TRiG.

Joanna: I absolutely support Bradley Manning. He has revealed war crimes. War crimes belong in the public domain. This is an indisputable fact.
That he’s being held in solitary confinement and that most people in America don’t have a clue, demonstrates very clearly what kind of “democracy” the U.S upholds.

Seriously every single headline talking about Berkeley looks like this:

“Berkeley (city counsel/students/people) do/start (inert something crazy/treasonous/stupid here).”

http://deadlinelive.info/2010/12/29/wikileaks-a-big-dangerous-us-government-con-job/

“Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document, and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. SIPRnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret. [2 ]

Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.

But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.

Excuse to police the Internet?

What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken. What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.”

Many years ago when I served in the Canoe-club, I had a job with a SECRET Clearance, for a time. I still remember the training required (including signing our names that we had each “…read-&-understood” all that stuff) before the clearance was granted. Here are a couple of points on that. SECRET Clearance doesn’t entitle you to access to jack, unless you also have “The Need-to-know.” Think of a Clearance as one key; NTK as the other; unless you have both, you don’t get in. Unless you have both, *for* the particular material, you don’t get to view it or physically to pick it up & carry it anywhere.

The notion that Bradley Manning had access to more Classified materials than one Enlisted-man’s job-description required–just doesn’t cut it. Might be the stuff of some B-movie, shown late at night on TV, but unless much has changed since 1989, Manning just could not be the sole source. He might be on his way to becoming a conspicuous example, and the actual case for his prosecution may be bulletproof. But the damage the whole CWO4 John Walker Treason-ring did (“spies” they were not), they took years doing, a piece at a time; a team-effort. If WE settle for a Bradley Manning, twisting in the wind, even if he bought & paid for that swing, shame on us. A nice, stout ridgepole and many lengths of rope are in order.

Assange’s technical, lawful culpability, I leave to those academically qualified to discuss it. I doubt he’s lost much sleep over whose laws he may have violated by receiving info with which he now plays. The higher above the law one elevates self, the more kinetic energy may go into the math if (by chance) one falls. RKBA! Best regards, all.

But a quickie search yielded me a bit of Title 18, USC love:

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Here is an excerpt from “Prairie Fire” to get us all in the mood:

Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.”
“The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.”