Naomi Spencer
WSWS

Army Private Bradley Manning, accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been held in solitary confinement by the military for more than seven months.

Manning, who has not been convicted of a crime, has been imprisoned since May at the Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. Prior to that the 22-year-old intelligence specialist was held in a military prison in Kuwait, where he was also kept in solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement is widely acknowledged to be a form of torture. Severe isolation leads to psychological trauma, despair and mental illness. While routinely employed in the US prison system, the treatment is banned as a cruel and unusual punishment in many countries.

By all indications, the Obama administration and the military are subjecting Manning to this treatment in the hope that, after being incapacitated and made pliant, he will accept a plea deal in exchange for implicating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange so that the US can prosecute the latter on conspiracy charges.

On Friday, the British Independent reported that the US Justice Department has offered Manning a plea bargain, which would involve him being transferred to civilian custody, in return for him naming Assange as an active collaborator in obtaining the leaked files.

Manning was detained after WikiLeaks released the “Collateral Murder” video last April. The video contains footage shot by a US attack helicopter of a massacre of civilians and journalists carried out in Baghdad in 2007. The Army private is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents and other material that show the massive scale of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, expose corruption and lies, and document war crimes.

Read more »

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

Oh! spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead. ~ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, Act III

"He will not be going back to that cell once occupied by Oscar Wilde."

Eventually he didn't. But little did Mark Stephens, one of Julian Assange's lawyers, know that it would still take over three twisting-and-turning hours for his client to finally exit the Royal Courts of Justice in central London a free man.

It's as if WikiLeaks founder Assange, emerging from the silence of the shadows to the proverbially frantic media scrum, already knew that the real war starts now - and has nothing to do with jealous groupies, broken condoms and "sex by surprise".

This was the key passage of Assange's brief statement, read immediately after he was able to breathe the air of London again. He said, "During my time in solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison, I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support."

As in: pay excruciatingly close attention to what the US government is doing to Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of cables to WikiLeaks. Manning has been held in solitary confinement at the US Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, for five months now. He has not been convicted of any crime. In a devastating Salon article, Glenn Greenwald has stressed that Manning is "under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture".

So that was Assange's terse way of saying to the world: Big Brother is watching you. And what they're doing to Manning they want to do to me, to you, and metaphorically to anyone who believes in freedom of information.

Read more »

Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

In this essay I would reflect on why as an exiled Palestinian, I do not believe that putting an end to Zionism would solve Palestine's problem ("Israel").

Supporting "equal rights", supporting “one person, one vote”, constitutes support for the occupiers' illegitimate privilege to impose their presence in a land they conquered by war and terrorism, looted and destroyed, holding on the estate of -survivors forced into exiled -“absentees”.

“Equal rights” and the deceptive expression “one person, one vote” would finalize the conquest of Palestine. This finalization of the theft of a foreign land, would be a grave violation of the fundamentals of ethics regulating human interaction.

Worse, it would be an irreversible step backwards into the dark ages, insofar that it would constitute the first jurisprudential invalidation of most fundamentals of International Law pertaining to sovereignty and wars of aggression and conquest. Centuries of modest, painstaking progress, would be thrown out the window. The Thirteenth Century's Magna Carta, the Seventeenth Century's Treaty of Westphalia and the Twentieth Century's Nuremberg Principles are the cornerstones of International Law, prohibiting Wars of Aggression, and regulating occupation.

“Equal rights”, and “one person one vote” would send the clear message to bullies, criminals, thieves, that they get away with MURDER. -Literally! It is a carte blanche for bullies and aggressors to do whatever they like, steal, kill, colonize, rape, oppress, torture...

And that is one of the reasons why any future decision on the status of ILLEGAL COLONIZERS in Palestine should be a PALESTINIAN DECISION; they, and ONLY they, can choose whether or not, to allow some of their tormentors to stay, or not, and in which legal parameter this can happen.

The term “negotiation table” has been abused to be merely the place where the Palestinians gradually and systematically loose everything there is to loose, and they just keep on participating and giving.

This moral and legal masquerade of “Equal Rights” and “One person, one vote” is not, and never will constitute a solid basis for a lasting peace. Peace existed before the arrival of the Jewish Zionist invasion, and will exist after they leave. Palestine's sovereignty is not on the negotiation table.

Rather naively, some believe that the only solution for the Palestinian tragedy would be to de-zionise "israel". I could not disagree more.

Read more »

Stephen Lendman

Three earlier articles addressed the issue, the most recent accessed through this link.

Net Neutrality is a defining issue of our time. It's essential to keep the Internet free and open, letting users access all content without restrictions, limitations, or discrimination, maintaining an online level playing field for everyone.

It's the essence of democratic free speech. Without it, the Internet will resemble cable TV, letting corporate predators game the system, deciding what web sites, content and applications are available at what price and speed.

Giant cable and telecom companies are lobbying Congress and the FCC furiously for that right. A leaked September 2010 House Energy and Commerce Committee draft bill, if enacted, will let them establish higher-priced premium lanes (two Internets), effectively destroying Net Neutrality, compromising the last free and open space. New FCC provisions may do the same. More on that below.

An October 2007 global measure, overriding national sovereignty, also threatens Net Neutrality, consumer privacy, and civil liberties. Called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), secret negotiations seek to subvert them, ostensibly to protect copyrighted intellectual property, including films, photos, and songs. ACTA remains a work in progress, but developments going forward bear watching, especially if a global agreement is reached.

Read more »