Manning gets 35 years

With time served, good behavior and parole he could be out in ten years. This seems fair to me. Details here.

Manning to be Sentenced Wednesday

He had his day in court and now the bill is due. The Army is asking for sixty years. That seems high to me. My guess is somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years. But I would be shocked if he gets less than twenty.

Snowden Flees Hong Kong; Maybe Heading for S. America

MOSCOW — Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who leaked top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs, fled Hong Kong for Moscow on Sunday with the assistance of the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, landing at Sheremetyevo International Airport aboard an Aeroflot flight, according to Russian media reports and a WikiLeaks spokesman.

Snowden’s ultimate destination was unknown, but Ricardo Patiño Aroca, Ecuador’s foreign minister, tweeted Sunday afternoon that his government had received a request for asylum from Snowden. WikiLeaks released a statement saying Snowden was “bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum.”

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Note: This is a developing story and the text at the linked site is likely to change.

1 Year Later: Wikileaks Assange to Remain in Embassy

(Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says he will not leave the sanctuary of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London even if Sweden stops pursuing sexual assault claims against him because he fears arrest on the order of the United States.

In an interview with Reuters and others to mark the one-year anniversary of taking refuge in the cramped diplomatic building, Assange said he remained hopeful he might be able to leave but offered little evidence to suggest he would be finding new living quarters anytime soon.

"I wouldn't say I wouldn't leave," he said. "(But) my lawyers have advised me I shouldn't leave the embassy because of the risk of arrest in relation to the risk of arrest and extradition to the United States."

When asked whether he would remain inside even if Sweden dropped the investigation against him, Assange said: "That's correct."

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Julian Assange’s bail backers told to pay up

Julian Assange's high-profile backers have been warned they face jail unless they pay £93,500 within a month in what has been called a “unique and wholly exceptional” case.

Julian Assange’s friends and supporters have been ordered to pay a court £93,500 after he skipped bail to seek asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy.

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Assange: Bad manners but not rape?

LONDON -- As U.S. Congressman Todd Akin fights for his political life over his "legitimate rape" comments, a high-profile British politician has ignited a storm on the other side of the Atlantic over the definition of rape.

George Galloway, a member of the U.K. parliament and former leader of the left-wing Respect Party, waded into the debate around the allegations faced by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

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Ecuador Is Wrong

Ecuador's government has a great record of challenging the disastrous record of Western neo-liberalism, but its Foreign Secretary is wrong to describe the charges as "laughable" and "hilarious". Though its UK Embassy must be protected from any British Government attempt to attack its sovereignty, it is wrong to offer Assange political asylum. Assange should go to Sweden to face the allegations. That doesn't mean abandoning the struggle to hold Western governments to account, and to force them to be open about how they act in our name. But this is a struggle that has become tragically compromised by Assange.

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HT: Dr. Tighe

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador

WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuador Embassy in London and has asked for political asylum, Ecuador's foreign minister said on Tuesday.

"Ecuador is studying and analyzing the request," Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters in the capital Quito.

The Ecuador Embassy issued the following statement:

    This afternoon Mr Julian Assange arrived at the Ecuadorian Embassy seeking political asylum from the Ecuadorian government.

    As a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration for Human Rights, with an obligation to review all applications for asylum, we have immediately passed his application on to the relevant department in Quito.

    While the department assesses Mr Assange's application, Mr Assange will remain at the embassy, under the protection of the Ecuadorian Government.

    The decision to consider Mr Assange's application for protective asylum should in no way be interpreted as the Government of Ecuador interfering in the judicial processes of either the United Kingdom or Sweden.

Read the rest here.

Good luck with that. The last time I checked "rape" was not classified as a political crime anywhere in the world. Nor is Sweden a country that is likely to prosecute someone on trumped up charges just to make the US happy. If anything Sweden has a more sober and fair legal system than ours. So I say pack him off to Sweden and let him have his day in court.

Supporters worry Julian Assange could be handed over to the US

Julian Assange faces being extradited to the US if British authorities agree to Swedish extradition, his supporters have claimed in a letter to the Daily Telegraph.

Signatories including Prof Noam Chomsky, the academic, and film director Ken Loach said that once in Sweden Mr Assange could be handed over to America without the "appropriate legal processes that accompany normal extradition cases."

The WikiLeaks founder was this month given permission by the Supreme Court to appeal against his extradition to Sweden where he could face rape and sexual assault charges.

But his supporters claim that sending him to Sweden would place him under "temporary surrender", putting him at threat of a fast-track extradition to the US, where prosecutors are considering charging him over the release of confidential documents.

In the letter published in the Daily Telegraph 74 prominent supporters write: "The chances of Mr Assange receiving a fair trial in the United States appear remote.

"A number of prominent political figures have called for him to be assassinated, and Joe Biden, the Vice-President, has called him a 'high-tech terrorist'. Given this atmosphere of hostility, we hold serious concerns about his safety once in American custody."

Source

WikiLeaks: British High Court rejects Assange extradition appeal

LONDON — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lost his battle against extradition Wednesday when Britain’s High Court ruled that he should be sent to Sweden to face questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct.

The judgment, handed down by High Court judges John Thomas and Duncan Ouseley with Assange in attendance, dismissed all four of the objections raised by Assange’s legal

In their ruling, the judges said that the European Arrest Warrant that triggered Assange’s arrest and subsequent proceedings by the Swedish authorities were “proportionate.”

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Low on cash, Wikileaks scales back operations

LONDON -- The anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks says it will be scaling back operations so that it can focus on raising money.

For months, WikiLeaks has been prevented from receiving donations through VISA, Mastercard and other firms that process financial transactions. Those firms severed their relations with the organization after American officials described its release of classified documents as damaging to U.S. national security interests.

On Monday, founder Julian Assange told reporters in London that WikLeaks would “temporarily suspend all publishing operations in order to direct all our resources to fighting the blockade and raising funds,” adding that the “blockade” had wiped out 95 percent of WikiLeaks’ revenue.

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WikiLeaks Leaves Names of Diplomatic Sources in Cables

WASHINGTON — In a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials, the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks has published on the Web nearly 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables in recent days, more than six times the total disclosed publicly since the posting of the leaked State Department documents began last November.

A sampling of the documents showed that the newly published cables included the names of some people who had spoken confidentially to American diplomats and whose identities were marked in the cables with the warning “strictly protect.”

State Department officials and human rights activists have been concerned that such diplomatic sources, including activists, journalists and academics in authoritarian countries, could face reprisals, including dismissal from their jobs, prosecution or violence.

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Manning faces new charges, possible death penalty

WASHINGTON — Following an intensive seven-month investigation, the Army on Wednesday filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of illegally downloading tens of thousands of classified U.S. military and State Department documents that were then publicly released by WikiLeaks, military officials tell NBC News.

The most serious of the new charges is "aiding the enemy," a capital offense which carries a potential death sentence.

Pentagon and military officials say some of the classified information released by WikiLeaks contained the names of informants and others who had cooperated with U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, endangering their lives.

According to the officials, the U.S. military rounded up many of those named and brought them into their bases for protection. But, according to one military official, "We didn't get them all." Military officials tell NBC News a small number of them still have not been found.

Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, did not immediately return a call from msnbc.com for comment.

But Coombs wrote on his blog Wednesday that it was uncertain whether any additional charges filed against his client would stick.

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Assange complains of Jewish smear campaign

LONDON — A report published by a British magazine on Tuesday said the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, suggested that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization.

His remarks appeared in the magazine Private Eye, in an article by its editor, Ian Hislop, who outlined a rambling phone call that Mr. Assange made on Feb. 16 to complain about the coverage of WikiLeaks.

He was especially angry about a Private Eye report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Mr. Assange complained that the article was part of a campaign by Jewish reporters in London to smear WikiLeaks.

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Wikileakds next bombshell... Swiss banking records?

LONDON — A Swiss banker whose actions caused a U.S. judge to briefly shut down WikiLeaks three years ago has promised to hand over a trove of banking secrets to the secret-spilling organization on Monday, a U.K. newspaper reported.

Releasing the bank details of 2,000 "high net worth individuals" and companies could reveal huge potential tax evasion, The Observer reported on Sunday.

Both American and British firms and individuals, including about "40 politicians," will be implicated, Rudolf Elmer, a former employee of Swiss-based Bank Julius Baer, told the newspaper.

Elmer, who pledged to give the information to WikiLeaks at a journalists' club in London on Monday, has been ordered to appear before a Zurich regional court Jan. 19 to answer charges of coercion and violating Switzerland's strict banking secrecy laws. If convicted he could be sentenced to up to three years in prison and a fine.

The list of individuals and companies includes multinational conglomerates and hedge funds that are "using secrecy as a screen to hide behind in order to avoided paying tax," Elmer told the Observer.

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US Warns People Named in Cable Leaks

WASHINGTON — The State Department is warning hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and businesspeople identified in leaked diplomatic cables of potential threats to their safety and has moved a handful of them to safer locations, administration officials said Thursday.

The operation, which involves a team of 30 in Washington and embassies from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, reflects the administration’s fear that the disclosure of cables obtained by the organization WikiLeaks has damaged American interests by exposing foreigners who supply valuable information to the United States.

Administration officials said they were not aware of anyone who has been attacked or imprisoned as a direct result of information in the 2,700 cables that have been made public to date by WikiLeaks, The New York Times and several other publications, many with some names removed. But they caution that many dissidents are under constant harassment from their governments, so it is difficult to be certain of the cause of actions against them.

The officials declined to discuss details about people contacted by the State Department in recent weeks, saying only that a few were relocated within their home countries and that a few others were moved abroad.

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Wikileaks: Julian Assange's fatal mistake

t's tempting to think of Julian Assange as an enigmatic international criminal mastermind. Romantic, even. And he certainly cultivates that image himself, with the wild hair and the comedy sunglasses. But Assange is no mastermind: his vanity, his hubris and his insatiable desire to see the world burn have led him to make a fatal, final error. As a result, the Wikileaks project is doomed.

At the tail-end of last month, Assange indicated to a journalist that he had information about a major US bank that would cause a scandal to rival Enron. That was a catastrophic misjudgment. Because now, one by one, every financial institution connected to Assange is severing his ability to finance Wikileaks. Each is giving very slightly different reasons - usually connected to terms of service and "illegal activity" - but all of their motivations are the same: in the middle of a recession, it would be disastrous to their own businesses should Assange attempt to take out a major bank.

For all the mirrors around the internet replicating Wikileaks's content, the organisation will fall without the financial resources to continue sifting through its vast repository of documents.

Read the rest here.

This is an excellent piece.

On a side note; am I the only one who perceives some truly delicious irony in a man who espouses absolute transparency but who wants to bank in Switzerland?

Founder of WikiLeaks threatens massive retaliation if arrested

WASHINGTON — Julian Assange, the beleaguered founder of the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, has threatened to release many more confidential diplomatic cables if legal action is taken against him or his organization. Mr. Assange’s threat poses a problem for the Obama administration as it explores ways to prosecute Mr. Assange or the group.

On Monday, as Mr. Assange’s lawyers said he would meet with the British police about criminal charges involving sexual encounters in Sweden, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the Justice Department had “a very serious, active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature” into the WikiLeaks matter.

“I authorized just last week a number of things to be done so that we can hopefully get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable,” he said at a news conference, declining to elaborate.

Mr. Holder’s statement followed Mr. Assange’s assertion that “over 100,000 people” had been given the entire archive of 251,287 cables “in encrypted form.”

“If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically,” Mr. Assange said Friday in a question-and-answer session on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian.

His threat is not idle, because as of Monday night the group had released fewer than 1,000 of the quarter-million State Department cables it had obtained, reportedly from a low-ranking Army intelligence analyst.

So far, the group has moved cautiously. The whole archive was made available to five news organizations, including The New York Times. But WikiLeaks has posted only a few dozen cables on its own in addition to matching those made public by the news publications. According to the State Department’s count, 1,325 cables, or fewer than 1 percent of the total, have been made public by all parties to date.

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