In this TomDispatch.com interview Civil rights attorney and PULSE contributor Chase Madar outlines the case against––and the defense on behalf of––the soldier who allegedly provided the documents for the latest WikiLeaks release as well as the now infamous “Collateral Murder” video, Private First Class Bradley Manning. Also, don’t miss Chase’s brilliant piece on Bradley Manning.
Category: USA
United States of Israel
Sarah Palin is just the latest GOP politician to visit to Israel after a string of possible Presidential hopefuls to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the past few months. Why is establishing your credentials in Tel Aviv before running for US president as vital as stumping in New Hampshire?
Breaking Australia’s silence: WikiLeaks and freedom
‘Breaking Australia’s silence: WikiLeaks and freedom’ was a public forum held on 16 March 2011 at the Sydney Town Hall. The event was staged by the Sydney Peace Foundation, Amnesty, Stop the War Coalition, and supported by the City of Sydney.
Chaired by Mary Kostakidis, it featured speeches by John Pilger, Andrew Wilkie MP (the only serving Western intelligence officer to expose the truth about the Iraq invasion) and Julian Burnside QC, defender of universal human rights under the law.
Gaddafi is the regime
Charles Glass has an excellent post on the London Review Blog, worth reproducing in full:
The Libyan dictator is resisting the popular forces ranged against him in ways that his counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt did not. In Tunis and Cairo, Zine Abedine Ben-Ali and Hosni Mubarak were the faces of military regimes. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is not the face: he is the regime. The Egyptian and Tunisian army chiefs calculated that sacrificing their nominal commanders-in-chief would preserve their own positions without jeopardising the interests of their American benefactors. Playing the role of saviours of the nation, after years in which the officer class enriched itself and ordinary soldiers were made to repress dissent, the armies in Tunisia and Egypt emerged as arbiters of whatever order will follow the post-dictator era.
Since Gaddafi seized power in Libya with his co-conspirator Major Abdul Salam Jalloud in 1969, he has remade the military in his own image to enforce his rule. In this, he enjoyed the successive support of the CIA, the Soviet Union and the East German security services. In Egypt, the army had some legitimacy from the Nasser era, when a whole generation of junior officers (all of whom entered the army after its officer class was expanded beyond the pashas in the 1930s) supported the revolution of 1952. When Nasser died in 1970 and Sadat was assassinated in 1981, the army set ground rules for transition that preserved its position. Libya, since Gaddafi overthrew King Idris, has never faced a transition. Gaddafi is not contemplating one, which leaves his army no option but to retain him. If he goes, they are finished.
What Gaddafi did for the CIA and MI6
This is why the West suddenly fell in love with Gaddafi a few years back. He was the CIA’s preferred torturer.
As opposition groups in Libya take over areas outside of the capital, state prisons and military buildings are being searched.
In Benghazi, the opposition says they have unearthed equipment used by the government to torture dissidents, while more and more allegations of cruelty towards political prisoners are emerging.
Al Jazeera’s Tony Birtley reports from Benghazi, Libya.
Philip Weiss on the Arab Revolt
This is as good as talk radio gets. Our friend, the great Phil Weiss on Radio Open Source with Chris Lydon to discuss the implications of the Arab revolt and the changing discourse in the American Jewish community.
Information Wars
Information is power and in the age of the information revolution, cyber and satellite communication is transforming our lives, reinventing the relationship between people and power. New media, from WikiLeaks to Facebook, Twitter to YouTube, is persistently challenging the traditional flow of information, and cyber disobedience is exposing powerful governments. Websites are now being treated like hostile territories; whistleblowers and leakers as terrorists, and hackers as insurgents. Governments are scrambling to salvage their influence and take advantage of the new cyber and satellite media. From China to the Sudan, Egypt to Iran, despots and armies are tracking web activity and setting up Facebook accounts to spy on their citizens. So is this the century of free information and expression as the cyber utopians predicted, or new methods of electronic oppression as the cyber sceptics warned?
The Qu’osby Show
Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show is brilliant.
US vetoes UN resolution on Israeli settlements
Al Jazeera English — Despite receiving the backing of 14 out of 15 members of the United Nations’ security council, an Arab-sponsored UN resolution branding Israeli settlements illegal was vetoed by the United States.
Meanwhile AIPAC is pleased with the Obama administration’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year which slates 5.6 billion US tax dollars for Israel, 3.1 billion of which will be military aid.
That same budget proposal continues US military aid for Egypt, but with room for alterations depending on developments…
The Trials of Bradley Manning: A Defense
For the past seven months, US Army Private First Class Manning has been held in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. Twenty-five thousand other Americans are also in prolonged solitary confinement, but the conditions of Manning’s pre-trial detention have been sufficiently brutal for the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on Torture to announce an investigation.
Pfc. Manning is alleged to have obtained documents, both classified and unclassified, from the Department of Defense and the State Department via the Internet and provided them to WikiLeaks. (That “alleged” is important because the federal informant who fingered Manning, Adrian Lamo, is a felon convicted of computer-hacking crimes. He was also involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution in the month before he levelled his accusation. All of this makes him a less than reliable witness.) At any rate, the records allegedly downloaded by Manning revealed clear instances of war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread torture committed by the Iraqi authorities with the full knowledge of the U.S. military, previously unknown estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed at U.S. military checkpoints, and the massive Iraqi civilian death toll caused by the American invasion.
For bringing to light this critical but long-suppressed information, Pfc. Manning has been treated not as a whistleblower, but as a criminal and a spy. He is charged with violating not only Army regulations but also the Espionage Act of 1917, making him the fifth American to be charged under the act for leaking classified documents to the media. A court-martial will likely be convened in the spring or summer.
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