RT TV Covers US DOJ Indictment of Edward Snowden

Head of U.S. House Homeland Security Committee Wants Glenn Greenwald in the Slammer

 On CNN today, Greenwald responded:

One of the things that is fascinating me most, as this latest revelation on our national security state's dysfunctional aspects unfolds, is how little focus is turning onto the threat of private enterprise taking over more and more of the vital functions of government.  What's next?  Having some new company take over the Trident submarine fleet?

Chris Hedges and Geoffrey Stone Debate Edward Snowden on Democracy Now

Tuesday Edward Snowden Wrapup

Abby Martin talks to firedoglake's Kevin Gostzola:

 Snowden's girlfriend:

 Chris Hayes talks to Sen. Bernie Sanders:

 Kathleen Mcclellan confronts The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin on Snowden:

Glenn Greenwald Interviews Edward Snowden in Hong Kong

Summer Is Starting to Look Like Summer

A perennial blooming in Judy's rock garden

During the hot spell last week, vegetation was just starting to get going after the late departure of very cold weather and snow.  We planted our vegetable garden about four days later than usual. The transplants had the advantage of four days of real hot weather to warm the soil around them.  I actually felt warm feet, as I planted peas, green beans and potatoes barefooted.

Each year, I try an experiment or two or three in the garden.  This year, the experiments are in growing new root vegetables, and in a new approach to one I have grown before.  So, I'm growing rutabagas, parsnips and burdock.  This is the first time I've tried parsnips, which need a long growing season.

Image of harvested burdock in Japan

I've grown burdock twice before.  Rather than planting it in the ground this year, I've transplanted my starters into something I'm calling a "burdock box."  A root vegetable, burdock in my garden in the past grew so deep, it would break off the bottom half of each root, even if I was very careful and used a calm shovel.  Hopefully, the box will fix this.  I'll just unscrew the plywood end pieces when it is time to harvest, and will have four feet of the burdock already above the ground.

Here's my burdock box:

Here's a lettuce head that is growing so rapidly, we'll be eating it next week:

Here is a huge spearmint plant, that wintered over in the house.  I later transplanted it into the soil:

Here's another of Judy's wildflowers, happy in the sunshine:

And here are our resident swans, with the female warming her nesting mound:

John Kerry Addresses the American Jewish Community Global Forum on Middle East Peace Prospects

Secretary of State John Kerry addressed the annual American Jewish Community Global Forum on Monday, June 3rd.  He focused on the limited time he believes the Palestinians and Israelis have to come up with a workable "two-state solution."

So I want to ask you this: Whenever you think about this challenge and how hard it is, think about what will happen if it doesn’t work. We will find ourselves in a negative spiral of responses and counter-responses that could literally slam the door on a two-state solution, having already agreed, I think, that there isn’t a one-state one. And the insidious campaign to de-legitimize Israel will only gain steam. Israel will be left to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state...

Personally, I believe the two-state solution is dead, and was probably never viable.  The "negative spiral" he cites is an ongoing death spiral of what might have been Democratic Israel, with equal rights for all its citizens.

The ultra-Orthodox are growing in numbers, population percentage and political power.  They do not want a two-state solution.  They want to expel the Palestinian Christians and Muslims, either across the Jordan into other countries, or onto increasingly smaller allotments, similar to the former South African Bantustans, or the kinds of Indian reservations one finds in upstate New York, or along the California coast.  So that they can have their ethnically cleansed, and - in their minds - pure Judea and Samaria.

Kerry paints the growing isolation of Israel and its few supporters glumly, without acknowledging why this is happening [emphasis added]:

So before anyone gives up on this hope, we have to ask whether we are prepared to live with permanent conflict, with the possibility of widespread civil disobedience, with the possibility of a civil rights movement that grows in the West Bank, with the possibility of another intifada always looming around the corner. If the parties don’t agree to come back to the table, the Palestinians have already said that they will go to the UN and seek to join more UN organizations, where, despite the best efforts of the United States, they will probably get more votes in their favor than they got last time. And last time, we only got nine votes against. And the Palestinians have also threatened to take their case to the International Criminal Court.

Why is "the possibility of a civil rights movement that grows in the West Bank" a bad thing, in the face of the continuing land confiscations, ghettoization, repression and random violence that Palestinians face daily?

Overall, it is an excellent speech.  However, it offers nothing imaginative regarding the dangerous impasse with Iran.  it is more than a bit too obsequious.  But it is no more of that than any typical speech about Israel by any leading American politician.



Discussion of the speech:

Mondoweiss

JTA

The Forward

Text of the speech

"I Am Bradley Manning" Video Teaser Released

for more information

Bradley Manning Trial - Day Two

Demonstrators outside of Ft. Meade on Monday

Early in Tuesday's legal proceedings against Bradley Manning at Ft. Meade, Maryland, the man who turned Manning in to the U.S. government, wired.com's Adrian Lamo, testified.  He will not be back.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation has raised the funds necessary (I contributed) to hire a court stenographer to provide daily transcripts of the proceedings.  The U.S. Army and Federal government are also transcribing the trial, but have stated their transcripts will not be made available to the public or press.  Here is a link to the transcript of yesterday's trial.

Kevin Gosztola is continuing his live blog updates from the trial at firedoglake.

At facebook yesterday, where I posted a link to my PA article on day one, my good friend Matt Murphy claimed Manning had divulged information which endangered U.S. troops in a direct way:

This case pulls me in a couple different directions. On one hand he was doing what he felt morally obligated to do. On the other he transferred classified information about troop movements to the enemy. That is the one that gets me. With as media driven as al Qaida and other groups have shown themselves to be how many other soldiers did he put in jeopardy? Either way I don't see this ending well for him. Unfortunately what he saw as a moral duty violated both the UCMJ and the US code.

I replied:

What evidence do you have that Manning "transferred classified information about troop movements to the enemy"? I've never seen any evidence of that.

Matt replied:

Part of a battlefield log, which is one of the document types that he leaked is the daily reports of personnel and where they are at including movement of units in theatre. 

I googled "Bradley Manning leaked battlefield log,"  and came up with this:

Bradley does not deny leaking the materials, which include 500,000 battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, he called the “War Logs”.  

He was horrified at what he was seeing and reading about what the US was doing through his job.  

He wanted to provoke public debate about US actions in the wars.  

At a pre-trial hearing in February of this year he said, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the [Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

What "battlefield logs" Manning released weren't related to anything having to do with active troop movements or future battle plans, from what I have been able to determine.

There are many myths about what damage Manning may have done.  Here is an article on aspects of this, Seven Myths About Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar, who is covering the trial for The Nation.

Here's a short youtube on the Manning trial Madar made recently:


Here is Democracy Now's segment on the trial's beginning, from this morning's edition:

American police and intelligence agencies announced they are monitoring blog posts such as this one closely over the course of the trial [emphasis added]:

The military legal matter expert took multiple questions this morning from reporters. One of the questions related to something that happened yesterday, where Manning supporters were told to turn their black “Truth” T-shirts inside out.  

What the legal matter expert said is that the base had brought in military police from other bases to help with security. One of the officers had apparently taken initiative and thought, since there are strong feelings on both sides, it would be a good idea to have supporters turn the shirts inside-out. This would decrease the possibility that a supporter and opponent of Bradley Manning sat next to each other and got into arguments.  

He went on to add that the military police “can’t read someone’s mind.” They do a “threat assessment.” They knew on Saturday there would be 1600 people who would come. There were demonstrations. They read the comments on the Internet (on stories covering Bradley Manning) and see comments and determine whether they need to follow through on any of them for security.  

What happened yesterday “wasn’t a very targeted decision.” He said it would not happen again.

He's referring to the T-shirt episode, not the internet monitoring.

Hi!

The Bradley Manning Trial Begins

After being held for more than three years awaiting trial, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is finally getting his case heard.  Manning has already stipulated that he did download and distribute classified information to an unauthorized source - Wikileaks.

Kevin Gostzola, who has been covering the pre-trial hearings extensively for firedoglake (disclaimer - I have written hundreds of articles for firedoglake), was interviewed this morning, on Democracy Now:

 

 Gostzola, in his article today at firedoglake, notes:

10:42 AM EST Judge asked, “What are procedures put in place for public access to trial?” Maj. Ashden Fein, military prosecutor, answered that there are two different sets, ones for general public and then press access. 16 seats are in the courtroom, which are dedicated to public access to sit in this courtroom. Then there’s a trailer with a feed from the courtroom for 35 individuals from the public.  

If there is an overflow of 35, there is a “theater next door to courthouse that seats presently 100 individuals, however, there is flexibility for up to 540 based off fire marshal coming in changing seats.”  

As far as media goes, there are 10 seats for media organizations that are credentialed. Two additional seats are in the courtroom for credentialed sketch artists.

Although the mainstream media, which largely ignored the pre-trial phases, is now there in force, their coverage will be fairly shallow, often reactionary.

firedoglake will be covering the trial as fully as they did the pre-trial events.  Other bloggers of note who will be there are:

Alexa O'Brien:

I had been covering the WikiLeaks releases from late 2010 into early 2011 and so I had, you know, covered Manning’s nine months of confinement at Quantico where the judge actually ruled that his treatment was unlawful in her recent ruling, and I went to the pretrial and nobody was covering this trial. This is the largest leak trial in U.S. history. You know, in the secular age of information, we’re going through a type of Reformation of sorts, and these source documents are in a certain sense our Bible in the vernacular language so to speak, and so this is such an important trial and no one was covering it in the way in which I felt that this story needed to be covered, so I started to actually transcribe the trial that was being conducted in secrecy with no public docket.

Greg Mitchell, for The Nation:

Having pled guilty to some offenses, there was no scenario where Manning would not be found guilty in the months to come. Manning will serve jail time. The key question now, as the trial proceeds, is: How much jail time? And will he be convicted of offenses (which he did not plead guilty to committing) such as “aiding the enemy”?  

Back in December 2011, the government charged Manning with 22 offenses. They have decided not to pursue one charge related to the release of the Reykjavik cable, but on all other charges they intend to pursue the greater offenses. And they claim to have uncovered digital media from the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan that held some of the State Department cables and Iraq or Afghanistan war logs, and they may be used as evidence to convict Manning of “aiding the enemy.” And that’s where we are, as the trial (which I’ll be attending each day), is set to begin, or so it seems.

Notably, national pro-Obama, so-called "progressive" blogs, such as Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, have shown little interest in promoting the idea that what Manning did was necessary, or even commendable.  The most pro-Obama Alaska blog, The Immoral Minority, doesn't have a Bradley Manning tag (or a Wikileaks tag, either).