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby Plutonia » Tue Jan 25, 2011 12:07 am

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake interviewed about Manning and yesterdays' events - she and David House were detained at Quantico for over 2 hours, effectively blocking David from his regular weekly visit:

[the British] government always kept a kind of standing army of news writers who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented & put into the papers whatever might serve the minister

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Re: Bradley Manning Thread

Postby 8bitagent » Tue Jan 25, 2011 12:24 am

NBC: U.S. can't link Army private to Assange

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41241414/ns ... _security/
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