Bradley Manning military trial: group petitions for a more open court

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Bradley Manning military trial: group petitions for a more open court

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 May 2012 21.38 BST

The military trial of the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning is being conducted amid far more secrecy than even the prosecution of the alleged 9/11 plotters in Guantanamo, a coalition of lawyers and media outlets protest.

Led by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, the coalition has petitioned the Army court of criminal appeals calling for the court-martial against Manning to be opened up to the press and public. The group complains that the way the trial is being handled by the trial judge Colonel Denise Lind is a violation of the First Amendment of the constitution that requires public access unless the government can specifically demonstrate the need for secrecy.

The petition lists the many ways in which the public are being kept in the dark over the prosecution of Bradley Manning, who faces 22 charges related to the leaking of a vast trove of US state secrets to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. He was arrested in May 2010 at a military base outside Baghdad where he was working as an intelligence analyst on suspicion of passing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables as well as warlogs from Iraq and Afghanistan to the site.

The army has allowed the publication of not one single motion submitted by the prosecution to the court-martial, nor any prosecution replies to defence motions, not even in redacted form. None of the orders issued by the court have been made public, and no transcripts have been provided of any of the proceedings – not even those that were fully open to the press.

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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/24/bradley-manning-military-trial-wikileaks

[jberryhill]

1. Denise Lind? The "communist"?

http://politicalvelcraft.org/2010/12/12/congress-communist-judge-denise-lind-violates-oath-of-office-congress-to-take-up-colonel-lakin-case/

Lakin is on trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Afghanistan. He challenged the orders because he questions President Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. His court martial is scheduled to begin Dec. 14.

...

As reported earlier by WND, court martial judge Col. Denise Lind, however, simply declared the orders received by Lakin were valid. Lind refused to allow Lakin to address the underlying eligibility issues and limited the scope of the trial to whether Lakin had knowingly disobeyed orders.

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For those not familiar with the Lakin story, he is a birther who refused orders to deploy to Afghanistan, claiming that his orders were invalid because Obama did not personally answer his questions about whether he was a natural born US citizen.

He was sentenced to a year in Leavenworth, and stripped of rank and pension.