The defense attorney of accused Army whistleblower Bradley Manning filed a 110-page motion on July 27 requesting that all charges against the soldier be dismissed. The motion was made on the basis of Article 13 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which bans “punishment or penalty other than arrest or confinement upon the charges pending against [a detainee].”
Manning’s lead attorney, David Coombs, wrote that “[t]he defense does not believe that there has ever been such an egregious case of unlawful pretrial punishment in Army history. This court needs to send a message that an unlawful order to keep a pretrial detainee in the equivalent of solitary confinement for almost nine months cannot—and will not—be tolerated."
Article 13 states that unnecessary pre-trial punishment is grounds for dismissal of charges.
Coombs also filed a motion of continuance based on the government’s withholding of 84 emails that reveal high-ranking Armed Forces complicity in ordering the mistreatment of Manning. The emails reveal that at least one three-star general specifically ordered Manning’s unbearable conditions, which some argue violate the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
As Coombs points out in his continuance filing, government officials withheld the emails until 9:15 p.m. on the night of July 26—less than three hours before the deadline to file an Article 13 motion—despite the court’s previously elaborated requirement that all documentation that is “obviously material to the preparation of the defense” be made available.
The military judge overseeing the hearings will almost certainly not dismiss the charges. Regardless of legal precedent, the Obama administration is determined to ruin Manning’s life for helping make public over 700,000 files that serve as evidence to the crimes of US imperialism.
The force with which the government is attacking Manning expresses its nervousness, as well as its resolve to prevent future leaks that may jeopardize attempts to maintain and expand its geo-political domination. Prosecutors are seemingly using any archaic, anti-democratic charge on the books in an attempt to destroy the young man.
The 34 counts being brought against Manning read as a laundry list of state despotism, from “treason”, “aiding the enemy” and “embezzlement and theft”, to “sedition”, and “espionage”. Government prosecutors are backing up these absurd claims with some of the most anti-democratic legal precedents of the past century, including the Espionage Act of 1917, the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the PATRIOT Act.
All the while, Manning remains in military custody. Though it has been over two years since he was arrested in May, 2010, the court has denied previous motions filed by the defense claiming that Manning’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial has been violated.
The Article 13 motion filed in July highlights the terrible conditions Manning has faced while in military custody.
The motion quotes UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez, who strongly criticized the US government’s treatment of Manning in an interview with the Guardian in March. “I conclude that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement,” Mendez said, “…constitutes at minimum cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in violation of Article 16 of the [UN] Convention Against Torture.”
Mendez was referring to the nearly one year that Manning spent in Quantico, Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011. During this period, Manning was kept in a six- by eight-foot cell for 23 to 24 hours a day.
Forced by guards to stay awake between 5:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. each day, Manning was also denied the right to exercise in his cell, use the cell walls as a backrest, or lie down at any point during the daytime.
For six months, Manning was given only 20 minutes of “sunshine call” per day, during which time he was told to walk in lace-less shoes, with shackles on his ankles and wrists and a guard’s hand on his back.
Manning was also forced to sleep naked and to stand naked in front of multiple guards at parade rest position. Guards sometimes took away Manning’s glasses and forced him to reply in the affirmative when they “checked on him” at five-minute intervals.
Manning’s overseers justified this cruel treatment as necessary to prevent Manning from inflicting harm upon himself or others. This argument carries no weight, as several military psychologists and hundreds of law professors have explained.
The Article 13 motion highlights the baseless nature of this claim by quoting interactions between psychiatrists and military officials.
When military psychiatrists recommended better treatment for Manning, an official reportedly replied, “We’ll do whatever we want to do. You [the psychiatrists] make your recommendation and I have to make a decision based on everything else.”
The psychiatrist responded, “Then don’t say it’s based on mental health. You can say it’s MAX [maximum] custody, but just don’t say that we’re somehow involved in this,” to which the senior officer said, “That’s what we’re going to do.”
Multiple military psychiatrists had been recommending that Manning be downgraded from POI [prevention of injury] status for months, according to the motion. Psychiatrists tried to explain to overseers that “[Manning] did not present a risk to himself and that the POI status was actually causing PFC Manning psychological harm.”
Furthermore, there is little legal framework to support Manning’s POI status, according to a letter written by 300 law professors in 2011.
“The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates,” the letter states. “Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.”
The trial has been wrought with possible grounds for dismissal of charges. In April of 2011, president Obama made comments that provided grounds for dismissal based on Article 37 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which protects against Unlawful Command Influence.
The president, revealing his disdain for the legal process, explained to a crowd that he did not need to wait for the verdict to pronounce guilt: “We’re a nation of laws,” the president said. “We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate… [Manning] broke the law.”
The comments are not only hypocritical coming from a president that has established his “right” to indefinitely detain and assassinate anyone, including American citizens, without a warrant. They may also serve as a basis for an argument for dismissal of charges against Manning.
According to Article 37 of UCMJ, “Unlawful Command Influence occurs when senior personnel, wittingly or unwittingly, have acted to influence court members, witnesses, or others participating in military justice cases. Such unlawful influence not only jeopardizes the validity of the judicial process, it undermines the morale of military members, their respect for the chain of command, and public confidence in the military.”
The court, however, has failed to dismiss charges based on Unlawful Command Influence.
Manning’s prosecution is being carried out in flagrant violation of basic constitutional rights and to legal precedent that does not serve the Obama administration. The information revealed in the Article 13 and continuance motions of July 26 serve as further proof that the minds of the decision makers have already been made up and that the trial is little more than an anti-democratic witch-hunt.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Showing posts with label Bradley Manning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bradley Manning. Show all posts
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
US blocks UN torture investigator from seeing Bradley Manning
The US government has blocked the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture from visiting Army Private Bradley Manning, who has been held in solitary confinement at Quantico Marine base since July.
Manning has yet to appear in court. The 23-year-old faces 34 charges of leaking classified material to the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks, including evidence of numerous US war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the charges is that of “aiding the enemy,” which carries a sentence of life in prison or execution.
In addition to living in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in a small, empty cell, Manning has been subjected to forced nudity, deprived of personal possessions including his glasses, denied the ability to exercise or sleep during the day in his cell, and is continually harassed and intimidated by military guards. The soldier issued a letter through his lawyer last month detailing his abuse.
The severity of his charges and the hellish conditions to which he is being subjected make clear that Manning is being held as a political prisoner by the Obama administration.
The UN envoy, Juan Mendez, said Monday, “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr. Manning.” The US “has not been receptive to a confidential meeting with Mr. Manning,” Mendez said in a statement. Military officials stated that the meeting could proceed only with a guard present, meaning that its content could be used against Manning in his court-martial trial.
Mendez issued a reprimand against the US—a measure only rarely undertaken by the UN, and usually in response to the conduct of small, dictatorial regimes—after being repeatedly stonewalled and denied entrance to the Virginia military base by the Obama administration since December.
Commenting to news agency Reuters, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan insisted that only lawyers were allowed unmonitored meetings with Quantico prisoners. Lapan added that there was “considerable misinformation” about Manning’s treatment, dismissing charges of cruelty and abuse. “There is no such thing at Quantico. … These facts are simply not true.”
Manning’s treatment has drawn condemnations from human rights groups and legal experts around the world. The British government, facing a mounting outcry over the mistreatment of the soldier, whose mother is Welsh, last week announced it would press US officials to moderate Manning’s conditions. (See, “British government presses US over treatment of Bradley Manning”)
On Sunday, the New York Review of Books published an open letter from prominent legal scholars to President Barack Obama describing the young soldier’s confinement as “degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.”
The open letter, written by law professors Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard and published under the headline “Private Manning’s Humiliation,” states that the conditions in which Manning is being held are a violation of both the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual treatment and the Fifth Amendment protection against punishment without trial.
“If continued,” the letter states, Manning’s treatment “may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, ‘the administration or application … of … procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.’…
“The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates,” the letter states. “Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.”
Nearly 300 lawyers, professors, and authors have signed the letter, including Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, who taught constitutional law to Obama and served as an advisor on legal access issues at the Justice Department until three months ago.
Tribe told the British Guardian that Manning’s detention was “not only shameful but unconstitutional … in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offenses, not to mention someone merely accused of such offenses.”
When asked during a press conference last month about Manning’s abuse, Obama asserted that he knew nothing directly about the case but that the soldier was being treated well. “With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.”
Obama also absurdly presented Manning’s strip-downs and other indignities as matters of personal protection. “I can’t go into details about some of their concerns,” he stated, “but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.”
After coming to power in part on the basis of pledges to reverse some of the worst abuses of democratic rights by the Bush administration, the Obama administration has overseen an expansion of these illegal policies, including the recent resumption of military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees. The White House has been particularly cut-throat in its pursuit of whistleblowers inside the government and military.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Manning has yet to appear in court. The 23-year-old faces 34 charges of leaking classified material to the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks, including evidence of numerous US war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the charges is that of “aiding the enemy,” which carries a sentence of life in prison or execution.
In addition to living in solitary confinement 23 hours a day in a small, empty cell, Manning has been subjected to forced nudity, deprived of personal possessions including his glasses, denied the ability to exercise or sleep during the day in his cell, and is continually harassed and intimidated by military guards. The soldier issued a letter through his lawyer last month detailing his abuse.
The severity of his charges and the hellish conditions to which he is being subjected make clear that Manning is being held as a political prisoner by the Obama administration.
The UN envoy, Juan Mendez, said Monday, “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr. Manning.” The US “has not been receptive to a confidential meeting with Mr. Manning,” Mendez said in a statement. Military officials stated that the meeting could proceed only with a guard present, meaning that its content could be used against Manning in his court-martial trial.
Mendez issued a reprimand against the US—a measure only rarely undertaken by the UN, and usually in response to the conduct of small, dictatorial regimes—after being repeatedly stonewalled and denied entrance to the Virginia military base by the Obama administration since December.
Commenting to news agency Reuters, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan insisted that only lawyers were allowed unmonitored meetings with Quantico prisoners. Lapan added that there was “considerable misinformation” about Manning’s treatment, dismissing charges of cruelty and abuse. “There is no such thing at Quantico. … These facts are simply not true.”
Manning’s treatment has drawn condemnations from human rights groups and legal experts around the world. The British government, facing a mounting outcry over the mistreatment of the soldier, whose mother is Welsh, last week announced it would press US officials to moderate Manning’s conditions. (See, “British government presses US over treatment of Bradley Manning”)
On Sunday, the New York Review of Books published an open letter from prominent legal scholars to President Barack Obama describing the young soldier’s confinement as “degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.”
The open letter, written by law professors Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard and published under the headline “Private Manning’s Humiliation,” states that the conditions in which Manning is being held are a violation of both the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual treatment and the Fifth Amendment protection against punishment without trial.
“If continued,” the letter states, Manning’s treatment “may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, ‘the administration or application … of … procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.’…
“The administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates,” the letter states. “Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.”
Nearly 300 lawyers, professors, and authors have signed the letter, including Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, who taught constitutional law to Obama and served as an advisor on legal access issues at the Justice Department until three months ago.
Tribe told the British Guardian that Manning’s detention was “not only shameful but unconstitutional … in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offenses, not to mention someone merely accused of such offenses.”
When asked during a press conference last month about Manning’s abuse, Obama asserted that he knew nothing directly about the case but that the soldier was being treated well. “With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are.”
Obama also absurdly presented Manning’s strip-downs and other indignities as matters of personal protection. “I can’t go into details about some of their concerns,” he stated, “but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.”
After coming to power in part on the basis of pledges to reverse some of the worst abuses of democratic rights by the Bush administration, the Obama administration has overseen an expansion of these illegal policies, including the recent resumption of military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees. The White House has been particularly cut-throat in its pursuit of whistleblowers inside the government and military.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Sunday, December 12, 2010
WikiLeaks Concern for South African Freedom of Information Activists
As WikiLeaks continues to release heaps of United States government secrets, freedom of information advocates in South Africa are concerned the controversy will spur the country’s parliament on to pass a controversial “Secrecy Bill” into law. “We’re concerned that the issues around WikiLeaks may drive the Ministry (of State Security) to suggest that even more information should be made classified,” says Alison Tilley, executive director of South Africa’s Open Democracy Advice Center.
ODAC’s website says it strives to “foster a culture of corporate and government accountability,” and seeks to achieve this “through realizing the (public’s) right to know.”
Earlier this year, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party introduced the Protection of Information Bill in parliament, and proposed the establishment of a “media tribunal” to “regulate” the country’s print media. The moves resulted in nationwide protests from human rights and freedom of expression groups, as well as the public, who remain concerned that they’re the first steps towards an ANC clampdown on media freedom and a new age of censorship in South Africa.
In recent years, the country’s media has exposed several scandals implicating top ANC officials – including President Jacob Zuma – and businesspeople close to the ruling party, in a variety of crimes - including massive corruption. The ANC denies it wants to curb media freedom, insisting its bill merely seeks to protect state secrets - the publication of which it insists could endanger South Africa’s security. But legal, constitutional and access to information experts say the bill’s definition of a “state secret” is so broad that it could allow the ANC to prevent the media from reporting on a wide range of issues embarrassing to the government – including corruption and even personal scandals.
According to the bill, the media would not be able to publish a story based on a “secret” document, even one that shows that a government minister has stolen taxpayers’ money. Instead, the person who leaked the document would be punished: the possession of such a document is a crime that could result in prison terms of up to five years – for the journalist and the whistle-blower who leaked the document.
Tilley says if the South African bill becomes law, a lot of people could end up in jail for possessing information such as that published by WikiLeaks. “Perhaps I went onto the website and downloaded information from the WikiLeaks website – that would make me liable; if I sent it to a colleague – that would make my colleague liable; if my colleague sent it to a newspaper – that would make the journalist liable. And presumably once the journalist publishes it and people buy and read the paper, it would make them liable too,” the lawyer explains. “The principle that we want to introduce in terms of the bill is that the only person who is liable is the person who’s actually professionally responsible for keeping that secret - that is, the member of the security agency, the person in national intelligence,” she maintains.
Thus, according to ODAC, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, should not be charged with any crime linked to the publishing of the US government secrets. Only his alleged source – US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning – should be held responsible for the leak. “Once the information is leaked, we think it’s completely wrong to try and criminalize everyone down the chain,” Tilley tells VOA. “That’s what the (South African) legislation does as it’s currently tabled.”
Experts who’ve analyzed the South African bill say the fact that it doesn’t contain a “public interest defense” holds extremely serious consequences. This means that whistle-blowers and reporters can’t argue in court that the “secret” information they’ve revealed is in the public interest – even if such information shows evidence of damage to the environment or theft of taxpayers’ money, for examples. “The Secrecy Bill says that in fact it doesn’t matter whether information’s in the public interest or not, it doesn’t matter what the (confidential) documents reveal - it could be anything up to genocide and you still would be criminally liable if you made the documents available in the public interest,” says Tilley.
Activists in South Africa argue that the South African government’s main motivation in drawing up the Bill is to prevent certain politician’s crimes from being exposed. Tilley says the instinct of security and intelligence agencies across the globe, including in South Africa and the US, is to try to keep increasing amounts of information secret. This is dangerous, she says … as Washington has discovered via WikiLeaks. “We think that would be a very wrong analysis of what WikiLeaks should mean to security agencies,” she stresses. “We think what it means is that you must narrow your focus, and concentrate only on that information which it is absolutely essential that you keep secret because lives are at risk. Then you secure that information as completely as you can.”
ODAC’s stance is that governments should keep as few secrets as possible, and strive for “openness and transparency.” “We think it improves decision-making; we think it allows people to participate in government more effectively; it allows them to advocate on issues more effectively; it allows better decisions around resources,” says Tilley. “The more transparency, the better the decisions that are made – both by people in power and by people who seek power.” She adds, “The instinct of security agencies to try to keep more and more information classified simply means that there are more people in the tent. And the more people there are in the tent, the more difficult it is to keep information secure, and the more likely it is that there’s going to be a security risk, there’s going to be a leak, and somebody’s going to let slip the information.”
Tilley and ODAC are not suggesting that governments don’t have a right to keep certain information hidden from the public. She says, “Governments do have secrets that they should legitimately keep. They keep those secrets in the interests of their citizens. They generally relate only to narrow security issues. If we have undercover policemen, for example, working in gangs to try and end gang violence or trying to end organized crime, we would accept that those identities need to be kept secret. This would benefit the public, in that criminal activity would be stopped.”
But Tilley says the “problem” is that once governments are entitled to keep secrets entirely at the state’s discretion “it seems to know no end” and is open to great abuse. “(In South Africa), we have documents that go in front of local government (municipalities) that are automatically marked ‘secret,’ simply because they’re being dealt with by an executive committee in local government. That’s clearly wrong,” she says.
Tilley says in South Africa, officials – using the excuse that certain information should be kept secret in the interests of the state – have tried to keep tender documents secret. “We’ve had people tell the Public Protector, she’s not entitled to documents because they’re classified so she can’t investigate corruption,” she says. “That’s precisely the misuse of classification which is problematic, and which we think will be probable – given the scope of the Secrecy Bill.”
South Africa’s Public Protector is appointed by the president to investigate complaints from the public against government agencies or officials. Tilley hopes South Africa’s government, as it continues to try to limit access to information, learns some lessons from the leaking of more than 250,000 US government secrets to WikiLeaks. “It shows that it’s very difficult to keep secrets – whatever you think about whether they should or shouldn’t be kept. The fact is that America, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a very extensive network of specialists trying to keep secrets secret, has found that it can’t be done.”
Source: Voice of America
ODAC’s website says it strives to “foster a culture of corporate and government accountability,” and seeks to achieve this “through realizing the (public’s) right to know.”
Earlier this year, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party introduced the Protection of Information Bill in parliament, and proposed the establishment of a “media tribunal” to “regulate” the country’s print media. The moves resulted in nationwide protests from human rights and freedom of expression groups, as well as the public, who remain concerned that they’re the first steps towards an ANC clampdown on media freedom and a new age of censorship in South Africa.
In recent years, the country’s media has exposed several scandals implicating top ANC officials – including President Jacob Zuma – and businesspeople close to the ruling party, in a variety of crimes - including massive corruption. The ANC denies it wants to curb media freedom, insisting its bill merely seeks to protect state secrets - the publication of which it insists could endanger South Africa’s security. But legal, constitutional and access to information experts say the bill’s definition of a “state secret” is so broad that it could allow the ANC to prevent the media from reporting on a wide range of issues embarrassing to the government – including corruption and even personal scandals.
According to the bill, the media would not be able to publish a story based on a “secret” document, even one that shows that a government minister has stolen taxpayers’ money. Instead, the person who leaked the document would be punished: the possession of such a document is a crime that could result in prison terms of up to five years – for the journalist and the whistle-blower who leaked the document.
Tilley says if the South African bill becomes law, a lot of people could end up in jail for possessing information such as that published by WikiLeaks. “Perhaps I went onto the website and downloaded information from the WikiLeaks website – that would make me liable; if I sent it to a colleague – that would make my colleague liable; if my colleague sent it to a newspaper – that would make the journalist liable. And presumably once the journalist publishes it and people buy and read the paper, it would make them liable too,” the lawyer explains. “The principle that we want to introduce in terms of the bill is that the only person who is liable is the person who’s actually professionally responsible for keeping that secret - that is, the member of the security agency, the person in national intelligence,” she maintains.
Thus, according to ODAC, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, should not be charged with any crime linked to the publishing of the US government secrets. Only his alleged source – US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning – should be held responsible for the leak. “Once the information is leaked, we think it’s completely wrong to try and criminalize everyone down the chain,” Tilley tells VOA. “That’s what the (South African) legislation does as it’s currently tabled.”
Experts who’ve analyzed the South African bill say the fact that it doesn’t contain a “public interest defense” holds extremely serious consequences. This means that whistle-blowers and reporters can’t argue in court that the “secret” information they’ve revealed is in the public interest – even if such information shows evidence of damage to the environment or theft of taxpayers’ money, for examples. “The Secrecy Bill says that in fact it doesn’t matter whether information’s in the public interest or not, it doesn’t matter what the (confidential) documents reveal - it could be anything up to genocide and you still would be criminally liable if you made the documents available in the public interest,” says Tilley.
Activists in South Africa argue that the South African government’s main motivation in drawing up the Bill is to prevent certain politician’s crimes from being exposed. Tilley says the instinct of security and intelligence agencies across the globe, including in South Africa and the US, is to try to keep increasing amounts of information secret. This is dangerous, she says … as Washington has discovered via WikiLeaks. “We think that would be a very wrong analysis of what WikiLeaks should mean to security agencies,” she stresses. “We think what it means is that you must narrow your focus, and concentrate only on that information which it is absolutely essential that you keep secret because lives are at risk. Then you secure that information as completely as you can.”
ODAC’s stance is that governments should keep as few secrets as possible, and strive for “openness and transparency.” “We think it improves decision-making; we think it allows people to participate in government more effectively; it allows them to advocate on issues more effectively; it allows better decisions around resources,” says Tilley. “The more transparency, the better the decisions that are made – both by people in power and by people who seek power.” She adds, “The instinct of security agencies to try to keep more and more information classified simply means that there are more people in the tent. And the more people there are in the tent, the more difficult it is to keep information secure, and the more likely it is that there’s going to be a security risk, there’s going to be a leak, and somebody’s going to let slip the information.”
Tilley and ODAC are not suggesting that governments don’t have a right to keep certain information hidden from the public. She says, “Governments do have secrets that they should legitimately keep. They keep those secrets in the interests of their citizens. They generally relate only to narrow security issues. If we have undercover policemen, for example, working in gangs to try and end gang violence or trying to end organized crime, we would accept that those identities need to be kept secret. This would benefit the public, in that criminal activity would be stopped.”
But Tilley says the “problem” is that once governments are entitled to keep secrets entirely at the state’s discretion “it seems to know no end” and is open to great abuse. “(In South Africa), we have documents that go in front of local government (municipalities) that are automatically marked ‘secret,’ simply because they’re being dealt with by an executive committee in local government. That’s clearly wrong,” she says.
Tilley says in South Africa, officials – using the excuse that certain information should be kept secret in the interests of the state – have tried to keep tender documents secret. “We’ve had people tell the Public Protector, she’s not entitled to documents because they’re classified so she can’t investigate corruption,” she says. “That’s precisely the misuse of classification which is problematic, and which we think will be probable – given the scope of the Secrecy Bill.”
South Africa’s Public Protector is appointed by the president to investigate complaints from the public against government agencies or officials. Tilley hopes South Africa’s government, as it continues to try to limit access to information, learns some lessons from the leaking of more than 250,000 US government secrets to WikiLeaks. “It shows that it’s very difficult to keep secrets – whatever you think about whether they should or shouldn’t be kept. The fact is that America, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with a very extensive network of specialists trying to keep secrets secret, has found that it can’t be done.”
Source: Voice of America
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Assange said to be hiding in Britain
An international manhunt is under way for WikiLeaks supremo Julian Assange, who is believed to be hiding in Britain. Interpol issued a “red notice” for the internet whistleblower who is wanted for questioning by police in Sweden after two women accused him of rape and sexual molestation. The 39-year-old Australian was added to the worldwide wanted list amid growing fury in Washington at the mass release of more than 250 000 classified US communiques.
Mark Stephens, Assange’s British-based lawyer, has questioned the timing of Interpol’s warrant, saying his client was being persecuted. But On Wednesday Scotland Yard launched a probe into the fugitive’s whereabouts after it was claimed he was holed up in a secret location in Britain. If he is held in the UK, he could face proceedings to extradite him to Sweden.
Assange lives a rootless life, has hardly any possessions and uses his Australian passport to stay with friends in various countries. Prosecutors in Sweden want to question Assange over alleged attacks on two women during a visit to Stockholm to give a lecture to the Social Democratic Party in August. He is accused of attacking one woman in Stockholm and then sexually assaulting another woman in the town of Enkoping, about 60km from the capital, three days later.
Stephens said his client had repeatedly offered to meet Swedish investigators either at the Swedish embassy in London or a UK police station. “The allegations against him are false and without basis,” he added. “In 28 years of practice I have never come across a prosecutor, whether in the third world or even in a totalitarian regime, where there has been such casual disregard by a prosecutor for their obligations. “Given that Sweden is a civilised country I am reluctantly forced to conclude that this is a persecution and not a prosecution.” He highlighted the fact that the Interpol alert was issued just two days after the WikiLeaks first release of US diplomatic cables.
An adviser to Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper has suggested Assange could be assassinated. Professor Tom Flanagan said Barack Obama should “put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something” to rid the world of the Australian. Although he later rowed back from the remarks, it shows the growing anger in North America. Former US presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Bradley Manning, the US army private thought to be behind the leak, should be executed. Manning is in military detention.
In other news, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday hit out at a “slanderous” leaked cable that described him as Batman and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as the comic book hero’s sidekick Robin. Putin - widely believed to be the real power broker in the Kremlin - took exception to America’s portrayal of him as being the one in the political tandem who called the shots. Speaking to CNN host Larry King last night, Putin said the caped crusader portrayal was “aimed to slander one of us”. It is the most high-profile condemnation of the leaks. The combative Russian leader hit back after one secret US document released by Wikileaks described him as an “alpha-dog” and another said Russia was a “virtual mafia state”. He said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was “deeply misled” in saying, according to the cables, that “Russian democracy has disappeared”.
Source: IoL
Mark Stephens, Assange’s British-based lawyer, has questioned the timing of Interpol’s warrant, saying his client was being persecuted. But On Wednesday Scotland Yard launched a probe into the fugitive’s whereabouts after it was claimed he was holed up in a secret location in Britain. If he is held in the UK, he could face proceedings to extradite him to Sweden.
Assange lives a rootless life, has hardly any possessions and uses his Australian passport to stay with friends in various countries. Prosecutors in Sweden want to question Assange over alleged attacks on two women during a visit to Stockholm to give a lecture to the Social Democratic Party in August. He is accused of attacking one woman in Stockholm and then sexually assaulting another woman in the town of Enkoping, about 60km from the capital, three days later.
Stephens said his client had repeatedly offered to meet Swedish investigators either at the Swedish embassy in London or a UK police station. “The allegations against him are false and without basis,” he added. “In 28 years of practice I have never come across a prosecutor, whether in the third world or even in a totalitarian regime, where there has been such casual disregard by a prosecutor for their obligations. “Given that Sweden is a civilised country I am reluctantly forced to conclude that this is a persecution and not a prosecution.” He highlighted the fact that the Interpol alert was issued just two days after the WikiLeaks first release of US diplomatic cables.
An adviser to Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper has suggested Assange could be assassinated. Professor Tom Flanagan said Barack Obama should “put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something” to rid the world of the Australian. Although he later rowed back from the remarks, it shows the growing anger in North America. Former US presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Bradley Manning, the US army private thought to be behind the leak, should be executed. Manning is in military detention.
In other news, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday hit out at a “slanderous” leaked cable that described him as Batman and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as the comic book hero’s sidekick Robin. Putin - widely believed to be the real power broker in the Kremlin - took exception to America’s portrayal of him as being the one in the political tandem who called the shots. Speaking to CNN host Larry King last night, Putin said the caped crusader portrayal was “aimed to slander one of us”. It is the most high-profile condemnation of the leaks. The combative Russian leader hit back after one secret US document released by Wikileaks described him as an “alpha-dog” and another said Russia was a “virtual mafia state”. He said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was “deeply misled” in saying, according to the cables, that “Russian democracy has disappeared”.
Source: IoL
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