WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

Don't Cry for Julian Assange
(Floyd Abrams, Opinion Essay, The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2011)

The fall of WikiLeaks has come with startling swiftness. A year ago millions viewed it as a vibrant, swashbuckling, hi-tech, anti-establishment revealer of secrets. Now WikiLeaks has suspended publication, and its founder and publisher, Julian Assange, has been ordered extradited from England to Sweden to respond to questions about alleged sexual assaults on two Swedish women.

The five newspapers to which WikiLeaks furnished hundreds of thousands of confidential State Department and U.S. military documents jointly announced they "deplored" its conduct in releasing the names of vulnerable confidential sources of information.

There has been much to deplore.

Earlier this year the American ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, was obliged to resign under Mexican pressure because his candid and quite correct cables to Washington released by WikiLeaks had observed that the Mexican army had been "risk averse" in pursuing drug traffickers. Ecuador expelled U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges for her candid assessment of the political situation there in cables released by WikiLeaks. In Zimbabwe, the attorney general of Robert Mugabe's despotic regime has stated that those leaders of his nation who spoke with the U.S. embassy, as revealed by WikiLeaks, could face prosecution for "treason."

In 2010, WikiLeaks released more than 77,000 confidential U.S. military reports from Afghanistan, which included the names of over 100 Afghan sources of information, placing them at risk of retaliation by the Taliban. This was followed, just a few months ago, by WikiLeaks' release of the full texts of over 251,000 confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, many containing the names of individuals who had sought and been promised confidentiality.

As summarized in London's Guardian newspaper, "several thousand [documents were] labeled with a tag used by the U.S. to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger, and more than 150 specifically mentioned whistleblowers." References were, as well, made to "people persecuted by their governments, victims of sex offenses and locations of sensitive government installations and infrastructure."

This was the conduct that caused the five publications (Der Spiegel, El Pais, Le Monde, the Guardian and the New York Times) that had published WikiLeaks documents—but which had redacted them to avoid reference to individuals who could be harmed by revealing their identities—to denounce WikiLeaks. Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, warned that even a reference to a journalist "in one of these cables can easily provide repressive governments with the perfect opportunity to persecute or punish journalists and activists."

There is, of course, another side to WikiLeaks. It released the cables of American diplomats in Tunisia commenting on the high level of corruption there that is often credited with igniting the "Arab Spring." It exposed a string of extrajudicial killings in Kenya, and much more.

But no amount of such revelations can justify or excuse WikLeaks' persistent recklessness.

There was no justification for WikiLeaks' release of a four-page, single-spaced cable, classified as secret, listing facilities around the world, ranging from specified undersea communication lines to a laboratory that makes smallpox vaccine, that the U.S. considers vital to its national security. The same may be said of WikiLeaks' release of a classified report describing the radio-frequency jammers used in Iraq by American soldiers to cut off signals to remotely detonated explosives.

None of this means that if WikiLeaks or Mr. Assange were brought to trial in this country that they would have no basis for claiming First Amendment protection. They would and should. Whatever the legal result, it would not absolve Mr. Assange of conduct that has put many people at great risk, or indeed, may already have cost some of them their lives.

"When delicate information is at stake, great prudence is demanded so that the information doesn't fall into the wrong hands and so that people are not hurt," the German newspaper Die Welt commented upon WikiLeaks' bulk release of unredacted State Department cables. That such self-evident language seems alien to Julian Assange and to WikiLeaks says it all.

No-one was celebrating when it became apparent that the dense hour of argument and counter argument in the vaulted courtroom number 4 in London had resulted in a further stay of extradition for WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange.The arguments turned on obscure but important skirmishes over the controversial use of European Arrest Warrants (EAWs) to transfer people from one country to another.

To get the technicalities out of the way, leave has been given for Mr Assange’s legal team to apply to the Supreme Court to have an argument heard that a politically appointed prosecutor in Sweden doesn’t qualify as a ‘Judicial Authority’ under mutual assistance agreements between Sweden and the UK.

The court would normally take up to six weeks – well into February 2012 – to decide if it wants to hear the argument, but someone behind the scenes appears to be in a serious hurry and it’s likely a decision will be made on December 19th, one day after the deadline for Mr Assange’s legal team to present their arguments. Depending on the outcome, Mr Assange may well shortly thereafter find himself in Gothenberg prison awaiting questioning and possible prosecution.

In the mean time, he will continue to live in legal limbo at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk with an electronic ankle manacle and a curfew for company. Not quite a cause for celebration, but it was nonetheless a valuable opportunity to take part in the post-hearing debrief where the tight knit team of lawyers, campaigners, hackers and troublemakers downloaded a year of suspense and misadventure for the benefit of travellers from afar.

Assange in person is focused and measured, warm and remarkably good humoured for someone who has deliberately aroused murderous fury amongst some of the most powerful people on the planet. The antidote to pervasive hostile surveillance appears to be cheerful self-surveillance – every conversation is recorded and documented to within an inch of its life – in addition to the occasional all-out transparency assault on the watchers themselves, for which the WikiLeaks founder now has a well deserved reputation.

Stockholm in winter is about as far from summer in Fremantle as you can get. It is a long way to chase another Australian citizen from courtrooms in London to Sweden, but it is worth it to gain a better understanding of what his conditions and entitlements will be if the extradition goes ahead. I trust that proceedings in Sweden will be conducted with fairness and rigour – if there are charges, let them be finally laid and the evidence heard.

The reason for my visit is that I have no such trust in how the rule of law will be applied in the United States in the current political climate, and I hold grave fears for Mr Assange’s safety if he is transferred there. In an election year in which senior Republican figures have pre-emptively declared him a terrorist, we need to look no further than the medieval treatment of Private Bradley Manning to understand the risks now faced by Julian Assange.

It is easy to dismiss calls for his casual murder as voices from the fringe, but remember – the United States has now completely normalised extrajudicial killing of foreign citizens by remote-piloted drones and highly trained kill teams. The post-911 legal environment in the US long ago passed the point of corrosive paranoia with regards anything relating to terrorism, and has drifted into a realm quite unhinged from the constitutional protections of which America was justifiably proud.

The regular process of extradition from Sweden to the US comes with important safeguards, the most important being that Sweden would never consent to an extradition for politically motivated charges, and the UK Home Secretary would also have to give its consent, a process safeguarded by judicial appeal.

But here we come to a grey area. What will the Swedish Government do if the US seeks the ‘temporary surrender’ of Mr Assange while in custody in Sweden? This is a little-known and poorly understood clause buried within the EU-US Extradition and Mutual Legal Assistance agreements signed into Swedish law in February 2010. It appears to allow a ‘fast track’ extradition, more akin to extraordinary rendition, in which Mr Assange could be taken rapidly out of custody in Sweden and transferred to the US to face prosecution on serious charges relating to espionage or computer crime. This would require the consent of the Swedish Prime Minister. The question is whether this option is on the table.

It is now more than a year since the spectacular releases of US State Department diplomatic cables to the world’s major newspapers, longer yet since the horrific revelations of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs. There has been time enough to consider the consequences.

The issue at stake here is trust. There is a form of consensus of the governed in open democratic societies, that we understand the need for a certain amount of confidentiality in international diplomacy. This does not mean we deserve to be lied to, tediously and repetitively deceived on matters of life and death.

I discovered things about my country that sit extremely uncomfortably. So did citizens of Sweden, and citizens of the United States. The release of this information was strongly in the public interest – not because states don’t deserve a modicum of discretion in their operations (I believe they do), but because occasional acts of unexpected transparency hold up a mirror of truth.

For those who have told the truth, the release of the cables hold little consequence other than validation. For those who have honourably dissembled, the releases are instructive and clarifying. For those who have just simply lied about war, governance and commerce, they are an indictment. And a very great many people have lied, in our names, and on our payroll.

Open democracies where the truth still holds currency will weather this transparency storm vastly better than regimes that have come unmoored from the rule of law. Twelve months after the cable releases, senior military and political figures in the US have acknowledged that while embarrassing, the releases did no lasting damage. No-one died. We just understand better how power really works, and that is the primary role of a free press.

In the first line of the London High Court’s ruling in November, Mr Assange was rightfully acknowledged as a journalist. On the other side of the world, in Australia’s most prestigious media awards a few weeks later, he was honoured with a Walkley Award for outstanding services to journalism. Without people willing to take such risks to confront power, the democratic protections which those of us in fortunate parts of the world take for granted are sapped and eroded.

The Australian Government has been slow to react to the possibility of the publishing organisation known as WikiLeaks being crushed by a wounded superpower, it still doesn’t appear to understand the threat of Mr Assange’s rendition to the US, and our Prime Minister appears mainly concerned with keeping her head down in the hope this will all go away.

The thing is, it won’t. Time is now very short. If Mr Assange ends up jailed in Sweden, Australia has the ability to repatriate him under the International Transfer of Prisoners (ITP) scheme. Australia must strongly insist that there will be no rendition to the US under the ‘temporary surrender’ mechanism. It’s time our Government pushed back on companies including Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, and demanded to know why they are continuing the crippling financial blockade of WikiLeaks. If indeed the blockade is legal under Australian trade practices law, then that’s a problem the Australian Parliament can remedy.

Remember the campaign against the unwanted and misguided internet filter? No-one directed that campaign – it was won by tens of thousands of people spontaneously deciding that their individual contribution was worth the effort. The messy, unplanned collective result was worth vastly more than the sum of its parts – inventive, well networked, determined and effective.

The stakes here are much higher, because freedom of speech, freedom to publish, freedom to demand transparency of government and privacy of the individual, are the sources from which all our other freedoms flow.
-Senator Scott Ludlam, December 10, 2011

Military rules guide hearing in WikiLeaks case
(By DAVID DISHNEAU, Associated Press, December 14, 2011)

The case of an Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing government secrets to WikiLeaks goes to court this week, but the military proceedings won't look familiar to most Americans raised on TV courtroom dramas, or to Pfc. Bradley Manning's many overseas supporters, either.

Only the potential punishment sounds familiar: Manning could face life behind bars.

A hearing starting Friday for Manning at an Army post in Maryland probably will feature long hours, little grandstanding and a number of closed sessions for discussion of classified material, even though much of what Manning is suspected of giving to WikiLeaks has been published on the anti-secrecy group's website.

The proceeding is to determine whether the Army intelligence analyst will be court-martialed for allegedly leaking government secrets. It's part of a military justice system that mirrors civilian courts, but differs in important ways.

As the "Manual for Courts-Martial" rule book makes clear, the purpose of military law is to promote justice, maintain order and foster military efficiency, all in the interest of national security.

By contrast, the purpose of criminal prosecutions is to establish guilt for an alleged violation of law. Things that are not crimes, such as being chronically late for work, might be subject to military prosecution because the system is set up to promote order and discipline. In the civilian world, they might be grounds for firing or a nonjudicial reprimand.

Manning's hearing will be open to the public, but seating for spectators and news media is limited by the courtroom's relatively small size. No civilian cameras or recording equipment are allowed. There will be a judge, but the officer acting in that role.

The process is called an Article 32 investigation. That refers to a part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a set of laws enacted in 1950 to create a unified criminal code for all branches of the military. Article 32 investigations resemble civilian preliminary hearings, in which a judge decides whether prosecutors have enough evidence to bring a suspect to trial.

Manning is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, including Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, confidential State Department cables and a classified military video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver.

The presiding official at an Article 32 hearing is called the investigating officer, not a judge. The investigating officer is often a military attorney, a judge advocate, but legal training isn't required.

Military prosecutors represent the government, just as civilian prosecutors represent the state in civilian courts. All defendants are assigned military defense attorneys, but those facing serious charges often retain civilian lawyers to lead their defense.

Manning's civilian lawyer is David E. Coombs, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel from Fall River, Mass., who has tried more than 130 military cases.

During an Article 32 hearing, lawyers can call witnesses and make motions, just as in civilian court. But the military tightly controls public access to written filings.

There is no court clerk from whom such documents can be readily obtained. Except for what's said in court, most of the public information about proceedings comes from civilian defense lawyers, who aren't bound by a chain of command.

Unlike a preliminary hearing in a criminal case, Military Article 32 proceedings can last for days.

Afterward, the investigating officer writes a report to the commander who ordered the investigation — in this case, the commander of the Military District of Washington, Maj. Gen. Michael S. Linnington — with a recommendation on how to proceed. Possible outcomes include a general court-martial, administrative punishment or dismissal of some or all of the charges.

There are three types of courts-martial. The general one at issue in this case is the most serious. General courts-martial can impose the death penalty, although prosecutors have said they will not do so in Manning's case. He faces a maximum sentence of life in a military prison, commonly known as a brig.

Manning is already very familiar with brigs. He's been in at least three of them since his arrest.

Most recently Manning has been in a military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. It is a dramatic change from his previous quarters in a Virginia Marine Corps brig where he spent 23 hours a day alone in his cell.

US Set to Try Soldier Over Leaks, Targets Assange
(By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press, December 15, 2011)

As the suspected source for the biggest intelligence leak in American history faces his first hearing Friday, U.S. prosecutors have their eye on another prize: the man who disclosed the documents to the world.

When WikiLeaks' spectacular disclosures of U.S. secrets exploded onto the scene last year, much of Washington's anger coalesced around Julian Assange, the silver-haired globe-trotting figure whose outspoken defiance of the Pentagon and the State Department riled politicians on both sides of the aisle. Pfc. Bradley Manning, long under lock and key, hasn't attracted the same level of ire.

The pair's fates have been intertwined, however, even if the Australian-born computer hacker says he didn't know the private's name until after news of his arrest emerged in June 2010. Manning's alleged disclosures put Assange at the epicenter of a diplomatic earthquake.

Assange in turn has worked energetically to drum up support for the imprisoned soldier — all while emphasizing that the way his anti-secrecy site was set up meant he could not be sure if Manning was his source.

U.S. investigators have been scrutinizing links between the two as they explore the possibility of charging the Australian with serious crimes under U.S. law. A Virginia grand jury is studying evidence that might link Assange to Manning, but no action has yet been taken.

In chat logs recorded by Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned Manning in, the 23-year-old private allegedly poured his heart out, laying bare his disillusionment with the military and his decision to ship mountains of classified material to Assange. In the logs — which the military says are genuine — Manning tells Lamo that he'd "developed a relationship with Assange" and hinted at instant messages swapped via a server maintained by the Germany-based Chaos Computer Club.

But even according to the logs, Manning and Assange do not seem to have learned very much about each other. "He won(')t work with you if you reveal too much about yourself," Manning is quoted as having said.

At least one media report suggested that prosecutors have struggled without success to flesh out the purported links between the pair. NBC News, citing unnamed military sources, said earlier this year that officials had turned up no evidence of direct contact between Assange and Manning.

In any case prosecutors face formidable obstacles. Experts say that a prosecution under the century-old Espionage Act would risk criminalizing practically any form of investigative journalism. A conspiracy charge, which some have floated as an alternative, would also be tough to prove.

"If Manning steals a bunch of information, and gives it to Julian Assange, I think that would be very difficult to show that that was a conspiracy," said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. Even if it turns out that Assange had, hypothetically, pushed Manning to divulge the documents, Wittes said it would still be hard to distinguish that from a traditional reporter trying to work a source.

"Is that any different in principle from the relationship between Deep Throat and Bob Woodward?" he asked, referring to the source behind the Watergate scandal and one of the reporters, Woodward, who broke the story.

Manning Hearing Halted as Investigator Considers Recusal Request
(Scott Shane, The New York Times, December 16, 2011)

FORT MEADE, Md. — A defense lawyer for Bradley Manning, the Army private accused in the most famous leak of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers, began a frontal attack during Private Manning’s first court appearance here on Friday morning, claiming the Army’s investigating officer at the evidentiary hearing was biased and should recuse himself from the case.

The lawyer, David Coombs, said that Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, the investigating officer who works as a Justice Department prosecutor in civilian life, was preventing the defense from calling witnesses to show that little harm was done by the disclosure of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents provided to WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy organization.

“All this stuff has been leaked,” Mr. Coombs said. “A year and a half later, where’s the danger? Where’s the harm?”

Colonel Paul Almanza said he did not believe he was biased because he does not currently supervise criminal cases in his job at the Justice Department and his work involves child abuse and obscenity, not national security. But he noted that military rules require him to recuse himself if a “reasonable person” might perceive bias, and he broke off the hearing at midday to consider the matter, with a decision possible Friday afternoon.

Meanwhile, the crowd of about 50 people in the unadorned courtroom, including reporters and relatives of Private Manning, caught their first glimpse of the soldier, who turns 24 on Saturday and faces a possible sentence of life in prison.

Private Manning, a slight figure in black-rimmed glasses, a crew cut and camouflage uniform, answered routine questions from the investigating officer in a quiet but steady voice. “Yes, sir,” he said, when asked whether he was satisfied with his lawyers.

He is accused of aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act by providing WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, military field reports and war videos. His supporters, who planned demonstrate Friday outside Fort Meade, hail him as a whistleblower who sought to expose wrongdoing.

The evidentiary proceeding, known as an Article 32 hearing and expected to last about a week, will determine whether the charges proceed to a court-martial or are dismissed. Both prosecutors and Private Manning’s lawyer will present evidence, and the public could learn new details of the origins of the disclosures that shook governments and embarrassed politicians around the world.

The hearing could shed light not just on Private Manning’s conduct, but on the possible role of WikiLeaks’s founder, Julian Assange, and other WikiLeaks activists, in soliciting the material or facilitating the leak. A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., is considering whether WikiLeaks leaders broke the law, though there has never been a successful prosecution of disseminating leaked secrets, as opposed to leaking them in the first place.

If Colonel Almanza declines to recuse himself, Mr. Coombs said he would seek a stay of the hearing while the recusal question is appealed to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals. If the case proceeds to court-martial, the military judge appointed to oversee the trial could consider the defense claim of bias and send the case back for a new hearing.

Mr. Coombs offered several grounds for asking Colonel Almanza to remove himself from the case, including his civilian role as a prosecutor in handling child-exploitation cases. With the Justice Department still pursuing the broader WikiLeaks investigation, he said, any Justice Department employee has a conflict of interest.

In addition, Mr. Coombs said that Colonel Almanza had shown bias by disallowing all but four of the 38 witnesses requested by the defense, while granting all the prosecution requests. Among others, the defense requested that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appear to describe any damage done by the leaks.

“This is one of the most interesting military cases of the last 20 years,” said Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale. Mr. Fidell said the case comes at the intersection of advancing technology, making it possible to lay bare a truckload of secrets on the Web with the click of a mouse, and the culture of the Facebook era in which nothing stays secret for long.

Reporters from around the world are covering the hearing, with a dozen at a time in the cramped courtroom and about 50 others following the proceedings on a video link from an adjacent media center. Security is tight at the sprawling Army base, which houses the National Security Agency, the intelligence agency that eavesdrops on foreign communications.

Private Manning’s treatment during 19 months of incarceration set off a major controversy. At the jail on the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va., he was held in isolation and forced to strip off his clothing and sleep in a tear-proof smock, a measure military officials said was necessary because he might be a suicide risk. After an outcry — including sharp criticism from the State Department’s top spokesman, who was fired as a result — Private Manning was moved to a new military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where his lawyer, Mr. Coombs, said his treatment was better.

Private Manning, an intelligence analyst, told friends and family of struggling with Army life and hiding his homosexuality while serving at Forward Operating Base Hammer, near Baghdad. He was arrested in Kuwait in May 2010 and accused of exploiting gaping security holes on the military computer system by downloading the secret material onto CDs that he marked as Lady Gaga songs.

In Web chat logs later made public by Wired magazine, Private Manning — identified in the logs only by a screen name — discussed his feelings of depression and loneliness and his motives for diverting the secret material to a “crazy white haired dude,” Mr. Assange.

The person in the chat logs showed a boyish glee at outsmarting the Army’s poorly protected computer system but also offered political motives, suggesting that “criminal political backdealings” should be subjected to public scrutiny.

The chat logs show him describing having seen in the secret files “incredible things, awful things” that he said “belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C.”

The leaked material was made public by WikiLeaks over more than a year, sometimes directly on the organization’s Web site and sometimes in collaboration with newspapers and other media organizations, including The New York Times.

Though WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, it attracted little public attention until it began to post the material Private Manning is accused of providing. The organization released a long-withheld video of American helicopters in Iraq fatally shooting people on the ground, two of whom turned out to be Reuters journalists, edited and given the title “Collateral Murder.”

Private Manning is also accused of passing on military reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a quarter-million State Department cables. The cables have made a splash in country after country, igniting diplomatic spats and forcing at least a few people named as sources for American diplomats to hide or flee to avoid retaliation from repressive governments.

State Department officials have argued that the exposure hampered diplomacy by making valuable informants overseas reluctant to speak candidly. But Arab activists say the revelations of high-level corruption and nepotism in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen, among other countries, helped fuel the revolts that have transformed the region.

Bradley Manning hearing – live updates

• Pre-trial hearing gets under way at Forte Meade, Maryland

• Manning accused of leaking military secrets to Wikileaks

• Judge rejects defence petition to step down over 'bias'.....


Activists hold signs in support of Bradley Manning, who is currently held at a secured facility in Kansas. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

4.45pm ET: EP – So the first day of the Bradley Manning "article 32 hearing" has ended, raising the question: what, if anything, have we learned from it?

Let's start on a selfish note: how it's been from a reporter's perspective. From that angle the pre-trial hearing has fully lived up to its reputation of being an incredibly slow and stuttering process. The court spent more time in recess today than it did in live session. David Coombs, Manning's lawyer, ridiculed the conditions in which the hearing is being conducted, casting his eye around the sparse and depressingly dingey court room and saying: "This courtroom is beautiful! This hearing is part of the military justice system – is this the best you can do?"

In the morning, we were treated to the surreal sight of a military officer dressed in fatigues – the investigating officer Paul Almanza - being given a thorough grilling by Coombs dressed in civvies (mind you, Coombs himself comes from a military background so it's all relative). That aside, all we really achieved today was the clearing of the decks before the witnesses begin to be presented to court on Saturday.

Delve a little deeper, though, and what Manning and his defence team did today could prove highly significant. They suggested that the prosecution process is biased and compromised. By pointing out that Lt Colonel Paul Almanza is employed by the Department of Justice, the same department that is currently going after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in a criminal investigation, they implied that Manning was being made the fall-guy in the US government's pursuit of bigger fish.

That's a theme that we can expect Manning and his legal team to elaborate for us in the days to come.

Watch this space. ....

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been granted permission by the UK Supreme Court to appeal against extradition to Sweden where he is accused of sex offences.

"The Supreme Court has granted permission to appeal and a hearing has been scheduled for two days, beginning on 1 February 2012," said a statement from the Supreme Court, the highest court in England. .....

So far (as you would have gathered from the posts above) it's the Australian Greens who are making the most effort in this respect.

Military Hearing Resumes in Manning Leak Case
(The Associated Press, December 17, 2011)

The young Army intelligence specialist accused of passing government secrets spent his 24th birthday in court Saturday as his lawyers argued his status as a gay soldier before the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" played an important role in his actions.

Lawyers for Pfc. Bradley Manning began laying out a defense to show that his struggles as a gay soldier in an environment hostile to homosexuality contributed to mental and emotional problems that should have barred him from having access to sensitive material.

Manning is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive items to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, including Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, State Department cables and a military video of a 2007 American helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 11 men, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver.

The Obama administration says the released information has threatened valuable military and diplomatic sources and strained America's relations with other governments. Manning's lawyers counter that much of the information that was classified by the Pentagon posed no risk.

The military is conducting a hearing in a small courtroom on an Army post outside Washington to determine whether prosecutors have enough evidence to bring Manning to trial, where he could face a term of life in prison as a traitor.

Prosecutors began presenting evidence to substantiate the charges against Manning.

Army criminal investigators described evidence they collected that links Manning to the WikiLeaks website's collection of U.S. military and diplomatic secrets.

But among the first issues to arise Saturday was whether Manning's sexual orientation is relevant to the case against him.

The basis for the charges Manning faces are transcripts of online chats with a confidant-turned-government-informant in which Manning allegedly confesses his ties to WikiLeaks and also reveals he is gay.

Maj. Matthew Kemkes, a defense lawyer, asked Special Agent Toni Graham, an Army criminal investigator, whether she had talked to people who believed Manning was gay or found evidence among his belongings relating to gender-identity disorder. The condition often is described as a mental diagnosis in which people believe they were born the wrong sex.

Graham said such questions were irrelevant to the investigation. "We already knew before we arrived that Pfc. Manning was a homosexual," Graham said.

Prosecutors objected several times to the questions. Kemkes responded that if the government can argue that Manning intended to leak secrets, "what is going on in my client's mind is very important."

During its cross examination of Graham, Manning's defense team also sought to convince the court that not all of the material he is accused of leaking is classified.

Graham, who collected evidence from Manning's living quarters and workplace, testified that among the items seized was a DVD marked "secret" that contained a military video showing the 2007 incident in which Apache attack helicopters gunned down unarmed men in Iraq.

The video was taken from the cockpit of one the helicopters. WikiLeaks posted the video in April 2010, sparking questions about the military's rules of engagement and whether more needed to be done to prevent civilian casualties. The gunners can be heard laughing and referring to the men as "dead bastards."

Kemkes, one of Manning's lawyers, asked Graham whether she knew the video was unclassified. She said she didn't. "In fact, it was an unclassified video," Kemkes said.

At the time the video was posted by WikiLeaks, the Pentagon called it a breach of national security and it was believed to be secret.

Although WikiLeaks had been posting sensitive information to the Web since 2006, release of the Apache video drew worldwide attention to the organization as it prepared to publish secret documents on the war in Afghanistan.

Manning's appearances Friday and Saturday in the Fort Meade courtroom mark the first time he has been seen in public after 19 months in detention. The Oklahoma native comes to court in Army camouflage fatigues and wearing dark-rimmed glasses. Slight and serious, he takes notes during the proceedings.

An Army appeals court on Friday rejected a defense effort to have the presiding officer, Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, because of alleged bias. Separately, lawyers for WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange are asking the military's highest appeals court to guarantee two seats in the Fort Meade courtroom.

Manning's hearing is open to the public, with limited seating. Inside the courtroom, no civilian recording equipment is allowed. Instead of a judge, a presiding officer delivers a recommendation as to whether prosecutors have enough evidence to bring a suspect to trial. A military commander then makes the final decision.

The case has spawned an international support network of people who believe the U.S. government has gone too far in seeking to punish Manning.

More than 100 people gathered outside Fort Meade for a march in support of Manning, some holding signs declaring "Americans have the right to know. Free Bradley Manning" and "Blowing the whistle on war crimes is not a crime."

Todd Anderson, 64, said he drove from New York City to take part. "I think this man showed a great deal of courage, the kind of thing I wouldn't have the courage to do, and I really consider him to be a hero," Anderson said.

Juline Jordan, 46, said she flew in from Detroit just for the day. "I support what he did because he exposed some horrific war crimes and horrific things done at the hands of the United States government and the Department of Defense, and he's a hero for that," Jordan said.

In London, several dozen protesters from gay organizations, the Occupy London protest camp and other groups rallied outside the U.S. Embassy Saturday calling for Manning's release and offering birthday wishes.

Lawyers for Pfc. Bradley Manning began laying out a defense to show that his struggles as a gay soldier in an environment hostile to homosexuality contributed to mental and emotional problems that should have barred him from having access to sensitive material.

Bradley Manning hearing: court told of Iraq unit's intelligence security chaos
Ed Pilkington in Fort Meade
Guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 December 2011 01.07 GMT

Head of unit describes loose controls around databases from which Manning is alleged to have downloaded military secrets


Bradley Manning is escorted from the military court in Fort Meade, Maryland, on the second day of his pre-trial hearing. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

A shocking lack of basic discipline and intelligence security at the unit in which Bradley Manning worked before his arrest for allegedly transferring the largest trove of state secrets in American history to WikiLeaks has been revealed at his pre-trial hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Under cross-examination by Manning's defence team, the head of the intelligence unit at the military base in Iraq where Manning was posted painted a picture of staggeringly loose controls. Soldiers were allowed to store movies on secure computer databases, were permitted to bring in commercial music CDs to areas where secure computers were in operation, DVDs were left strewn about and there was no system for checking that classified information was not removed from the building.

Captain Steven Lim told the hearing that he was shocked when he was presented with a set of memorandums from Manning's immediate supervisor, Master Sergeant Paul Atkins. The memorandums chronicled emotional behaviour on Manning's behalf dating back to before he was deployed to Iraq in October 2009.

Yet Atkins did not warn Lim, or any of his other superiors in the chain of command, about Manning's problems until 3 June 2010 – after his May 25 arrest. The memorandums gave details of an email that Manning had sent Atkins in April that year in which the soldier confessed that he was suffering severe psychological problems including gender identification disorder that was making it difficult for him to do his job, to interact with other people or even to think.

Manning included a picture with the email of himself dressed as a woman.

The memorandums also itemised a series of incidents in which Manning had displayed emotional outbursts. He assaulted a woman supervisor and was demoted shortly before his arrest to the rank of private first class.

In December 2010 he had to be restrained after he flipped over a table and made to grab a gun from a gun rack. In another incident he was found curled up in a foetal position on the floor of the unit.

Questioned by Manning's defence lawyer, David Coombs, Lim admitted that the incident with the gun rack was not a "minor" disciplinary matter as earlier suggested by the prosecution. Had he known about it at the time, Lim said, he would have recommended that Manning be issued with a "derog" – a disciplinary complaint that would probably have seen him removed from the intelligence unit and stripped of his security clearance.

That in turn, Lim admitted, would have meant that Manning would no longer have had access to the huge databases of state secrets from which he allegedly made his WikiLeaks downloads.

Because of his dereliction of duty in failing to pass on crucial information about Manning's state of mind to his superiors – at a key time in the soldier's alleged leaking to WikiLeaks – Atkins was demoted earlier this year to the rank of sergeant first class. ....<cont>

Who knows what other information will be brought to the hearing?