Jonathan Hafetz, professor at Seton Hall Law School and co-counsel in the court martial trial of PFC Bradley Manning writes:.
May 24, 2012, New York – Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a petition requesting the Army Court of Criminal Appeals to order the Judge in the court martial of alleged Wikileaks leaker Private Bradley Manning to grant the public and press access to the government’s motion papers, the court’s own orders, and transcripts of proceedings, none of which have been made public to date.
In addition, the petition challenges the fact that substantive legal matters in the court martial – including a pretrial publicity order – have been argued and decided in secret..
The petitioners include CCR itself and a diverse group of media figures: Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, The Nation and its national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill, and Wikileaks and its publisher, Julian Assange. Also included are Kevin Gosztola, co-author of Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning and civil liberties blogger covering the Manning court martial, and Chase Madar, author of The Passion of Bradley Manning and a contributing editor to The American Conservative…
A Synopsis Of This Morning’s News… H/t to ChrisM my MP3Angel for supplying the audio files.
«o»There are primaries and caucuses in Alabama, Mississippi, the Virgin Islands and Guam today. If Mitt Romney doesn’t carry Alabama and Mississippi he’ll have a hard time with his Southern strategy.
«o»The fight is already on as to where the trial for the Army sergeant who just massacred sixteen Afghan civilians will be held. The Pentagon is claiming the trial will be held under Court Martial rules using the Uniform Code of Military Justice but the Afghan government is saying they expect a civilian trial under Afghanistan’s laws. Lets see… Not military action… Kills civilians as an ‘independent actor’… The latter seems to be the appropriate route, but YOU BET that’s not what’s going to happen with the Pentagon saying the soldier will be out of the country within 48 hours.
You can hear the clamor and cries in the halls and chambers of US government to speed EVERYONE’S exit from the country while president Obama says “We shouldn’t rush to the exits” out one side of his two faces as he apologizes for atrocities committed by our soldiers from the other ‘face’.
Meanwhile, let it be said without denying this tragedy in a war that is NOTHING BUT a continuing tragedy for the people of Afghanistan, that American soldiers ARE victims themselves, of a deceptive lying (Osama bin-Laden spent most of his hiding time in Pakistan NOT Afghanistan) government… OUR GOVERNMENT, that put them in harms way, and in this case recycled the soldier FOUR TIMES into a combat zone… Because the US government DEPENDS on a small army, lest there be a military draft for our Imperial wars, which means EVERYONE in America gets to meet troopers who have been destroyed in any number of ways by war, or lost a friend, relative, or lover to a war. Not a pleasant proposition for a nation raised on bloodless video game violence.
The protests in regard to that civilian massacre are just… getting…started in Kandahar, Kabul, and other larger towns. Expect those protests to spread and get more violent in light of the Taliban’s statement that they’ve ordered their fighters to begin attacking everyone and anyone in the employ of the US or NATO, and their facilities throughout the country.
«o»Egypt has managed to monger together a truce between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza after four days of tit-for-tat rocket attacks and air bombardments.
«o»The House of Representatives has gone home to hustle their constituents for re-election and the senate will break later today or tomorrow after they figure out how to gut the Transportation bill. More.
«o»There will be protests in Oakland and elsewhere in California today over a provision in the new state budget that would cut animal shelter funding and reduce the ‘wait-time till destruction’ for errant pets to three days. Details.
In OTHER News:
Let it be noted that your government is SCARED OF YOU… So what do we do?
“The world’s leaders flee from us … so what do we do? Maybe we just laugh at them?”
ADBUSTERS: TACTICAL BRIEFING #27 – #LAUGHRIOT
Alright you wild cats, nimble dreamers and jammer tacticians,
In a sudden about-face, the United States has conceded a victory to Occupy and moved May’s G8 summit to Camp David, an impenetrable military base in rural Maryland.
Wow! Looks like the specter of 50,000 occupiers ready to swarm with a list of demands has turned the climactic Showdown in Chicago into a humiliating G8 Backdown. Bravo! Splitting the G8 and NATO summits was a deft move… but now we’ve got a major tactical rethink on our hands.
The big question is do we follow Mao’s advice (“when the enemy retreats, we pursue”) or Sun Tzu’s (“Do not pursue an enemy who simulates flight”)?
We’ve heard persuasive arguments on all sides. Some occupiers say the movement should lay chase and go for #OCCUPYCAMPDAVID against all odds … a month of tree-sits, lockdowns and nomadic encampments in the woods and nearby Thurmont. Others believe it’s best to up the ante with #OCCUPYCHICAGO: an even bigger mobilization beginning with the May Day General Strike. Still others advocate an unpredictable everywhere-at-once global insurgency of anarchic swarms throughout the month of May….
When Ben Ali first attacked then tried to hide from his people, he was toppled. When Mubarak refused to negotiate and tried to beat his people back into line, he was deposed. Now the White House and the G8 are repeating the mistakes of last year’s autocrats … first they try to scare us with tough talk of repressive anti-Occupy ordinances, crowd suppression technologies and paramilitary policing, then they make a hasty retreat to the safety of Camp David.
The world’s leaders flee from us … so what do we do? Maybe we just laugh at them?
On May 18, the day the G8 leaders meet in Camp David, why don’t we, the people of the world have a #LAUGHRIOT.
Let roars of laughter rise up from towns and cities everywhere at the spectacle of the world’s leaders trying to crisis manage the economy from behind closed doors and razor wire fences…
In full @ Adbusters… The Journal Of The Mental Environment
—30—
This is Razer Raygun saying ‘Happy Motoring America…’. Remember:
Capitalism has a gun at your head every moment you’re alive
Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the NLG’s Military Law Task Force (MLTF) said, “Manning is being prosecuted for patriotic acts akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. His prosecution highlights both the way that military proceedings subvert fundamental due process rights and the dangers of government secrecy to a free society.”
The potential for prosecutorial abuse stems from the power that commanding officers have as the convening authorities over court martial hearings. The convening authority selects the officer who first investigates a case, recommends charges against the accused, and then selects the “members” of the court martial, who form the jury. Particularly in a high profile case such as this, where the government has already indicated its determination to convict and punish Manning, the ability of the convening authority to control the process and the outcome is overwhelming.
“The court martial system is fraught from beginning to end with the danger of command influence,” noted MLTF Chair James Branum. “It has permeated this case from the beginning and emanated from the Commander-in-Chief on down, making due process impossible. In this situation, dismissal of all charges is the only just option.”
A Synopsis Of This Morning’s News… H/t to ChrisM my MP3Angel for supplying the audio files.
«o»Just before and during president Obama’s State of the Union address SEAL Team Six was in action in Somalia snatching a couple of Western aid agency workers held hostages by an un-named party, and rescued a Dane and an American woman without casualties on our side. Nine Somalis were killed in the raid. The hostages were either very high value (ie. CIA workers) or the SEALS are simply practicing for an not-too-distant-future incursion into Somalia to attempt keeping the illegitimate (there WAS an elected government in place, the Islamic Court Union) U.N.-established ‘government’ in place/kill anyone who might threaten them militarily or politically. More on the president’s SOTU address, and still more in the commentary.
«o»Quick Comparison - A Marine sergeant who led the troops involved in the Haditha Iraq massacre where twenty four civilians were slaughtered has pled guilty, and all others in his squad were exonerated. The sergeant will do no time, and a decision on whether he will remain in the Marines is still pending. Meanwhile, PFC Bradley Manning, accused of releasing a number of items including the Collateral Murder war crime video of a US helicopter gunship crew lying to their fire controller and aerially gunning down a Reuters photographer along with a number of Iraqi civilian including a man with children in a van who came to their aid, is facing life imprisonment for ‘aiding the enemy’.
«o»In Afghanistan the winter snows have finally arrived causing a massive avalanche which has closed the Salang Pass, one of the three key resupply routes for our military operations in the country, with another one of those routes, the Khyber Pass, either still closed by the Pakistani government in retaliation for the killing of a couple of dozen of their troops by NATO helicopter gunships, or perhaps simply closed due to winter conditions.
«o»A solar storm is in progress for the next few days. Airlines have rerouted their flights to avoid the North Pole where the radiation would be severest, affecting instrumentation, and if you go out to a dark place at night, you MIGHT see traces of an Aurora
In OTHER News: The other day yours truly reported on the massive attack by hackers all over the world directed at US and other country’s government agencies, the MPAA, the RIAA, and other pimps and thieves involved in the Movie and Recording Industry.
It was such a severe and widespread attack that it actually made the MSM news… but of course they left something out because the same people who own the MSM news also pretty much own the Movie and Recording industry (It’s called Media Concentration, and the reason you never hear about it? Media Concentration!)
There’s an unstated reason WHY the federal government chose right now to take down a very specific internet operation, MegaUpload, and IT IS NOT the ‘racketeering and piracy’ reasons they are claiming:
In December of 2011, just weeks before the takedown, Digital Music News reported on something new that the creators of #Megaupload were about to unroll. Something that would rock the music industry to its core…
…a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings,” [H/t: M3ntalist]
The Entertainment-Industrial Complex = Pimps and Thieves.
—30—
This is Razer Raygun saying ‘Happy Motoring America…’. Remember:
Capitalism has a gun at your head every moment you’re alive:
Christian Science Monitor, with whom I’ve had some serious bones to pick over the last few year, as recently as their boosterism for NATO’s invasion of Libya…
I think they’re feeling like they got ‘burned’.
As I’ve said recently
You can take this to the bank (Credit Union if you prefer). IF they discipline the Marines who did this …the punishment WILL NOT be as severe as the punishment inflicted on the person who blew the whistle… Just like Bradley Manning
You can take this to the bank (Credit Union if you prefer). IF they discipline the Marines who did this, the punishment WILL NOT be as severe as the punishment inflicted on the person who blew the whistle… Just like Bradley Manning.
“Aiding the enemy”: That’s one of the crimes that Lieutenant Colonel Paul Almanza, who was tasked with an investigation of Manning’s case, says there is evidence he committed. Almanza has advised the Army to submit Manning to a court martial, relating to the massive, classified document dump to Wikileaks, with which he’s been accused. Manning’s defense attorney, David Coombs, has voiced complaint that Almanza works in the Justice department as a civilian. Justice is currently building a case against Wikileaks head Julian Assange, which opens up risk of conflict of interest. If Manning is convicted through a court martial, he could face life imprisonment. source
A Message To #Occupiers Everywhere: "Ignore the loyalists, ignore the cynics, keep fighting ...... Shut them down. Shut the entire god damn system down. No one can stop this. I love you all." ~~Redditor Aniadrift
March 13 2012 Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: A Lesson In ‘Ghetto’ Economics - Currency… Intrinsic Value… And The Tide
Wow! Looks like the specter of 50,000 occupiers ready to swarm with a list of demands has turned the climactic Showdown in Chicago into a humiliating G8 Backdown. Bravo! Splitting the G8 and NATO summits was a deft move… but now we’ve got a major tactical rethink on our hands.
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