Mr. Kristinn Hrafnsson, Wikileaks spokesperson, said last week that representatives from the FBI came to Iceland in August 2011. The Icelandic Minister of the Interior confirmed this the same day and said that when he became aware of the FBI in Iceland he cancelled all cooperation with the FBI and told the representatives to leave.

Mr. Hrafnsson said that the FBI came to Iceland to investigate Wikileaks. In an announcement from the Icelandic police it was stated that the FBI agents were here because of an imminent attack on the Ministry Offices in Iceland. The FBI agents interrogated one person regarding Wikileaks and the computer attacks. That person was interrogated at the US embassy in Iceland and then taken to Washington where he was interrogated for four more days. It was also mentioned in the announcement from the police that the person who was interrogated came willingly forward to the embassy.

The FBI agents interrogated the man, who is twenty years old, for five days after the Ministry of the Interior declined to cooperate with the FBI.

The interrogations took place in hotels around Reykjavik but never at the US embassy.

On August 30th the FBI agents told the Chief of police in Iceland that the Ministry of the Interior had said that they did not want the boy interrogated any further in Iceland and that their stay here was unwanted. The agents then left the country.

They however took the boy with them to Washington where he was interrogated for four more days. It is said that the boy went willingly. After the interrogations the boy was flown back to Iceland.

Mr. Ossur Skarphedinsson, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, said to a local newspaper today that the FBI’s stay in Iceland was illegal. He said that the objective of the ministries had been to protect the boy, they thought that the boy did not realize the consequences of his actions. Mr. Skarphedinsson added:

“Therefore, we at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs thought that these conversations should be prevented, to protect this Icelandic citizen, because the conversations took place at very unusual places and without authorization. We did not receive any request regarding authorization to interrogate this man.”

An announcement from Mr. Ogmundur Jonasson, the Minister of the Interior, is expected soon.

Tuesday, 05 February 2013 16:10 font size Print Email

Find this story at 5 February 2014

Copyright News of Iceland.

The mid-June sun is setting on the Mansfield jail near Dallas when Barrett Brown, the former public face of Anonymous, shuffles into the visitors hall wearing a jumpsuit of blazing orange. Once the nattiest anarchist around, Brown now looks like every other inmate in the overcrowded North Texas facility, down to his state-issued faux-Crocs, the color of candy corn.

Who Are America’s New Political Prisoners?

Brown sits down across from his co-counsel, a young civil-liberties lawyer named Ahmed Ghappour, and raises a triumphant fist holding several sheets of notebook paper. “Penned it out,” he says. “After 10 months, I’m finally getting the hang of these archaic tools.” He hands the article, titled “The Cyber-Intelligence Complex and Its Useful Idiots,” to his lawyer with instructions to send it to his editor at The Guardian. Brown used to write for the British daily, but since he’s been in prison, it’s written about him and his strange legal ordeal that has had him locked up for nearly a year while he awaits trial next month. Should he be found guilty of all the charges the federal government is bringing against him – 17 counts, ranging from obstruction of justice to threatening a federal officer to identity fraud – he’ll face more than 100 years in prison.

Given the serious nature of his predicament, Brown, 32, seems shockingly relaxed. “I’m not worried or panicked,” he says. “It’s not even clear to me that I’ve committed a crime.” He describes his time here as a break from the drug-fueled mania of his prior life, a sort of digital and chemical fast in which he’s kicked opiates and indulged his pre-cyber whims – hours spent on the role-playing game GURPS and tearing through the prison’s collection of what he calls “English manor-house literature.”

Brown has been called many things during his brief public career – satirist, journalist, author, Anonymous spokesman, atheist, “moral fag,” “fame whore,” scourge of the national surveillance state. His commitment to investigating the murky networks that make up America’s post-9/11 intelligence establishment set in motion the chain of events that culminated in a guns-drawn raid of his Dallas apartment last September. “For a long time, the one thing I was happy not to see in here was a computer,” says Brown. “It appears as though the Internet has gotten me into some trouble.”

Encountering Barrett Brown’s story in passing, it is tempting to group him with other Anonymous associates who have popped up in the news for cutting pleas and changing sides. Brown’s case, however, is a thing apart. Although he knew some of those involved in high-profile “hacktivism,” he is no hacker. His situation is closer to the runaway prosecution that destroyed Aaron Swartz, the programmer-activist who committed suicide in the face of criminal charges similar to those now being leveled at Brown. But unlike Swartz, who illegally downloaded a large cache of academic articles, Brown never broke into a server; he never even leaked a document. His primary laptop, sought in two armed FBI raids, was a miniature Sony netbook that he used for legal communication, research and an obscene amount of video-game playing. The most serious charges against him relate not to hacking or theft, but to copying and pasting a link to data that had been hacked and released by others.

“What is most concerning about Barrett’s case is the disconnect between his conduct and the charged crime,” says Ghappour. “He copy-pasted a publicly available link containing publicly available data that he was researching in his capacity as a journalist. The charges require twisting the relevant statutes beyond recognition and have serious implications for journalists as well as academics. Who’s allowed to look at document dumps?”

Brown’s case is a bellwether for press freedoms in the new century, where hacks and leaks provide some of our only glimpses into the technologies and policies of an increasingly privatized national security-and-surveillance state. What Brown did through his organization Project PM was attempt to expand these peepholes. He did this by leading group investigations into the world of private intelligence and cybersecurity contracting, a $56 billion industry that consumes 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget.

Meet Jacob Applelaum, the American Wikileaks Hacker

“Barrett was an investigative journalist who was merely doing his professional duty,” says Christophe Deloire of Reporters Without Borders. “The sentence that he is facing is absurd and dangerous.”

B
rown grew up in the affluent North Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow, where, following his parents’ divorce, he lived with his New Age mother. Karen Lancaster always believed her only son was special – he once wrote that she called him “an indigo child with an alien soul.” Among her house rules was that mother and son meditate together daily. She instructed him in the predictions of Nostradamus and made sure he kept a dream journal for the purpose, as Brown described it, “of helping him divine the future by way of my external connection to the collective unconscious.” (For her part, Brown’s mother says she was progressive, but not “New Age”, and that her son’s comments were made in jest.)

The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond, Enemy of the State

A precocious pre-adolescent reader and writer, Brown produced a newspaper on his family’s desktop computer while in elementary school. When he started writing for the student paper at his private high school in the mid-Nineties, he quickly clashed with the paper’s censors over his right to criticize the administration. “Barrett always challenged authority, even as a kid, and anytime you go up against authority, you’re going to get in trouble,” says Brown’s father, Robert. “You could sort of always see this coming.”

By the time he reached high school, Brown had discovered Ayn Rand and declared himself an atheist. He founded an Objectivist Society at school and distinguished himself from other Randians by placing second out of 5,000 entrants in a national Ayn Rand essay contest. (Brown now expresses regret over this.) By all accounts, Brown hated everything about organized education, preferring to follow his own curricula and chat up girls on the bulletin-board systems of a still-embryonic Internet.

After his sophomore year, Brown told his parents he wasn’t going back. He signed up for online courses and spent his junior year in Tanzania with his father, a Maserati-driving conservative, safari hunter and serial entrepreneur who was trying to launch a hardwood-harvesting business. “Barrett loved living in Africa,” says his father. “He preferred adventure to being in school with his peers. We weren’t far from the embassy that was bombed that year.”

Brown returned to the U.S. and in 2000 joined some of his childhood friends in Austin, where he spent two semesters taking writing classes at the University of Texas. After dropping out, he spent a summer doing what one friend calls a “heroic” amount of Ecstasy and acid before settling into the charmed life of a pre-crisis Austin slacker – working part-time, smoking pot and paying cheap rent in a series of group houses with enormous porches. Brown’s roommates remember his rooms as being strewn with leaning towers of books and magazines – he especially liked Gore Vidal, P.J. O’Rourke and Hunter S. Thompson – but say he was not especially political. “After 9/11 and Iraq, there were a lot of protests in Austin,” says Ian Holmes, a childhood friend of Brown’s. “I don’t remember him participating in it or being extra vocal, but he was against it all like everyone else.”

As Brown built up his clip book and matured as a writer, his ambitions began to outgrow Austin. In 2007, Brown moved to Brooklyn with a group of old friends that called itself “the Texadus.” Their Bushwick apartment emerged as a hub for Lone Star State refugees who liked to get high, crush beers and play video games. “People were always hanging out and coming and going,” says Caleb Pritchard, a childhood friend of Brown’s who lived with him in Austin and Brooklyn. Among the apartment’s large cast of characters were a crew of weed-delivery guys from Puerto Rico and Honduras who used the apartment as a daytime base of business operations. “They brought over an Xbox, bought us beer and food and played strategy games with us,” Pritchard says. “It was a good cultural exchange for a bunch of skinny white kids from Dallas.”

As virtual-world games grew increasingly sophisticated, Brown spent more time in front of his computer. But he didn’t play the games like most people. In Second Life, he linked up with a group of people known as “griefers,” the term for hackers who in the mid-00s became known for generating chaos inside video-game worlds. Socializing on the bulletin board 4chan.org, they formed the first cells of what would later become Anonymous. In the documentary We Are Legion, about the hacktivist group, Brown waxes nostalgic over his griefer period, when he’d spend entire nights “on Second Life riding around in a virtual spaceship with the words ‘faggery daggery doo’ written on it, wearing Afros, dropping virtual bombs on little villages while waving giant penises around. That was the most fun time I ever had in my life.”

When everyone else went out to the bars, Brown stayed in. Aside from video games and the odd afternoon of pick-up basketball, he also pounded out columns, diaries and blog posts for Vanity Fair, Daily Kos and McSweeney’s, as well as restaurant reviews and essays for weeklies like New York Press and The Onion’s A.V. Club. Though he had some paying gigs, he published most heavily in unpaid, self-edited community forums like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. “Barrett wasn’t really working in New York so much as getting by with the help of friends and family,” says Pritchard. Among his unpaid gigs was his work as the spokesman for the Godless Americans PAC, which led to Brown’s first TV appearance, on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends.

In Brooklyn, Brown resumed shooting heroin, which he’d dabbled in off and on since he was 19. Over the years, doctors have diagnosed him with ADHD and depression. Accurate or not, the diagnoses suggest Brown was drawn to opiates for more than just the high. “When I joined him in Brooklyn in ’08, Barrett was already basically a functional junkie,” says Pritchard.

Heroin did not mellow Brown when it came to America’s pundit class. Brown’s critique made clear he didn’t want to join the journalistic establishment so much as lash it without mercy. Then, in March 2010, he announced in a blog post the goal of replacing it, of making its institutions irrelevant and rebuilding them in the image of an overly self-confident 28-year-old junkie named Barrett Brown. It was perhaps his first public manifestation of extreme self-assurance that could come off as imperious self-importance. Brown himself did not deny it, once saying, “I don’t think arrogance is something I’m in a position to attack anyone on.”

The project envisioned by Brown was a new kind of crowdsourced think tank to be “established with a handful of contributors who have been selected by virtue of intellectual honesty, proven expertise in certain topics and journalistic competence in general.” He named it Project PM, after a gang in William Gibson’s Neuromancer called the Panther Moderns.

Brown conceived his new network partly as a response to what he saw as the sad state of affairs at the two main homes for his work, Daily Kos and HuffPo. After years of vibrancy, both now suffered from “the watering-down of contributor quality,” he said. At Project PM, he assured that “below-average participants will have only very limited means by which to clutter the network.”

How Anonymous Took Down the Music Industry’s Websites

With typical cigarette-waving flourish, Brown declared, “Never has there existed such opportunity for revolution in human affairs.”

Had Project PM developed along the lines of Brown’s original vision – as a kind of exclusive, experts-only, friends-of-Barrett blogger network – it is extremely unlikely that Brown would now be in jail. Or that the FBI would have subpoenaed the company hired to secure its server, as it did in March. But Project PM ended up taking a different route.

Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview

T
he event that locked Brown’s path into a collision course with the federal government came on February 11th, 2010, when he posted an essay on Huffington Post that he grandiloquently titled “Anonymous, Australia and the Inevitable Fall of the NationState.”

At the time, Anonymous was in the news after some of its hackers, in an action they called Operation Titstorm, brought down Australian government servers in retaliation for the government’s attempt to block certain kinds of niche pornography. For Brown, Titstorm was a world-historic game-changer, a portent of an age in which citizens could successfully challenge state power on their laptops and neutralize government propaganda and censorship.

In the comically aggrandizing tone that had become his trademark, Brown concluded, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and underreported social developments to have occurred in decades.”

Among those taken by Brown’s interpretation of Titstorm was Gregg Housh, a Boston Web designer and early Anonymous associate, who had emerged as a sort of quasi-spokesman for the group. Through Housh, Brown gained entrance to the online inner sanctums of the hackers he thought were turning history on its head. Housh, who was starting to feel burned out from fielding the barrage of international media requests, saw Brown as someone who could step in and talk to reporters for Anonymous.

“Barrett ‘got it’ in a way few journalists did,” says Housh. “Soon, he was one of us, and that pretty much set the course for everything that happened next.”

Brown always denied holding any official capacity as the spokesman of Anonymous, maintaining such a thing was not even possible given the amorphous nature of the group. Yet he embraced the media role with relish, sometimes using the royal “we” during interviews. In March 2011, Brown described himself to a visiting NBC News crew as a “senior strategist” for Anonymous. He also, along with Housh, began writing a book about the group, detailing the transformation of Anonymous from a community of amoral videogame-playing punks into an ethical crusade, assisting street protests across the globe during the Arab Spring.

From the beginning, Brown’s public role was a subject of internal controversy. A minority dismissed and attacked him as a preening “name fag” – Anonymous slang for people who use their real names and speak to the press. Others were more bothered that Brown was a “moral fag,” the term used by unrepentant griefers to describe the new generation of hacktivists who began flocking to the Anonymous banner in 2008. In We Are Legion, Brown makes his allegiance clear, hailing the hacktivists for turning a “nihilist, ridiculous group” into a “force for good.”

Yet something of the old griefer remained in Brown even after his and the group’s politicization process had converged to take on the world of intelligence outsourcing. “He was just trolling the hell out of these corporate-surveillance guys,” says Joe Fionda, a New York activist who assisted Brown in his investigations. “Not just doing the serious research work no one else was doing – getting tax files and all that – but calling them at their homes to introduce himself, sometimes straight up pranking them. He’s legit funny and sees the humor and the absurd in everything.”

Another former colleague, a Boston Web developer and activist named Lauren Pespisa, shared Brown’s love of prank calls: “Sometimes we’d drink and prank-call lobbyists for fun. We went after this one group, Qorvis, because they were helping the kingdom of Bahrain handle its image when they were shooting people. So we’d call them up and ‘dragon shout’ at them,” she says, referring to a sound effect in one of Brown’s favorite video games, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

By combining the two ethos of Anonymous, Brown won over more people than he alienated. Part of his appeal was the act of his drily affected pseudo-aristocratic-asshole persona, which he exaggerated during media appearances. He preferred a corduroy sports jacket to the Guy Fawkes mask that Anonymous members favor. A typical portrait showed Brown’s arm slung over a chair, a Marlboro dangling off his bottom lip and a stuffed bobcat on the wall behind him. He was oth loved and hated for being one of the more colorful characters found in the Internet Relay Chat rooms where hackers gathered. He famously once conducted a strategy session while drinking red wine in a bubble bath.

“Barrett became a bit like the court jester of Anonymous,” says Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who has written about the network. “His behavior was legendary because he was the ethical foil. Anonymous isn’t just for hackers. People like Barrett Brown can thrive: the organizer, the media-maker, the spectacle-maker.”

W
hen Brown met Housh, he was nearing the end of his three-year stint in Brooklyn. In the spring of 2010, Brown called his parents and told them he had a heroin problem. At their urging, he returned to Dallas and began an outpatient treatment that included the heroin replacement Suboxone. It was from a tiny Dallas apartment that Brown deepened his involvement with Anonymous. Since most of his friends lived in Austin, his new social life consisted of the IRC rooms populated by hacktivists. It was a world of nonstop, petty cyberintrigue, which to outsiders can appear like a hellish fusion of The Hollywood Squares, WarGames and Degrassi Junior High.

Bradley Manning Explains His Motives

Pritchard remembers the first time Brown crashed on his couch in Austin after his return to Dallas. “I’d wake up, and he’d be online having conversations with these kids on Skype or something,” he says. “Barrett would say, ‘I know what you’re doing!’ The other guy would be stroking his chin like he’s Dr. Claw, saying, ‘No, I know what you’re doing.’ It was nonstop cyberwar, with these dorks just dorking it out with each other. It seemed like a bunch of kids trolling each other.”

Still, Pritchard appreciated that beneath the dorkery, Brown was involved in serious business. This was Brown’s first year as an unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, and it was eventful. The hackers were aiding the uprisings of the Arab Spring, and assaulted PayPal and credit-card companies in retaliation for their refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks. This latter action, called Operation PayBack, earned the attention of the Justice Department. In the summer of 2011, the FBI issued 35 search warrants and arrested 14 suspected hackers.

The Trials of Bradley Manning

By the time of the arrests, Brown’s focus had settled squarely on the nexus between government agencies, private intelligence firms and the information-security industry – known as InfoSec – contracted to build programs and technologies of surveillance, disruption and control that Brown suspected were in many cases unconstitutional. What’s more, he was as bratty as ever about it. He phoned CEOs and flacks at their homes and called them liars. He boasted about bringing the whole system down. As the first raids and arrests took place following Operation PayBack, some observers of Brown’s antics began to suspect that the court jester of Anonymous was not a very safe thing to be.

“You could just tell it was going to end badly,” says an Anonymous member and veteran hacker. “When he really started making noise about going after these intel-contracting companies, I was like, ‘You’re going to get locked up, kid.'”

A
fter Operation Payback, Anonymous was on the radar of every private security firm looking to build a quick reputation. In the office of Aaron Barr, CEO of a struggling digital-security contractor called HBGary Federal, it was the biggest thing on the radar. Barr was convinced that taking down Anonymous before it struck again was a fast track to industry juice and massive contracts. In February 2011, he bragged to The Financial Times about the supersecret sleuthing techniques he had developed to get the goods on Anonymous. He claimed to know the identities of the group’s leaders. Implicit in Barr’s comments was the possibility of federal raids on those identified.

Partly to avoid that outcome, and partly out of curiosity, an Anonymous cell hacked HBGary’s servers. They discovered that Barr’s techniques involved hanging out on major social-media sites and compiling lists of mostly innocent people. It wasn’t the only example of his staggering miscalculation: Within minutes, the hackers easily got around the firm’s security defenses, ransacking company servers, wiping Barr’s personal tablet and absconding with 70,000 internal e-mails. Stephen Colbert devoted a segment to the fiasco, based around the image of Barr sticking his penis in a hornets’ nest.

Once the hackers who broke into HBGary’s servers discovered that Barr was basically a clown, they abandoned pursuit. “There were tens of thousands of e-mails and no one wanted to go through them,” says an Anonymous associate who observed the HBGary hack. “Everyone was like, ‘We’re not even going to dump these, because there’s no point.'”

Brown disagreed. When the hackers posted the e-mails on a BitTorrent site, he used Project PM to organize the painstaking work of collating and connecting the dots to see what picture emerged.

“Nobody was reading more than a couple of the e-mails before getting bored,” says the Anonymous associate. “But Barrett has this strangely addictive and journalistic kind of mind, so he could stare at those e-mails for 10 hours. He’d be sitting alone in the HBGary channel, yelling at everyone, ‘You’ve got to pay attention! Look at the crap I found!'” Brown quickly drew in some 100 volunteers to help him trawl through and make sense of the e-mails.

The HBGary cache offered one of the fullest looks ever at how corporate-state partnerships were targeting groups they considered subversive or inimical to the interests of corporate America. The projects under consideration at HBGary ranged from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns targeting civic groups and journalists to Weird Science-supermodel avatars built to infiltrate and disrupt left-wing and anarchist networks.

Project PM volunteer investigator Joe Fionda remembers the disturbing thrill of uncovering HBGary’s use of a Maxim pinup to create online personas designed to spy for corporate and government clients. “I couldn’t believe how much crazy shit they were up to,” Fionda says. “My brain still feels like it’s going to explode.”

The biggest fish flopping in Brown’s net was the story of a cluster of contractors known as Team Themis. The origins of Team Themis dated to Bank of America’s alarm over Julian Assange’s 2010 claim to possess documents that “could take down a bank or two.” The Department of Justice recommended Bank of America retain the services of the white-shoe D.C. law firm Hunton & Williams and the high-­powered intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. On behalf of Bank of America, Hunton & Williams turned to the large and growing world of InfoSec subcontractors to come up with a plan, settling on HBGary and two dataintelligence shops, Berico Technologies and Palantir Technologies.

The Themis three were also preparing a proposal for Hunton & Williams on behalf of another client, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The leaked HBGary documents revealed that Themis was exploring ways of discrediting and disrupting the activities of organized labor and its allies for the Chamber. The potential money at stake in these contracts was considerable. According to Wired, the trio proposed that the Chamber create a $2-milliona-month sort of cyber special-forces team “of the kind developed and utilized by the Joint Special Operations Command.” They also suggested targeting a range of left-of-center organizations, including the SEIU, watchdog groups like U.S. Chamber Watch, and the Center for American Progress. (The Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America have denied ever hiring Team Themis or having any knowledge of the proposals.)

In pursuit of the Chamber and Bank of America contracts, the Themis three devised multipronged campaigns amounting to a private-sector information-age COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program to infiltrate and undermine “subversive” groups between 1956 and 1971. Among the The mis ideas presented to Hunton & Williams: “Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.”

The revelations represented a triumph for Brown and his wiki. A group of Democratic congressmen asked four Republican committee chairs to hold hearings on the “deeply troubling” question of whether “tactics developed for use against terrorists may have been unleashed illegally against American citizens.” But the calls for investigation went nowhere. The lack of outrage in Washington or on influential editorial pages didn’t shock Brown, who had long ago lost hope in the politicians and pundits who are “clearly intent on killing off even this belated scrutiny into the invisible empire that so thoroughly scrutinizes us – at our own expense and to unknown ends.”

It was Brown’s finest moment, but his relationship with Anonymous was rapidly deteriorating. By May 2011, Brown had begun turning on the network. “There’s little quality control in a movement like [Anonymous],” Brown told an interviewer. “You attract a lot of people whose interest is in fucking with video-game companies.”

Brown’s haughty dismissal of the new crop of hacktivists was not a feeling shared by the FBI. The government continued to see Anonymous as a major and growing threat. And in the summer of 2011, it acquired a key piece in its operation to destroy the network. On the night of June 7th, four months after the HBGary hack, two federal agents visited the Jacob Riis publichousing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and introduced themselves to a 27-year-old unemployed hacker named Hector Monsegur, known inside Anonymous as “Sabu.” As a leader of an Anonymous offshoot called Lulzsec, he had hacked a number of state and corporate servers. In early 2011, he made some rookie errors that led the FBI to his door: Facing the prospect of being indicted on 12 counts of criminal conspiracy, Sabu rolled over on his old hacker associates. He signed a cooperation agreement and began feeding the FBI information on Anonymous plots. The biggest of these involved a private global intelligence contractor located in Barrett Brown’s backyard, the Austin-based Stratfor.

I
n early December 2011, a young Chicago Anon named Jeremy Hammond cracked Stratfor’s server and downloaded some 5 million internal documents. With the apparent blessing and supervision of the FBI, Sabu provided the server for Hammond to store the docs. Hammond then proceeded to release them to the public. Sifting through the data dump would require a massive coordinated effort of exactly the kind Project PM had been training for. Brown and his dedicated volunteers attacked the mountains of e-mails. “We had between 30 and 50 people involved, usually 15 at a time,” says Lauren Pespisa, the Boston Project PM volunteer who now helps organize Brown’s legaldefense fund.

Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?

After six months of work, Brown would discover what he considered the fattest spider amid the miles of Stratfor web: a San Diego-based cybersecurity firm called Cubic. As Brown followed the strings, he discovered links between Cubic and a data-mining contractor known as TrapWire, which had ties to CIA vets. Brown thought that he had stumbled on a major find illuminating new technologies for spying and surveillance, but the media pickup was not what Brown had hoped. Major dailies shrugged off the story, and Gawker and Slate poured cold water on his alarm, calling it “outlandish.” Brown responded to the criticism with a rambling, connect-the-conspiracy-dots YouTube video.

It wasn’t just gossip sites that viewed Brown’s reading of the Stratfor docs with a skeptical eye. Even sympathetic students of intelligence contracting urged caution about interpreting the TrapWire materials. “I applaud anyone digging into this stuff, but you can’t really draw conclusions from what these contractors say in these e-mails because they’re bragging and they’re trying to land business,” says Tim Shorrock, whose 2008 book Spies for Hire first exposed the scope of the intelligence-contracting industry. “Some of the quote-unquote intelligence that Stratfor was reporting on was ludicrous. Why would an intelligence agency buy this stuff?”

WikiLeaks Stratfor Emails: A Secret Indictment Against Julian Assange?

Meanwhile, deeply buried in the TrapWire debate was the fact that included in the Stratfor docs were the credit-card numbers of 5,000 Stratfor clients. Brown likely did not give the numbers a second thought. But it’s these numbers that form the most serious charges against Brown. The government alleges that when Brown pasted a link in a chat room to the alreadyleaked documents, he was intentionally “transferring” data for the purpose of credit-card and identity fraud.

“If the Pentagon Papers included creditcard info, then would The New York Times have been barred from researching them?” says Brown’s co-counsel Ghappour. “There is nothing to indicate Barrett wanted to profit from this information, or that he ever had the information in his possession. He was openly critical of such motives and disapproved of hacking for the sake of it. This was a big part of his rift with Anonymous – why he was considered a ‘moral fag’ by some.”

The FBI raided Brown’s Dallas apartment on the morning of March 6th, 2012, three months after the Stratfor hack, and one day after Jeremy Hammond was arrested in Chicago. More than a dozen feds led by agent Robert Smith knocked down the door with warrants for Brown’s computers and seized his Xbox. Brown was staying at his mother’s house nearby. Later that morning, the agents appeared at the home of Brown’s mother with a second warrant. They found his laptop in a kitchen cabinet, and she was later charged with obstruction. Brown, who was in the shower preparing for a TV interview when the agents arrived, was not arrested. The agents left with his laptop.

Among hacktivists, theories differ on the motive behind the FBI action. As one of the few public figures associated with Anonymous, Brown made a soft target with a potentially very valuable hard drive or two. Some say it was meant as a warning; others say Brown had simply pissed off too many powerful people, or was getting too close to something big.

Then there is the theory, advanced by Gregg Housh, that Brown and Hammond were targeted out of frustration with a blown sting against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. After looking into the Stratfor hack, Housh believes that the FBI allowed the hack to proceed not in order to arrest Hammond but Assange. “The idea was to have Sabu sell the stolen Stratfor material to Assange,” says Housh. “This would give them a concrete charge that he had knowingly bought stolen material to distribute on WikiLeaks.”

Housh believes Hammond got wind of Sabu’s plan to sell the documents to Assange and dumped them before the transaction could take place. While there is no proof of contact between Sabu and Assange, Sabu reportedly communicated with Sigurdur Thordarson, a teenage Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer and an FBI informant.

“Hammond had no idea what he’d done,” says Housh. “The FBI were a day away from having evidence against Assange, and Hammond screwed it up for them. That’s why they went after him so hard.”

Yet Hammond, who led the Stratfor hack, faced only 30 years before cutting a plea deal for 10. Why is Brown facing 105?

F
ollowing the March raid, Brown continued his investigations and planned for the future of Project PM. 2012 was going to be a big year. He had a new nucleus of friends and colleagues in Boston, where he was going to move and live in an activist group house. His investigations increasingly took place outside the Anonymous network. Brown had new allies in groups like Telecomix, a collective that operated its own crowdsourcing investigations into the cybersurveillance industry. That summer, he visited New York for the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, an annual gathering of hackers and activists, where he met a few of his Project PM colleagues offline for the first time. “I remember he was wearing a full suit in this crazy heat, sweating profusely in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania,” says Fionda. “He was still struggling with kicking heroin, he had tremors and looked like he was in a lot of pain. But he was full of energy. He was telling everyone, ‘We’re going to the center of the Earth with this story!'”

But Brown’s mental state seemed to deteriorate during the summer of 2012. Having battled depression throughout his life, he had gone off his meds and was simultaneously struggling with cold-turkey breaks from Suboxone for heroin withdrawal. His YouTube channel documents the effects. In August, Brown posted a clip that showed him skeet-shooting over the words of Caligula’s lament: “If only all of Rome had just one neck.” In early September, as Brown planned his move to Boston, he struggled to contain his rage at the local FBI agent Robert Smith, who had raided his mother’s home and taken his beloved Xbox.

In September, Brown uploaded a discombobulated three-part video series, the last one titled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith.” In the videos, Brown struggles to maintain focus. He demands the return of his Xbox and warns that he comes from a military family that has trained him with weapons – weapons he says he’ll use to defend his home. He calls Smith a “fucking chickenshit little faggot cocksucker” before uttering the words he has since admitted were ill-considered, as well as the result of a chemically combustive mental state.

Why Shouldn’t Freedom of the Press Apply to WikiLeaks?

“Robert Smith’s life is over,” says Brown. “And when I say his life is over, I don’t say I’m going to go kill him, but I’m going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids. How do you like them apples?”

It takes a suspension of disbelief to hear a credible physical threat as defined by law. The rail-thin Brown appears a desperate, pathetic character in need of psychiatric help. A more humane FBI office might have sent a doctor rather than a car of armed agents. But the FBI didn’t send a shrink. That evening a team of armed agents stormed Brown’s apartment, threw him violently to the ground and arrested him for threatening a federal officer.

WikiLeaks Releases ‘Beat the Blockade’ Benefit CD

Over the next four months, federal grand juries issued three multicount indictments for obstruction and “access devicefraud” related to the Stratfor link. It is the last of these that concern civil-liberties activists and that could have a possible chilling effect. “One can’t apply the transfer provision of the statute to someone conducting research,” says Ghappour. “If cutting and pasting a link is the same as the transfer of the underlying data, then anyone on the Internet is prone to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.”

The FBI has shown interest in expanding that theoretical “anyone” to include Brown’s circle of volunteers. In March, the bureau went hunting for the digital fingerprints of Project PM administrators with a subpoena. The action has shaken the group’s inner circle, as it was surely intended. “It was a pretext to sow discord and fear in Barrett’s project,” says Alan Ross, a U.K. investigator for Project PM. “They were desperate to bolster their case. After the subpoena, people began to worry about being monitored. I worry about my personal safety even though I acted within the confines of the law. I worry about travel.”

Travel is one thing Brown does not have to worry about at the moment. Nor, if the government gets its way, will he have to worry about handling the media, his former specialty. In August, the prosecution requested a gag be placed on Brown and his lawyers, a move that suggests they understand the dangers of public scrutiny of the legal peculiarities of United States vs. Barrett Lancaster Brown.

Meanwhile, Brown has not joined the prison tradition of mastering the law behind bars. Rather than study up on cyberfraud statutes, he has resumed his writing on intel contractors and the pundits who defend them. “Nobody talks to me here,” Brown says of his year in jail, “but I was pretty unsociable on the outside too.” One of the hardest things about incarceration for the atheist has been contending with his cellmates’ singing of hymns. “Prison is great for reading and for thought, until they start in with their Pentecostal nonsense,” says Brown. “It ruins everything.”

His friends keep him supplied with articles and printouts, which lately have included material related to the Edward Snowden leak. Snowden gained access to information about secret NSA spying on private citizens while working for the intelligence subcontractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a company that had been on Brown’s radar long before most Americans learned of it in the wake of Snowden’s bombshells.

“This is all much bigger than me,” Brown says in the visiting room. “What matters is this.” He leans over to tap his handwritten manuscript. The pages of the essay are messy on the table, and sticking out from under the pile is the last sentence on the last page. “This is the world that we accept if we continue to avert our eyes,” it says. “And it promises to get much worse.”

This story is from the August 29th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905

by Alexander Zaitchik
SEPTEMBER 05, 2013

Find this story at 5 September 2013

Copyright ©2013 Rolling Stone

In early 2010, journalist and satirist Barrett Brown was working on a book on political pundits, when the hacktivist collective Anonymous caught his attention. He soon began writing about its activities and potential. In a defense [2] of the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published on February 10, Brown declared, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”

By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S. Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S. Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny, in which he declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”

But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutia (and ability to organize and explain minutia) that would ultimately land him in trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying, Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk faced by reporters who report on leaks.

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified the leadership of the hacktivist colletive. (In fact he only had screen names of a few members). Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to “LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of The Colbert Report [3], the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary. Some 70,000 company emails were downloaded and posted online. As a final insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”

Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management [4]” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.

The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM [5], and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists, and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.

One connection was between Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks had claimed to possess a large cache of documents belonging to Bank of America. Concerned about this, Bank of America approached the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ directed it to the law and lobbying firm Hunton and Williams [6], which does legal work for Wells Fargo and General Dynamics and also lobbies for Koch Industries, Americans for Affordable Climate Policy, Gas Processors Association, Entergy among many other firms. The DoJ recommended that Bank of America hire Hunton and Williams, explicitly suggesting Richard Wyatt [7] as the person to work with. Wyatt, famously, was the lead attorney in the Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit against the Yes Men.

In November 2010, Hunton and Williams organized a number of private intelligence, technology development and security contractors—HBGary, plus Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies, and, according to Brown, a secretive corporation with the ominous name Endgame Systems—to form “Team Themis” —‘themis’ being a Greek word meaning “divine law.” Its main objective was to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, like Chamber Watch [8] using such tactics as creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that US Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.” In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.” The leaked emails showed that similar disinformation campaigns were being planned against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.

It was clear to Brown that these were actions of questionable legality, but beyond that, government contractors were attempting to undermine Americans’ free speech—with the apparent blessing of the DOJ. A group of Democratic Congressmen asked for an investigation [9] into this arrangement, to no avail.

By June 2011, the plot had thickened further. The FBI had the goods on the leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who went under the nom de guerre Sabu. The FBI arrested him on June 7, 2011 and (according to court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Just three days before his arrest, Sabu had been central to the formation of a new group called AntiSec, which comprised his former LulzSec crew members, as well as members as Anonymous. In early December AntiSec hacked the website of a private security company called Stratfor Global Intelligence. On Christmas Eve, it released a trove of some five million internal compnay emails. AntiSec member and Chicago activist Jeremy Hammond [10], has pled guilty to the attack and is currently facing ten years in prison for it.

The contents of the Stratfor leak were even more outrageous than those of the HBGary hack. They included discussion of opportunities for renditions and assassinations. For example, in one video, Statfor’s Vice President of Intelligence, Fred Burton, suggested taking advantage of the chaos in Libya to render Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who had been released from prison on compassionate grounds due to his terminal illness. Burton said that the case “was personal.” When someone pointed out in an email that such a move would almost certainly be illegal—“This man has already been tried, found guilty, sentenced…and served time”—another Stratfor employee responded that this was just an argument for a more efficient solution: “One more reason to just bugzap him with a hellfire. :-)”

(Stratfor employees also seemed to take a keen interest in Jeremy Scahill’s writings about Blackwater in The Nation, copying and circulating entire articles, with comments suggesting a principle interest was in the question of whether Blackwater was setting up a competing intelligence operation. Emails also showed grudging respect for Scahill: “Like or dislike Scahill’s position (or what comes of his work), he does an amazing job outing [Blackwater].”)

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Brown decided to put ProjectPM on it. A link to the Stratfor dump appeared in an Anonymous chat channel; Brown copied it and pasted it into the private chat channel for ProjectPM, bringing the dump to the attention of the editors.

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems [11], an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” one leaked email read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to “zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business Week [12] published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

The FBI acquired a warrant [13] for Brown’s laptop, gaining the authority to seize any information related to HBGary, Endgame Systems, Anonymous, and, most ominously, “email, email contacts, ‘chat’, instant messaging logs, photographs, and correspondence.” In other words, the FBI wanted his sources.

When the FBI went to serve Brown he was at his mother’s house. Agents returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieving his laptop. To turn up the heat on Brown, the FBI initiated charges against his mother for obstruction of justice for concealing his laptop computer in her house. (Facing criminal charges, on March 22, 2013, his mother, Karen McCutchin, pled guilty to one count of obstructing the execution of a search warrant. She faces up to twelve months in jail. Brown maintains that she did not know the laptop was in her home.)

By his own admission, the FBI’s targeting of his mother made Brown snap. In September 2012, he uploaded an incoherent YouTube video [14], in which he explained that he had been in treatment for an addiction to heroin, taking the medication Suboxone, but had gone off his meds and now was in withdrawal. He threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his mother, by name, warming:

“I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me… And if it’s legal when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”

“That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids… How do you like them apples?”

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! [15]

The media narrative was immediately derailed. No longer would this be a story about the secretive information-military-industrial complex; now it was the sordid tale of a crazy drug addict threatening an FBI agent and his (grown) children. Actual death threats against agents are often punishable by a few years in jail. But Brown’s actions made it easier for the FBI to sell some other pretext to put him away for life.

The Stratfor data included a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes. On this basis, the DOJ accused Brown of credit card fraud for having shared that link with the editorial board of ProjectPM. Specifically, the FBI charged him with Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features, Access Device Fraud, Aggravated Identity Theft, as well as an Obstruction of Justice charge (for being at his mother’s when the initial warrant was served) and charges stemming from his threats against the FBI agent. All told, Brown is looking at century of jail time: 105 years in federal prison if served sequentially. He has been denied bail.

Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had several priors and is facing a maximum of ten years, the inescapable conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself, but with Brown’s journalism. As Glenn Greenwald remarked in the Guardian: “it is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.”

Today, Brown is in prison and ProjectPM is under increased scrutiny by the DOJ, even as its work has ground to a halt. In March, the DOJ served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena [16] for all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM, describing it as a “forum” through which Brown and others would “engage in, encourage, or facilitate the commission of criminal conduct online.” The message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their grave peril.

Some journalists are now understandably afraid to go near the Stratfor files. The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups. The mere fact that the FBI’s senior cybersecurity advisor has recently moved to Hunton and Williams shows just how incestuous this relationship has become. Meanwhile the Department of Justice is also using its power and force to trample on the rights of citizens like Barrett Brown who are trying to shed light on these nefarious relationships. In order to neutralize those who question or investigate the system, laws are being reinterpreted or extended or otherwise misappropriated in ways that are laughable—or would be if the consequences weren’t so dire.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the NSA’s spying programs, Barrett Brown’s work was pointing to a much deeper problem. It isn’t the sort of problem that can be fixed by trying to tweak a few laws or by removing a few prosecutors. The problem is not with bad laws or bad prosecutors. What the case of Barrett Brown has exposed is that we confronting a different problem altogether. It is a systemic problem. It is the failure of the rule of law.

Links:
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barrett-brown/anonymous-australia-and-t_b_457776.html
[3] http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/426198/may-09-2013/colbert-s-book-club—learning–the-great-gatsby-
[4] http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/hbgarys-high-volume.html
[5] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page
[6] http://www.hunton.com/
[7] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/19/chamber-of-commerce-still_n_768076.html
[8] http://images2.americanprogress.org/ThinkProgress/ProposalForTheChamber.pdf
[9] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022805810.html
[10] http://www.dailydot.com/news/lulzsec-jeremy-hammond-bail-denied-hacker/
[11] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems
[12] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/cyber-weapons-the-new-arms-race-07212011.html
[13] http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/exclusive-fbi-escalates-war-on-anonymous
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI
[15] https://subscribe.thenation.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&cds_page_id=122425&cds_response_key=I12SART1
[16] http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/doj-issues-subpoena-for-info-on-barrett-browns-project-pm-site/

Peter Ludlow | June 18, 2013

Find this story at 18 June 2013

© 2012 The Nation

Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty today to the infamous Stratfor hack, as well as taking responsibility for eight additional hacks of law enforcement and defense contractor websites in 2011 and 2012. As a condition of the plea, the radical hacker will face a maximum of 10 years in federal prison, and restitution costs of up to $2.5 million. After Hammond entered his plea, his legal team framed his prosecution as part of the government’s larger attempt to control the flow of information and punish those who seek to distribute it to journalists and the public.

“There’s a war going on about corporate spying and access to information,” said defense attorney Sarah Kunstler at a press conference immediately following the hearing. “Jeremy is someone who worked toward making information public.”

In a statement posted online after the plea deal, Hammond echoed this point. “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors,” Hammond wrote. “I did what I believe is right.”

The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State

Hammond entered his plea – admitting to one count of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking – in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, surrounded by observers and supporters. One of those in attendance was his twin brother, Jason, who had just flown in from Chicago. When Hammond initially addressed the judge, he raised his right hand to be sworn in, and clenched his fist in a symbol of defiance.

The hack Hammond pleaded guilty to involved accessing information from the servers of Stratfor, a private intelligence company, and providing it to Wikileaks, who then published some of the information. Hammond was charged under the controversial 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law used to charge the late Aaron Swartz and other cyber-activists. “Included among the leaked internal documents were millions of emails that exposed Stratfor’s wide-ranging spying activities, including surveillance of Bhopal activists at the behest of Dow Chemical, of PETA on behalf of Coca-Cola, and of Occupy Wall Street under contract to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” supporters said in a statement.

Beyond Stratfor, Hammond took responsibility for eight other hacks, all of which involved either law enforcement, intelligence firms or defense contractor websites. From June 2011 to February 2012, Hammond obtained unauthorized information from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the FBI virtual academy, a marketing firm that builds websites for law enforcement called Brooks Jeffreys, Special Forces Gear, Vanguard Defense Industries, the Jefferson County sheriffs department, the Boston Police Patrolman’s Institute and a Pennsylvania firm called Combined Systems that makes tear gas. Hammond was granted immunity from federal prosecution for any of those hacks in exchange for taking responsibility for them. Kunstler said he could potentially face charges at the state level, though she said there may be some double jeopardy protection.

The New Political Prisoners: Leakers, Hackers and Whistleblowers

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center For Constitutional Rights and lawyer for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, said that journalists should stand up for Hammond. “He should be looked at as a source, as a whistle-blower,” Ratner said after the plea deal. “He, like other whistle-blowers in this country, ought to be protected, because they’re the only thing that let us know what our government and our private security companies are doing and they’re the only things that can keep this government even close to honest.”

Earlier in the case, Hammond’s legal team made a motion for Judge Loretta Preska to recuse herself because her husband was a victim of the Stratfor leak. That motion was denied. (Full disclosure: This reporter previously spoke at a rally that called for Preska to recuse herself.)

Other hackers in the Anonymous-affiliated group called Lulzsec who were charged in similar leaks – but were tried in the U.K. – have received much lighter sentences, from 20 to 32 months. Jason Hammond has asked supporters to sign a Change.org petition on his brother’s behalf calling for Judge Preska to sentence Hammond to time served. Jeremy Hammond’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for September 6th.

by John Knefel
MAY 28, 2013

Find this story at 28 May 2013

©2013 Rolling Stone

LONDON—Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example :

“[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase” – CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.

The material contains privileged information about the US government’s attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor’s own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks. There are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The emails also expose the revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States. Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money. The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.

The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the “Yes Men”, for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.

Stratfor has realised that its routine use of secret cash bribes to get information from insiders is risky. In August 2011, Stratfor CEO George Friedman confidentially told his employees : “We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I don’t plan to do the perp walk and I don’t want anyone here doing it either.”

Stratfor’s use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into a money-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman hatched an idea to “utilise the intelligence” it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS : “What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like”. The emails show that in 2011 Goldman Sach’s Morenz invested “substantially” more than $4million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors. Throughout 2011, a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But, confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff : “Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral… It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor… we are already working on mock portfolios and trades”. StratCap is due to launch in 2012.

The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff. It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in “becoming government Stratfors”. Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division. Despite the governmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in complete secrecy with no political oversight or accountability. Stratfor claims that it operates “without ideology, agenda or national bias”, yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad – including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.

Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused “gravy train” that sprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures :

“[Is it] possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravy train ? This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing. And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet… Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventing one’s own employees from leaking sensitive information… In fact, I’m not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.”

Like WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables, much of the significance of the emails will be revealed over the coming weeks, as our coalition and the public search through them and discover connections. Readers will find that whereas large numbers of Stratfor’s subscribers and clients work in the US military and intelligence agencies, Stratfor gave a complimentary membership to the controversial Pakistan general Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, who, according to US diplomatic cables, planned an IED attack on international forces in Afghanistan in 2006. Readers will discover Stratfor’s internal email classification system that codes correspondence according to categories such as ’alpha’, ’tactical’ and ’secure’. The correspondence also contains code names for people of particular interest such as ’Hizzies’ (members of Hezbollah), or ’Adogg’ (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad).

Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations and journalists – from Reuters to the Kiev Post. The list of Stratfor’s “Confederation Partners”, whom Stratfor internally referred to as its “Confed Fuck House” are included in the release. While it is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by other media organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients these relationships are corrupt or corrupting.

WikiLeaks has also obtained Stratfor’s list of informants and, in many cases, records of its payoffs, including $1,200 a month paid to the informant “Geronimo” , handled by Stratfor’s Former State Department agent Fred Burton.

WikiLeaks has built an investigative partnership with more than 25 media organisations and activists to inform the public about this huge body of documents. The organisations were provided access to a sophisticated investigative database developed by WikiLeaks and together with WikiLeaks are conducting journalistic evaluations of these emails. Important revelations discovered using this system will appear in the media in the coming weeks, together with the gradual release of the source documents.

END

Public partners in the investigation
Comment
Current WikiLeaks status
How to read the data
Public partners in the investigation:

More than 25 media partners (others will be disclosed after their first publication) :

Al Akhbar – Lebanon – http://english.al-akhbar.com
Al Masry Al Youm – Egypt – http://www.almasry-alyoum.com
Bivol – Bulgaria – http://bivol.bg
CIPER – Chile – http://ciperchile.cl
Dawn Media – Pakistan – http://www.dawn.com
L’Espresso – Italy – http://espresso.repubblica.it
La Repubblica – Italy – http://www.repubblica.it
La Jornada – Mexico – www.jornada.unam.mx/
La Nacion – Costa Rica – http://www.nacion.com
Malaysia Today – Malaysia – www.malaysia-today.net
McClatchy – United States – http://www.mcclatchydc.com
Nawaat – Tunisia – http://nawaat.org
NDR/ARD – Germany – http://www.ndr.de
Owni – France – http://owni.fr
Pagina 12 – Argentina – www.pagina12.com.ar
Plaza Publica – Guatemala – http://plazapublica.com.gt
Publico.es – Spain – www.publico.es
Rolling Stone – United States – http://www.rollingstone.com
Russian Reporter – Russia – http://rusrep.ru
Sunday Star-Times – New Zealand – www.star-times.co.nz
Ta Nea – Greece –- http://www.tanea.gr
Taraf – Turkey – http://www.taraf.com.tr
The Hindu – India – www.thehindu.com
The Yes Men – Bhopal Activists – Global http://theyesmen.org
Comment:

WikiLeaks – Kristinn Hrafnsson, Official WikiLeaks representative, +35 4821 7121

Other comment :
Bhopal Medical Appeal (in UK) – Colin Toogood : colintoogood@bhopal.org / +44 (0) 1273 603278/ +44 (0) 7798 845074
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (in India) – Rachna Dhingra : rachnya@gmail.com, +91 98 261 67369
Yes Men – mike@theyesmen.org / +44 (0) 7578 682321 – andy@theyesmen.org, +1-718-208-0684
Privacy International – +44 (0) 20 7242 2836

Twitter tag : #gifiles
CURRENT WIKILEAKS STATUS:

An extrajudicial blockade imposed by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union that is designed to destroy WikiLeaks has been in place since December 2010. The EU Commission is considering whether it will open a formal investigation, but two lawsuits have been filed (http://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blocka…). There are also other ways to donate (https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate). It is legal to donate, including in the United States. The US Treasury has publicly stated that that there are no grounds to place WikiLeaks on a US government blacklist.

WikiLeaks Founder and Publisher Julian Assange has not been charged with any crime in any country. Four prosecutors are currently trying to charge him under the Espionage Act of 1917 before a closed Grand Jury in Virginia, in the United States. Julian Assange has been detained for 447 days (10,728 hours) since Dec 7, 2010, without charge, and he is currently awaiting a decision from the UK Supreme Court on extradition to Sweden (http://www.justiceforassange.com/Su…). The decision is expected in March. The decision on whether he will be onwardly extradited to the US lies in the hands of the Swedish Executive, but Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has refused to state whether he will protect Assange from a politically motivated extradition to the United States (http://justice4assange.com/US-Extra… ).

The Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has repeatedly attacked WikiLeaks this week in a bizarre manner (http://ferrada-noli.blogspot.com/20… ).

An alleged WikiLeaks US military source, Bradley Manning, has been in pre-trial detention for 639 days (http://bradleymanning.org/ ). His arraignment took place on 24 February 2012. In December 2011, Manning’s attorney revealed in the preliminary hearing that the US government is attempting to enter a plea deal with Manning in order to “go after” Assange. Manning has 22 charges against him, including violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and aiding the enemy. Manning has deferred entering a plea. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are legally represented in the Manning hearings by the US Centre for Constitutional Rights (http://ccrjustice.org/ ). WikiLeaks was denied full access to Manning’s hearing after appeal (http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/pres… ). WikiLeaks put out a statement relating to Manning’s trial ahead of the Article 32 Hearing : (http://www.wikileaks.org/Statement-… ).

The alleged WikiLeaks-supporting hacktivists known as the “PayPal 14” were arrested in 2011 following co-ordinated online demonstrations against the financial services companies that are carrying out the unlawful financial blockade on WikiLeaks (VISA, MasterCard, Paypal, Western Union, Bank of America). They are represented by attorney Stanley Cohen and will go before court in May 2012 (http://www.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=4644 ).

WikiLeaks is about to launch a distributed, encrypted “Facebook for revolutionaries” (https://wlfriends.org/ ).

Julian Assange is currently directing interviews, from house arrest, for a programme on the future of the world that is syndicated to various broadcasters. The first show will be broadcast in March (http://www.wikileaks.org/New-Assang… )
HOW TO READ THE DATA

This is a glossary and information on how to understand the internal terms and codes used by Stratfor in their emails. It is not a complete list. We call on the public to add to this list by tweeting #gifind

To see a list of the terms George Friedman considers useful for his staff to know please download this PDF : The Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms.

OPEN SOURCE VS. “COVERT”

As you browse through the content, you will notice that a large set of it is what is classified as “open source” (subject lines which include [OS]). These are basically email threads that start with someone posting a published and accessible source, such as news sites, and follow with commentary by the staff. In one of the emails, Joseph Nye is referenced saying :

“Open source intelligence is the outer pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, without which one can neither begin nor complete the puzzle”

CODES IN SUBJECT LINES

Many of the emails have codes in the subject lines as well as in the body, to make it easier for the staff to “quickly identify when we need to go back and have a look-see.” [*] :

Examples : INSIGHT – COUNTRY – Subject – SOURCE CODE INSIGHT – CHINA – Trains and planes – CN1000

Please refer to the glossary for the code names of subject and country tags, as well as mailing list names.

SOURCE CODES

A lot of interesting stuff comes from “sources”. Sources are either informal contacts or people they have a formal relationship with. The IDs for sources have the format of CN120 or ME001. In terms of the character part, it refers to a region or a country :

A) Regions ME – Middle East region EU – European Union EE – Eastern Europe LA- South America SA- South Asia

B) Countries or Orgs CN – China PK – Pakistan IN- India ML – Malaysia VN – Vietnam NP- Nepal

US – United States VZ – Venezuela CO- Colombia BR-Brazil NC- Nicaragua MX- Mexico CL/CH- Chile AR- Argentina PY- Paraguay BOL- Bolivia

RU – Russia UA – Ukraine GE – Georgia TJ – Tajikstan MD – Moldova BG -Bulgaria CR/CZ- Czech Republic PT- Portugal

ZA – South Africa AO – Angola SO – Somalia NG- Nigeria CD- DR Congo CI- Cote D’Ivoire ZW- Zimbabwe ZM- Zambia RW- Rwanda KE- Kenya ET- Ethiopia SD -Sudan MA- Morocco SN- Senegal GN- Guinea SL- Sierra Leone

IR – Iran IQ- Iraq IL or IS- Israel SA- Saudi Arabia SY- Syria KU- Kuwait Y or YN – Yemen HZ – Hizbollah TK – Turkey LN- Lebanon LY- Libya UAE- UAE EG- Egypt (etc.)

C) Odd codes OCH – Old China hand, a finance insider. Stick – Scott Stewart, high level employee Z’s – Zetas, Mexican drug gang

INSIGHTS FORMAT

When “insights” are sent, they usually have the following header information :

SOURCE : The ID of the source, say CN123. Sometimes this is left “no source ID” when it’s a new source.

ATTRIBUTION : How the source is to be attributed, i.e. “Source in the pharma distribution industry in China”, Stratfor source, etc.

SOURCE DESCRIPTION : Describes the source, for example : “Source works with Mercator Pharmaceutical Solutions, distributing pharma to developing countries.” These include concrete details on the source for internal consumption so that there’s a better understanding on the source’s background and ability to make assessments on the ground.

PUBLICATION : Yes or No. If the option is yes it doesn’t mean that it would be published, but rather that it _can_ be published.

SOURCE RELIABILITY : A/B

SOURCE RELIABILITY : A-F, A being the best and F being the worst. This grades the turnaround time of this source in responding to requests.

ITEM CREDIBILITY : 1-10, 1 being the best and 10 being the worst (we may change the range here in the future). this changes a lot based on the info provided. 1 is “you can take this to the bank” and 10 would be an example of maybe – “this is a totally ridiculous rumor but something that is spreading on the ground”

SPECIAL HANDLING : often this is “none” but it may be something like, “if you use this we need to be sure not to mention the part about XXX in the publication” or any other special notes

SOURCE HANDLER : the person who can take follow-up questions and communicate with the source.

MAILING LISTS

alpha@stratfor.com Discussions circulated exclusively among analysts, writers and higher-ups, including ’insights’ and discussions about sources and source meetings. secure@stratfor.com Discussions circulated exclusively among analysts and higher-ups, and only for use within continental US (analysts traveling ’overseas’ are removed from the list for the duration of their journey). analysts@stratfor.com – Discussion among analysts only, who manage sources, gather and analyze intelligence. ct@stratfor.com Ongoing discussions to collect and analyze counterterrorism intelligence, circulated among select group of analysts. tactical@statfor.com Non-time sensitive discussions for internal training on technical and tactical matters within field of counterterrorism. intelligence@stratfor.com gvalerts@stratfor.com – Related to Gas ventures clients military@stratfor.com Military list for pre-approved staff africa@stratfor.com eastasia@stratfor.com mesa@stratfor.com Middle East/South Asia list for pre-approved staff. eurasia@stratfor.com os@stratfor.com List with information from the public domain circulated and discussed among all employees. adp@stratfor.com List for ADPs. See Glossary. translations@stratfor.com alerts@stratfor.com responses@stratfor.com dialog-list@stratfor.com

GLOSSARY

a) Industry and other misc. tags :

HUMINT – Human intelligence OSINT- Open source intelligence DATA FLU BIRDFLU ECON TECH ENERGY MINING GV – Gas Venture CT – Counterterrorism G1-G4 B2-B4 S1-S4 MILITARY or MIL PENTAGON AQ- Al Qaeda AQAP – Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula SF- Special Forces CONUS- Continental US

b) Special internal codewords :

Hizzies or HZ – Hizbollah Izzies or IZ – Israel A-dogg – Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, Iranian President Baby bashar – Bashar Al-Assad, Syrian President Uncle Mo – Moammar Gaddhafi ADP- Analyst Development Program. Four-month program at STRATFOR from which candidates— mostly recent college graduates— are selected for hire. Strictly protect and protect – Often mentioned in the ’subject’, means that the source is protected. Played- A term used for procuring sensitive information from sources. E.g. from one of the secure list messages circulating the ’complete scenario for the Israeli team in Centcom’s war game,’ the analyst who procured the data wrote : “I played the head of the Mossad which was great fun.” Excomm- Appears to be ’executive committee’ of STRATFOR.

c) Regions and Orgs

AFRICOM – African countries LATAM – Latin American MERCOSUR NATFA ASEAN APEC FSU – Former Soviet Union countries MESA or MIDDLEEAST – Middle East EASTASIA OPEC EURASIA SA – South Asia FSB- Federal Security Service (Russia)

ATTACHED DOCUMENTS

Attached documents can be searched by Filename or part of the file name. Preliminary searches for filenames using the terms ’lists’, ’source lists’ or ’insight lists’, coupled with the names of source handlers (e.g. Reva for Turkey, Brazil or Venezuela) produced Excel lists of the source names, contact info and source descriptions which correspond to the source codes (e.g. ME1315).

Sourcing Criteria

The following are the proposed criteria for analyzing both sources and insight.

1. Source Timeliness 2. Source Accessibility/Position 3. Source Availability 4. Insight Credibility 5. Insight Uniqueness

Source Timeliness : This is the average grade on how long this particular source turns around tasks and replies to inquiries. It may change but is more of a static indicator.

Source Accessibility : Accessibility weighs the source’s position to have certain knowledge in a particular field. So, for example, if we are looking for energy insight and the source is an official in an energy agency, his or her Accessibility would be ranked higher than if s/he was a banker giving insight on energy. While we would welcome a banker giving his/her insight, a good source may not have a high accessibility ranking if they aren’t in a position to offer reliable insight on a certain topic. The source’s access to decision makers, specific training or education in the desired topic area, specific knowledge of events/situations/incidents can also be considered.

Source Availability : How often can we go to this source ? Are they someone we can tap daily, weekly, monthly, yearly ?

Insight Credibility : This is our assessment of the veracity of the insight offered. Here we need to consider whether or not this is disinformation, speculation, correct data or knowledgeable interpretation. Any bias that the source is displaying or any specific viewpoints or personal background the source is using in the assessment provided should also be considered.

Insight Uniqueness : Is this insight something that could be found in OS ? If it is but the analysis of the information is unique, it would still have a high uniqueness ranking. Or, if it is concrete data, but is something that is only offered to industry insiders, i.e. stats that aren’t published but that aren’t secret, it would still have a high uniqueness score.

Scoring

All of the above factors will be scored on an A-F scale, with A being exemplary and F being useless.

Source Timeliness : A = turnaround within 24 hours B = turnaround within 48 hours C = turnaround within a week D = turnaround within a month F = lucky to receive a reply at all

Source Accessibility : A = Someone with intimate knowledge of the particular insight B = Someone within the industry but whose knowledge of the topic is not exact (e.g. if we were asking someone in the oil industry about natural gas) C = Someone working close to the industry who doesn’t have intimate knowledge of a particular topic but can speak to it intelligently (e.g. a financial consultant asked to gauge the movement of the stock market) D = Someone who may know a country but doesn’t have any concrete insight into a particular topic but can offer rumors and discussions heard on the topic F = Someone who has no knowledge of a particular industry at all

Source Availability : A = Available pretty much whenever B = Can tap around once a week C = Can tap about once a month D = Can tap only several times a year F = Very limited availability

Insight Credibility : A = We can take this information to the bank B = Good insight but maybe not entirely precise C = Insight is only partially true D = There may be some interest in the insight, but it is mostly false or just pure speculation. F = Likely to be disinformation

Insight Uniqueness : A = Can’t be found anywhere else B = Can only be found in limited circles C = Insight can be found in OS, but the source has an interesting take/analysis D = Insight can be found in OS, but still may not be common knowledge F = Insight is accessible in numerous locations

Daily Insight Scoring

SOURCE : code ATTRIBUTION : this is what we should say if we use this info in a publication, e.g. STRATFOR source/source in the medical industry/source on the ground, etc SOURCE DESCRIPTION : this is where we put the more concrete details of the source for our internal consumption so we can better understand the source’s background and ability to make the assessments in the insight. PUBLICATION : Yes or no. If you put yes it doesn’t mean that we will publish it, but only that we can publish it. SOURCE RELIABILITY : A-F. A being the best and F being the worst. This grades the source overall – access to information, timeliness, availability, etc. In short, how good is this source ? ITEM CREDIBILITY : A-F. A = we can take this info to the bank ; B = Good insight but maybe not entirely precise ; C = Insight is only partially true ; D = There may be some interest in the insight, but it is mostly false or just pure speculation ; F = Likely to be disinformation. SPECIAL HANDLING : often this is “none” but it may be something like, “if you use this we need to be sure not to mention the part about XXX in thepublication” or any other special notes SOURCE HANDLER : the person who can take follow-up questions and communicate with the source.

Find this story at 27 February 2012

The “Kissinger Cables,” a collection of U.S. diplomatic cables released on Monday by WikiLeaks, contain some fascinating revelations about the political scenario in India in the 1970s. Here are the five great insights about India in the WikiLeaks release:

India’s first nuclear test was possibly motivated by political considerations:

According to this cable, sent from New Delhi to the Department of State, India’s first nuclear test on May 18, 1974, was motivated by domestic politics. The cable says that the nuclear test had been done at a time when the Indian government was tackling an economic slowdown, increasing discontent and rising political unrest.

“We are inclined to believe that this general domestic gloom and uncertainty weighed significantly in the balance of India’s nuclear decision,” reads the cable sent on the date of the nuclear test. “The need for a psychological boost, the hope of recreated atmosphere of exhilaration and nationalism that swept the country after 1971 – contrary to our earlier expectation – may have tipped the scales.”

The cable adds that the U.S. Embassy was not aware of any recent military pressure on the Indian government, and that the decision to demonstrate nuclear capability may also have been driven by a need to regain its position in international politics, where India “has felt it had been relegated to the sidelines with its significance ignored and its potential role downplayed.”

Rajiv Gandhi might have acted as the middleman for a Swedish airplane manufacturer:

During his stint as an Indian Airlines pilot, Rajiv Gandhi might have acted as a middleman for the Swedish company Saab-Scania, which was trying to persuade the Indian Air Force to buy its Viggen fighter aircraft. This cable, dated Oct. 21, 1975, says that a Swedish Embassy official had informed the U.S. Embassy that the “main Indian negotiator” for Saab-Scania is Rajiv Gandhi while the French company Dassault’s chief negotiator was the son-in-law of the then Indian air marshal, Om Prakash Mehra. The cable added that Indira Gandhi did not want to purchase the British Jaguar because of “her prejudices against the British.” The Swedish diplomat “expressed irritation at the way Mrs. Gandhi is personally dominating negotiations, without involvement of Indian Air Force officers.”

“The Swedes here have also made it quite clear they understand the importance of family influences in the final decision in the fighter sweepstakes,” said another cable, dated Feb. 6, 1976. “Offhand we would have thought a transport pilot not the best expert to rely upon in evaluating a fighter plane, but then we are speaking of a transport pilot who has another and perhaps more relevant qualification.”

In 1974 India returned 195 prisoners of war to Pakistan, originally wanted by Bangladesh for war crimes trials:

This cable sent from Islamabad on May 17, 1974, reveals that after the Bangladesh-India-Pakistan agreement signed on April 9, 1974, India returned the last Pakistani prisoners of war from India, including 195 prisoners originally wanted by Bangladesh for war crimes trials. “Bhutto and Minstate Aziz Ahmed have hailed the April 9 agreement as a major move toward a durable peace with India, but the continuing drumfire of anti-India comment in the media reflects the strong emotional suspicion of India still prevalent here,” the cable reads. The cable adds that even in the top leadership in the Pakistani government, there is “exasperation” over what they perceived as India’s continuous efforts to hamper Pakistan from obtaining military supplies. While the U.S. diplomat foretold a thawing of relations between the two countries, he said “continuing mutual suspicion” would hinder diplomatic efforts.

Indira Gandhi said she was proud that she “resisted pressures to destroy Pakistan in 1971″

In an analysis of India-Pakistan relations after the 1971 war, a cable sent from the U.S. Department of State says that Indira Gandhi felt that she showed restraint during the war. “Mrs. Gandhi was proud, and we believe sincere, in explaining she resisted pressures to destroy Pakistan in 1971,” reads this cable, dated March 1, 1974. “We believe that she wants détente on the subcontinent and she feels she made concessions at Simla to achieve this. She also insists – plausibly we think – that further disintegration of Pakistan would not be in India’s interest.” The cable says that while Pakistan’s recognition of Bangladesh improves the short-term prospects for better India-Pakistan relations, there is continued suspicion on both sides. The document argues that while India feels that Pakistan must “adjust to Indian power and influence” there is little likelihood of that happening in the near future.

…

April 8, 2013, 7:07 am
By NEHA THIRANI BAGRI

Find this story at 8 April 2013

Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has just published “the Kissinger Cables,” 1.7 million U.S. diplomatic and intelligence documents from 1973 to 1976 that include many once-secret memos written by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. While the documents have been available to the public at the National Archives, WikiLeaks has created a searchable online database to allow anyone in the world to quickly search them. WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange reportedly did most of the work creating the database from his refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London. WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson joins us to discuss the documents’ release. Hrafnsson also comments on the recent anniversary of the release of the “Collateral Murder” military video, which shows U.S. forces killing 12 people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. After WikiLeaks obtained the video, Hrafnsson met with family members of the victims in Iraq. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks is back in the news today. The website has just published 1.7 million U.S. diplomatic and intelligence documents from 1973 to 1976. The project is being dubbed the “Kissinger Cables.”

While the documents have been available to the public at the National Archives, WikiLeaks has created a searchable online database to allow anyone in the world to quickly search through the trove of documents. The archive includes many once-secret memos written by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The release has already made front-page news in India. One document posted online by WikiLeaks indicates former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi acted as a middleman in the ’70s for a Swedish company that was looking to sell fighter jets to the Indian air force.

WikiLeaks posted the documents in a new database called the Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy, or PLUSD. WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange reportedly did most of the work creating the database from his refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he is holed up seeking to stop his extradition to Sweden because he’s concerned about then being extradited to the United States.

To talk about the significance of the latest trove of documents, we go to Washington, D.C., to talk to Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesperson for WikiLeaks. He’s a former investigative journalist who was named Icelandic journalist of the year three times.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Kristinn. You are about, as we go to broadcast, to hold a news conference at the National Press Club. Talk about what you are announcing and what this trove of documents is all about.

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: Well, this is a very important trove of documents, the 1.7 million documents that you mentioned in your introduction, that we have merged together with the 250,000 embassy cables that we published previously under—in the Cablegate project. This is a—these new documents are from the period 1973 to 1976. You said these documents were already accessible, but they are actually quite difficult to get to for the general public. And anybody that can go online and try to find these documents will find out quickly that it’s very hard to access them. So, in our view, the inaccessibility and the difficulty of accessing them is a form of secrecy, in a way, so we found it important to get it to the general public in a good searchable database, and that’s what we have done in this project. It covers a very interesting and turbulent period in our contemporary history and is shedding a light on foreign relations in the Kissinger era.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Kristinn, if you could explain—as you said, these are not documents that haven’t been available to the public, so that’s different than the other troves of documents that WikiLeaks released—you know, the [Iraq] War Logs, as well as Afghanistan, as well as what is called the State Department cables—but most people don’t have a way of really going through them. You’re talking about 1.7 million documents. So explain what it is that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did.

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: Well, what we have is created a database which is easily searchable, and people can access them—the general public, as well as journalists and academics—without any problems. It has shown the credibility that we have in handling huge databases. This is what we’ve been working on for quite some time now. This is a part of our commitment to make accessible historical documents that are hard to find for the general public.

One element of all this is to keep in mind that there has been a trend in the last decade and a half to reverse previously declassified policy. A policy set out, for example, by Clinton in the mid-’90s was, a few years later under Bush, reversed. It was revealed in 2006, for example, that over 55,000 documents that were previously available had been reclassified by the demand of the CIA and other agencies. And it is known that this program continued at least until 2009. So, it is very worrying when the government actually starts taking back into behind the veil of secrecy what was previously available. It doesn’t really increase the trust in government. So, now at least you have all these documents available, and they will be available in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, talk about—you’re an investigative journalist—what you found most significant about these documents, the content of the documents. You know, in the United States, when talking about either Bradley Manning or Julian Assange or WikiLeaks, it’s always about the process or what they did, but rarely, unlike other countries which have, you know, front-page news, like, for example, in India right now, Rajiv Gandhi, what the documents show about him acting as a middleman for a Swedish military company. Talk about these revelations in the documents, Kristinn.

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: Well, the revelations are coming out as we speak and will come out in the next few days. We did cooperate with 18 media organizations around the world in analyzing these documents, and they found terrific stories. I hesitate to steal their headlines before they publish it. It will come out in the next hours and days. There are documents there that shed light on the U.S. relation regarding—with regard to dictatorships in Latin America. I just talked yesterday with a Brazilian journalist who had been diving into this, and it is extremely important what is revealed there. Keep in mind that just recently the Brazilians decided to come to terms with their period of dictatorship after President Dilma set up a truth commission. So, there’s a lot of things from this period that has not been reconciled with and come to terms with, and these documents are really helping this effort in these countries.

AMY GOODMAN: During Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing earlier this year, he spoke about the so-called collateral video—”Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq that occurred on July 12th, 2007. He admitted for the first time being the source of the leaked tape. Bradley Manning described the video as “war porn” and said the crew’s lack of concern for human life and concern for injured children at the scene greatly bothered him. This is the video shot in July 2007 that Manning referenced. It shows U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. This is video that was taken, not by peace activists on the ground, but by the Apache helicopter itself, the video on board the helicopter.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: I have individuals with weapons.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Let me know when you’ve got them.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.

AMY GOODMAN: Reuters driver Saeed Chmagh, who was 40 years old and has four children, survived that initial attack. He’s seen in the video trying to crawl away as the helicopter flies overhead after the first attack. U.S. forces again open fire when they notice a van pulling up to evacuate the wounded Saeed Chmagh.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: The bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Where’s that van at?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Right down there by the bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: OK, yeah.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Let me engage. Can I shoot?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Picking up the wounded?

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: They’re taking him.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV—or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: We’re engaging.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Coming around. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Roger. Trying to—

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: I hear ’em—I lost ’em in the dust.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: I got ’em.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about 12 to 15 bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!

AMY GOODMAN: That, again, the video that was taken that was on board the Apache helicopter. It was July 12th, 2007, released three years ago, on April 5th, 2010, released by WikiLeaks and dubbed the “Collateral Murder” video. Kristinn Hrafnsson, you went to Iraq afterwards. Can you talk about what you did there?

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: Well, I went to Iraq before we released this video. I thought it was very important that we would be able to analyze the situation on the ground, locate the victims and identify them. And so, after working by remote for a little, short period, I did fly to Baghdad with my producer and cameraman, and we arrived about three days before the release of the video, on April 5th, 2010. We were able to establish that the driver of the minivan, Matasher Salah Tomal, a 42-year-old father of four, was simply passing by the scene, driving his two children to a special tutoring. We interviewed his widow. We met with the children, Sayad and Doaha, who were eight and 12 at the time, who were still bearing the scars from this attack and, of course, the trauma of losing their father in the incident. In my mind, this attack on the minivan is a clear war crime. But it has never been investigated as such. And it should be, because the people on the ground there, those killed and the families of the victims, still have not seen any justice because of this incident.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, right now Julian Assange is holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador. Kristinn Hrafnsson, you’re an investigative journalist. Can you talk about the significance of what is happening to him now? Clearly, he is very productive there. If he steps foot outside, he’ll be arrested by British authorities and sent to Sweden. But can you talk very briefly—and we’re going to talk about this with our next guest, as well—but as you got off to the National Press Club to hold your news conference, talk about both Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: Well, Julian Assange has been in the embassy since June 19th, so it’s been quite a time. We are still hoping that there will be some progress very soon. And there is some indication that he will be freed, and I hope that happens very soon. Meanwhile, he is in a fairly good spirit and is still, of course, working as a leader of our team, and working on a new project, as the one that we are releasing today.

With reference to Bradley Manning, of course it’s appalling that he has been held in pretrial confinement for 1,048 days. No soldier in our contemporary history has been held in such a long period of time without trial, and it’s unheard of. Of course, you mentioned that he recently plead that he was the source of this information, which, of course, I cannot confirm, because it’s our policy that the best way to guard our sources is not knowing them. But it is interesting that even though he has—has this plea, the prosecution is still going ahead with very serious charges of treason, basically aiding the enemy, which carries the maximum of the death penalty, which, in my mind, is an indication that this is a persecution, rather than a prosecution, against Bradley Manning.

AMY GOODMAN: I know that you have to leave to go to the news conference to speak to the press. Are you concerned, Kristinn, coming to this country, that you, too, could be arrested? And have you been questioned by the grand jury that we understand is impaneled in Virginia to investigate WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, that others have been called before?

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: I have not been questioned, and I have not been harassed in any way, but I assume that information has been gathered about me. This investigation is unheard of in scope. More than 40,000 documents have been gathered in the investigation. A lot of our people have been harassed at the borders here, and they have been spied upon. We know that. We have confirmation on that. So, this is a very serious, ongoing investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: Kristinn, the Kissinger Cables that you have now—that you’re announcing the release of, at least a documented database form of them, one of the reports in the Indian paper that have already been published, so you can discuss it, is about Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime minister of India, being a middleman for a Swedish military company. Talk about the significance of this. What exactly did he do?

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: I have to admit that I’m not familiar with the details of that story, so I don’t want to go into that in much details.

AMY GOODMAN: OK.

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: And I should be actually going to the National Press Club to host the conference.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, the last question, the last question. The quote of Henry Kissinger: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: That is a quote from a meeting, minutes from a meeting in Turkey, where he was talking to his Turkish counterpart. And it is a quite interesting quote and shows maybe the spirit of how he was conducting the foreign policy of this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t we end on that quote one more time? It was a quote of the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, March 10th, 1975: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” Kristinn Hrafnsson, I want to thank you for being with us. We will cover your news conference in the National Press Club and hope to speak to you again soon.

KRISTINN HRAFNSSON: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Spokesperson for WikiLeaks. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. But we’re staying on this subject. When we come back, we’ll be joined by Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament who played a critical role in WikiLeaks. She has now come to this country to speak about both WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning. Stay with us.

Monday, April 8, 2013

Find this story at 8 April 2013

‘Investigative journalism has never been this effective!’ – Publico

The Kissinger Cables are part of today’s launch of the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which holds the world’s largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of its launch on April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words.

WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange stated: “The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on Earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published.”
THE KISSINGER CABLES

“The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” — Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975: http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/P860114-1573_MC_b.html#efmCS3CUB

The Kissinger Cables comprise more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976, including 205,901 records relating to former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Dating from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976 they cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. They include more than 1.3 million full diplomatic cables and 320,000 originally classified records. These include more than 227,000 cables classified as “CONFIDENTIAL” and 61,000 cables classified as “SECRET”. Perhaps more importantly, there are more than 12,000 documents with the sensitive handling restriction “NODIS” or ‘no distribution’, and more than 9,000 labelled “Eyes Only”.

At around 700 million words, the Kissinger Cables collection is approximately five times the size of WikiLeaks’ Cablegate. The raw PDF data is more than 380 Gigabytes in size and is the largest WikiLeaks publication to date.

WikiLeaks’ media partners will be reporting throughout the week on their findings. These include significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels.

The documents also contain hourly diplomatic reporting on the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria (the “Yom Kippur war”). While several of these documents have been used by US academic researchers in the past, the Kissinger Cables provides unparalled access to journalists and the general public.

Most of the records were reviewed by the United States Department of State’s systematic 25-year declassification process. At review, the records were assessed and either declassified or kept classified with some or all of the metadata records declassified. Both sets of records were then subject to an additional review by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Once believed to be releasable, they were placed as individual PDFs at the National Archives as part of their Central Foreign Policy Files collection. Despite the review process supposedly assessing documents after 25 years there are no diplomatic records later than 1976. The formal declassification and review process of these extremely valuable historical documents is therefore currently running 12 years late.

The form in which these documents were held at NARA was as 1.7 million individual PDFs. To prepare these documents for integration into the PlusD collection, WikiLeaks obtained and reverse-engineered all 1.7 million PDFs and performed a detailed analysis of individual fields, developed sophisticated technical systems to deal with the complex and voluminous data and corrected a great many errors introduced by NARA, the State Department or its diplomats, for example harmonizing the many different ways in which departments, capitals and people’s names were spelt. All our corrective work is referenced and available from the links in the individual field descriptions on the PlusD text search interface: https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd
RECLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTS THWARTED

The CIA and other agencies have attempted to reclassify or withhold sections of the US National Archives. Detailed minutes of US State Department meetings show that these attempts, which originated under the Bush II administration, have continued on through until at least 2009. A 2006 analysis by the US National Security Archives, an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at George Washington University, found that 55,000 pages had been secretly reclassified.

The censorship of the US National Archives was thrown into stark relief in November last year when the Archive censored all searches for ‘WikiLeaks’ from its records. See http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/11/03/us-national-archives-has-blocked-searches-for-wikileaks/

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ publisher, said: “The US administration cannot be trusted to maintain the history of its interactions with the world. Fortunately, an organisation with an unbroken record in resisting censorship attempts now has a copy.”

Sun Apr 7, 2013 21:00 EST

Find this story at 7 April 2013

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For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.” Reading for more than an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said: “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is “aiding the enemy” and carries a possible life sentence. We are joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He just returned from attending Manning’s hearing. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He returned last night from attending the pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning.

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate >
Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.”

Reading for over an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said, quote, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” He added, quote, “I believed that these cables would not damage the United States. However, I believed these cables would be embarrassing.” He said he took the information to WikiLeaks only after he was rebuffed by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is aiding the enemy and carries a possible life sentence.

Over the course of the hearing, Bradley Manning took responsibility for leaking the so-called “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some U.S. diplomatic cables, including one of the early WikiLeaks publications, the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs; some of the files on detainees in Guantánamo; and two intelligence memos.

For more, we’re joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He has just returned from attending that pretrial hearing last night for Bradley Manning.

Michael Ratner, welcome back to Democracy Now! Well, this is explosive. Bradley Manning stands in court and accepts responsibility for releasing the documents, says he is guilty of doing that.

MICHAEL RATNER: It was one of the more moving days I’ve ever spent in a courtroom. You’ve heard from Bradley Manning once before, which was when he testified about the torture that happened to him. I was crying through that. This was amazing. I mean, he actually didn’t stand; he sat at the defense table. And he read his 35-page statement, which, sadly, we do not have a copy of, even though there’s nothing classified about that statement. And hopefully we’ll get it, because that is something that should be taught in every school in America.

He went through each of the releases that he took responsibility for, that you mentioned on the air, and he told us why he did it. And in each case, you saw a 22-year-old, a 23-year-old, a person of incredible conscience, saying, “What I’m seeing the United States do is utterly wrong. It’s immoral. The way they’re killing people in Iraq, targeting people for death, rather than working with the population, this is wrong.” And in each of these—each of these statements tells you about how he was doing it politically.

AMY GOODMAN: Remind us of how he did this. He was actually serving in Iraq as a soldier.

MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, he was a soldier. He was in—and he goes through that in his statement. He’s an intelligence analyst. And one of the things he worked with, what were called “significant activities reports,” which are the daily logs of what’s happening in Iraq and, attached to it, of course, in Afghanistan. And as he read those, I think he became appalled by what he saw: the killings, the targeted assassinations, the fact that people didn’t want the United States there, the fact that we weren’t really helping the country or helping individuals. And he said he wanted to lift the fog of war from it. And he got in touch with various organizations, including WikiLeaks. And that, he talks about. He talks about that. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain. He actually said he didn’t go to WikiLeaks first.

MICHAEL RATNER: No, that’s correct. He first—he had these documents on a disk that he eventually took out of—took out of the special secure room. He actually came to the United States with it. That’s the Iraq war logs and the Afghan war logs. And he tried to get it to The New York Times and The Washington Post. He calls up The Washington Post, has a five-minute discussion with somebody there.

AMY GOODMAN: Does he know who?

MICHAEL RATNER: He doesn’t recall who, or at least didn’t say it. He doesn’t take it—he said they don’t take him seriously, and then he feels he can’t get that. He calls the public editor at The New York Times and leaves a message on the answering machine of the public editor and doesn’t get a call back. He’s then thinking about: “How am I going to get this critical information out? Because I think what the U.S. is doing should be debated in the United States. We’re killing people without cause, essentially.”

And then, he has already known about WikiLeaks, because he was aware of WikiLeaks in part because of their release of the text messages or the SMSes from the World Trade Center phones that were there on 9/11. So he’s aware of WikiLeaks. He’s in some communication, by chat or otherwise, with WikiLeaks. And they point him to a site where he can upload, upload the documents.

One interesting point on that is what he mentions about WikiLeaks. Some papers have reported that he said he believes he was in communication with Julian Assange. He actually says it could have been Julian Assange, it could have been someone he calls “Daniel Schmitt,” which is probably Daniel Domscheit-Berg from Germany. And he says—and it also says it could have been someone high up in WikiLeaks. He really doesn’t know. And he says, “Whatever I did in this case, I did because I wanted to do it. I was not pressured to do it. I made the decision to do it.” So he tries these other media, and ultimately he sees that WikiLeaks has a way of uploading documents that’s anonymous, that he doesn’t know who’s on the other end, and they don’t know who’s on his end.

AMY GOODMAN: He also said he was motivated by the Reuters FOIAs, right? Freedom of the Information Act requests to get the—what came to be known as the “Collateral Murder” video.

MICHAEL RATNER: I mean, when we can get the transcript and put out the quotes of what he said, on that “Collateral Murder” video, which he saw the Reuters journalists killed, then he saw them attack the van that was trying to rescue people, in which children were injured, and he said, “What I heard them say in that helicopter as they were shooting was incredible bloodlust.” “Bloodlust,” that’s what he said.

AMY GOODMAN: During that pretrial hearing on Wednesday, let’s talk about this, Michael. Bradley Manning spoke about the “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq and admitted for the first time being the source of the leaked tape. Manning said, quote, “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team happened to have.” He added, the soldiers’ actions, quote, “seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass,” describing the video as “war porn,” saying the crew’s “lack of concern for human life” and “concern for injured children at the scene” greatly bothered him. So, this is the video—it was shot July 12th, 2007—that Manning referenced. It shows U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters employees. Now, this video is taken by the U.S. military Apache helicopter. It is the camera that’s mounted within the helicopter. You hear the soldiers in the helicopter joking, cursing. And it is showing a target on the men who are walking in an area of Baghdad known as New Baghdad below. Among them, an up-and-coming Reuters videographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: I have individuals with weapons.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Let me know when you’ve got them.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.

AMY GOODMAN: Reuters driver Saeed Chmagh survived that initial attack. He’s seen trying to crawl away as the helicopter flies overhead. U.S. forces open fire again when they see a van pulling up. The van comes to evacuate the wounded, like Saeed Chmagh.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: The bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Where’s that van at?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Right down there by the bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: OK, yeah.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Let me engage. Can I shoot?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Picking up the wounded?

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: They’re taking him.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV—or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: We’re engaging.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Coming around. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Roger. Trying to—

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: I hear ’em—I lost ’em in the dust.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: I got ’em.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about 12 to 15 bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!

AMY GOODMAN: That is the video that WikiLeaks, when releasing it, dubbed “Collateral Murder,” of the July 12, 2007, attack. In that van, by the way, were two children who were critically wounded. Saeed Chmagh was killed. That is the video that we played first when it was released and also interviewed Julian Assange at the time here in the United States, interestingly. Michael Ratner with us, who is Julian Assange’s attorney. So this video Bradley Manning got in downloading, because it’s a U.S. military video, that Reuters, which had asked repeatedly for it, never got until WikiLeaks released it, to know the last seconds of their employees’ lives.

MICHAEL RATNER: Not only did Reuters never get it, Amy, CENTCOM, which is I guess the central part of the Army, basically said, “We don’t think we have the video.” And yet, everybody that was in the room with Bradley Manning, everybody knew about the video. It was one of many, many videos. He says in this video—and he said it in court—he said, “What was amazing is, when they—after they hurt these children in the van,” he said, “they showed no remorse for the children. And when they saw someone crawling on the ground, they said, ‘I hope he picks up a gun,’ essentially, ‘because we can kill him then.'” So, these people—this was really here a 22- or 23-year-old man watching this. Most people would have said, “Well, I’ll just get through the Army, and that’ll be it.” He didn’t, and he’s a hero for that, because what he did is he acted on his moral conscience, and he exposed what the—the war crimes the U.S. was doing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what does this mean right now? Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to uploading the largest trove of state secrets in U.S. history to WikiLeaks, which then released them. What does he face exactly?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, he faces a possible 20 years in prison. But the problem here, military is different than our regular courts in the U.S., which is to say that the plea does not have to be accepted by the government or by the judge—

AMY GOODMAN: So why would he have agreed to plead guilty?

MICHAEL RATNER: —or by the prosecutor, really. He did what’s called a “naked plea.” His hope, I think, is that when the government sees this and also the support he’ll get for acknowledging what he did and also the reasons and the moral reasons why he did it and the political reasons he did it, that the government won’t go on and try and prove aiding the enemy and the more serious espionage charges. What he really pleaded to was doing actions that were prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the military, by giving documents to someone not authorized or a group not authorized to get them. So he faces 20 years. I think he did it because he was otherwise facing, and he still could be facing, life imprisonment, if not the death penalty. So they’re trying to figure out—

AMY GOODMAN: Because? Life imprisonment for?

MICHAEL RATNER: For espionage, as well as the death penalty.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about this charge, aiding the enemy?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the—

AMY GOODMAN: What is the case for it?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the craziest. I mean, that’s just saying, because he gave documents to WikiLeaks and they were published by WikiLeaks — and they were published by The New York Times, I should say, and The Guardian and Der Spiegel — that al-Qaeda read those documents, and therefore WikiLeaks was essentially the transmittal means he used to get documents to al-Qaeda. So that the enemy there is al-Qaeda; some would say the enemy is even WikiLeaks, according to the U.S. government. But that’s the claim. It seems like a completely spurious, ridiculous claim. You can go after The New York Times for that every time it publishes and someone from a, quote, “terrorist” group reads those documents. So it’s a nonsensical claim.

But he was facing life. And he made this statement that—you know, I just want to say that whatever people’s images were of Bradley Manning from the newspapers, which have reported on this, you know, disturbed human being, this disturbed individual, this man gave a political statement that should be read, I think, by every American and should certainly be taught in every one of our schools on what the moral obligations are of people in the military to stop, really, a killing machine of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for Julian Assange? You’re his attorney. You were just recently there once again in London in the Ecuadorean embassy, where he is holed up and granted political asylum by Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy or Britain, the British authorities, will arrest him. The significance of this, Julian Assange, who believes the grand jury empaneled here could indict him for espionage and is afraid of being extradited here?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, there are two things that came out. One is, I would say that Bradley Manning’s testimony put WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the same place that The New York Times would be or The Guardian, which is to say he gave documents or uploaded them to a website that is the equivalent of—you know, with The New York Times getting information about warrantless wiretapping from someone in the U.S. National Security Agency. So I think, in that sense, it tells us that the U.S. should get off his back, that Julian Assange should be getting the support of The New York Times and The Guardian and Der Spiegel, which used all of these—which used all of these documents. So I think it’s actually, in that sense, helpful to Julian Assange.

On the other hand, there were two people who were identified to me as members—as lawyers on the grand jury that’s sitting in—that’s sitting in Virginia. Two of the prosecuting attorneys were there in the court.

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, at the pretrial hearing of Bradley Manning.

MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: So they’re there, and you’re there, Assange’s attorney.

MICHAEL RATNER: They’re there, and I’m there. I didn’t have a chance to meet them, because they don’t come out and mix with the rest of us. They’re on the government’s side with—surrounded by camouflaged people. But they were there. And so, that tells us that that grand jury is still active and going on, and that they are still after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. When I say “they,” the U.S. government. But for some reason, they’re thinking they can distinguish that from The New York Times and The Guardian. I don’t think they can. And I think it’s—you know, to me, it’s outrageous that The New York Times and The Guardian have not supported one of the people they worked with in revealing these documents.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Ratner, I want to thank you for being with us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, returned last night from attending the pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning, who has been in detention now for more than 1,000 days.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Stay with us.

Find this story at 1 March 2013

After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?

The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma’am.”

The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating. The judge will apparently allow my testimony, so if the prosecution decides to pursue the more serious charges to which Manning did not plead guilty, I will explain at trial why someone in Manning’s shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit—a journalistic “Little Engine that Could” that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times. The prosecutor’s “Yes Ma’am,” essentially conceded that core point of my testimony in order to keep it out of the trial. That’s not a concession any lawyer makes lightly.

The charge of “aiding the enemy” is vague. But it carries the death penalty—and could apply to civilians as well as soldiers.

But that “Yes Ma’am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too.

A
country’s constitutional culture is made up of the stories we tell each other about the kind of nation we are. When we tell ourselves how strong our commitment to free speech is, we grit our teeth and tell of Nazis marching through Skokie. And when we think of how much we value our watchdog press, we tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg. Decades later, we sometimes forget that Ellsberg was prosecuted, smeared, and harassed. Instead, we express pride in a man’s willingness to brave the odds, a newspaper’s willingness to take the risk of publishing, and a Supreme Court’s ability to tell an overbearing White House that no, you cannot shut up your opponents.

Whistleblowers play a critical constitutional role in our system of government, particularly in the area of national security. And they do so at great personal cost. The executive branch has enormous powers over national security and the exercise of that power is not fully transparent. Judicial doctrines like the “state secrets” doctrine allow an administration to limit judicial oversight. Congress’ oversight committees have also tended to leave the executive relatively free of constraints. Because the materials they see are classified, there remains little public oversight. Consider the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the interrogation torture practices during the immediate post 9/11 years: Its six thousand pages, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, are “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate.” But they are unavailable to the public.

Freedom of the press is anchored in our constitution because it reflects our fundamental belief that no institution can be its own watchdog. The government is full of well-intentioned and quite powerful inspectors general and similar internal accountability mechanisms. But like all big organizations, the national security branches of government include some people who aren’t purely selfless public servants. Secrecy is necessary and justified in many cases. But as hard-earned experience has shown us time and again, it can be—and often is—used to cover up failure, avarice, or actions that simply will not survive that best of disinfectants, sunlight.

That’s where whistleblowers come in. They offer a pressure valve, constrained by the personal risk whistleblowers take, and fueled by whatever moral courage they can muster. Manning’s statement in court yesterday showed that, at least in his motives, he was part of that long-respected tradition. But that’s also where the Manning prosecution comes in, too. The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.

Hard cases, lawyers have long known, make bad law. The unusual nature of Manning’s case has led some to argue that his leaks are different than those we now celebrate as a bedrock component of accountability journalism: Daniel Ellsberg leaked specific documents that showed massive public deception in the prosecution of the Vietnam War. Deep Throat leaked specific information about presidential corruption during the Watergate investigation. Manning, though, leaked hundreds of thousands of documents, many of which were humdrum affairs; perhaps, some have argued, the sheer scope raises the risks. But in the three years since the leaks began, there has still been no public evidence that they in fact caused significant damage. The prosecutors say they will introduce evidence of harm in secret sessions; one of these bits of evidence is reportedly going to be that they will show that several of the files published were found on Osama Bin Laden’s computer. Does that mean that if the Viet Cong had made copies of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg would have been guilty of “aiding the enemy?”

If the Viet Cong photocopied the Pentagon Papers, could Daniel Ellsberg have been prosecuted for aiding the enemy?

It is also important to understand that although the number of leaked items was vast, it was not gratuitously so; some of the most important disclosures came precisely from sifting through the large number of items. Certainly, some of the important revelations from the leaks could have been achieved through a single “smoking gun” document, such as the chilling operational video from a U.S. helicopter attack that killed two Reuters’ cameramen, and shot at a van trying to offer relief to the injured, wounding two children who were in the van. But many of the most important insights only arise from careful analysis of the small pieces of evidence. This type of accountability analysis showed that the military had substantially understated the scale of civilian casualties in Iraq; and that U.S. forces were silently complicit in abuses by allied Iraqi government forces; it uncovered repeated abuses by civilian contractors to the military. The war logs have become the most important spin-free source of historical evidence about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The reputation that WikiLeaks has been given by most media outlets over the past two and a half years, though, obscures much of this—it just feels less like “the press” than the New York Times. This is actually the point on which I am expected to testify at the trial, based on research I did over the months following the first WikiLeaks disclosure in April 2010. When you read the hundreds of news stories and other materials published about WikiLeaks before early 2010, what you see is a young, exciting new media organization. The darker stories about Julian Assange and the dangers that the site poses developed only in the latter half of 2010, as the steady release of leaks about the U.S. triggered ever-more hyperbolic denouncements from the Administration (such as Joe Biden’s calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist”), and as relations between Assange and his traditional media partners soured.

In early 2010, when Manning did his leaking, none of that had happened yet. WikiLeaks was still a new media phenom, an outfit originally known for releasing things like a Somali rebel leader’s decision to assassinate government officials in Somalia, or a major story exposing corruption in the government of Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya. Over the years WikiLeaks also exposed documents that shined a light on U.S. government practices, such as operating procedures in Camp Delta in Guantanamo or a draft of a secretly negotiated, highly controversial trade treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. But that was not the primary focus. To name but a few examples, it published documents that sought to expose a Swiss Bank’s use of Cayman accounts to help rich clients avoid paying taxes, oil related corruption in Peru, banking abuses in Iceland, pharmaceutical company influence peddling at the World Health Organization, and extra-judicial killings in Kenya. For its work, WikiLeaks won Amnesty International’s New Media award in 2009 and the Freedom of Expression Award from the British magazine, Index of Censorship, in 2008.

No one would have thought at the time that WikiLeaks had the gravitas of the Times. But if you roll back to the relevant time frame, it is clear that any reasonable person would have seen WikiLeaks as being in the same universe as we today think of the range of new media organizations in the networked investigative journalism ecosystem, closer probably to ProPublica or the Bureau of Investigative Journalism than to Huffington Post or the Daily Beast. If leaking classified materials to a public media outlet can lead to prosecution for aiding the enemy, then it has to be under a rule that judges can apply evenhandedly to the New York Times or the Guardian no less than to ProPublica, the Daily Beast, or WikiLeaks. No court will welcome a rule where culpability for a capital offense like aiding the enemy depends on the judge’s evaluation of the quality of the editorial practices, good faith, or loyalty of the media organization to which the information was leaked. Nor could a court develop such a rule without severely impinging on the freedom of the press. The implications of Manning’s case go well beyond Wikileaks, to the very heart of accountability journalism in a networked age.

T
he prosecution will likely not accept Manning’s guilty plea to lesser offenses as the final word. When the case goes to trial in June, they will try to prove that Manning is guilty of a raft of more serious offenses. Most aggressive and novel among these harsher offenses is the charge that by giving classified materials to WikiLeaks Manning was guilty of “aiding the enemy.” That’s when the judge will have to decide whether handing over classified materials to ProPublica or the New York Times, knowing that Al Qaeda can read these news outlets online, is indeed enough to constitute the capital offense of “aiding the enemy.”

Aiding the enemy is a broad and vague offense. In the past, it was used in hard-core cases where somebody handed over information about troop movements directly to someone the collaborator believed to be “the enemy,” to American POWs collaborating with North Korean captors, or to a German American citizen who was part of a German sabotage team during WWII. But the language of the statute is broad. It prohibits not only actually aiding the enemy, giving intelligence, or protecting the enemy, but also the broader crime of communicating—directly or indirectly—with the enemy without authorization. That’s the prosecution’s theory here: Manning knew that the materials would be made public, and he knew that Al Qaeda or its affiliates could read the publications in which the materials would be published. Therefore, the prosecution argues, by giving the materials to WikiLeaks, Manning was “indirectly” communicating with the enemy. Under this theory, there is no need to show that the defendant wanted or intended to aid the enemy. The prosecution must show only that he communicated the potentially harmful information, knowing that the enemy could read the publications to which he leaked the materials. This would be true whether Al Qaeda searched the WikiLeaks database or the New York Times’. Hence the prosecutor’s “Yes Ma’am.”

This theory is unprecedented in modern American history. The prosecution claims that there is, in fact precedent in Civil War cases, including one from 1863 where a Union officer gave a newspaper in occupied Alexandria rosters of Union units, and was convicted of aiding the enemy and sentenced to three months. But Manning’s defense argues that the Civil War cases involved publishing coded messages in newspapers and personals, not leaking for reporting to the public at large. The other major source that the prosecution uses is a 1920 military law treatise. Even if the prosecutors are correct in their interpretations of these two sources, which is far from obvious, the fact that they need to rely on these old and obscure sources underscores how extreme their position is in the twenty-first century.

In fact, neither side disagrees with this central critique: That for 150 years, well before the rise of the modern First Amendment, the invention of muckraking journalism, or the modern development of the watchdog function of the press in democratic society, no one has been charged with aiding the enemy simply for leaking information to the press for general publication. Perhaps it was possible to bring such a charge before the first amendment developed as it did in the past hundred years, before the Pentagon Papers story had entered our national legend. But before Rosa Parks and Brown vs. Board of Education there was also a time when prosecutors could enforce the segregation laws of Jim Crow. Those times have passed. Read in the context of American constitutional history and the practice of at least a century and a half (if not more) of “aiding the enemy” prosecutions, we should hope and expect that the court will in fact reject the prosecution’s novel and aggressive interpretation of that crime.

But as long as the charge remains live and the case undecided, the risk that a court will accept this expansive and destructive interpretation is very real.

That’s especially true when you consider that “aiding the enemy” could be applied to civilians. Most provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice apply only to military personnel. But Section 104, the “aiding the enemy” section, applies simply to “any person.” To some extent, this makes sense—a German-American civilian in WWII could be tried by military commission for aiding German saboteurs under this provision. There has been some back and forth in military legal handbooks, cases, and commentary about whether and to what extent Section 104 in fact applies to civilians. Most recently, Justice Stevens’ opinion in the Supreme Court case of Hamdan implies that Section 104 may in fact apply to civilians and be tried by military commissions. But this is not completely settled. Because the authorities are unclear, any competent lawyer today would have to tell a prospective civilian whistleblower that she may well be prosecuted for the capital offense of aiding the enemy just for leaking to the press.

…

Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School and co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

BY YOCHAI BENKLER

Find this story at 1 March 2013

COPYRIGHT 2013 © THE NEW REPUBLIC

After admitting guilt in 10 of 22 charges, soldier reveals how he came to share classified documents with WikiLeaks and talks of ‘bloodlust’ of US helicopter crew
• Glenn Greenwald: Bradley Manning – the face of heroism

Manning’s statement recounted how he had first become aware of WikiLeaks in 2009. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of the biggest unauthorised disclosure of state secrets in US history, has pleaded guilty to being the source of the leak, telling a military court that he passed the information to a whistleblowing website because he believed the American people had a right to know the “true costs of war”.

At a pre-trial hearing on a Maryland military base, Manning, 25, who faces spending the rest of his life in military custody, read out a 35-page statement in which he gave an impassioned account of his motives for transmitting classified documents and videos he had obtained while working as an intelligence analyst outside Baghdad.

Sitting at the defence bench in a hushed courtroom, Manning said he was sickened by the apparent “bloodlust” of a helicopter crew involved in an attack on a group in Baghdad that turned out to include Reuters correspondents and children.

He believed the Afghan and Iraq war logs published by the WikiLeaks website, initially in association with a consortium of international media organisations that included the Guardian, were “among the more significant documents of our time revealing the true costs of war”. The decision to pass the classified information to a public website was motivated, he told the court, by his depression about the state of military conflict in which the US was mired.

Manning said: “We were obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and ignoring goals and missions. I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general [that] might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counter-terrorism while ignoring the human situation of the people we engaged with every day.”

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In a highly unusual move for a defendant in such a serious criminal prosecution, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges out of his own volition – not as part of a plea bargain with the prosecution. He admitted to having possessed and willfully communicated to an unauthorised person – probably Julian Assange – all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure.

That covered the so-called “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some US diplomatic cables including one of the early WikiLeaks publications the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs; some of the files on detainees in Guantánamo; and two intelligence memos.

The charges to which the soldier pleaded guilty carry a two-year maximum sentence each, committing Manning to a possible upper limit of 20 years in military prison.

But the plea does not avoid a long and complex trial for the soldier, that is currently scheduled to begin on 3 June. Manning pleaded not guilty to 12 counts which relate to the major offences of which he is accused by the US government.

Specifically, he denied he had been involved in “aiding the enemy” – the idea that he knowingly gave help to al-Qaida and caused secret intelligence to be published on the internet, aware that by doing so it would become available to the enemy.

As he read his statement, Manning was flanked by his civilian lawyer, David Coombs, on one side and two military defence lawyers on the other. Wearing full uniform, the soldier read out the document at high speed, occasionally stumbling over the words and at other points laughing at his own comments.

He recounted how he had first become aware of WikiLeaks in 2009. He was particularly impressed by its release in November that year of more than 500,000 text messages sent on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He had originally copied the war logs as a good housekeeping measure to have quick access to the information. But the more he read into the data, he said, the more he was concerned about what it was uncovering.

He decided to take a copy of the data on a memory stick when he went back from Iraq to the US on leave in January 2010. There, having failed to interest the Washington Post and the New York Times in the stash of information, he turned to WikiLeaks.

On his return to Iraq, he encountered a video that showed an Apache helicopter attack from 2007 in which a group of people in Baghdad came under US fire. The group was later found to have included civilians, children and two Reuters correspondents who died.

Manning said he was “troubled” by the resistance of the military authorities to releasing the video to Reuters, and a claim from on high that it might not still exist. When he looked through the video on a secure military database he was also troubled by the attitude of the aerial weapons team in the Apache – “the bloodlust they seemed to have, they seemed not to value human life”.

The soldier related that in the video a man who has been hit by the US forces is seen crawling injured through the dust, at which point one of the helicopter crew is heard wishing the man would pick up a weapon so that they could kill him. “For me that was like a child torturing an ant with a magnifying glass.”

After he had uploaded the video to WikiLeaks, which then posted it as the now notorious “Collateral Murder” video, Manning said he was approached by a senior WikiLeaks figure codenamed “Ox”. He assumed the individual was probably Julian Assange, and gave him his own codename – Nathaniel Frank – after the author of a book he had recently read.

Of the largest portion of the WikiLeaks disclosures – the 250,000 US diplomatic cables – Manning said he was convinced the documents from embassies around the world would embarrass but not damage the US. “I thought these cables were a prime example of the need for more diplomacy. In many ways they were a collection of cliques and gossip,” he said.

After reading his statement, Manning entered into several hours of questions from the trial judge, Colonel Denise Lind, who has the duty of ensuring that the accused made his guilty plea voluntarily and in full knowledge of its implications. Lind found Manning made his plea without coercion and in knowledge of its impact, and accepted it.

In the course of the questioning, Lind tried to get to the bottom of an apparent contradiction in Manning’s comments. In his statement, he expressed strong moral reasons for his actions that suggested he was justified in leaking confidential information for the greater good.

…

Ed Pilkington at Fort Meade, Maryland
The Guardian, Thursday 28 February 2013 22.21 GMT

Find this story at 28 February 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

For more information on the lack of public and press access to United States v. Pfc. Manning, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a petition requesting the Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA) “to order the Judge 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.”

The statement below was read by Private First Class Bradley E. Manning at the providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification under Article 92 with a substituted time frame for the offense, and nine specifications for lesser included offenses under Article 134. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O’Brien at the Article 39(a) session of United States v. Pfc. Bradley Manning on February 28, 2013 at Fort Meade, MD, USA.

UPDATE

Judge Lind: Pfc. Manning you may read your statement.

Pfc. Bradley Manning: Yes, your Honor. I wrote this statement in the confinement facility. Start now. The following facts are provided in support of the providence inquiry for my court martial, United States v. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.

Personal Facts.

I am a twenty-five year old Private First Class in the United States Army currently assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, HHC, US Army Garrison (USAG), Joint Base Myer, Henderson Hall, Fort Meyer, Virginia.

My [exodus?] assignment I was assigned to HHC, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, NY. My primary military occupational specialty or MOS is 35 Foxtrot intelligence analyst. I entered active duty status on 2 October 2007. I enlisted with the hope of obtaining both real world experience and earning benefits under the GI Bill for college opportunities.

Facts regarding my position as an intelligence analyst.

In order to enlist in the Army I took the Standard Armed Services Aptitude Battery or [ASVAB?]. My score on this battery was high enough for me to qualify for any enlisted MOS position. My recruiter informed me that I should select an MOS that complimented my interests outside the military. In response, I told him that I was interested in geopolitical matters and information technology. He suggested that I consider becoming an intelligence analyst.

After researching the intelligence analyst position, I agreed that this would be a good fit for me. In particular, I enjoyed the fact that an analyst could use information derived from a variety of sources to create work products that informed the command of its available choices for determining the best course of action or COA’s. Although the MOS required working knowledge of computers, it primarily required me to consider how raw information can be combined with other available intelligence sources in order to create products that assisted the command in its situational awareness or SA.

I accessed that my natural interest in geopolitical affairs and my computer skills would make me an excellent intelligence analyst. After enlisting I reported to the Fort Meade military entrance processing station on 1 October 2007. I then traveled to and reported at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri on 2 October 2007 to begin basic combat training or BCT.

Once at Fort Leonard Wood I quickly realized that I was neither physically nor mentally prepared for the requirements of basic training. My BCT experience lasted six months instead of the normal ten weeks. Due to medical issues, I was placed on a hold status. A physical examination indicated that I sustained injuries to my right soldier and left foot.

Due to those injuries I was unable to continue ‘basic’. During medical hold, I was informed that I may be out processed from the Army, however, I resisted being chaptered out because I felt that I could overcome my medical issues and continue to serve. On 2[8 or 20?] January 2008, I returned to basic combat training. This time I was better prepared and I completed training on 2 April 2008.

I then reported for the MOS specific Advanced Individual Training or AIT on 7 April 2008. AIT was an enjoyable experience for me. Unlike basic training where I felt different from the other soldiers, I fit in and did well. I preferred the mental challenges of reviewing a large amount of information from various sources and trying to create useful or actionable products. I especially enjoyed the practice of analysis through the use of computer applications and methods that I was familiar with.

I graduated from AIT on 16 August 2008 and reported to my first duty station, Fort Drum, NY on 28 August 2008. As an analyst, Significant Activities or SigActs were a frequent source of information for me to use in creating work products. I started working extensively with SigActs early after my arrival at Fort Drum. My computer background allowed me to use the tools of organic to the Distributed Common Ground System-Army or D6-A computers to create polished work products for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team chain of command.

The non-commissioned officer in charge, or NCOIC, of the S2 section, then Master Sergeant David P. Adkins recognized my skills and potential and tasked me to work on a tool abandoned by a previously assigned analyst, the incident tracker. The incident tracker was viewed as a back up to the Combined Information Data Network Exchange or CIDNE and as a unit, historical reference to work with.

In the months preceding my upcoming deployment, I worked on creating a new version of the incident tracker and used SigActs to populate it. The SigActs I used were from Afghanistan, because at the time our unit was scheduled to deploy to the Logar and Wardak Provinces of Afghanistan. Later my unit was reassigned to deploy to Eastern Baghdad, Iraq. At that point, I removed the Afghanistan SigActs and switched to Iraq SigActs.

As and analyst I viewed the SigActs as historical data. I believed this view is shared by other all-source analysts as well. SigActs give a first look impression of a specific or isolated event. This event can be an improvised explosive device attack or IED, small arms fire engagement or SAF, engagement with a hostile force, or any other event a specific unit documented and recorded in real time.

In my perspective the information contained within a single SigAct or group of SigActs is not very sensitive. The events encapsulated within most SigActs involve either enemy engagements or causalities. Most of this information is publicly reported by the public affairs office or PAO, embedded media pools, or host nation (HN) media.

As I started working with SigActs I felt they were similar to a daily journal or log that a person may keep. They capture what happens on a particular day in time. They are created immediately after the event, and are potentially updated over a period of hours until final version is published on the Combined Information Data Network Exchange. Each unit has its own Standard Operating Procedure or SOP for reporting and recording SigActs. The SOP may differ between reporting in a particular deployment and reporting in garrison.

In garrison, a SigAct normally involves personnel issues such as driving under the influence or DUI incidents or an automobile accident involving the death or serious injury of a soldier. The reports starts at the company level and goes up to the battalion, brigade, and even up to the division level.

In deployed environment a unit may observe or participate in an event and a platoon leader or platoon sergeant may report the event as a SigAct to the company headquarters and through the radio transmission operator or RTO. The commander or RTO will then forward the report to the battalion battle captain or battle non-commissioned officer or NCO. Once the battalion battle captain or battle NCO receives the report they will either (1) notify the battalion operations officer or S3; (2) conduct an action, such as launching a quick reaction force; or (3) record the event and report– and further report it up the chain of command to the brigade.

The reporting of each event is done by radio or over the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network or SIPRNet, normally by an assigned soldier, usually junior enlisted E-4 and below. Once the SigAct is recorded, the SigAct is further sent up the chain of command. At each level, additional information can either be added or corrected as needed. Normally within 24 to 48 hours, the updating and reporting or a particular SigAct is complete. Eventually all reports and SigActs go through the chain of command from brigade to division and division to corps. At corps level the SigAct is finalized and [missed word].

The CIDNE system contains a database that is used by thousands of Department of Defense– DoD personnel– including soldiers, civilians, and contractors support. It was the United States Central Command or CENTCOM reporting tool for operational reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two separate but similar databases were maintained for each theater– CIDNE-I for Iraq and CIDNE-A for Afghanistan. Each database encompasses over a hundred types of reports and other historical information for access. They contain millions of vetted and finalized directories including operational intelligence reporting.

CIDNE was created to collect and analyze battle-space data to provide daily operational and Intelligence Community (IC) reporting relevant to a commander’s daily decision making process. The CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A databases contain reporting and analysis fields for multiple disciplines including Human Intelligence or HUMINT reports, Psychological Operations or PSYOP reports, Engagement reports, Counter Improvised Explosive Device or CIED reports, SigAct reports, Targeting reports, Social and Cultural reports, Civil Affairs reports, and Human Terrain reporting.

As an intelligence analyst, I had unlimited access to the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A databases and the information contained within them. Although each table within the database is important, I primarily dealt with HUMINT reports, SigAct reports, and Counter IED reports, because these reports were used to create a work product I was required to published as an analyst.

In working on an assignment I looked anywhere and everywhere for information. As an all-source analyst, this was something that was expected. The D6-A systems had databases built in, and I utilized them on a daily basis. This simply was– the search tools available on the D6-A systems on SIPRNet such as Query Tree and the DoD and Intellink search engines.

Primarily, I utilized the CIDNE database using the historical and HUMINT reporting to conduct my analysis and provide a back up for my work product. I did statistical analysis on historical data including SigActs to back up analysis that were based on HUMINT reporting and produce charts, graphs, and tables. I also created maps and charts to conduct predictive analysis based on statistical trends. The SigAct reporting provided a reference point for what occurred and provided myself and other analysts with the information to conclude possible outcome.

Although SigAct reporting is sensitive at the time of their creation, their sensitivity normally dissipates within 48 to 72 hours as the information is either publicly released or the unit involved is no longer in the area and not in danger.

It is my understanding that the SigAct reports remain classified only because they are maintained within CIDNE– because it is only accessible on SIPRnet. Everything on CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A to include SigAct reporting was treated as classified information.

Facts regarding the storage of SigAct Reports.

As part of my training at Fort Drum, I was instructed to ensure that I create back ups of my work product. The need to create back ups was particularly acute given the relative instability and reliability of the computer systems we used in the field during deployment. These computer systems included both organic and theater provided equipment (TPE) D6-A machines.

The organic D6-A machines we brought with us into the field on our deployment were Dell [missed word] laptops and the TPE D6-A machines were Alienware brand laptops. The [M90?] D6-A laptops were the preferred machine to use as they were slightly faster and had fewer problems with dust and temperature than the theater provided Alienware laptops. I used several D6-A machines during the deployment due to various technical problems with the laptops.

With these issues several analysts lost information, but I never lost information due to the multiple backups I created. I attempted to backup as much relevant information as possible. I would save the information so that I or another analyst could quickly access it whenever a machine crashed, SIPRnet connectivity was down, or I forgot where the data was stored.

When backing up information I would do one or all of the following things based on my training:

[(1)] Physical back up. I tried to keep physical back up copies of information on paper so that the information could be grabbed quickly. Also, it was easier to brief from hard copies of research and HUMINT reports.

(2) Local drive back up. I tried to sort out information I deemed relevant and keep complete copies of the information on each of the computers I used in the Temporary Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or T-SCIF, including my primary and secondary D6-A machines. This was stored under my user profile on the desktop.

[(3)] Shared drive backup. Each analyst had access to a ‘T’ drive– what we called ‘T’ drive shared across the SIPRnet. It allowed others to access information that was stored on it. S6 operated the ‘T’ drive.

[(4)] Compact disk rewritable or CD-RW back up. For larger datasets I saved the information onto a re-writable disk, labeled the disks, and stored them in the conference room of the T-SCIF. This redundancy permitted us the ability to not worry about information loss. If the system crashed, I could easily pull the information from a my secondary computer, the ‘T’ drive, or one of the CD-RWs.

If another analyst wanted to access my data, but I was unavailable she could find my published products directory on the ‘T’ drive or on the CD-RWs. I sorted all of my products or research by date, time, and group; and updated the information on each of the storage methods to ensure that the latest information was available to them.

During the deployment I had several of the D6-A machines crash on me. Whenever one of the a computer crashed, I usually lost information but the redundancy method ensured my ability to quickly restore old backup data and add my current information to the machine when it was repaired or replaced.

I stored the backup CD-RW with larger datasets in the conference room of the T-SCIF or next to my workstation. I marked the CD-RWs based on the classification level and its content. Unclassified CD-RWs were only labeled with the content type and not marked with classification markings. Early on in the deployment, I only saved and stored the SigActs that were within or near our operational environment.

Later I thought it would be easier to just to save all of the SigActs onto a CD-RW. The process would not take very long to complete and so I downloaded the SigActs from CIDNE-I onto a CD-RW. After finishing with CIDNE-I, I did the same with CIDNE-A. By retrieving the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs I was able to retrieve the information whenever I needed it, and not rely upon the unreliable and slow SIPRnet connectivity needed to pull. Instead, I could just find the CD-RW and open up a pre-loaded spreadsheet.

This process began in late December 2009 and continued through early January 2010. I could quickly export one month of the SigAct data at a time and download in the background as I did other tasks.

The process took approximately a week for each table. After downloading the SigAct tables, I periodically updated them, by pulling only the most recent SigActs and simply copying them and pasting them into the database saved on the CD-RW. I never hid the fact that I had downloaded copies of both the SigAct tables from CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A. They were stored on appropriately labeled and marked CD-RWs, stored in the open.

I viewed the saved copies of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables as being for both for my use and the use of anyone within the S2 section during the SIPRnet connectivity issues.

In addition to the SigAct tables, I had a large repository of HUMINT reports and Counter IED reports downloaded from CIDNE-I. These contained reports that were relevant to the area in and around our operational environment in Eastern Baghdad and the Diyala Province of Iraq.

In order to compress the data to fit onto a CD-RW, I used a compression algorithm called ‘bzip2’. The program used to compress the data is called ‘WinRAR’. WinRAR is an application that is free, and can be easily downloaded from the internet via the Non-Secure Internet Relay Protocol Network or NIPRnet. I downloaded WinRAR on NIPRnet and transferred it to the D6-A machine user profile desktop using a CD-RW. I did not try to hide the fact that I was downloading WinRAR onto my SIPRnet D6-A machine or computer.

With the assistance of the bzip2 compression algorithm using the WinRAR program, I was able to fit all of the SigActs onto a single CD-RW and relevant HUMINT and Counter IED reports onto a separate CD-RW.

Facts regarding my knowledge of the WikiLeaks Organization or WLO.

I first became vaguely aware of the WLO during my AIT at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, although I did not fully pay attention until the WLO released purported Short Messaging System or SMS messages from 11 September 2001 on 25 November 2009. At that time references to the release and the WLO website showed up in my daily Google news open source search for information related to US foreign policy.

The stories were about how WLO published about approximately 500,000 messages. I then reviewed the messages myself and realized that the posted messages were very likely real given the sheer volume and detail of the content.

After this, I began conducting research on WLO. I conducted searches on both NIPRnet and SIPRnet on WLO beginning in late November 2009 and early December 2009. At this time I also began to routinely monitor the WLO website. In response to one of my searches in December 2009, I found the United States Army Counter Intelligence Center or USACIC report on the WikiLeaks organization. After reviewing the report, I believed that this report was possibly the one that my AIT referenced in early 2008.

I may or may not have saved the report on my D6-A workstation. I know I reviewed the document on other occasions throughout early 2010, and saved it on both my primary and secondary laptops. After reviewing the report, I continued doing research on WLO. However, based upon my open-source collection, I discovered information that contradicted the 2008 USACIC report including information that indicated that similar to other press agencies, WLO seemed to be dedicated to exposing illegal activities and corruption.

WLO received numerous award and recognition for its reporting activities. Also, in reviewing the WLO website, I found information regarding US military SOPs for Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and information on the then outdated rules of engagement for ROE in Iraq for cross-border pursuits of former members of Saddam Hussein [missed word] government.

After seeing the information available on the WLO website, I continued following it and collecting open source information from it. During this time period, I followed several organizations and groups including wire press agencies such as the Associated Press and Reuters and private intelligence agencies including Strategic Forecasting or Stratfor. This practice was something I was trained to do during AIT, and was something that good analysts were expected to do.

During the searches of WLO, I found several pieces of information that I found useful in my work product– in my work as an analyst, specifically I recall WLO publishing documents related to weapons trafficking between two nations that affected my OP. I integrated this information into one or more of my work products.

In addition to visiting the WLO website, I began following WLO using Instant Relay Chat or IRC Client called ‘XChat’ sometime in early January 2010.

IRC is a protocol for real time internet communications by messaging and conferencing, colloquially referred to as chat rooms or chats. The IRC chat rooms are designed for group communication discussion forums. Each IRC chat room is called a channel– similar to a television where you can tune in or follow a channel– so long as it is open and does not require an invite.

Once you joining a specific IRC conversation, other users in the conversation can see that you have joined the room. On the Internet there are millions of different IRC channels across several services. Channel topics span a range of topics covering all kinds of interests and hobbies. The primary reason for following WLO on IRC was curiosity– particularly in regards to how and why they obtained the SMS messages referenced above. I believed that collecting information on the WLO would assist me in this goal.

Initially I simply observed the IRC conversations. I wanted to know how the organization was structured, and how they obtained their data. The conversations I viewed were usually technical in nature but sometimes switched to a lively debate on issues the particular individual may have felt strongly about.

Over a period of time I became more involved in these discussions especially when conversations turned to geopolitical events and information technology topics, such as networking and encryption methods. Based on these observations, I would describe the WL organization as almost academic in nature. In addition to the WLO conversations, I participated in numerous other IRC channels across at least three different networks. The other IRC channels I participated in normally dealt with technical topics including with Linux and Berkley Secure Distribution BSD operating systems or OS’s, networking, encryption algorithms and techniques, and other more political topics, such as politics and [missed word].

I normally engaged in multiple IRC conversations simultaneously– mostly publicly, but often privately. The XChat client enabled me to manage these multiple conversations across different channels and servers. The screen for XChat was often busy, but its screens enabled me to see when something was interesting. I would then select the conversation and either observe or participate.

I really enjoyed the IRC conversations pertaining to and involving the WLO, however, at some point in late February or early March of 2010, the WLO IRC channel was no longer accessible. Instead, regular participants of this channel switched to using the Jabber server. Jabber is another internet communication [missed word] similar but more sophisticated than IRC.

The IRC and Jabber conversations, allowed me to feel connected to others even when alone. They helped me pass the time and keep motivated throughout the deployment.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the SigActs.

As indicated above I created copies of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables as part of the process of backing up information. At the time I did so, I did not intend to use this information for any purpose other than for back up. However, I later decided to release this information publicly. At that time, I believe and still believe that these tables are two of the most significant documents of our time.

On 8 January 2010, I collected the CD-RW I stored in the conference room of the T-SCIF and placed it into the cargo pocket of my ACU or Army Combat Uniform. At the end of my shift, I took the CD-RW out of the T-SCIF and brought it to my Containerized Housing Unit of CHU. I copied the data onto my personal laptop. Later at the beginning of my shift, I returned the CD-RW back to the conference room of the T-SCIF. At the time I saved the SigActs to my laptop, I planned to take them with me on mid-tour leave and decide what to do with them.

At some point prior to my mid-tour leave, I transferred the information from my computer to a Secure Digital memory card from for my digital camera. The SD card for the camera also worked on my computer and allowed me to store the SigAct tables in a secure manner for transport.

I began mid-tour leave on 23 January 2010, flying from Atlanta, Georgia to Reagan National Airport in Virginia. I arrived at the home of my aunt, Debra M. Van Alstyne, in Potomac, Maryland and quickly got into contact with my then boyfriend, Tyler R. Watkins. Tyler, then a student at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and I made plans for me to visit him [the] Boston, Massachusetts area.

I was excited to see Tyler and planned on talking to Tyler about where our relationship was going and about my time in Iraq. However, when I arrived in the Boston area Tyler and I seemed to become distant. He did not seem very excited about my return from Iraq. I tried talking to him about our relationship but he refused to make any plans.

I also tried to raising the topic of releasing the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables to the public. I asked Tyler hypothetical questions about what he would do if he had documents that he thought the public needed access to. Tyler really didn’t really have a specific answer for me. He tried to answer the questions and be supportive, but seemed confused by the question in this and its context.

I then tried to be more specific, but he asked too many questions. Rather than try to explain my dilemma, I decided to just to drop the conversation. After a few days in Waltham, I began to feel really bad feeling that I was over staying my welcome, and I returned to Maryland. I spent the remainder of my time on leave in the Washington, DC area.

During this time a blizzard bombarded the mid-atlantic, and I spent a significant period of time essentially stuck in my aunt’s house in Maryland. I began to think about what I knew and the information I still had in my possession. For me, the SigActs represented the on the ground reality of both the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I felt that we were risking so much for people that seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and anger on both sides. I began to become depressed with the situation that we found ourselves increasingly mired in year after year. The SigActs documented this in great detail and provide a context of what we were seeing on the ground.

In attempting to conduct counter-terrorism or CT and counter-insurgency 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 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 the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday.

At my aunt’s house I debated what I should do with the SigActs– in particular whether I should hold on to them– or expose them through a press agency. At this point I decided that it made sense to try to expose the SigAct tables to an American newspaper. I first called my local newspaper, The Washington Post, and spoke with a woman saying that she was a reporter. I asked her if The Washington Post would be interested in receiving information that would have enormous value to the American public.

Although we spoke for about five minutes concerning the general nature of what I possessed, I do not believe she took me seriously. She informed me that The Washington Post would possibly be interested, but that such decisions were made only after seeing the information I was referring to and after consideration by the senior editors.

I then decided to contact the largest and most popular newspaper, The New York Times. I called the public editor number on The New York Times website. The phone rang and was answered by a machine. I went through the menu to the section for news tips. I was routed to an answering machine. I left a message stating I had access to information about Iraq and Afghanistan that I believed was very important. However, despite leaving my Skype phone number and personal email address, I never received a reply from The New York Times.

I also briefly considered dropping into the office for the Political Commentary blog, Politico, however the weather conditions during my leave hampered my efforts to travel. After these failed efforts I had ultimately decided to submit the materials to the WLO. I was not sure if the WLO would actually publish these the SigAct tables [missed a few words]. I was also concerned that they might not be noticed by the American media. However, based upon what I read about the WLO through my research described above, this seemed to be the best medium for publishing this information to the world within my reach.

At my aunt’s house I joined in on an IRC conversation and stated I had information that needed to be shared with the world. I wrote that the information would help document the true cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the individuals in the IRC asked me to describe the information. However, before I could describe the information another individual pointed me to the link for the WLO website’s online submission system. After ending my IRC connection, I considered my options one more time. Ultimately, I felt that the right thing to do was to release the SigActs.

On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by a special link. TOR is a system intended to provide anonymity online. The software routes internet traffic through a network of servers and other TOR clients in order to conceal the user’s location and identity.

I was familiar with TOR and had it previously installed on a computer to anonymously monitor the social media websites of militia groups operating within central Iraq. I followed the prompts and attached the compressed data files of CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs. I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to The Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying ‘It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information– perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.’

After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly published by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of 10 Reykjavik 13.

I first became aware of the diplomatic cables during my training period in AIT. I later learned about the Department of State or DoS Net-centric Diplomacy NCD portal from the 2/10 Brigade Combat Team S2, Captain Steven Lim. Captain Lim sent a section wide email to the other analysts and officers in late December 2009 containing the SIPRnet link to the portal along with the instructions to look at the cables contained within them and to incorporate them into our work product.

Shortly after this I also noticed the diplomatic cables were being reported to in products from the corps level US Forces Iraq or USF-I. Based upon Captain Lim’s direction to become familiar with its contents, I read virtually every published cable concerning Iraq.

I also began scanning the database and reading other random cables that piqued my curiosity. It was around this time– in early to mid-January of 2010, that I began searching the database for information on Iceland. I became interested in Iceland due to the IRC conversations I viewed in the WLO channel discussing an issue called Icesave. At this time I was not very familiar with the topic, but it seemed to be a big issue for those participating in the conversation. This is when I decided to investigate and conduct a few searches on Iceland and find out more.

At the time, I did not find anything discussing the Icesave issue either directly or indirectly. I then conducted an open source search for Icesave. I then learned that Iceland was involved in a dispute with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands concerning the financial collapse of one or more of Iceland’s banks. According to open source reporting much of the public controversy involved the United Kingdom’s use of anti-terrorism legislation against Iceland in order to freeze Icelandic access assets for payment of the guarantees for UK depositors that lost money.

Shortly after returning from mid-tour leave, I returned to the Net Centric Diplomacy portal to search for information on Iceland and Icesave as the topic had not abated on the WLO IRC channel. To my surprise, on 14 February 2010, I found the cable 10 Reykjavik 13, which referenced the Icesave issue directly.

The cable published on 13 January 2010 was just over two pages in length. I read the cable and quickly concluded that Iceland was essentially being bullied diplomatically by two larger European powers. It appeared to me that Iceland was out viable options and was coming to the US for assistance. Despite the quiet request for assistance, it did not appear that we were going to do anything.

From my perspective it appeared that we were not getting involved due to the lack of long term geopolitical benefit to do so. After digesting the contents of 10 Reykjavik 13 I debated on whether this was something I should send to the WLO. At this point the WLO had not published or acknowledged receipt of the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigAct tables. Despite not knowing that if the SigActs were a priority for the WLO, I decided the cable was something that would be important and I felt that I would I might be able to right a wrong by having them publish this document. I burned the information onto a CD-RW on 15 February 2010, took it to my CHU, and saved it onto my personal laptop.

I navigated to the WLO website via a TOR connection like before and uploaded the document via the secure form. Amazingly, when WLO published 10 Reykjavik 13 within hours, proving that the form worked and that they must have received the SigAct tables.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team or AW team video.

During the mid-February 2010 time frame the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division targeting analyst , then Specialist Jihrleah W. Showman and others discussed a video that Ms. Showman had found on the ‘T’ drive.

The video depicted several individuals being engaged by an aerial weapons team. At first I did not consider the video very special, as I have viewed countless other war porn type videos depicting combat. However, the recording of audio comments by the aerial weapons team crew and the second engagement in the video of an unarmed bongo truck troubled me.

As Showman and a few other analysts and officers in the T-SCIF commented on the video and debated whether the crew violated the rules of engagement or ROE in the second engagement, I shied away from this debate, instead conducting some research on the event. I wanted to learn what happened and whether there was any background to the events of the day that the event occurred, 12 July 2007.

Using Google I searched for the event by its date by its and general location. I found several news accounts involving two Reuters employees who were killed during the aerial weapon team engagement. Another story explained that Reuters had requested for a copy of the video under the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA. Reuters wanted to view the video in order to be able to understand what had happened and to improve their safety practices in combat zones. A spokesperson for Reuters was quoted saying that the video might help avoid the reoccurrence of the tragedy and believed there was a compelling need for the immediate release of the video.

Despite the submission of the FOIA request, the news account explained that CENTCOM replied to Reuters stating that they could not give a time frame for considering a FOIA request and that the video might no longer exist. Another story I found written a year later said that even though Reuters was still pursuing their request, they still did not receive a formal response or written determination in accordance with FOIA.

The fact neither CENTCOM or Multi National Forces Iraq or MNF-I would not voluntarily release the video troubled me further. It was clear to me that the event happened because the aerial weapons team mistakenly identified Reuters employees as a potential threat and that the people in the bongo truck were merely attempting to assist the wounded. The people in the van were not a threat but merely ‘good samaritans’. The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the seemly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have.

They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote “dead bastards” unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers. At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.

While saddened by the aerial weapons team crew’s lack of concern about human life, I was disturbed by the response of the discovery of injured children at the scene. In the video, you can see that the bongo truck driving up to assist the wounded individual. In response the aerial weapons team crew– as soon as the individuals are a threat, they repeatedly request for authorization to fire on the bongo truck and once granted they engage the vehicle at least six times.

Shortly after the second engagement, a mechanized infantry unit arrives at the scene. Within minutes, the aerial weapons team crew learns that children were in the van and despite the injuries the crew exhibits no remorse. Instead, they downplay the significance of their actions, saying quote “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kid’s into a battle” unquote.

The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the children or the parents. Later in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team crew verbalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over a body– or one of the bodies. As I continued my research, I found an article discussing the book, The Good Soldiers, written by Washington Post writer David Finkel.

In Mr. Finkel book, he writes about the aerial weapons team attack. As, I read an online excerpt in Google Books, I followed Mr. Finkel’s account of the event belonging to the video. I quickly realize that Mr. Finkel was quoting, I feel in verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew.

It is clear to me that Mr. Finkel obtained access and a copy of the video during his tenure as an embedded journalist. I was aghast at Mr. Finkel’s portrayal of the incident. Reading his account, one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as ‘payback’ for an earlier attack that lead to the death of a soldier. Mr. Finkel ends his account of the engagement by discussing how a soldier finds an individual still alive from the attack. He writes that the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together, a common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture extending his middle finger.

The individual apparently dies shortly thereafter. Reading this, I can only think of how this person was simply trying to help others, and then he quickly finds he needs help as well. To make matter worse, in the last moments of his life, he continues to express his friendly gesture– his friendly intent– only to find himself receiving this well known gesture of unfriendliness. For me it’s all a big mess, and I am left wondering what these things mean, and how it all fits together , and it burdens me emotionally.

I saved a copy of the video on my workstation. I searched for and found the rules of engagement, the rules of engagement annexes, and a flow chart from the 2007 time period– as well as an unclassified Rules of Engagement smart card from 2006. On 15 February 2010 I burned these documents onto a CD-RW, the same time I burned the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable onto a CD-RW. At the time, I placed the video and rules for of engagement information onto my personal laptop in my CHU. I planned to keep this information there until I redeployed in Summer of 2010. I planned on providing this to the Reuters office in London to assist them in preventing events such as this in the future.

However, after the WLO published 10 Reykjavik 13 I altered my plans. I decided to provide the video and the rules of engagement to them so that Reuters would have this information before I re-deployed from Iraq. On about 21 February 2010, I as described above, I used the WLO submission form and uploaded the documents. The WLO released the video on 5 April 2010. After the release, I was concern about the impact of the video and how it would be received by the general public.

I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public, who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled– if not more troubled that me by what they saw.

At this time, I began seeing reports claiming that the Department of Defense and CENTCOM could not confirm the authenticity of the video. Additionally, one of my supervisors, Captain Casey Fulton, stated her belief that the video was not authentic. In her response, I decided to ensure that the authenticity of the video would not be questioned in the future. On 25 February 2010, I emailed Captain Fulton a link to the video that was on our ‘T’ drive, and a copy of the video published by WLO that was collected by the Open Source Center, so she could compare them herself.

Around this time frame, I burned a second CD-RW containing the aerial weapons team video. In order to made it appear authentic, I placed a classification sticker and wrote Reuters FOIA REQ on its face. I placed the CD-RW in one of my personal CD cases containing a set of ‘Starting Out in Arabic’ CD’s. I planned on mailing out the CD-RW to Reuters after our I re-deployed , so they could have a copy that was unquestionably authentic.

Almost immediately after submitting the aerial weapons team video and the rules of engagement documents I notified the individuals in the WLO IRC to expect an important submission. I received a response from an individual going by the handle of ‘ox’ ‘office’– at first our conversations were general in nature, but over time as our conversations progressed, I accessed assessed this individual to be an important part of the WLO.

Due to the strict adherence of anonymity by the WLO, we never exchanged identifying information. However, I believe the individual was likely Mr. Julian Assange [he pronounced it with three syllables], Mr. Daniel Schmidt, or a proxy representative of Mr. Assange and Schmidt.

As the communications transferred from IRC to the Jabber client, I gave ‘ox’ ‘office’ and later ‘pressassociation’ the name of Nathaniel Frank in my address book, after the author of a book I read in 2009.

After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly relationship with Nathaniel. Our mutual interest in information technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work.

The anonymity that was provided by TOR and the Jabber client and the WLO’s policy allowed me to feel I could just be myself, free of the concerns of social labeling and perceptions that are often placed upon me in real life. In real life, I lacked a closed friendship with the people I worked with in my section, the S2 section.

In my section, the S2 section and supported battalions and the 2nd Brigade Combat Team as a whole. For instance, I lacked close ties with my roommate to his discomfort regarding my perceived sexual orientation. Over the next few months, I stayed in frequent contact with Nathaniel. We conversed on nearly a daily basis and I felt that we were developing a friendship.

Conversations covered many topics and I enjoyed the ability to talk about pretty much everything anything, and not just the publications that the WLO was working on. In retrospect I realize that that these dynamics were artificial and were valued more by myself than Nathaniel. For me these conversations represented an opportunity to escape from the immense pressures and anxiety that I experienced and built up through out the deployment. It seems that as I tried harder to fit in at work, the more I seemed to alienate my peers and lose the respect, trust, and support I needed.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of documents related to the detainments by the Iraqi Federal Police or FP, and the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and the USACIC United States Army Counter Intelligence Center report.

On 27 February 2010, a report was received from a subordinate battalion. The report described an event in which the Federal Police or FP detained 15 individuals for printing anti-Iraqi literature. On 2 March 2010, I received instructions from an S3 section officer in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division Tactical Operation Center or TOC to investigate the matter, and figure out who these quote ‘bad guys’ unquote were and how significant this event was for the Federal Police.

Over the course of my research I found that none of the individuals had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist militia groups. A few hours later, I received several photos from the scene– from the subordinate battalion. They were accidentally sent to an officer on a different team on than the S2 section and she forwarded them to me.

These photos included picture of the individuals, pallets of unprinted paper and seized copies of the final printed material or the printed document; and a high resolution photo of the printed material itself. I printed up one [missed word] copy of a high resolution photo– I laminated it for ease of use and transfer. I then walked to the TOC and delivered the laminated copy to our category two interpreter.

She reviewed the information and about a half an hour later delivered a rough written transcript in English to the S2 section. I read the transcript and followed up with her, asking her for her take on the content. She said it was easy for her to transcribe verbatim, since I blew up the photograph and laminated it. She said the general nature of the document was benign. The documentation, as I had sensed as well, was merely a scholarly critique of the then current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

It detailed corruption within the cabinet of al-Maliki’s government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people. After discovering this discrepancy between the Federal Police’s report and the interpreter’s transcript, I forwarded this discovery to the top OIC and the battle NCOIC. The top OIC and the overhearing battle captain informed me that they didn’t need or want to know this information anymore. They told me to quote “drop it” unquote and to just assist them and the Federal Police in finding out, where more of these print shops creating quote “anti-Iraqi literature” unquote.

I couldn’t believe what I heard and I returned to the T-SCIF and complained to the other analysts and my section NCOIC about what happened. Some were sympathetic, but no one wanted to do anything about it.

I am the type of person who likes to know how things work. And, as an analyst, this means I always want to figure out the truth. Unlike other analysts in my section or other sections within the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, I was not satisfied with just scratching the surface and producing canned or cookie cutter assessments. I wanted to know why something was the way it was, and what we could to correct or mitigate a situation.

I knew that if I continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister al-Maliki, those people would be arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police and very likely tortured and not seen again for a very long time– if ever.

Instead of assisting the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police, I decided to take the information and expose it to the WLO, in the hope that before the upcoming 7 March 2010 election, they could generate some immediate press on the issue and prevent this unit of the Federal Police from continuing to crack down on political opponents of al-Maliki.

On 4 March 2010, I burned the report, the photos, the high resolution copy of the pamphlet, and the interpreter’s hand written transcript onto a CD-RW. I took the CD-RW to my CHU and copied the data onto my personal computer. Unlike the times before, instead of uploading the information through the WLO website’s submission form. I made a Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP connection to a file drop box operated by the WLO.

The drop box contained a folder that allowed me to upload directly into it. Saving files into this directory, allowed anyone with log in access to the server to view and download them. After uploading these files to the WLO, on 5 March 2010, I notified Nathaniel over Jabber. Although sympathetic, he said that the WLO needed more information to confirm the event in order for it to be published or to gain interest in the international media.

I attempted to provide the specifics, but to my disappointment, the WLO website chose not to publish this information. At the same time, I began sifting through information from the US Southern Command or SOUTHCOM and Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Cuba or JTF-GTMO. The thought occurred to me– although unlikely, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the individuals detainees detained by the Federal Police might be turned over back into US custody– and ending up in the custody of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

As I digested through the information on Joint Task Force Guantanamo, I quickly found the Detainee Assessment Briefs or DABs. I previously came across the documents before in 2009 but did not think much about them. However, this time I was more curious in during this search and I found them again.

The DABs were written in standard DoD memorandum format and addressed the commander US SOUTHCOM. Each memorandum gave basic and background information about a specific detainee held at some point by Joint Task Force Guantanamo. I have always been interested on the issue of the moral efficacy of our actions surrounding Joint Task Force Guantanamo. On the one hand, I have always understood the need to detain and interrogate individuals who might wish to harm the United States and our allies, however, I felt that’s what we were trying to do at Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

However, the more I became educated on the topic, it seemed that we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely that we believed or knew to be innocent, low level foot soldiers that did not have useful intelligence and would be released if they were still held in theater.

I also recall that in early 2009 the, then newly elected president, Barack Obama, stated that he would close Joint Task Force Guantanamo, and that the facility compromised our standing over all, and diminished our quote ‘moral authority’ unquote.

After familiarizing myself with the Detainee Assessment Briefs, I agree. Reading through the Detainee Assessment Briefs, I noticed that they were not analytical products, instead they contained summaries of tear line versions of interim intelligence reports that were old or unclassified. None of the DABs contained the names of sources or quotes from tactical interrogation reports or TIR’s. Since the DABs were being sent to the US SOUTHCOM commander, I assessed that they were intended to provide a very general background information on each of the detainees and not a detailed assessment.

In addition to the manner in which the DAB’s were written, I recognized that they were at least several years old, and discussed detainees that were already released from Joint Task Force Guantanamo. Based on this, I determined that the DABs were not very important from either an intelligence or a national security standpoint. On 7 March 2010, during my Jabber conversation with Nathaniel, I asked him if he thought the DABs were of any use to anyone.

Nathaniel indicated, although he did not believe that they were of political significance, he did believe that they could be used to merge into the general historical account of what occurred at Joint Task Force Guantanamo. He also thought that the DAB’s might be helpful to the legal counsel of those currently and previously held at JTF-GTMO.

After this discussion, I decided to download the data DABs. I used an application called Wget to download the DABs. I downloaded Wget off of the NIPRnet laptop in the T-SCIF, like other programs. I saved that onto a CD-RW, and placed the executable in my ‘My Documents’ directory on of my user profile, on the D6-A SIPRnet workstation.

On 7 March 2010, I took the list of links for the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and Wget downloaded them sequentially. I burned the data onto a CD-RW, and took it into my CHU, and copied them to my personal computer. On 8 March 2010, I combined the Detainee Assessment Briefs with the United States Army Counterintelligence Center report on the WLO, into a compressed [missed word] IP or zip file. Zip files contain multiple files which are compressed to reduce their size.

After creating the zip file, I uploaded the file onto their cloud drop box via Secure File Transfer Protocol. Once these were uploaded, I notified Nathaniel that the information was in the ‘x’ directory, which had been designated for my own use. Earlier that day, I downloaded the USACIC report on WLO.

As discussed about above, I previously reviewed the report on numerous occasions and although I saved the document onto the work station before, I could not locate it. After I found the document again, I downloaded it to my work station, and saved it onto the same CD-RW as the Detainee Assessment Briefs described above.

Although my access included a great deal of information, I decided I had nothing else to send to WLO after sending the Detainee Assessment Briefs and the USACIC report. Up to this point I had sent them the following: the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs tables; the Reykjavik 13 Department of State Cable; the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team video and the 2006-2007 rules of engagement documents; the SigAct report and supporting documents concerning the 15 individuals detained by the Baghdad Federal Police; the USSOUTHCOM and Joint Task Force Guantanamo Detainee Assessment Briefs; a USACIC report on the WikiLeaks organization website.

Over the next few weeks I did not send any additional information to the WLO. I continued to converse with Nathaniel over the Jabber client and in the WLO IRC channel. Although I stopped sending documents to WLO, no one associated with the WLO pressured me into giving more information. The decisions that I made to send documents and information to the WLO and the website were my own decisions, and I take full responsibility for my actions.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of other Government documents.

One 22 March 2010, I downloaded two documents. I found these documents over the course of my normal duties as an analyst. Based on my training and the guidance of my superiors, I look at as much information as possible.

Doing so provided me with the ability to make connections that others might miss. On several occasions during the month of March, I accessed information from a government entity. I read several documents from a section within this government entity. The content of two of these documents upset me greatly. I had difficulty believing what this section was doing.

On 22 March 2010, I downloaded the two documents that I found troubling. I compressed them into a zip file named blah.zip and burned them onto a CD-RW. I took the CD-RW to my CHU and saved the file to my personal computer.

I uploaded the information to the WLO website using the designated prompts.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the Net Centric Diplomacy Department of State cables.

In late March of 2010, I received a warning over Jabber from Nathaniel, that the WLO website would be publishing the aerial weapons team video. He indicated that the WLO would be very busy and the frequency and intensity of our Jabber conversations decrease significantly. During this time, I had nothing but work to distract me.

I read more of the diplomatic cables published on the Department of State Net Centric Diplomacy server. With my insatiable curiosity and interest in geopolitics I became fascinated with them. I read not only the cables on Iraq, but also about countries and events that I found interesting.

The more I read, the more I was fascinated with by the way that we dealt with other nations and organizations. I also began to think that the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn’t seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.

Up to this point, during the deployment, I had issues I struggled with and difficulty at work. Of the documents release, the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn’t harm the United States. I conducted research on the cables published on the Net Centric Diplomacy, as well as how Department of State cables worked in general.

In particular, I wanted to know how each cable was published on SIRPnet via the Net Centric Diplomacy. As part of my open source research, I found a document published by the Department of State on its official website.

The document provided guidance on caption markings for individual cables and handling instructions for their distribution. I quickly learned the caption markings clearly detailed the sensitivity level of the Department of State cables. For example, NODIS or No Distribution was used for messages at the highest sensitivity and were only distributed to the authorized recipients.

The SIPDIS or SIPRnet distribution caption was applied only to recording of other information messages that were deemed appropriate for a release for a wide number of individuals. According to the Department of State guidance for a cable to have the SIPDIS [missed word] caption, it could not include other captions that were intended to limit distribution.

The SIPDIS caption was only for information that could only be shared with anyone with access to SIPRnet. I was aware that thousands of military personnel, DoD, Department of State, and other civilian agencies had easy access to the tables. The fact that the SIPDIS caption was only for wide distribution made sense to me, given that the vast majority of the Net Centric Diplomacy Cables were not classified.

The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that– that this type of information should become public. I once read a and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other.

I thought these cables were a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy. Given all of the Department of State cables information that I read, the fact that most of the cables were unclassified, and that all the cables have a SIPDIS caption, I believe that the public release of these cables would not damage the United States; however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations.

In many ways these cables are a catalogue of cliques and gossip. I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy. On 22 March 2010, I began downloading a copy of the SIPDIS cables using the program Wget, described above.

I used instances of the Wget application to download the Net Centric Diplomacy cables in the background. As I worked on my daily tasks, the Net Centric Diplomacy cables were downloaded from 28 March 2010 to 9 April 2010. After downloading the cables, I saved them onto a CD-RW.

These cables went from the earliest dates in Net Centric Diplomacy to 28 February 2010. I took the CD-RW to my CHU on 10 April 2010. I sorted the cables on my personal computer, compressed them using the bzip2 compression algorithm described above, and uploaded them to the WLO via designated drop box described above.

On 3 May 2010, I used Wget to download and update of the cables for the months of March 2010 and April 2010 and saved the information onto a zip file and burned it to a CD-RW. I then took the CD-RW to my CHU and saved those to my computer. I later found that the file was corrupted during the transfer. Although I intended to re-save another copy of these cables, I was removed from the T-SCIF on 8 May 2010 after an altercation.

Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of Garani, Farah Province Afghanistan 15-6 Investigation and Videos.

[NB Pfc. Manning plead ‘not guilty’ to the Specification 11, Charge II for the Garani Video as charged by the government, which alleged as November charge date. Read more here.]

In late March 2010, I discovered a US CENTCOM directly on a 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan. I was searching CENTCOM for information I could use as an analyst. As described above, this was something that myself and other analysts and officers did on a frequent basis. As I reviewed the documents I recalled the incident and what happened. The airstrike occurred in the Garani village in the Farah Province, Northwestern Afghanistan. It received worldwide press coverage during the time as it was reported that up to 100 to 150 Afghan civilians– mostly women and children– were accidentally killed during the airstrike.

After going through the report and the [missed word] annexes, I began to review the incident as being similar to the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team engagements in Iraq. However, this event was noticeably different in that it involved a significantly higher number of individuals, larger aircraft and much heavier munitions. Also, the conclusions of the report are even more disturbing than those of the July 2007 incident.

I did not see anything in the 15-6 report or its annexes that gave away sensitive information. Rather, the investigation and its conclusions helped explain how this incident occurred, and were– what those involved should have done, and how to avoid an event like this from occurring again.

After investigating the report and its annexes, I downloaded the 15-6 investigation, PowerPoint presentations, and several other supporting documents to my D6-A workstation. I also downloaded three zip files containing the videos of the incident. I burned this information onto a CD-RW and transferred it to the personal computer in my CHU. I did later that day or the next day– I uploaded the information to the WLO website this time using a new version of the WLO website submission form.

Unlike other times using the submission form above, I did not activate the TOR anonymizer. Your Honor, this concludes my statement and facts for this providence inquiry.

__________

UPDATE: On March 2, 2013, I went through each line of the rush transcript published here on March 1 to check it for accuracy and inadvertent typos or misspellings.

Since multiple news outlets have printed the rush transcript that was originally published here; every single amendment made during this review– including non-substantive typos– are noted with a strike-through and/or highlighted.

When I first published the rush transcript of Manning’s statement, I had noted under “Facts regarding the unauthorized storage and disclosure of the 12 July 2007 aerial weapons team or AW team video” that the handle of the individual who Manning said he interacted with was ‘office’ and not ‘ox’.

When Guardian journalist, Ed Pilkington, approached me to ask for permission to publish the rush transcript on the guardian.co.uk, we had a quick conversation concerning the fact that both he and a Wired journalist had noted the handle was ‘ox’ and not ‘office’.

Because of the overriding need to publish Manning’s statement as soon as possible, and my being back in Court at Fort Meade during our exchange after having worked through the night to get a rush transcript completed and published, I quickly deferred to consensus and amended ‘office’ to ‘ox’.

After reviewing my rush transcript line-by-line, however, I stand by my original notation of the handle as ‘office’, and not ‘ox’. I have amended the transcript above to reflect that determination.
Categories: Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks

By Alexa O’Brien on February 28, 2013 11:59 AM |

Find this story at 28 February 2013

Last week, in a Grisham-like courtroom scene, Bradley Manning—the Army private charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks—testified publicly for the first time since his arrest in May of 2010. For more than five hours, Manning described the two months he spent in a “cage” inside a dark tent in Kuwait and the nine months that followed in 23-hours-a-day solitary confinement on a Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. In one theatrical moment, Manning got up from the stand and paced inside a 6 by 8 tape outline on the courtroom floor to demonstrate the size of his prison cell. In another, he donned the suicide smock he had to wear.

Manning’s testimony was the climax of a week of pre-trial hearings about his experience at Quantico, which, his lawyer argued, was illegal and grounds for dropping the charges against him. The details about Manning’s captors revealed in the hearings—they called his underwear, which they removed at night so he wouldn’t hang himself by the waistband, “panties”; penned a poem about his presumed suicidal tendencies inspired by Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham (“I can wear them in a box / I can wear them with a fox / I can wear them in the day / I can wear them so I say / But I can’t wear them at night / My comments gave the staff a fright”); and ignored a psychiatrist’s recommendations for fewer restrictions—made dispatches read more like a scene from The Lives of Others than a court proceeding in the United States.

There was, however, a notable absence in the courtroom: The New York Times. The paper did not cover the hearings, picking up only one dispatch from the Associated Press. This is odd, especially considering the Times benefited as much as anyone from the material that Manning leaked. After partnering with WikiLeaks to release the cables in July 2010, the Times continued to rely on the documents Manning leaked to Assange in its reporting. In April 2011, an analysis in The Atlantic Wire showed that 54, or nearly half, of the newspaper’s 115 issues so far that year, had contained stories that “relied on WikiLeaks documents as sources.”

“It’s really crazy,” says Michael Ratner, a human rights lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights who has been defending Julian Assange. “[T]he key leaker in U.S. history in the last decade, and they don’t cover his treatment? He’s the one whose materials they used and they don’t cover it? I don’t get it. [T]hey had to make a decision not to do it.”

The Times has covered Manning’s trial to some degree–in early November, the paper published a story about Manning’s plans to plead guilty to some charges and the Times’ editorialized against Manning’s poor treatment at Quantico back in March of 2011. But last week’s hearing, with Manning’s direct testimony, seemed especially newsworthy–outlets including CNN, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine covered it. The Guardian, another newspaper that collaborated with Wikileaks and the Times, sent veteran reporter Ed Pilkington, the chief reporter for Guardian U.S. and a former national and international editor for the paper. Pilkington called his decision to cover the hearings in depth “pure news judgement,” when we spoke.

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The Times has always had a rocky relationship with WikiLeaks, Manning, and other leakers of state secrets. After publishing the cables, Bill Keller, the Times executive editor at the time, wrote an 8,000-word New York Times Magazine story in which he compared Julian Assange to a “bag lady.” “We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator,” he wrote. The Guardian, on the other hand, sought “partnership between a mainstream newspaper and WikiLeaks: a new model of cooperation aimed at publishing the world’s biggest leak,” as Yochai Benkler described it in the Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review. (My emails to Times executive editor Jill Abramson, Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt, and Keller, were not answered.)

The Times’ attitude towards Assange and Manning is, at least, consistent with its treatment of leakers in the past. Even though the Times had to defend itself in court for publishing the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellberg told me over the phone that the paper’s lawyers refused to offer him even the smalles amount of help with his criminal case (which was eventually dismissed). In Ellsberg’s telling, A.M. Rosenthal, then the editor-in-chief of the Times, told him there was no policy at the paper regarding prosecutions of sources: Ellsberg was, after all, the first person ever prosecuted for leaking classified government documents to the press.

“Editors and reporters have a good deal of ambivalence towards their sources, especially in the national security field,” Ellsberg told me. “They all thought I had broken the law, and a lot of them may have thought I was a traitor even though they used the material.” When Assange expressed his shock to Ellsberg over a critical profile the Times published about him, Ellsberg told him “don’t take it personally, they didn’t treat me any better.”

…

DECEMBER 5, 2012
BY ELIZA GRAY

Find this story at 5 December 2013

COPYRIGHT 2013 © THE NEW REPUBLIC

Judge rules that Manning will not be allowed to present evidence about his motives for the leak – a key plank of his defence

Colonel Denise Lind ruled that general issues of motive were not relevant to the trial stage of the court martial. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of being behind the largest leak of state secrets in America’s history, has been denied the chance to make a whistleblower defence in his upcoming court martial in which he faces possible life in military custody with no chance of parole.

The judge presiding over Manning’s prosecution by the US government for allegedly transmitting confidential material to WikiLeaks ruled in a pre-trial hearing that Manning will largely be barred from presenting evidence about his motives in leaking the documents and videos. In an earlier hearing, Manning’s lead defence lawyer, David Coombs, had argued that his motive was key to proving that he had no intention to harm US interests or to pass information to the enemy.

The judge, Colonel Denise Lind, ruled that general issues of motive were not relevant to the trial stage of the court martial, and must be held back until Manning either entered a plea or was found guilty, at which point it could be used in mitigation to lessen the sentence. The ruling is a blow to the defence as it will make it harder for the soldier’s legal team to argue he was acting as a whistleblower and not as someone who knowingly damaged US interests at a time of war.

“This is another effort to attack the whistleblower defence,” said Nathan Fuller, a spokesman for the Bradley Manning support network, after the hearing.

The judge also blocked the defence from presenting evidence designed to show that WikiLeaks caused little or no damage to US national security. Coombs has devoted considerable time and energy trying to extract from US government agencies their official assessments of the impact of WikiLeaks around the world, only to find that he is now prevented from using any of the information he has obtained.

The 25-year-old intelligence analyst faces 22 charges relating to the leaking of hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from the Afghan and Iraq wars, and videos of US military actions. The most serious charge, “aiding the enemy”, which carries the life sentence, accuses him of arranging for state secrets to be published via WikiLeaks on the internet knowing that al-Qaida would have access to it.

…

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 January 2013 18.22 GMT

Find this story at 17 January 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

A federal judge has refused to recuse herself from the closely watched trial of jailed computer hacker Jeremy Hammond, an alleged member of the group “Anonymous” charged with hacking into the computers of the private intelligence firm Stratfor and turning over some five million emails to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Hammond’s lawyers had asked Federal Judge Loretta Preska to recuse herself because her husband worked for a client of Stratfor, and himself had his email hacked. Hammond’s supporters say the Stratfor documents shed light on how the private intelligence firm monitors activists and spies for corporate clients. He has been held without bail or trial for more than nine months. We speak with Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, about Hammond’s case. [includes rush transcript]

Find this story at 27 December 2012