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+--- Thread: US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks (/thread-3331.html)
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Ed Jewett - 22-06-2010
Pentagon Snubs Leaker's Lawyers
by Philip Shenon [url=javascript:void(0)] [/url][url=javascript:void(0)]Info [/url]
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-18/wikileaks-/
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hired lawyers to represent the Army intel analyst accused of leaking State Dept. secrets. But the Pentagon sent them away. Philip Shenon reports on WikiLeaks concerns about Bradley Manning's treatment in custody—and the video of a U.S. massacre in Afghanistan, coming as soon as next week. The secretive whisteblowing website WikiLeaks said Friday night that its founder, Julian Assange, had hired private criminal defense lawyers to represent the 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist accused of providing WikiLeaks with highly classified combat videos from Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Birgitta Jonsdottir, a parliamentarian in Iceland who acts as a spokeswoman for the website, said in a telephone interview from Reykjavik that the Pentagon had refused this week to allow the lawyers to meet the Army intel analyst, Bradley Manning.
“I haven’t seen it myself,” Jonsdottir said of the new video. But she said she understood it was “horrible” because “there are so many children being massacred.”
Jonsdottir said Assange had hired private lawyers several days ago because of growing alarm that the accused whistleblower is being mistreated by the Defense Department.Manning, who has been assigned military counsel, is reported to be in custody in Kuwait and has not been heard from publicly since he was arrested three weeks ago.
Manning, of Potomac, Maryland, was turned into authorities by a former computer hacker in California, Adrian Lamo, who said he had been contacted by Manning for advice about his plans to become a government whistleblower. In Internet chat logs with Lamo, Manning is reported to have boasted of stealing two combat videos, as well as 260,000 classified State Department cables.
A Pentagon spokeswoman had no comment Friday night on Manning’s status.
Ms. Jonsdottir, who said she is in daily contact with Assange in his hiding place somewhere outside the United States, said Assange was hard at work both in organizing legal assistance for Manning and in preparing for the public release of a second classified Pentagon video—this one depicting an American airstrike last year in Afghanistan that left as many as 140 civilians dead, most of them children and teenagers. She said Assange had completed decrypting the video of the attack on the Afghan village of Garani—believed to be the most lethal American airstrike in Afghanistan in terms of civilian deaths since the United States invasion in 2001—and could release it publicly as early as next week.
“I haven’t seen it myself,” she said of the new video. But she said she understood it was “horrible” because “there are so many children being massacred.”
In April, WikiLeaks posted a classified Pentagon video of an American airstrike in Baghdad in 2007 in which 14 people were killed, including two employees of the news service Reuters. Pentagon officials were outraged by the security breach.
Ms. Jonsdottir, a writer and longtime political activist who joined WikiLeaks last winter, was closely involved in preparing that video for release. Assange, who has no permanent home, lived in Iceland in the weeks before the video’s release.
“I did everything from recruiting volunteers and helping write the script to cutting Julian’s hair,” she said.
Ms. Jonsdottir said she not aware of the name of the private lawyers retained in the United States on Manning’s behalf this month. But she said she understood that the lawyers had approached the Defense Department in Washington this week and asked to be put in contact with Manning. The Pentagon declined, she said.
While the website refuses to confirm that Manning is a source, “we’re trying to help Manning, at least to speak out for him,” she said, drawing a comparison between Manning’s “heroic acts” and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg. “There’s a parallel between Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning.”
Ms. Jonsdottir would not give hints as to the whereabouts of Assange, except to say that he is not in the United States or Iceland and that he is “comfortable” wherever he is. She disputed news reports suggesting that Assange was living in fear of arrest or detainment by U.S. authorities.
“He’s fine,” she said. “It’s annoying for him to be in hiding. It’s distracting. But he’s not fearing for his life.” As recently as two weeks ago, Assange was reported to be in his native Australia.
Ms. Jonsdottir may help resolve one of the central mysteries of recent days in the WikiLeaks saga—what happened to the classified State Department cables that Manning is also alleged to have leaked to WikiLeaks.
She said that Assange is telling the truth in his recent assertion that, to the best of his knowledge, WikiLeaks does not have the cables—because the site’s electronic in-baskets have been so overwhelmed with leaked material in recent months that the site has not been able to dig the cables out, if they exist.
“We don’t know if we have them,” she said of the library of cables. “You can imagine how much stuff is coming in.”
In Internet chat logs obtained by Wired magazine, Manning boasts to Lamo, the former computer hacker, of having downloaded the cables and transmitted them to Assange earlier this year.
“Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning said of the cables, which are reported to involve the work of American diplomats throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Philip Shenon, a former investigative reporter at The New York Times, is the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Magda Hassan - 22-06-2010
There seems to be much more resources being put into this leak that the one in the Gulf of Mexico.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Keith Millea - 22-06-2010
Quote:Ms. Jonsdottir, who said she is in daily contact with Assange in his hiding place somewhere outside the United States,
OK,I'm not too smart,but how the heck can this woman be in touch with Assange everyday,and not have the US Govt.trace his location?Somethings not adding up for me.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Ed Jewett - 22-06-2010
Well, let's see...
He is in Iceland?
They have an encrypted method of communications?
Those volcanic clouds are really smoke signals?
There is a hidden tunnel from Iceland to Australia?
Quote: Dr. Roger Nelson, of Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (or PEAR Lab), announced the results of research that showed that subjects in the study were able to communicate complex information such as images of very different types of buildings and sculptures to other subjects thousands of miles away. The proof that such information could be communicated mentally from one person to another was interesting enough, but what really astounded the audience in the Smithsonian seminar in February 1994 where the results were announced was that, in a large number of cases, receivers got the information up to three days before it was sent out.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Keith Millea - 22-06-2010
Quote:Dr. Roger Nelson, of Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (or PEAR Lab), announced the results of research that showed that subjects in the study were able to communicate complex information such as images of very different types of buildings and sculptures to other subjects thousands of miles away. The proof that such information could be communicated mentally from one person to another was interesting enough, but what really astounded the audience in the Smithsonian seminar in February 1994 where the results were announced was that, in a large number of cases, receivers got the information up to three days before it was sent out.
Ok,now I get it.They've hired Uri Geller. :rofl:
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Magda Hassan - 22-06-2010
Quote:There is a hidden tunnel from Iceland to Australia?Shhhhhhh! No one is supposed to know this. :bandit:
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Ed Jewett - 22-06-2010
Magda Hassan Wrote:Quote:There is a hidden tunnel from Iceland to Australia?Shhhhhhh! No one is supposed to know this. :bandit:
The dirt is sprinkled in the gardens, the wood stove sits atop the hole, and former spooks are in charge of forging the money and the passports. The backup tunnel was compromised when BP accidentally drilled a hole in the bloody thing. :creep:
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Ed Jewett - 22-06-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbGiPjIE1pE&feature=player_embedded#!
Part One is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb_URYfQExE
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Keith Millea - 22-06-2010
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2010/06/21-2
06.21.10 - 9:06 PM
On the Alert
by Abby Zimet
![[Image: Julian-Assange-of-WikiLea-006.jpg]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/images/Julian-Assange-of-WikiLea-006.jpg)
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has surfaced in Brussels after almost a month in hiding, during which U.S. officials were said to be looking for him to grill him on State Department cables on Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange, who appeared at a seminar on freedom of information, is still working on a video of a U.S. air strike that killed scores of Afghan civilians and children.
"I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the US during this period." - Assange
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Helen Reyes - 22-06-2010
Brad Manning's most obvious defense would be: "I didn't send anybody anything. Lamo doctored the chat logs. It may be true I misconstrued myself as a hacktivist to him to some extent." How would the court martial prove the material was moved, even in a closed courtroom, even giving prosecutors full intelligence intercepts?
Who knows, maybe this will somehow go down in history as the first trial that relied on chat logs alone to convict someone. I doubt it though. Chat logs are basically a text copy/paste, not evidence.
And Keith is totally correct, they know exactly where he is. Sweden is my guess, because he has basic legal protection there as a journalist, whistleblower and leaker. He must've got his passport back in Australia, which the US would know about certainly. He's probably in Goteborg, Malmo or Stockholm when he's not running down to Brussels.
(Incidentally, Jules Verne wrote a book about a tunnel under Iceland, which might've been based on an old Norwegian story about two canoers who got sucked into the hollow earth and lived to tell the tale.)