HAPPY NEW YEARS Y'ALL!!!

2010 was a disaster. The mainstream media was responsible for the right-winged takeover of the Lower House of Congress, for Pfc Bradley Manning to be figuratively CRUCIFIED in the public square, for Obama (THAT One) caving time and time again again, undermining Nancy Pelosi and pruning Harry Reid's ability for enabling better legislation. For passing a bogus DADT Repeal which is anything BUT - and with the fake Bradley Manning scandle, they'll take years, if not decades, to get a round tuit and lift DADT. And yes, the Bradley Manning scandle is utterly FAKE, because all the evidence that's been produced so far are a bunch of BOGUS or at least apparently so chat logs produced by one disreputable character, Adrian Lamo, quisling!

And why am I so pissed off at the Bradley Manning scandle? Because if the guy is sent to 52 years in prison, or executed for Treason MERELY FOR SPEAKING THE TRUTH, then the US Government gets to be as opaque as it wants to be, but the citizenry, not just in the US but all over the world, will have to be utterly transparent to the US government! This is nothing short of utter insanity and pure fascism and is reminiscent of the sort of human liberty abuses that were predicted in Revelations Chapter 13. Even tho' I'm a Bible disbeliever!

And I am going to make a Hitler Downfall (Untergang) parody where Der Fuehrer complains that Obama (THAT One!) is horning in on HIS territiry and is liable for civil and criminal penalties under Godwin's Law!!!

Happy New Year!

Merged Chat Logs Timeline Discrepancies!

Many thanks to Fire Dog Lake for merging the alleged Manning-Lamo chat log bits and pieces from wired, BoingBoing.net and The Washington Post. They have also included unsubstantiated statements from Adrian Lamo, the quisling who fingered Bradley Manning. If Manning's guilty, he's a hero. If innocent, he's been set up, framed and railroaded.

Glenn Greenwald became furious over the past two weeks as he found out that as Bradley Manning is suffering under conditions that any rational being would call torture, Adrian Lamo was free to make many, many unsubstantiated claims about how Manning uploaded the docs up to WikiLeaks (remember, folks, there's 3/4 Million in all, not the 260K Manning's charged with) so he wrote a demand that Poulsen either substantiate Lamo's claims or deny them here, calling the utter fiasco of journalism at Wired a worsening disgrace!

In response, Evan Hansen and Kevin Poulsen of Wired sought to put the record straight here, except they don't, really. They did more of a self-defense through rationalisation and justification, which Glenn Greenwald clearly saw through and reported here and here. Glenn noticed that Poulsen and Hansen did not address Lamo's claims that (1) Manning contacted him out of the blue, either through the AOL(?) IM service or through sending encoded emails that Lamo didn't decode because he lost or discarded the key he had to do so, and (2) Assange gave Manning special software other than the FTP software that can be used by anybody to upload sensitive documents up to WikiLeaks. Assange has said several times that his technology is set up to upload completely anonymously so that the WikiLeaks people would not ever know who uploaded the data. Assange also said that he never knew of Manning until his name was made public by the Mainstream Media!

Well today, BoingBoing.net reported that Poulsen and Hansen basically threw Lamo under the bus! And even then they were being coy about it: Evan Hansen tweet: "@ggreenwald I just reviewed the full text and all descriptions of Manning's relationship w/ Assange and Wikileaks are already public."

I for one think that the chat logs are very fishy. They appear to have Manning and Lamo chatting at peculiar hours, especially for a soldier who's expected to keep normal - early to bed, early to rise - hours after being removed from the intelligence unit (the logs allege that) and probably when he was in it, too! BoingBoing noticed that Adriam Lamo was outing him as a pre-transitioned transgendered person (really Adrian? where's the proof?). So without further adieu, I shall sort out the blocs of chats and the hours covered. The times in FDL as in every other media hour, I presume to be Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), which is = GMT - 7. Iraq Military Time (IMT) is GMT + 3. So to get IMT, one adds 10 hours to PDT.

FireDogLake's Merged Chat Logs Divided into Blocs

IMT: 0000:00 HRS to 1200:00 HRS is AM; 12:00:00 HRS to 2400:00 HRS is PM.

Bloc A

Begin 5/21 01:41:12 PM PDT = 5/21 2341:12 HRS IMT
End 5/21 02:17:29 PM PDT = 5/22 0017:29 HRS IMT

Bloc B - Question by Lamo - Manning should be asleep.

Lamo 5/21 06:07:29 PM PDT = 5/22 0407:29 HRS IMT

Bloc C - Answer by Manning. Assume before dawn 5/22 PDT. Lamo's probably up!

Manning 5/22 03:16:24 AM PDT = 5/22 1316:24 HRS IMT

Bloc D

Begin 5/22 12:15:11 PM PDT = 5/22 2215:11 HRS IMT
End 5/22 02:19:37 PM PDT = 5/23 0019:37 HRS IMT

Bloc E

Begin 5/23 07:19:12 AM PDT = 5/23 1719:12 HRS IMT
End 5/23 07:34:48 AM PDT = 5/23 1734:48 HRS IMT

Bloc F

Begin 5/23 08:01:30 AM PDT = 5/23 1601:30 HRS IMT
End 5/23 10:37:28 AM PDT = 5/23 2037:28 HRS IMT

Bloc G

Begin 5/25 02:03:10 AM PDT = 5/25 1203:10 HRS IMT
End 5/25 02:32:53 AM PDT = 5/25 1232:53 HRS IMT

Bloc H

Begin 5/25 02:26:01 PM PDT = 5/26 0026:01 HRS IMT*
End 5/25 03:02:03 PM PDT = 5/26 0102:03 HRS IMT

Bloc J

Begin 5/25 03:07:26 PM PDT = 5/26 0107:26 HRS IMT
End 5/25 03:12:16 PM PDT = 5/26 0112:16 HRS IMT

Okay, what the hell is a soldier doing up at 1 in the morning if he has to awake at 5 or 6 AM??? And even later, cause the chat logs if fully released, could show the alleged conversation going even further into the morning!

Time Lapse Blocs. The time recorded between end of Bloc J and beginning of Time Lapse Bloc K goes BACK in time by more than one hour. Recorded by Wired as having occurred on the 25th PDT. I will leave it like that here, but plot it on the attached chart (at the bottom) as having occurred the next day. To avoid obvious conflicts.

Time Lapse Bloc K

Begin 5/25 01:52:30 PM PDT = 5/25 2352:30 HRS IMT
End 5/25 02:03:53 PM PDT = 5/26 0003:53 HRS IMT

Time Lapse Bloc L

Begin 5/25 02:12:23 PM PDT = 5/26 0012:23 HRS IMT
End 5/25 02:29:18 PM PDT = 5/26 0029:18 HRS IMT*

* There are 3 minutes' overlap between the beginning of Bloc H and the end of Time Lapse Bloc L, but the subject matter does not match one with the other! They are mutually exclusive and it appears there are texts sent simultaneously by Manning! This is absolutely impossible. This is an immense credibility problem for these chat logs, given Lamo's disreputable character.

Time Lapse Bloc M

Begin 5/25 03:38:07 PM PDT = 5/26 0138:07 HRS IMT
End 5/25 03:45:13 PM PDT = 5/26 0145:13 HRS IMT

Time Lapse Bloc N

Begin 5/25 04:32:05 PM PDT = 5/26 0232:05 HRS IMT
End 5/25 04:46:29 PM PDT = 5/26 0246:29 HRS IMT

What on Earth is a soldier doing up at 3 AM unless he's on night duty? And if he's on duty, and already people have eyes on him, what would he be doing chatting with this slacker hacker? Or is he "talking" with the hacker only in the hacker's BRAIN? Enquiring minds want to know!

Now the Time Lapse blocs. Since Wired has these blocs on the 25th PDT, they could have been in Lamo's 'puter as reading that they were made on the 25th! Immediately I would assume, if I were on the jury, that these chat logs, being *.txt files, are utterly suspect. I mean, they could have been corrupted or even invented by Lamo. Who basically snitched on Manning or set him up and framed him without even contacting him. Which means Lamo and others whom he pals around with, like Poulsen, could be working for the US central government. Which in itself is utterly corrupt.

So instead of Manning being Courtmartialed, the whole government/military-industrial nomenklatura should should all be arrested. For war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as treason.

Yemeni Nationals Get to Call Home From Guantanamo.

Xinhuanet: ICRC facilitates video calls for Guantanamo detainees, their families in Yemen

SANAA, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced on Tuesday that it has facilitated video-teleconference calls between detainees at the U.S.-run military jail in Guantanamo Bay and their families in Yemen.

"The first calls were made ten days ago at the headquarters of the ICRC's delegation in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The latest round of calls was made from Yemen's southern city port of Aden," the ICRC said in a press release.

"So far, four Yemeni families have used the video calls," Nourane Houas of the ICRC's Sanaa delegation said.

The video calls can last up to one hour, in which detainees for the first time in almost a decade can speak and also see their families in Yemen.

No information on whether Pfc Bradley Manning can call his family or receive phone calls from them, even from his aunt who lives in Potomac, MD., only 50 miles away by Expressway, his father in Oklahoma, or his mum and other aunt in Wales. I suspect he cannot. And I bet that compared to Manning's solitary confinement, the detainees prisoners of war at Guantanamo Bay live in the lap of luxury. For one thing, they don't have to sleep in only boxer shorts under a heavy, itchy and scratchy blanket that is exactly like rough commercial carpet superglued onto an x-ray technician's protective shroud, which is pure torture. Which is why he takes sleeping pills.

A Lawless State Tortures Its Own.

Bradley Manning, whether he leaked the video and the documents or not, was only doing his job!

From Paul Craig Roberts:

Bradley Manning, who allegedly provided the media with the video made by US troops of their wanton, fun-filled slaughter of newsmen and civilians, has been abused in solitary confinement for six months. Murdering civilians is a war crime, and as General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, “It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral” and to make such orders known. If Manning is the source of the leak, he has been wrongfully imprisoned for meeting his military responsibility. The media have yet to make the point that the person who reported the crime, not the persons who committed it, is the one who has been imprisoned, and without a trial.

Read the whole article here.

Actually the solitary confinement has been going on for seven months and counting. It is an intensive 23-hour-a-day solitary, made all the more inhumane by a now unneccesary for six-and-a-half months Prevention of Injury watch, ostensibly for the soldier's own protection! This is no less than torture, even when done with the best of intentions, and reeks of pure fascism.

Everything is Oppositeland at Fox News

Do they have anything useful that can be used? The former Defence Undersecretary says Manning's attorney should contact the Inspector General. I assume he's done that already.



This Fox News piecs is no less than a smear on Bradley Manning and us, his supporters. Worse, they're justifying and advocating torture! And the one speaking up for our side and for Bradley is beyond pathetic. The whole exercise is disgusting!

This US Soldier's Torture Is Worse than Crucifixion, Totally Insane and Beyond Disgusting.

The US central government is slowly grinding down an heroic soldier, who either with the aid of others, leaked swarms of documents and other files that document war crimes and other US misdeeds to WikiLeaks and was entrapped by a hacker, or made a nuisance of himself insisting his superiors address the international felonies and was conveniently gotten rid of. The soldier's name is Pfc Bradley Manning. They are grinding down through the slow psychological torture of intensive, 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, made all the more wearying with restrictions invoked through a "Prevention Of Injury" order. How Orwellian is that??

First is the infamous video of a US War Crime in North Baghdad that Bradley is alleged to have leaked. It'll turn your stomach!



And following is an excellent article by Chris Floyd of the Empire Burlesque blog.

Written on the Body: The Progressive Torture of Bradley Manning
Written by Chris Floyd

Monday, 27 December 2010 23:17

Tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, the government of the United States is torturing a young man -- one of its own soldiers -- whom it has incarcerated but not indicted. He has been held in solitary confinement for months on end, subjected to techniques of sleep deprivation taken from the Soviet gulag, denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes -- all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to "confess" to a broader "conspiracy" against state power.

His name is Bradley Manning. He is 23 years old. The "crime" he is accused of committing is releasing video evidence of an American atrocity committed years ago in Iraq: the murder of Iraqi civilians by helicopter gunships. Under the American system of jurisprudence, of course, he is considered innocent until proven guilty of this heinous 'crime' of truth-telling. He has not been tried or convicted of this charge, or any other crime.

Yet tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, in the United States of America, under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama, 23-year-old Bradley Manning is being subjected to same tortures routinely inflicted on other unindicted, untried captives of the militarist state.

Journalist Andy Worthington, who has been one of the most thorough and assiduous chroniclers of the modern American gulag, has noted the parallels between the treatment imposed on Manning and that doled out to earlier prisoners of the bizarre, lawless limbo concocted by the American war machine for those who threaten -- or are perceived to threaten -- its ever-expanding, ever-more corrupt operations around the world. Worthington states that the conditions of Manning's imprisonment

bear a marked and chilling resemblance to the conditions in which a handful of US citizens and residents were held as “enemy combatants” under the Bush administration. The key elements here are the elements of profound isolation and suffering ... not just the solitary confinement, with no other human being for company, but also the refusal to allow Manning to have a pillow, sheets, or any access to the outside world through the reporting of current affairs.

It is these factors that mark out his conditions of detention as sharing some key elements with the conditions endured by the three “enemy combatants” held on the US mainland under the Bush administration — the US citizens Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, and the US legal resident Ali al-Marri.

...

al-Marri, along with two American citizens also held as “enemy combatants” — Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla — was subjected to the same “Standard Operating Procedure” that was applied to prisoners at Guantánamo during its most brutal phase, from mid-2002 to mid-2004. This involved the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including prolonged isolation, painful stress positions, exposure to extreme temperature, sleep deprivation, extreme sensory deprivation, and threats of violence and death.

...

There is, at present, no suggestion that Bradley Manning has been subjected to a wide range of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but prolonged isolation is confirmed, and depriving him of a pillow, sheets, or any access to the outside world through the reporting of current affairs are all elements of discomfort and further isolation that were key to the program of belittling and punishing “enemy combatants,” and, crucially, “softening them up” or “breaking” them for interrogation. It is, sadly, all too easy to imagine that other techniques designed to disorientate Manning and to further erode his will — involving elements of sleep deprivation, threats and sensory deprivation — could also be applied, or are, perhaps, already being applied, especially if, as has been suggested by the Independent, the authorities are hoping to cut a plea deal with him, reducing a 52-year sentence in exchange for a confession that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, whom the US is seeking to extradite to the US, was not just a passive recipient of the information leaked by Manning, but was instead a conspirator.

As Glenn Greenwald and others have documented, the known treatment being meted out to Bradley Manning is itself a profound form of torture. Indeed, isolation, sleep deprivation, incessant harassment and constant interrogation were primary methods of the torturers in the Soviet gulag, who in many cases did not resort to more "enhanced" techniques unless the pressure was on from above to produce large numbers of "convictions" and "evidence" of conspiracies in a hurry. These techniques -- the same techniques now used under the command of the Peace Laureate -- were considered highly effective and severely punishing tortures in their own right. They are now at the center of the American gulag's treatment of its captives.And, as Worthington ominously notes, we have no way of knowing at this moment whether "enhanced" techniques are being used on Manning as well.

I am running out of words to describe the depths we are sinking into. I am running out of ways to try to shake people from their stupor and shock them into an awareness of the monstrous evil that is rising all around them. Even those who proclaim themselves the progressive friends of all humankind spend most of their time and energy wringing their hands over the political tea leaves, parsing the strategy and tactics of the partisan squabbles between the two scarcely-distinguishable factions of the militarist establishment. And while they are sometimes bold enough to criticize this or that element of the Peace Laureate's administration, they still fret and fight and pray to keep that administration in power.

But tonight that very administration is torturing a young man -- torturing him -- for telling the truth about the crimes being committed by the machinery of evil that their standard-bearer, the Peace Laureate, now proudly directs. If you support this administration, then you support the torture of Bradley Manning. You are working to guarantee that such tortures, and worse, are inflicted on more and more truth-tellers, more and more people whose consciences have been jolted to the core by the abominations they have witnessed or learned about from others.

The militarist, corporatist, liberty-stripping evil that our earnest lovers of humanity fear will come to pass if those evil Republicans come to power is already here, it is happening before their very eyes. "Oh, that Glenn Beck, how terrible he is!" Yes, he is terrible, but I tell you this: Glenn Beck hasn't tortured anyone. Glenn Beck hasn't killed hundreds of defenseless innocent civilians, men, women and children murdered without any warning by robot drones in an undeclared war on an allied nation. Glenn Beck hasn't "surged" an endless, pointless, murderous, money-making war of domination against a broken land and its terrorized people. Glenn Beck is not going to court to defend torturers. Glenn Beck is not proclaiming he has the arbitrary, unchallengeable power to assassinate anyone on earth whenever he feels like it.

But the Peace Laureate has done all these things. He is doing all these things, and more. No doubt Glenn Beck -- and all the other greasy-pole climbers seeking wealth and domination in our degraded society -- would like to do these things too. But those with their eyes fixed on the potential or fantasized future evil of their partisan opponents are blind to the fact that their own faction is committing gross evils right here and now. Barack Obama is entrenching the machinery of evil deeper and deeper into the structures of government and society; he is strengthening the foundations of evil that others will build upon, just as he is building upon the wars and gulags and corporate whoredom of his predecessor. Progressives who support Obama -- who support this entrenching process -- are in fact guaranteeing that their dystopian nightmares of the future will come true. They are helping Obama clear the path for an even rougher, more merciless beast now slouching toward Washington to be born.

As I said, words are beginning to fail me. And in any case, almost no one is reading the words on this site. [Most of the traffic is drawn by the magnificent -- and shattering -- collection of Iraq War photos compiled by the webmaster, Rich Kastelein.] So let me end with the words of someone else: the incomparable Arthur Silber, whose mighty heart and incisive mind have blazed with light through many dark years:

I repeat once more: these horrors are now what the United States stands for. Thus, for every adult American, the question is not, "Why do you obey?" but:

Why do you support?

Or will you refuse to give your support? Will you say, "No"? These are the paramount questions at this moment in history, and in the life of the United States. We all must answer them. Our honor, our humanity, and our souls lie in the balance.

UPDATE: After putting this post together, I ran across the latest essay by Chris Hedges at Truthdig. Hedges, like Silber, is one of the very few who have the courage to walk the full walk and live fully by their convictions, despite the cost. Hedges was recently arrested outside the White House of the Peace Laureate, one of many protestors hauled off for speaking the truth about the Laureate's wars in a manner deemed unseemly in our great democracy.

His new piece is an eloquent description of how the nightmare dystopia noted above is already coming into being, a horrible mash-up of Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "1984." You should read the whole thing, but here are a few excerpts, beginning with his mention of the Bradley Manning case:

...The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans.

...The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

...

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Hedges also provides a telling passage from Orwell's novel, where the facts of life are explained to Winston Smith:

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. ... The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

These bedrock truths of our time are now being played out on the body and mind of Bradley Manning. The object of Bradley Manning's torture is not bolstering "national security" or upholding the "rule of law"; the object of his torture is the torture itself: the demonstration of power, the enactment of power, the physical embodiment of power. Power is not a reality until you exercise it -- inflict it -- upon someone else. And that is the essential, the ultimate concern of the militarist empire that rules us today.

So this is how we support our troops! By treating the ones who are accused of being whistle-blowers as if they are enemy combatants (who should be treated better than they are)! By subjecting them to torture and cruel and unusual punishments! We do it without conviction, without trial, without an indictment, even! Where is the soldier's right to humane treatment whilst awaiting only a short time for a speedy trial? Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? I guess like the Constitution and the Rule of Law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice has been gitmoised!

This is not what one would expect from Limited Government!

This is not what one would expect from Liberal Politicians!

This is NOT right, it is totally beyond the pale, and cannot be tolerated in any civilised society!

Obama, Biden, Hilary, Gates, et al, must all be impeached and removed from office; then arrested. For war crimes as well as treason.

And the Teabaggers scream about Birth Certificates!

Please click here and here to join me in support of Bradley Manning.