The 30-year-old Manning filed her statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday.
Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, came out as transgender after being sentenced to 35 years in prison. President Barack Obama granted Manning clemency last year after she had served seven years..
Manning is running as a Democrat and will challenge two-term Sen. Ben Cardin in the primary.
Manning is yet to file for the primary with the state elections board, which she must do in person by Feb. 27, according to the board’s website.
Senator Cardin is also yet to file. But campaign finance reports show that his campaign had nearly $2 million cash on hand in late September.
Chelsea Manning is running for Senate. It"s worth remembering what her leaks actually exposed, because it was a long time ago, and a lot of people have sort of moved on. But she showed unbelievable courage to do what was right. Here"s an old video I did on her leaks. https://t.co/oXxrBnjcef
If you are cool with Sheriff Arpaio running for Senate in Arizona but up in arms that Chelsea Manning is running in Maryland – you my friend are a HYPOCRITE. #GoChelsea
Chelsea Manning wrote serious draft cybersecurity legislation to abolish the FISA court WHILE SHE WAS IN PRISON and did not have access to the Internet or a word processor that could save documents. She had to call supporters to look up citations etc. Gtfo with "no experience"
This article was chosen for republication based on the interest of our readers. Anti-Media republishes stories from a number of other independent news sources. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect Anti-Media editorial policy.
According to her Wikipedia page, Chelsea Manning spent 1 semester studying History and English at Montgomery Community College in Maryland but dropped out after failing her first final. She got her first job with a software company called Zoto, but was fired after 4 months because her boss said she would "just lock up and simply sit and stare." Manning then served a short stint at Incredible Pizza before joining the army, stealing a bunch of classified documents, leaking them to WikiLeaks, getting convicted of espionage and serving 7 years in prison. Of course, with an impressive resume like that, Harvard"s John F. Kennedy School of Government simply had to have her.
That said, while securing a visiting fellow position at Harvard was just the natural progression of what has been an already illustrious career for Manning, not everyone agrees with Harvard"s most recent staffing decisions.
As Fox News points out, Former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell announced his resignation earlier today as senior fellow saying he couldn"t be associated with an organization "that honors a convicted felon and leaker of classified information."
Morell, a former CIA deputy director who twice served as acting director, announced his resignation from Harvard"s Belfer Center was a result of Manning"s appointment, saying he couldn"t be part of an organization "that honors convicted felon and leaker of classified information."
"Senior leaders in our military have stated publicly that the leaks by Ms. Manning put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk," Morell said. "I have an obligation in my conscience -- and I believe to the country -- to stand against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information."
Meanwhile, according Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Morell could be just one of many Harvard educators about to announce their exits.
Given the number of people I"ve heard from at Harvard and elsewhere, this from Pres. Obama"s Deputy CIA Director could open the floodgates. https://t.co/4Q1LHWoWRC
(ANTIMEDIA Op-Ed)Social media outrage erupted Wednesday after President Trump announced his decision to reinstate a ban on transgender individuals in the military. But as many condemned the move as discriminatory, another widely overlooked sentiment is far more pressing: the ban didn’t go far enough. Everyone should be banned from the military.
Though military service is often regarded as the highest form of patriotism and the institution and its veterans are considered by many Americans to be immune from criticism — and owed unquestioning respect — the facts on the ground paint a very different picture.
Over the decades, the United States military has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent civilians. This isn’t an honorable opportunity that should be extended to all variations of Americans. It should be extended to none.
This doesn’t mean it isn’t noble to advocate tolerance and equality for transgender individuals. Societal discrimination and phobia of transgender individuals are real, and as trans individuals struggle to gain recognition as human beings, it is a valiant effort to recognize their plight and their humanity.
But to argue that doing so requires equal access to military service is to deny the humanity of other human beings. In the Trump era, over 2,000 civilians have already been killed in U.S. military operations. His secretary of defense, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, has made it clear he is unconcerned with civilian casualties, and a recent report found as many as 40,000 civilians were killed in the recent months-long battle for Mosul – one ultimately deemed a “liberation” by the military and its media lapdogs (though not all the deaths were caused by the U.S. military, ISIS’ domination of Iraq in the first place is a direct consequence of U.S. military operations).
This type of carnage was commonplace under Barack Obama, who received glowing praise for his “tolerant” policy toward transgender individuals in the military as he blew up wedding parties and funerals in Yemen and directly caused the deaths of children in multiple countries while escalating the war in Afghanistan. He drew the U.S. military into even more countries than George W. Bush with the drone program, exponentially expanding robotic warfare.
But it isn’t just presidents who have made the military a moral dumpster fire.
The ruling establishment in the U.S. military has punished soldiers who objected to their Afghan allies raping children. It has been responsible for the loss of weapons that ended up in the hands of ISIS. It strategically desired the proliferation of that terror group for the purpose of gaining geopolitical dominance in the region. The military’s soldiers have killed journalists — as exposed by transgender former soldier Chelsea Manning. Soldiers have tortured individuals never charged with a crime. They have terrorized and murdered innocent women and children.
Further, the military’s top ally in the Middle East brutally oppresses trans individuals domestically.
This is not a concern for the U.S. military, which has military officials in the command room of the Saudi military’s operations in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have been slaughtered or forced to the brink of starvation because of the Saudis’ unrelenting assaults on infrastructure and agriculture. Their war there is largely intended to strengthen the monarchy’s power in the region — the same monarchy that “has carried out arrests for cross-dressing and ordered the imprisonment and flogging of men accused of behaving like women, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch,” Newsweek has noted.
All of this serves not only to preserve American hegemony and control of resources, but to keep profits flowing for massive military-industrial conglomerations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, who currently have officials making calls in the Pentagon (American defense companies are also selling the Saudis weapons they use in their assault on Yemen).
The American crusade is not a humane one and has no place for individuals fighting for their own humanity or the betterment of mankind — and it hasn’t been for decades.
Rather than begging a violent institution to validate trans individuals, Americans — regardless of sexual identity — should ban themselves from joining a military that has become a force for corporate hegemony, resource grabs, and war crimes around the world, rather than a force for freedom. Doing so would do far more to promote the cause of universal acceptance than indulging in jingoistic nationalism behind the barrels of guns and joysticks of remote-controlled bombers and calling it progress.
Those who want to serve their country should exercise their rights to oppose the inhumane actions of the military rather than seek to partake in them. After all, it matters little to innocent victims of American violence whether the person dropping bombs on them identifies as straight, gay, transgender, or anything else.
With a bird’s eye view of the battle-ravaged streets of suburban Baghdad, two U.S. Apache helicoptersunleasheda relentless barrage of 30 mm bullets on a group of people the Pentagon claimed were insurgents — injuring two children and killingReutersphotojournalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, camera assistant Saeed Chmagh, their driver, Saleh Matasher Tomal, and at least nine others on July 12, 2007 — the entire incident captured on appallingly stark video.
U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the abominable footage to Wikileaks, whose publication of this blatant and — judging from blithe cockpit narration among American troops carrying out the attack — zealous murder, gut-checked the entire planet for its glib casualness in meting death from above.
All of the victims seen slaughtered in the video Wikileaks titled Collateral Murder were innocent. Not one person has been held accountable for the slayings.
On the day of the attack exactly ten years ago, the U.S. affirmed the deaths of the two journalists along with the group of “insurgents,”describingthe incident as a combat operation against a “hostile force” — and that, in the murkiness of battle, the Reuters reporters might even have been killed by Iraqi militants instead of the American military.
Multiple Freedom of Information Act requests byReutersfor further disclosure on the suspicious deaths of its employees and circumstances surrounding the killings were submitted — to no avail.
Further, the lack of details and information — as well as that the killings had occurred in one of the U.S. empire’s many theaters of war — effectively erased the deaths from the media’s spotlight. Truth that the incident had in actuality comprised an insufferable atrocity remained shielded from public purview.
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An inquiry by the U.S. military — which incidentally did not address shooting the driver’s children — found the service members had acted justly, and cleared all of wrongdoing in the matter.
That was the end of it. Case closed. Nothing to see here — trust your government.
Or, it would have been — until the April 2010 publication by Wikileaks of Collateral Murder and an enormous cache of documents covertly leaked by Manning smashed through the closet door secreting one of the U.S.’ nastier skeletons.
Worse, Josh Stieber, a member of the U.S. military company responsible for the killings, claimed the incident didn’t depart from standard operating procedure,statingplainly,
“When I started to see the discussion flowing from [the video], I was surprised at how extreme it was made out to be. What was shown in the video was not out of the ordinary in Iraq. One policy we had that was even more extreme was if a roadside bomb went off, we were supposed to shoot anyone standing in that area. We were told that we needed to make the local population more afraid of us.”
Anyone watching this video, now, a decade removed, in time only, knows U.S. boots still echo all over Iraq and Middle East — and must also know, given the criminal lack of punishment for gross human rights transgressions, that inexcusable violations of human rights continue to be committed with normalized regularity.
Arrested and charged under the notoriously broad Espionage Act, Manning garnered a 35-year sentence in August 2013 for blowing the whistle. After three years in solitary confinement — rightly called torturous for the whistleblower by her supporters — Manning’s remaining sentence was commuted by President Obama and she was released in May.
Christian ChristensenwroteforCommon Dreamsfive years after Baghdad attack,
“In a statement by Manning made during her 2013 trial she outlined her motivations for the leak, stating (in relation to Collateral Murder) that one of the most disturbing aspects was the ‘bloodlust’ exhibited by the US military. At one point we can hear members of the aerial weapons team begging a wounded Iraqi to pick up a weapon so that they would have a reason open fire on him once again. This, as Manning put it, was ‘similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.’ The violence in the video is both dehumanizing and grotesque, and serves to remind viewers of the perversity of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, as well as the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.”
Sadly, it seems pro-war propaganda, often subtle in delivery, has so fully inundated American popular culture as to make opposing or criticizing the military — and Washington’s bellicose foreign ‘policy’ — somewhat of a rebellious act. War, thus, continues unimpeded with nary a blip on the mainstream’s apathetic radar.
In fact, just this month the U.S. patted itself on the back for its coalition’s successful wrest of control of Mosul from the terrorist group it played a hand in creating: the Islamic State. Self-congratulatory rhetoric aside, however, human rights advocates paint a far less rosy portrait of the military actions undertaken to effect that victory — one hauntingly reminiscent of Collateral Murder’s chilling revelations.
“The scale and gravity of the loss of civilian lives during the military operation to retake Mosul must be publicly acknowledged. The horrors people have witnessed and the disregard for human life by all parties to this conflict must not go unpunished. Entire families have been wiped out, many of whom are still buried under the rubble today. The people of Mosul deserve to know, from their government, that there will be justice and reparation so that the harrowing impact of this operation is duly addressed.”
But that isn’t likely to happen.
It has, after all, been ten years since journalists and innocents were mowed down in the street by the U.S. military, as if the gunmen played a video game; seven years since public release of the Collateral Murder video; and mere months since the person courageous enough to blow the whistle on this disgusting behavior — and more — walked relatively free.
In her first interview since being released from prison, whistleblower said she felt “responsibility to the public.”
(COMMONDREAMS) — US Chelsea Manning has given her first interview since being released from prison last month in which she explains her motivations for making public thousands of military documents.
Excerpts of her interview with ABC‘s “Nightline” co-anchor Juju Chang aired Friday on the network’s “Good Morning America.”
Asked about why she leaked the trove of documents, she says, “I have a responsibility to the public … we all have a responsibility.”
“We’re getting all this information from all these different sources and it’s just death, destruction, mayhem.”
“We’re filtering it all through facts, statistics, reports, dates, times, locations, and eventually, you just stop,” she adds. “I stopped seeing just statistics and information, and I started seeing people.”
Asked by Hing what she would tell President Obama, Manning, choking up, says, “I’ve been given a chance,” she says. “That’s all I asked for was a chance.”
Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst who was charged with leaking the largest trove of government secrets in U.S. history, spoke out for the first time this week after spending seven years in prison.
“I accept the responsibility,” Manning said. “No one told me to do this. No one directed me to do this. This is me, it’s on me.”
Manning said she was inspired to turn over the collection of over 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, after watching American soldiers commit atrocities against innocent civilians in the Middle East.
“All of this information—it’s just death, destruction, mayhem, and eventually you just stop—I stopped seeing just statistics and information,” Manning said. “I started seeing people. Counterinsurgents and warfare is not a simple thing. It’s not as simple as ‘good guys vs. bad guys.’ It was a mess.”
As a result, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison—the longest sentence given to any whistleblower in U.S. history. President Obama waited until the end of his presidency to commute the remainder of Manning’s sentence.
One of the videos included in the trove, which Manning said inspired her to turn to WikiLeaks, showed American solders carrying out an aerial attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
Amnesty International Americas Director Erika Guevara-Rosas noted that while Manning was originally given an extremely long sentence, none of the solders exposed in any of the videos faced justice.
“Instead of punishing the messenger, the U.S. government can send a strong signal to the world that it is serious about investigating the human rights violations exposed by the leaks and bringing all those suspected of criminal responsible to justice in fair trials,” Guevara-Rosas said.
READ MORE:Obama says his is ‘most transparent administration" ever
As The Free Thought Project has reported, while Manning is out of prison now, she remains on an active duty soldier in the U.S. Army, and has been “placed on voluntary excess leave, rather than discharged—and, as such, could be swiftly and relentlessly punished for the slightest violation, despite technically being considered free.”
London, UK – On Friday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed the public for the first time since rape charges were dropped by Swedish authorities. Since 2012, Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London under asylum, understanding that the Swedish arrest warrant was simply a pretext to a subsequent extradition to the U.S. under a secret sealed indictment.
“Today is an important victory for me, and for the UN human rights system. But it by no means erases seven years of detention without charge – in prison, under house arrest, and almost five years here in this embassy without sunlight,” Assange said from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy.
“Seven years without charge, while my children grew up without me. That is not something that I can forgive, it is not something that I can forget.
“The inevitable inquiry into what has occurred in this moment of terrible injustice is something that I hope will be more than just about me, and this situation, because the reality is, detention and extradition without charge has become a feature of the EU.
“A feature which has been exploited, yes, in my case, for political reasons, but for other cases have subjected many people to terrible injustices.”
Assange stated that “while today was an important victory, an important vindication,” the “the war is far from over.”
He says, “WikiLeaks will continue publication,” but noted that he was happy to engage in dialogue with the U.S. Department of Justice.
“While US has made extremely threatening remarks, always happy to engage in dialogue over what has occurred.”
READ MORE:WikiLeaks" 10 Most Damning Clinton Emails that Prove Mainstream Media is Scripted & Controlled
“My staff, my legal staff, have contacted the UK authorities and we hope to engage in a dialogue about what is the best way forward.
“To some extent the UK has been exploited by the process it entered into with the EU, where it agreed to extradite people without charge.
“That is to extend a forced position the UK has been put into. And, the first part of that is over. The UK refuses to confirm or deny at this stage whether a US extradition warrant is in the UK territory.”
Assange went on to thank “Ecuador, its people, and its asylum system. They have stood by my asylum in the face of intense pressure.”
He then took the opportunity to comment on the release of Chelsea Manning.
“We have had an even more important victory this week [and] that is the release of Chelsea Manning after seven years in military prison.”
Assange also gave thanks to the UN human rights system as a last resort for people “bound up by our legal circumstances” dealing with the politics or geopolitics of states.
As the Free Thought Project previously reported, Julian Assange, for the last six years, has been persecuted and held captive because of rape allegations; allegations that we have now found out are entirely fabricated by police.
In December, Assange went public with his version of events surrounding the rape allegations for which he was arrested in 2010.
READ MORE:BREAKING: Hillary Clinton Linked to Bogus Dating Site Associated with Julian Assange Pedophile Smear
“Six years ago today, on 7 December 2010, I was handcuffed and locked into Wandsworth prison by order of a Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny,” Assange explains in a testimony released on Wednesday. “I had not and still have not been charged with an offence. The claimed grounds for my arrest and extradition without charge were so that Ny could question me. But it was not until six years later – three weeks ago – that I was questioned for the first time. I have decided to release my responses.”
In November, Assange was finally questioned aver a two-day period. However, as Assange points out, “my Swedish lawyer was excluded from the room in yet another breach of my basic rights.” In spite of this unlawful questioning, today’s dropped charges reveal the police never had a case in the first place.
In a 19-page statement, also released in December, Assange details the events leading up to his persecution, including being railroaded by the American, Swedish, English and Australian governments. The sentiment then was the same as it was today.
You have subjected me to six years of unlawful, politicized detention without charge in prison, under house arrest and four and a half years at this embassy. You should have asked me this question six years ago. Your actions in refusing to take my statement for the last six years have been found to be unlawful by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and by the Swedish Court of Appeal. You have been found to have subjected me to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. You have denied me effective legal representation in this process. Despite this, I feel compelled to cooperate even though you are not safeguarding my rights. I refer you to my statement where all these questions were answered.
Not coincidentally, all of these allegations of Assange’s alleged sexual misconduct came after he began exposing the war crimes of the US government, after being leaked information by the heroic Manning.
READ MORE:Manning Blows Whistle Again! Gov"t So Paranoid, Its Own Employees Now Under "Total Surveillance"
Assange’s victory today is a major one. But, like he said, we still have a long way to go to make truth the norm.
Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning now walks relatively free from her cage after serving seven harrowing years at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for leaking some 700,000 documents and files to Wikileaks — among them, video footage of U.S. Military service membersannihilating twelve civilians, including two members of a Reuters news crew, with machine guns fired from an Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007.
“I can confirm Manning has been released from The United States Disciplinary Barracks, Ft. Leavenworth,”Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith affirmed in astatementthis morning.“Based on privacy act restrictions there is nothing further I can provide at this time.”
Army officialsconfirmedtoBuzzfeedManning was released at 2 a.m., Central Time.
Manning — who was just 22 years old when she began copying and funneling diplomatic cables and military intelligence information on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — would have served 35 full years in prison, had former President Obama not commuted her sentence just three days before leaving office.
“Chelsea has already served the longest sentence of any whistleblower in the history of this country,”asserted Manning’s attorneys, Nancy Hollander and Vincent Ward, in a previousstatement.“It has been far too long, too severe, too draconian.
“President Obama’s act of commutation was the first time the military took care of this soldier who risked so much to disclose information that served the public interest.”
Now, Manning will be able to step away from confining prison walls and fully focus on“building her life,”as her ACLU attorney and transgender advocate, Chase Strangio, toldNBC Newspreviously. Speaking officially for the first time on plans after leaving Leavenworth, Manningproclaimedlast week,
“For the first time, I can see a future for myself as Chelsea. I can imagine surviving and living as the person who I am and can finally be in the outside world.”
Strangio, a close confidante of Manning’s,spokeoptimistically of the whistleblower’s release toNBC News:
“She is looking forward to eating pizza, swimming, playing PlayStation and meeting the many friends who have supported her over the years but who were never allowed to visit in person.
“Beyond that, she is waiting to experience life outside of prison before declaring any future plans. After so many years of government control over her body and gender, I know she is eager to grow her hair, express her gender and negotiate decisions on her own terms.”
As an intelligence analyst assigned to a unit in Iraq in 2009, Manning had access to classified information and databases. After leaking information she had compiled to Wikileaks, Manning confided in an online acquaintance, who then betrayed the trust to military counterintelligence.
She later acknowledged leaking the information to blow the whistle on the military’s questionable actions in the Middle East.
Manning had been convicted by court-martial in July 2013, for asmatteringof offenses, including aiding the enemy — which could have garnered the death penalty — as well as violations of the nefarious Espionage Act, for disclosing the gargantuan cache of information, including diplomatic cables, as well as documents, files, and other U.S. military data, variously deemed classified or sensitive in nature.
Under conditions the whistleblower’s attorneyssuggestwere inhumane and evenhostile, Manning twice attempted suicide while behind bars, in July and again in August last year, and then undertook a hunger strike in September, due to lack of treatment for gender dysphoria.
Those incidents spoke of her treatment as a whistleblower and likely contributed to Obama’s eleventh-hour decision to commute the soldier’s remaining 28 years.
If victory can be declared for the commutation, its consequent freedom must, unfortunately, be tempered by several conditions — both official and unofficial — as Manning will undoubtedly be subjected to intensive surveillance and scrutinized for the most minute misbehavior.
Manning is still an active duty soldier in the U.S. Army — having been placed on voluntary excess leave, rather than discharged — and, as such, could be swiftly and relentlessly punished for the slightest violation, despite technically being considered free.
“Chelsea is still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ),”David Coombs, Manning’s military defense attorney, who last had contact with her in February,toldNBC News.“She wouldn’t be charged again for the same offenses, but if she committed a new crime, the military would still have jurisdiction over her.”
READ MORE:Leaked Sec Kerry Audio that CNN & NY Times Tried to Hide — Confirms US Role in Rise of ISIS
As NBC points out, the release of previously unreleased classified information or even a simple fistfight could land Manning in fresh and stale hot water — but, worse, the military could pursue re-imprisonment should the whistleblower say or write the wrong thing.
“You would want to be careful in terms of what you want to write or say if you’re still under military control,”Coombs explained.“Let’s say you write something critical, now you run the real chance of being called on the carpet for that.”
According to reports, Manning will be on Active duty indefinitely, until all her court ties are resolved. As the Kansas City Star reports:
“The Army has no choice” until still-unresolved appeals of her 2013 conviction run their course, said Eric L. Mayer, who practices military law in Overland Park but is not connected to the Manning case.
Only when appeals are exhausted — and that might include petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court — can military command “approve what I suspect will be a dishonorable discharge,” Mayer said. Such action would end Army privileges and prevent Manning from drawing on future veterans’ benefits.
Because the content of documents she leaked was classified and sensitive in nature — or because it painted the U.S. military such a heinous light — Manning garnered furious criticism from a number of politicians, including President Trump, whotweetedof her mere days before being inaugurated,
“TRAITOR … who should never have been released from prison.”
“Chelsea Manning’s treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets,”House Speaker Paul Ryan bloviated on, what hetermed, the“outrageous”news Obama would commute her remaining sentence.
Eagerness to see the young soldier imprisoned for the full 35 years, in other words, abounds — but is far from a unanimous sentiment in the United States.
It should be noted no unassailable proof exists that anything Wikileaks has published has ever placed a military or Intelligence Community member in grave or fatal danger — a fact the organization repeatedly declares as a condition when evaluating information in deciding whether certain documents must be withheld.
Heralded as a beacon of integrity in a military repeatedly embroiled in shameful scandals by some and harpooned as an outright traitor by others, what Manning will face outside prison walls remains to be seen. Her cruel and difficult time served, however, has made Chelsea an icon of the transparency and human rights movements.
It has become standard practice — thanks to efficacious nationalist propaganda — for the American public to excoriate those who call out governmental corruption, be they journalists, insiders, or others sounding the alarm.
However, considering the astounding scope of wrongdoing evinced in leak after leak — and how frequently that misbehavior ignores the U.S. Constitution, makes a mockery of ethics, and outright tramples human rights — whistleblowers could arguably be the last bastion of albeit forced transparency into the system’s gory inner workings.
Without Manning and a host of other whistleblowing heroes — a term this writer employs unabashedly — the pompous lawlessness running rampant in every arm of the U.S. government might still be unknown, at all our peril.
Chelsea Manning— who, upon sentencing,apologizedfor “hurting the U.S.,” and lamented she hadonly wanted to“change the world for the better”— should never have been locked in a cage.
Rather, she should be lionized for pulling the gloves off the Pentagon’s embarrassingly blood-stained hands.
In a stunning new report, CNN has just revealed, according to anonymous sources at least, that US authorities have prepared charges and will seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for intelligence leaks dating all the way back to 2010.
US authorities have prepared charges to seek the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US officials familiar with the matter tell CNN.
The Justice Department investigation of Assange and WikiLeaks dates to at least 2010, when the site first gained wide attention for posting thousands of files stolen by the former US Army intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning.
This latest revelation comes after CIA Director Mike Pompeo ramped up the Trump administration"s rhetoric against WikiLeaks describing it as a "non-state hostile intelligence service" earlier this week. Ironically, as we noted this morning, Pompeo"s comments can just days before the FBI and CIA admitted that they are searching for an "insider" at the CIA (not a Russian) who exposed thousands of top-secret documents that described CIA tools used to penetrate smartphones, smart televisions and computer systems.
Last week in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, CIA Director Mike Pompeo went further than any US government official in describing a role by WikiLeaks that went beyond First Amendment activity.
He said WikiLeaks "directed Chelsea Manning to intercept specific secret information, and it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States."
"It"s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: A non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia," Pompeo said.
Pompeo"s comments were, of course, met with an immediate snarky reply from Assange over twitter.
Called a "non-state intelligence service" today by the "state non-intelligence agency" which produced al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iraq, Iran & Pinochet.
For the past several years, U.S. prosecutors have struggled with whether the First Amendment precluded the prosecution of Assange. In fact, in what now appears to be a very prescient opinion piece, Julian Assange recently penned an article in the Washington Post defending his publications by saying that his motives are "identical to those claimed by the New York Times and The Post."
Quite simply, our motive is identical to that claimed by the New York Times and The Post — to publish newsworthy content. Consistent with the U.S. Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true irrespective of whether sources came by that truth legally or have the right to release it to the media. And we strive to mitigate legitimate concerns, for example by using redaction to protect the identities of at-risk intelligence agents.
During President Barack Obama"s administration, Attorney General Eric Holder and officials at the Justice Department determined it would be difficult to bring charges against Assange because WikiLeaks wasn"t alone in publishing documents stolen by Manning. Several newspapers, including The New York Times, did as well. The investigation continued, but any possible charges were put on hold, according to US officials involved in the process then.
All that said, CNN"s sources seem to believe those same prosecutors have now found a way to move forward...though we"re sure the New York Times won"t receive similar arrest warrants.
Of course, it"s unclear what immediate purpose the charges will serve given that Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the sole purpose of avoiding political persecution. That said, somehow we suspect that some form of "leverage" is about to be applied against Ecuador to help them "remember" that they have other immediate and critically important uses for Assange"s London bedroom.
And this pretty much sums it up:
Wednesday "WikiLeaks will show illegal actions by the CIA" Friday "US prepares charges to arrest Assange"https://t.co/7zRy5A2ZAH
(ANTIMEDIA) The CIA’s chickens have come home to roost as distrust of the agency swells amid recent revelations from Wikileaks regarding the agency’s extensive spying and hacking practices.
Rather than examining the problems inherent to the CIA’s extensive power to hack into smart phones, for example, the government has focused its efforts on a quest to discover who leaked the sensitive documents. In one apparent attempt to explain away the damning findings, former CIA Director Michael Hayden recently toldBBC news that millennials are the weak link because they do not view loyalty and secrecy in the same light as previous generations.
“In order to do this kind of stuff, we have to recruit from a certain demographic,” he said in reference to government surveillance. “And I don’t mean to judge them at all, but this group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy, and transparency than certainly my generation did.”
He continued:
“So we bring these people into the agency – good Americans all, I can only assume – but again, culturally, they have different instincts than the people who made the decision to hire them, and we may be running into this different cultural approach.”
He singled out Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, both millennial whistleblowers who made massive waves when they revealed nefarious activities on the part of the federal government.
On one hand, Hayden is correct in his assessment that millennials have different understandings of “loyalty, secrecy, and transparency.” As the Interceptpointed out:
“A 2013 Pew poll found that millennials were more skeptical of government surveillance than any other age group — with45 percentof millennials saying it was more important for the federal government to ‘not intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terror threats’ than ‘to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy.’”
They compared with just 26% of those aged 65 and older.
Further, at least some members of previous generations did appear to display more fervent loyalty to the government. Renowned journalist Carl Bernstein reported in 1977 that journalists were covertly working in tandem with the CIA — and that they felt a strong sense of duty and loyalty to the agency in doing so:
“[T]the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors—usually without pay—in the national interest.
Bernstein reported that one prominent columnist later said, “I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it. The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.”
Still, leaking sensitive documents in defiance of established authority is not just a trait of the modern generation or era. Around the same time journalists were proudly working with the CIA, others were subverting the government’s secrecy. The Intercept notes:
“Consider Daniel Ellsberg,who was 40when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, exposing widespread government deceit about the Vietnam War. Or Mark Felt,who was almost 60when he helped formed the basis for the Watergate stories under the pseudonym ‘Deep Throat.’”
This is a historical trend spanning centuries. In 1772, Benjamin Franklin leaked letters from then-Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson in which the state leader discussed “repressing the rights of colonists.”
Try as Hayden might to blame his agency’s woes on millennials, the fact remains that distrust of government is growing among all generations, and apparently, among whistleblowers of all ages. William Binney, an NSA whistleblower, was not a millennial. Nor were Jeffrey Sterling or John Kiriakou.
Evidently, millennials do not hold a monopoly on listening to their consciences and acting accordingly — nor does the CIA hold a monopoly on secrecy. At least, not anymore.
In the past 48 hours, two stories broke that illustrate how dominant technology has become in the age-old war between freedom and control:
(Wired) – A group of researchers at Ben-Gurion’s cybersecurity lab has devised a method to defeat the security protection known as an “air gap,” the safeguard of separating highly sensitive computer systems from the internet to quarantine them from hackers. If an attacker can plant malware on one of those systems—say, by paying an insider to infect it via USB or SD card—this approach offers a new way to rapidly pull secrets out of that isolated machine. Every blink of its hard drive LED indicator can spill sensitive information to any spy with a line of sight to the target computer, whether from a drone outside the window or a telescopic lens from the next roof over.
————-
(CNN) – Conservative provocateur James O’Keefe is setting his sights on CNN.
O’Keefe said in a telephone interview with CNN on Wednesday that he has “a few hundred hours” of “secretly recorded material” from inside the network. “We’re calling it CNN Leaks,” he said, drawing inspiration from WikiLeaks’ document dumps.
He said “part one” would be published Thursday at about 10 a.m. ET. “This is all legally recorded information,” he said, declining to be more specific.
The first article illustrates the extraordinary – and increasing — power that cutting-edge tech offers governments to watch and otherwise control their citizens. Combine the above relatively-narrow-gauge application with the NSA’s existing ability to monitor pretty much every electronic signal, facial recognition software that can pick individuals out of crowds, algorithms that lip read, and tiny drones that can see without being seen, and the potential result is a police state that’s slicker, subtler and therefore scarier than anything envisioned in dystopian novels like Brave New World or 1984.
But the second story is the counterweight, illustrating how those same technologies are being used around the world to expose the secrets of the powerful. Where Daniel Ellsberg once had to spend months photocopying the Pentagon Papers and physically sneaking them out of his Defense Department office, today all that’s required for a major leak is one disillusioned or otherwise motivated insider with a thumb drive, laptop or smart phone.
In just the past few years, Sony’s emails were hacked and released, to the profound embarrassment of Hollywood; US military misbehavior was exposed by a lowly private named Bradley Manning; the Democrat National Committee’s emails – which exposed collusion between political operatives and mainstream media, among many other things — were published just in time to cost that party the presidency; and of course the great Edward Snowden, an outside contractor for the NSA, exposed the breathtaking illegality of US spying here and abroad.
Every big organization now lives with the knowledge that it’s one leak away from existential crisis — and that there is no fix. Doing big, bad things requires a lot of people with the ability to access and understand what you’re doing. And it only takes one of them with widely-available technology to expose you to the whole world.
With all the issues now dividing people – abortion, Israel, immigration, etc., etc. – this might be the most telling. Do you see Snowden and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange as traitors or heroes? Because the worlds in which they end up one or the other couldn’t be more different.
The first image, What, is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, also referred to as the “doomsday seed vault” in Norway.
The second image, Where, reportedly shows a cave Nazis used to store gold and other valuables in during World War II.
The third image, When, has been located here:
The fourth image, Who, shows whistleblowers Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on newspapers under the headline “infamous spies”.
The fifth image, Why, shows a welder… and gives us yet another Air Force reference.
The sixth and final image asks “How did #Vault7 make its way to WikiLeaks?” and shows us a retro image of a woman in a beret mailing something at a mailbox.
So… What, Where, When, Who, Why and How did WikiLeaks Acquire Vault 7?
People have a lot of theories on what this series of Tweets refers to.
First, the Tweet Wikileaks sent immediately before its first Vault 7 Tweet had to do with the FBI releasing “Vault 6” of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Maybe its about both, considering Hillary Clinton was a New York senator at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Either way, thousands of people are waiting on pins and needles wondering if Wikileaks is going to deliver on its conspiracy theory scavenger hunt. With a build up like that, it better be something good.
We could use a little truth in this world right about now...
Just yesterday we noted that Julian Assange and his lawyers were seemingly shying away from an offer they previously made to the Obama administration whereby Assange agreed to U.S. extradition in return for clemency for Chelsea Manning (see "Assange"s Lawyer Provides An "Out": Says Conditions Not Met For Extradition Deal"). While initial tweets from WikiLeaks implied that the extradition deal was still on, a follow-up from Assange"s U.S. attorney seemed to declare a technical breach of "contract."
“Mr. Assange welcomes the announcement that Ms. Manning"s sentence will be reduced and she will be released in May, but this is well short of what he sought,” said Barry Pollack, Assange’s United State’s attorney.
“Mr. Assange had called for Chelsea Manning to receive clemency and be released immediately.”
That said, on a live press conference held earlier today on periscope, Assange once again confirmed that he "stands by everything I said including the offer to go to the United States if Chelsea Manning"s sentence was commuted."
"We look forward to having a conversation with the DoJ [Department of Justice] about what the correct way forward is."
"I"ve always been willing to go to the United States provided my rights are respected because this is a case that should never have occurred."
Meanwhile, irrespective of what happens with his personal extradition agreement, Assange promised a "big publishing year" in 2017 with the popularity of the "Podesta Emails" encouraging other sources to come forward with new leaks.
Assange promised a “big publishing year ahead” for WikiLeaks, adding “I’m in love with the publications we have coming.”
Following the media coverage the Podesta emails garnered, Assange said “that exposure has, like it always does, encouraged other sources to come forward.”
“We have a lot of material to get through, it takes time,” he said, concluding that WikiLeaks’ decade-long record of accuracy is a valuable reputation to maintain.
Among a litany of other topics, Assange also touched on the "fake news" epidemic saying that Facebook was "more or less in the tank for Clinton" and has become "integrated with the U.S. establishment."
Assange described Facebook’s attempts to stop fake news as “super interesting,” saying that as Facebook “became rich [it] has integrated with the US establishment,” adding the social media site was “more or less in the tank for Clinton” during the election.
“Organizations like Facebook are permitting many people to publish billions at the touch of a button - that’s breaking down the control structure,” he said. ”That is a new circumstance in democracy.”
Finally, touching on a topic we"ve written about frequently in recent months, Assange discussed the attempts of the establishment to dismiss any hint of legitimate opposition from a pissed off electorate as nothing more than a reflection of Russian propaganda....
“There is that environment now, where you can see the incentives, so whatever propaganda Russia may be putting out, through RT or elsewhere, and it certainly has its angle on things, you can see the incentives for incumbents, like Merkel, just like we could see with Clinton to try and hype up an issue about potential Russian involvement."
“It’s not that they [the incumbents] have a genuine opposition. It’s not that the people are annoyed with misbehavior in government, and of course there is, I’m not saying anything in particular about Merkel"s government, but as a government who misbehaves, well, there’s an attempt to go, any criticism of governmental misbehavior, corruption, or incompetence, well it’s not the opposition or the people making a fuss, no it’s secretly the Russians.”
...though we"re sure the Russians told Assange to say all of the above so we highly recommend you take it all with a grain of salt.
After a January 12th tweet from WikiLeaks saying that Assange would agree to be extradited to the U.S. if the Obama administration granted "clemency" to Chelsea Manning, attorneys for Assange seem to be backtracking today on an alleged technicality.
Here was the "official offer" from WikiLeaks:
If Obama grants Manning clemency Assange will agree to US extradition despite clear unconstitutionality of DoJ case https://t.co/MZU30SlfGK
But, according to new comments today from his U.S. attorney, the offer from Assange implicitly required an immediate release of Chelsea Manning. Therefore, at least according to Assange"s attorney, Obama"s decision to release Manning from his 35-year sentence in "May" is "well short of what he sought." Per The Hill:
“Mr. Assange welcomes the announcement that Ms. Manning"s sentence will be reduced and she will be released in May, but this is well short of what he sought,” said Barry Pollack, Assange’s United State’s attorney.
“Mr. Assange had called for Chelsea Manning to receive clemency and be released immediately.”
Now, without passing judgement on the merits of the DOJ case against Assange, and while we"re not ones to split hairs, the tweet above doesn"t reference an immediate release and neither does any definition of "clemency" to our knowledge. Per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, clemency is defined simply as follows:
1. disposition to be merciful and especially to moderate the severity of punishment due
2. an act or instance of leniency
Then came the following tweet from WikiLeaks saying that "Assange is still happy to come to the US" on the condition that "all his rights are guaranteed"...a condition that we suspect will never be met to the complete satisfaction of Assange"s attorneys.
Assange is still happy to come to the US provided all his rights are guarenteed despite White House now saying Manning was not quid-quo-pro.
Of course, comments from Assange and his attorneys today seem to offer a very different tone from WikiLeaks" initial tweets yesterday which celebrated the commutation of Manning"s sentence and confirmed that Assange was "standing by" his proposed "extradition "deal"".
Assange is confident of winning any fair trial in the US. Obama"s DoJ prevented public interest defense & fair jury. https://t.co/Mb6gXlz7QS
(ANTIMEDIA) In a surprising move by an American president who has used the outdated Espionage Act more than all past presidents combined, Barack Obama commuted the 35-year prison sentence of whistleblower Chelsea Manning on Tuesday. Manning is now set to be released on May 17 of this year.
Chelsea Manning was prosecuted for leaking vast troves of documents to Wikileaks, including a horrific video aptly dubbed “Collateral Murder,” in which soldiers in a U.S. Apache helicopter opened fire on a number of civilians, including journalists who worked for Reuters.
Although Manning’s reprieve has been highly regarded as great news by journalists and activists alike, her release still raises the issue that she was sentenced and punished in the first place. To date, she has already served approximately seven years. The harsh conditions of her sentence and lack of appropriate medical care drove her to attempt suicide twice in a six-month period. Her original sentence of 35 years was the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak of information. The U.N. torture chief said Manning’s treatment was “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” and might have constituted torture.
But what about the perpetrators of the attack in the Collateral Murder video? What kind of sentence did they receive?
Nothing.
Yet according to soldier Ethan McCord, depicted in the Collateral Murder video carrying an injured boy, “what happened then was not an isolated incident. Stuff like that happens on a daily basis in Iraq.”
Despite this glaring admission, Senator John McCain had the confidence to claim Manning’s actions in leaking the material to Wikileaks “endangered the lives of American troops, diplomats, and intelligence sources.” But what about those who actually endangered the lives of others by deliberately shooting them down from an advanced war machine? They, too, endanger American lives; it has been advanced multiple times that the single most effective recruitment tool for radical groups like ISIS is the high number of civilian casualties associated with America’s military ventures across the globe.
Conversely, how many people have been killed as a result of Manning’s leaks to Wikileaks? Can Senator McCain name one?
By comparison, there are countless examples of U.S. personnel committing mass atrocities and receiving no more than a slap on the wrist in response. On March 16, 1968, a platoon of American soldiers entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai. By the end of the day, they had killed between 300 and 507 unarmed and unresisting men, women, and children, none of them apparently enemy forces. The Viet Cong were 150 miles away at the time, meaning the U.S. troops had acted on inaccurate intelligence. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison for the attack. In total, however, he ended up serving four and a half months in a military prison before he was acquitted and sent home.
No one else was convicted over the heinous massacre that took place that day. No top officials who may have ordered the attack were prosecuted. The Nixon administration did not face any punishment or trial for the crimes. Calley is still alive and well, walking around as a free man (don’t worry – he did apologize).
In 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped over 26,000 bombs, mostly in countries the United States is not even officially at war with. His covert drone strike program, alone, has killed thousands of civilians, yet he continues to deny the high death toll and, instead, has happily passed this violent legacy onto a bomb-loving, anti-Muslim reality TV star.
Meanwhile, Obama himself is set to make millions off the back of his presidency and live a very comfortable life.
It is incredibly promising to see Manning’s release commuted, but that still doesn’t change the fact Chelsea Manning was punished quite severely for leaking crimes committed by others, who to date have received no criminal sanction. It says something about justice in the United States that a soldier with no blood on her hands can be subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment, sentenced to 35 years in prison, and be released after already serving approximately seven years in total, all for leaking documents that have not been shown to endanger anyone. According to Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence official who investigated the effects of Wikileaks’ disclosures on behalf of the Department of Defense, the leaks have caused zero American deaths by enemy combatants.
Yet the American personnel who actively murder civilians can walk around as free men. As stated by Coretta Scott King:
“Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience.”
#WeGotThis https://t.co/ynFv6w32np
