Judge refuses to drop charges in Manning case - Americas - Al Jazeera English

Judge refuses to drop charges in Manning case - Americas - Al Jazeera English

A military judge has denied a motion to drop some of the charges against WikiLeaks suspect Private Bradley Manning, and said his trial would is likely to be delayed until November.
The judge, Denise Lind, on Friday rejected defence motions to dismiss 10 of 22 charges against Manning for allegedly spilling a trove of US intelligence secrets to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website.
The judge rejected the claim that eight charges of unauthorised possession and disclosure of classified information were "unconstitutionally vague," noting that the Supreme Court had rejected similar claims and had concluded there was no uncertainty in the law. "The court finds there's no uncertainty in the statute," she said.
On the third and final day of preliminary hearings, Lind also denied the defence's bid to drop two additional charges that Manning exceeded his authorisation to use the US Defence Department intranet.
She did, though, ask the government to provide more details on the charges.
The ruling "raises the burden on the government to prove more things," a military official told the AP news agency. "The government could dismiss [the two charges] or change them to make them survive."

The MIlitary Budget versus NASA's Budget

You always hear how we "wasted" all that money on going into Space. Here's the facts:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist and science communicator. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Since 2006 he has hosted the educational science television show NOVA scienceNOW on PBS, and has been a frequent guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Jeopardy!. It was announced on August 5, 2011, that Tyson will be hosting a new sequel to Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television series.

Memorial Day quiz: Test yourself - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

Memorial Day quiz: Test yourself - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post

Here’s a quiz to test yourself on how much you know about Memorial Day and the wars in which U.S. soldiers have fought and died.
Answers, with a bit of history, follow the questions.

Scouts light more than 17,000 candles at the Fredericksburg National Cemetery in Virginia. (Peter Cihelka/AP) 

  1. Memorial Day was a response to the loss of American lives in which war?

a) Revolutionary War

b) Civil War

c) World War I

d) World War II

See the rest of the quiz at the link above:

Memorial Mile by Gainesville Veterans for Peace - Memorial Day 2012 - YouTube

Memorial Mile by Gainesville Veterans for Peace - Memorial Day 2012 - YouTube
Thanks to Geoff from Occupy for this video!

An Inspiring Story of How a Disabled Veteran Learned to Run Again

An Inspiring Story of How a Disabled Veteran Learned to Run Again

Trying to lose weight?  Have a barrier to overcome that seems insurmountable?  Watch this!

Why are we still in 'Vietghanistan?' - CNN.com

Why are we still in 'Vietghanistan?' - CNN.com
Scot has an article on the CNN Opinion pages addressing the same issue of "Body Parts" that he spoke so eloquently on their televised forum 

 Scott Camil   Da Loc   Vietnam1967

Gainesville Celebrates Mayday in style!

Occupy Gainesville Florida 
Gainesville had a mellow Occupy Mayday event cosponsored by the Labor Council with Free eats from Food not Bombs, the famous Gainesville Radical Cheerleaders and tabling by groups such as Move to Amend.  A number of VFP members were there as well as you will see from the slide show below:

Intelligence Rupture Over Iran: Israeli Apparat Falling Apart | Veterans Today

Intelligence Rupture Over Iran: Israeli Apparat Falling Apart | Veterans Today: A rift the size of a potential coup is taking shape between the Israeli government and the military-intelligence men over Iran, a fact which threatens the ruling Israeli political apparat on the one hand and exonerates Iran of all years-long groundless allegations on the other.

Pictures often speak louder than words but you might want to read the details in the article about the Military intelligence chiefs in Israel who are challenging the propaganda on Iran with, well, the facts!

 

Bradley Manning in jail for 700 days - Government is withholding evidence - Is this a fair trial?

The Shroud of Secrecy in Bradley Manning’s Legal Proceedings 

Fire Dog Lake is Blogging the pretrial maneuverings in the Bradley Manning case.  They report a serious and illegal lack of transparency by the prosecution.  The judge has acknowledge this process by forcing the government to turn over risk assessments related to the release of cables to Wikileaks to the defense.

 . Judge Denise Lind ruled the government has to produce damage assessments yesterday that the defense had been seeking for months. The State Department is challenging this ruling by the judge, but it appears reports from the WikiLeaks Task Force (setup under then-CIA director Leon Panetta), the Information Review Task Force (set up under then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates) and the State Department will be given to the defense. The judge also ruled the government must do a search of hard drives in their possession from FOB Hammer, where Manning was based, and inform the defense of whether any of the drives have programs that Manning is charged with downloading without authorization.

However the press is being denied access to filings even though they have been read aloud in court.

  the judge denied requests for press access to court filings, which the press has in military proceedings for Guantanamo prisoners but does not have in the case of Bradley Manning. She contended the proceedings had “remained open thus far.”... The government is scheming to conceal the full extent of the legal fun and games that the prosecution has played in the proceedings thus far.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has entered the fray attempting to testify but being denied the right by the judge.

President Emeritus of CCR, Michael Ratner, wrote yesterday that the refusal to grant the press access to court filings is a “clear violation of the law, but it will likely take burdensome litigation to rectify this lack of transparency. The US supreme court has insisted that criminal trials must be public, and the fourth circuit, where this court martial is occurring, has ruled that the first amendment right of access to criminal trials includes the right to the documents in such trials.”

THe government has reacted to the demands for transparency with accusations against Manning not included in their charges.  Kevin Gosztola from Firedoglake concludes:

So, now, not only is Manning accused of “aiding the enemy,” which is al Qaeda and any terrorist groups related, even though there is no mention of his intent in the charge against him, but he is also considered an espionage actor who is using the legal proceedings to unveil the inner workings of government for nefarious purposes.
This is what the lack of transparency does to people who work for and on behalf of the government. They are so used to being able to use their power to conceal what they do that when someone succeeds in using the system to get just a little peek at what goes on behind closed doors people begin to throw out hysterical charges of evildoing.
Manning, like all soldiers accused of crimes, is entitled to a fair trial. There are still months of legal proceedings to go before the trial even commences. All of this secrecy, which invites challenges from the defense, just means Manning stays in pre-trial confinement for one hundred or more days. He already has been held in prison for 700 days.

OP-ED: Member of Veterans for Peace Alters Afghanistan Discussion on CNN | Huntington News

OP-ED: Member of Veterans for Peace Alters Afghanistan Discussion on CNN | Huntington News


Our own Chapter 14 Coordinator Scott Camil Appeared on CNN this week in a discussion about the current war scandal in Afghanistan in which photos of US soldiers posing with body parts have been released. Scott distinguished himself by speaking the truth about War in a way rarely heard on television. When asked about the photos he replied "you're nit picking when you're talking about things like people posing with bodies. The real question should be why are we at war in the first place? Why are we killing so many people in the first place? The concern over posing with someone that's dead, it seems to me the fact that that person is dead and that we're killing people is more important than what happens after they're dead." Camil continued: "What I understand is what it's like to be in a war zone and I understand the behavior in a war zone. And I would say that, first of all, that war is really an institution made up of criminal behavior. When we as civilians want to solve our problems, we're not allowed to murder people and burn their houses down. I don't see why war is an acceptable means of conflict resolution. And furthermore, the majority of people that die are innocent civilians." His comments changed the course of discussion with one of the panel members agreeing while others tried to maintain the status quo discussion which another guest described as offering support for the soldiers do they would understand the World is watching, another words, keep their body parts photos and other inconvenient facts about War to themselves.

Diego Garcia US Military Base: Indian Ocean - one of a thousand US bases around the world.

Diego Garcia Military Base: 
 We start our descriptions of US Military bases world wide with Diego Garcia, a Naval facility in the Indian Ocean in an area which is still a part of the British Empire, described as a British Overseas Territory.  The British enabled the establishment of the American Base on Diego Garcia,  the larges island in the Archipelago, in 1971 by forcibly deporting the approximately 2000 residents who had been living there since the time of the American Revolution.  These former residents are still suing to get their home back. 

According to David Vine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University and author of “Island of Shame: the Secret History of the U.S. Military on Diego Garcia(Princeton University Press).” in Global Researcher

Long off limits to reporters, the Red Cross, and all other international observers and far more secretive than Guantanamo Bay, many long suspected the island was a clandestine CIA "black site" for high-profile detainees, Vine wrote in a related article. Journalist Stephen Grey's 2006 book “Ghost Plane” documented the presence on the island of a CIA-chartered plane used for rendition flights. On two occasions former U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey publicly named Diego Garcia as a detention facility. And a Council of Europe report named the atoll, along with those in Poland and Romania, as a secret prison.

The island became “a major launch pad” for the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, Vine said. In addition to its capacious harbor, the island readily supports some of the largest U.S. warplanes, including Air Force B-52s, B-1Bs and B-2s. Two years ago, the Pentagon awarded a $32 million contract to add a submarine base to the island’s arsenal.

Diego Garcia had been a British possession until 1966, when London allowed the U.S. to use it as a military base in exchange for cancelling a $14-million British debt for a military hardware purchase. Some idea of the size of the base may be conveyed by the fact it is said by the Pentagon to contain 654 buildings.

Recently released documents on British colonial history detail what was kept from the public as the base was developed:

The aim behind the decision to control the islands, noted a Foreign Office official in a document dated September 1966 and marked "Secret and Guard", was to build "defence facilities … without hindrance or political agitation".
In 1970, the Foreign Office told its officials at the UN to describe the islanders as "contract labourers" engaged to work on coconut plantations. "The merit of this line," it noted, "is that it does not give away the existence of the Ilois [the indigenous islanders] but is at the same time strictly factual."

In addition Wiki-leaks cables revealed further maneuverings to keep the islands free of indigenous populations so that the US and Britain can maneuver there as they please:

 In April 2010, the UK established a marine nature reserve around the Chagos Islands. A cable subsequently released by Wiki-leaks reported exchanges between a US political counsellor in London, Richard Mills, and a Foreign Office official, Colin Roberts. According to the leaked cable, Roberts "asserted that establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago's former residents".

A description from Wikipedia of the Base and its uses to the US Empire:
  During the Cold War era, the United States was keen to establish a military base in the Indian Ocean to counter Soviet influence in the region and protect the sea-lanes for oil transportation from the Middle East. The US saw the island as a strategically important one.^[104] The value has been proved many times, with the island providing a "fixed aircraft carrier" for the US during the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.  The US Navy operates a large naval ship and submarine support base, military air base, communications and space tracking facilities, and an anchorage for pre-positioned military supplies for regional operations aboard Military Sealift Command ships in the lagoon.The Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia provides Base Operating Services to tenant commands located on the island. The command's mission is "To provide logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf AORs in support of national policy objectives."

 The atoll shelters the ships of the US Marine Pre-positioning Squadron Two. These ships carry equipment and supplies to support a major armed force with tanks, armoured personnel carriers, munitions, fuel, spare parts and even a mobile field hospital. This equipment was used during the Persian Gulf War, when the squadron transported equipment to Saudi Arabia.

There are facilities for Aircraft up to and including the size of the Space Shuttle and extensive communications facilities including satellite communications and one of five GPS stations operated by the US Military. And remember this is all paid for by our tax dollars while our schools decay, health care is out of reach for 50 million Americans and the Middle Class dwindles.

“The Warrior Class”: The Blackwater Videos—Winter Soldier revisited

“The Warrior Class”: The Blackwater Videos—By Harper's Magazine (Harper's Magazine):
Note the whole article requires a subscription but the videos are  available at the above link.

The April 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine includes “The Warrior Class,” a feature by Charles Glass on the rise of private-security contractors since 9/11. The conclusion to the piece describes a series of videos shown to Glass by a source who had worked for the private-security company Blackwater (now Academi, formerly also Xe Services) in Iraq. Clips and photos from the videos are shown below, introduced by Glass’s descriptions:

See the link above.

Iraq Slams Saudis, Qataris for Plans to Arm Syrian Rebels |Military Response is again Our only Choice?

Iraq Slams Saudis, Qataris for Plans to Arm Syrian Rebels | Informed Comment

 Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal gave an impassioned speech in which he said it was “a duty” to provide the Syrian opposition with weapons, and he reaffirmed that necessity of getting arms to the revolutionaries of Syria. In the meantime, he demanded an immediate ceasefire by the regime, which he said has by its severe repression has committed what can only be crimes against humanity. 

So again our response to a crisis is use of force. And in steps Iraq:

 In contrast, Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki (Iraq also attended the summit) strongly supported the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and severely condemned the plan to give arms to the rebels.

“”We reject any arming (of Syrian rebels) and the process to overthrow the (Assad) regime, because this will leave a greater crisis in the region . . . The stance of these two states [Qatar and Saudi Arabia] is very strange… They are calling for sending arms instead of working on putting out the fire, and they will hear our voice, that we are against arming and against foreign interference . . . We are against the interference of some countries in Syria’s internal affairs, and those countries that are interfering in Syria’s internal affairs will interfere in the internal affairs of any country… It has been one year and the regime did not fall, and it will not fall, and why should it fall?

  Iraq’s fears are not without reason. Saud al-Faisal’s idea of arming the rebels recalls the similar plan to arm the Afghan opposition, in in the 1980s, which led to a Soviet withdrawal but also created a long-term security nightmare in the form of al-Qaeda.

Finally the issues in Syria are really all about Iran.

Veterans at Occupy Sacramento Speak Out in November - Gainesville Vets follow the Speak Out Tradition this Week

Veterans at Occupy Sacramento Speak Out  in November - 

Last November VFP member and pastor Jerry Pederson spoke out against war based on his personal experience at the end of WWII:

Sacramento area veterans, including many appearing in uniform or military garb with ribbons and medals, spoke out against wars that they said only benefit the 1 percent during a news conference held by Occupy Sacramento at Cesar Chavez Park on Veterans Day, 2011.
Jerry Pedersen, a Lutheran minister, was only 17 when he was drafted to serve in the US. Army in the Pacific during World War II. He was a member of the honor guard that served at the surrender of the Japanese army aboard USS Missouri on September 2, 1945.
“I was standing only 30 feet away from where the table where General Douglas MacArthur and officials of the allies and Japanese government met,” said Pederson. “McCarthur said to the crowd, ‘We preserve in peace what we won in war.’”
“Out of my experience that day, I made my committment to work for peace – and decided that the best way to do that was as a pastor,” he said. “As a member of Veterans for Peace, I am working for our veterans to be treated honorably when they come home from war – and for the government to make a real commitment to slow down the war and violence business.”

Gainesville Veterans Speak Out this Wednesday Evening

Regardless of your stand on war and peace all Gainesville area veterans are invited to speak out about their own experiences and points of view this Wednesday at Santa Fe Community College.  The public is invited to attend and learn from our veterans.

WHEN:  Wednesday:  March 28, 6:30-9:00 pm.

WHERE:  Santa Fe College, Northwest Gainesville Campus, Room WA-104, Bldg WA

         [bldg WA is just west of bldg W].

WHO: SFC student groups, in conjunction with Community Coalition Against War & Terrorism and Veterans for Peace.

WHAT: All veterans, of all opinions, are invited to tell their stories, speak their minds, and answer questions from the public.

Contact: Pierce Butler: pbutler@igc.org, 352-377-4601

Pressure Mounts for Transparency in Manning Court-Martial

Courthouse News Service
 The pressure to honor Bradley Manning's civil rights continues as trial lawyers and reporters are left in the dark on the initial proceedings.

   "As the Manning court-martial purports to be a public trial, we cannot understand why critical aspects of the proceedings are being withheld from public view," the Center for Constitutional Rights' Michael Ratner wrote in a three-page letter released Thursday."

National Security again cited as an excuse for denying a citizen civil rights guaranteed in the Constitution.

  Last December, Manning stepped into a court in Fort Meade, Md., for the first time in an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury.
     The government has not released motions, rulings and transcripts of those and subsequent proceedings.
     In a March 12 letter to Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson, more than 40 news organizations wrote that the government showed greater transparency with the cases of Guantanamo detainees than with that of Manning.
     "As such, the coalition respectfully urges the government to implement similar reforms in its regulations governing court-martial proceedings generally and that of Manning specifically to ensure that military personnel tried stateside have the same rights to a public trial as those afforded accused terrorists," the letter states.
     Ratner, on behalf of Assange and Wikileaks, joined that effort on Thursday, in a letter to the presiding military judge, Col. Denise Lind, which he copied to the Pentagon."

government claims of the necessity of secrecy has shrouded the court proceedings in secrecy and denied the importance of the rules by which a democracy must live.

 The letter quoted 6th Circuit Judge Damon Keith's grim warning, "Democracies die behind closed doors," from an opinion in the case of Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, which forced immigration courts to open proceedings of defendants with suspected ties to the Sept. 11 attacks.
     Ratner said that it is difficult for even lawyers to follow the Manning court-martial without access to these records.
     "For example, undersigned counsel attended the motions hearing on March 15, 2012, and determined that it was not possible to understand fully or adequately the issues being litigated because the motions and response thereto were not available," he wrote.

Why does US need over 1000 military bases around the world?

Why does US need over 1000 military bases around the world? - RT 110214 - YouTube
Introducing a new series: US Foreign Military Base of the Month.  I would love some help with deciding which of the 1000 or so US military bases to highlight each month.  If you have info on a base or would like to hear about a particular base let me know.

Attorney asks for dismissal in WikiLeaks case - Government refusesd to release documents for trial.

Attorney asks for dismissal in WikiLeaks case - seattlepi.com: FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — An attorney for an Army private charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of pages of classified information asked a military judge Thursday to dismiss the charges against his client, arguing the government bungled the turning over of documents in the case.  The request came during a hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning at a military courtroom at Fort Meade, Md., near Baltimore.

The Militarization of Foreign Policy | Are we ready to negotiate with Iran or Anyone.?

The Militarization of Foreign Policy | We Meant Well - Peter Van Buren
So if we don't bomb Iran are we prepared to negotiate?  Here is a story from Iraq on how our Foreign Policy was carried out.  You would laugh at how poorly we did our "nation building"  if it wasn't a tragedy for so many innocent people.
Peter Van Buren, an envoy in Iraq:

What you do get for your money is the militarization of foreign policy. During my year in Iraq as a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Leader I watched with some sadness as the majority of our engagement with Iraqis in the field was conducted by young Army captains. I was the lone Foreign Service Officer assigned to a brigade of some 3000 soldiers

If you wonder why so few envoys look at the facts about funding.

There really are more military band members than State Department Foreign Service Officers. The whole of the Foreign Service is smaller than the complement aboard one aircraft carrier. Despite the role that foreign affairs has always played in America’s drunken intercourse abroad, the State Department remains a very small part of the pageant. The Transportation Security Administration has about 58,000 employees; the State Department has about 22,000. The Department of Defense (DOD) has nearly 450,000 employees stationed overseas, with 2.5 million more in the US.

At the same time, Congress continues to hack away at State’s budget. The most recent round of bloodletting saw State lose some $8 billion while DOD gained another $5 billion. The found fiver at DOD will hardly be noticed in their overall budget of $671 billion. The $8 billion loss from State’s total of $47 billion will further cripple the organization. The pattern is familiar and has dogged State-DOD throughout the war of terror years.

I had heard this quote about the military band  from a young State Department envoy I know and on research found it was actually something Condolezza Rice said. And she was at least partly correct as you can see from the numbers above we don't put much money where our negotiating mouth is. Here are some more examples form Iraq on how skewed our approach to foreign policy is towards the military side.

The bottom line was that for most Iraqis not living and working in the Green Zone, the only Americans they saw wore green and carried weapons.

The militarization issue was always visible at the smallest units of diplomacy in Iraq, the PRTs. The Department of State struggled to field adequate numbers of qualified employees from among its own ranks, forcing the creation of an army of contractors, called 3161s after the name of the legislation in 5 USC 3161 that created their hiring program. The need for 3161s to live on a military base skewed hiring toward self-selecting former military, nearly self-defeating the idea of providing a civilian side to reconstruction.

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction in its review of the PRTs’ first year of operation found an Army veterinarian developing agriculture programs, an Air Force aviation maintenance manager as a PRT co-leader, and advisers to Iraqi provincial governors who included a former Navy submariner, a Marine ultrasound technician, and an Army drill sergeant. My own PRT staff fit a similar profile, with the exception of my agricultural adviser, a pig farmer from Missouri. He always felt a bit out of place in Iraq when no one wanted to discuss hogs with him

.

A sad story here that does not give you confidence that we are at all prepared to negotiate. The author also talked about the difficulties for the young Army Captains who were essentially the bulk of our "envoys" to Iraq who had to put down their guns and try to do diplomacy with essentially no training and a huge disadvantage in that they were negotiating with people who we had recently been shooting and whose relatives we often had killed.

There is also a critique of State and its ability to carry through Nation Building. Of course I and most of VFP would say that this Nation Building was nothing but a front to provide profits for private corporations that benefited from the unregulated and chaotic battle field conditions and the dismantling of state owned services in the conversion to the more profitable Free Market economy.  we also might say that Nation Building was irrelevant and probably impossible since Iraq will have to rebuild itself and cannot derive any benefits from the colonial approach of the US doing it for them although we definitely owe them reparations money which will probably never be paid. This is especially true since we started and seem to have remained totally ignorant and uninterested in Iraqi cultural traditions.  This last fact speaks to the flawed nature of our whole militarized foreign policy which not only puts the rest of the World at risk but makes Amreican citizens vulnerable to the blow-back it creates.

A Brave Fellow Protestor for Peace Accepts the Iranian People's Oscar

The Iranian People's Oscar - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast: Alyssa Rosenberg calls it "by far the classiest, most meaningful speech of the evening":

One of the best things art can do is expose who we are, in all our beauty and ugliness, and remind us of what we’re capable of being. And in this case, it was also a brave act. Farhadi’s been wearing a necktie most of this awards season in a subtle rebuke to the Iranian regime’s suggestion that it’s a decadent Western accessory, and tonight, some commentators suggest that his speech could prevent him from returning to Iran or make life uncomfortable for him when he got back there. That’s a real risk for an award that carries less benefit than a Best Actor or Best Director statuette. Farhadi should be an example to politically engaged artists—and to politicians—everywhere.

There are just a few problems With Bombing Iran

There are just a few problems | Firedoglake: Former Israeli intelligence chief Meir Dagan, in his first U.S. television interview, says he believes that the Iran regime is rational and that now is not the time to attack Iran.

“The regime in Iran is a very rational one,” the former top Israeli spymaster tells CBS’ Leslie Stahl, according to excerpts of the interview released by 60 Minutes.