http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/ellsberg-assange-and-others-attend-bradley-manning-press-call

Ellsberg, Assange, and others attend Bradley Manning press call

May 25, 2011
Bradley Manning Support Network

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Noted attorneys, military experts, and transparency advocates who support Private First Class Bradley Manning held a press teleconference this morning (Wed., May 25, 2011, 11:00am ET) to discuss updates in Manning’s situation. PFC Bradley Manning is accused of being the source of revelations leaked to WikiLeaks, including diplomatic cables that many experts believe helped to catalyze democratic revolts across the Middle East. His supporters assert that the information PFC Manning is accused of revealing should have been in the public domain.

The complete audio from the call can be downloaded with the link below: Audio of May 25, 2011 press call (MP3)

The Speakers:

FULL TRANSCRIPT: download file (.doc) (.rtf)

http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/update-32712-daniel-ellsberg-at-a-whistle-blowers-conference-wikileaks-and-freedom-of-the-press-and-livestreaming-a-play-about-bradley

Update 3/27/12: Daniel Ellsberg at a whistle-blowers conference, WikiLeaks and freedom of the press, and livestreaming a play about Bradley

Daniel Ellsberg praises Bradley Manning at whistle-blowers conference. At Occupy the Truth’s whistle-blower conference, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg lauds Bradley Manning for, if doing what he’s accused of, shining light on grave abuses. He talks about his own case, and also about what we can do for Bradley, whom he calls a hero. The segment includes audio from the Collateral Murder video and comments from other soldiers, but Ellsberg’s talk begins just after the 13-minute mark:

http://soundcloud.com/flashpoints/flashpoints-daily-49
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http://wlcentral.org/

The UK Supreme Court will decide whether or not Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden on May 30, at 9:15AM. The proceedings will be open to the public and will also be live-streamed via the Sky website ( http://news.sky.com/home/supreme-court ). The judgment is expected to last around 10 minutes.

If the court rules to extradite Mr Assange, he will be sent to Sweden within 10 days. He can appeal further to the European Court of Human Rights, though this will not stop his extradition.

Julian Assange has not been charged with any crime in any country, yet he will have spent 540 days detained—10 in solitary confinement, and 530 under house arrest—by the time the verdict is handed down. Sweden is trying to extradite him for the purpose of questioning, but they have refused all offers to question him via telephone or video call, despite it being a completely legal method under Swedish law.

If extradited to Sweden, Mr Assange will be immediately placed in prison, incommunicado. He will be held in solitary confinement, which the UN Rapporteur on Torture stated amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in excess of 15 days. Since Sweden does not have a bail system, he will be held for an indefinite period of time. If charged, the following trial would be held in secret.

Julian Assange also faces the risk of being further extradited to the United States. Sweden has a "temporary surrender" mechanism in their extradition treaty with the U.S. which sidesteps traditional extradition safeguards. Sweden has not refused an extradition request by the U.S. since 2000.

It must be noted that Mr Assange is still at risk for U.S. extradition even if he is not sent to Sweden. Emails from the intelligence company Stratfor revealed that the U.S. has a sealed indictment against Julian Assange, and a secret grand jury on WikiLeaks has been active in the U.S. since September 2010. Both the UK and Sweden have refused to guarantee they will not extradite him to the U.S.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/16/daniel-ellsberg-wikileaks_n_797801.html

Daniel Ellsberg Defends Julian Assange, Bradley Manning

MATTHEW BARAKAT 12/16/10 04:35 PM ET

WASHINGTON — The man who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War defended both WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the Army private suspected of providing the site with thousands of sensitive government documents.

Daniel Ellsberg said Thursday that Wikileaks' disclosure of government secrets on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and thousands of diplomatic cables was "exactly the right thing" to do.

"I think they provided a very valuable service," Ellsberg said, also referring to man suspected of leaking the documents, Pvt. Bradley Manning. "To call them terrorists is not only mistaken, it's absurd."

Ellsberg said he frequently hears people praise his 1971 leak of the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War while condemning the WikiLeaks disclosures. The 79-year-old former military analyst rejected that argument, calling Manning a "brother" who, if he indeed provided the documents to WikiLeaks, committed "a very admirable act."

And he said the government is wrong to pursue criminal charges against Assange, comparing him to New York Times and Washington Post journalists who have published information from classified documents.

"Anybody who believes Julian Assange can be distinguished from The New York Times ... is on a fool's errand," Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg once faced criminal charges over his leak, but they were thrown out by a judge.

While generally praising Assange, Ellsberg said Assange should have done a better job in his initial document releases of redacting names of people and sources who could be subject to violence if their names were discovered, such as Afghans who could be targeted by extremists for helping the U.S. He said WikiLeaks has modified its policies to release only documents that are also released by mainstream news outlets.

Ellsberg acknowledged that the government needs to keep some secrets, but said the WikiLeaks documents expose information that the public needs to know, including cables showing that U.S. special forces are engaged in operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

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http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2012/5/14/noam_chomsky_on_wikileaks_obamas_

Monday, May 14, 2012

NOAM CHOMSKY: I don’t see anything that’s come out on WikiLeaks that was a legitimate secret. I mean, WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for—presidential medal of honor. He’s—the whole WikiLeaks operation has helped inform people about what their elected representatives are doing. That should be a wonderful thing to do, like—and it’s interesting. Nothing really sensational has come out, but it is interesting to know, for example...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/10/25/honoring-julian-assange/

October 25, 2010

In the Tradition of Sam Adams

Honoring Julian Assange

by RAY McGOVERN

You are not likely to learn this from corporate press but WikiLeaks and its leader Julian Assange have received the 2010 Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award for their resourcefulness in making available secret U.S. military documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars.

If the WikiLeaks documents get the attention they deserve, and if lessons can be learned from the courageous work of former CIA analyst Sam Adams—and from Daniel Ellsberg’s timely leak of Adams’ work in early 1968—even the amateurs in the White House may be able to recognize the folly of widening the war from Afghanistan to adjacent countries. That leak played a key role in dissuading President Lyndon Johnson from approving Gen. William Westmoreland’s request to send 206,000 more troops—not only into the Big Muddy, but also into countries neighboring Vietnam.

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SAAII is a movement of former CIA colleagues and other associates of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those in intelligence who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. Sam did precisely that, and in honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a member of the intelligence profession exemplifying Sam Adam’s courage, persistence, and devotion to truth — no matter the consequences.

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In the past, the annual Sam Adams Award has been given to truth tellers Coleen Rowley of the FBI; Katharine Gun of British Intelligence; Sibel Edmonds of the FBI; Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan; former US Army Sgt. Sam Provance, who told the truth about Abu Ghraib; and Maj. Frank Grevil of Danish Army Intelligence, who exposed his government’s eagerness to conspire with the Bush administration in advertising non-existent weapons of mass destruction in order to “justify” the invasion of Iraq — and went to prison for it; and Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who exposed the powers behind many of the crimes of the Bush administration — first and foremost what he called the “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal;" in Washington, DC.

RAY McGOVERN was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/11/16/whistleblowers-honored-on-nov-21/

Whistleblowers Honored on Nov. 21

November 16, 2011

In recent decades, information – the lifeblood of democracy — has often been cut off from the American body politic on “national security” grounds or because insiders feel it wouldn’t be “good for the country.” To counter that benighted view, a group of ex-U.S. intelligence officials honors brave whistleblowers, this year Thomas Drake and Jesselyn Radack.

By Ray McGovern

Our country’s need for courageous whistleblowers is now. That is mostly why Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) publicly honors people who have spoken truth, and suffered the consequences, as Sam Adams, my former analyst colleague at CIA, did on Vietnam.

So that is why, this year, we are honoring Thomas Drake, who was a senior official at the National Security Agency where he observed serious waste, fraud and violations of the constitutional rights of Americans, and Jesselyn Radack, a Justice Department lawyer who objected to the abusive treatment of John Walker Lindh, dubbed the “American Taliban” during the early days of the Afghan War. [See details below.]

We want to encourage people with integrity to blow the whistle, preferably with documents, when circumstances dictate this course of action as the correct moral choice. There are, in other words, what ethicists call “supervening values” that dwarf non-disclosure promises, and SAAII’s annual award for integrity is an excellent reminder of that reality — and of its relevance to today.

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