I know what a grand jury does, I’m trying to understand if you’re just telling me that this is how the process works? Because I think we’ve already established that I think the GJ can be replaced and the process changed. But, I’m also trying to make sure I understand what you’re arguing in the first place. I hope you understand I’m genuinely just not following what you’re trying to say here.
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More like “if I haven’t done anything wrong, I’m probably not going to spend a lot of time worrying about what my trusted friends might tell a grand jury.”
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But the question at hand is whether Manning being called before a grand jury would undermine others’ trust in HER.
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Her reasoning is debatable, I give you that; but if I had been imprisoned and tortured, I’d likely never trust anyone in authority, ever again.
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The problem is not with the ostensible purpose of grand juries, it’s that their implementation gives huge power to a prosecutor with very few of the traditional checks that a courtroom usually has.
Prosecutors know this, and they use Grand Juries not to determine whether probable cause exists, but to terrorize and jail vulnerable activists.
Chelsea Manning, an outspoken trans human rights activist, is sitting in jail even though she hasn’t even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of one. She is in jail because the rules of a Grand Jury allow the prosecutor to compel a judge to order this.
Chelsea Manning should be free right now. She is a bright spot in a pretty dim world. Free Chelsea Manning.
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Grand juries serve to gather information on dissidents far beyond what police and prosecutors could gather on their own; they have been used to isolate, divide, and destroy social movements since the 1960s. Grand juries are currently being used to target anarchists, anti-fascists, and indigenous water protectors who struggled at Standing Rock.
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We are seeing in this case something that would spark deep suspicion if it weren’t the Mueller probe. The publicly known connection between Wikileaks and Manning is press and source. The relationship of Wikileaks to the DNC emails is press to reporting, at least as far as we have public proof. It is certainly possible that Wikileaks was involved in unethical means to acquire that material or did it for bad reasons, but right now those are only assumptions. So yes, this looks an awful lot like the use of a grand jury to attack a press outlet, which while almost certainly legal should give everyone pause. Add to that the history of the use of grand juries as an intimidation tactic and a tool to disrupt activist groups and even more caution is warranted. I don’t grant federal prosecutors enough default trust to overcome those concerns without better public evidence.
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Well, the two examples are not exactly analogous:
[Manning] - [Wikileaks] - [News Outlets]
[Guc.2.0] - [?] - [Wikileaks]
We can be pretty sure that the DNC email hack was performed by the IRC and released by WL, but we don’t know what intermediaries, if any, were between the two. Whereas we know from Manning’s own testimony that the connection between her and WL was direct. If there were reputable intermediaries between IRC and WL, then at least WL has a credible claim to be press. If there was no intermediary, or the intermediary was also a known state actor, the WL isn’t really press it’s propaganda.
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I appreciate your answer and indeed, it may be 100% correct. However, it may not be, at all. Hell, maybe Wikileaks/Assange was under Russian influence from the very early days – whether everyone involved knew, or not. I don’t think we have incontrovertible evidence that this is not the case. These days, I tend to assume that state actors are behind a lot more interwebs weirdness than most people realize. Well, I always assumed that, actually.
It could very well turn out that they were acting in a nonpress capacity, but until that is proven I think it is fair to continue treating a previously known press outlet as a press outlet. It is actually hard to construct a scenario that seems probable that moves Wikileaks actions firmly out of the press realm given what we know. Even if they were given the info direct from known Russian agents it still would come down to incentives and newsworthiness. I think the fact that most major news outlets ran with the same material once it was out meets some threshold for newsworthiness. Barring something like a payment for publication, I think the most likely motivation is some version of standard Wikileaks ethos combined with Assange’s personal dislike of Clinton. The charges we’re seen leveled at the assorted Trump surrogates, like unregistered foreign agent, tax and banking frauds, and campaign violations probably wouldn’t apply to a non-resident, non-citizen, who wasn’t employed by a campaign.
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May I ask, how is Wikileaks a press outlet? “Press outlet” to me implies editorial. I can’t think of a press outlet that would simply re-release hundreds of thousands or millions of pages of unreviewed classified government documents in totally unredacted form.
Now, my facts may be off, and I’m certainly open to learning something new through fact and reasoned argument, but I just don’t see them as anything even slightly resembling a “press outlet.” By that highly loose definition, I might as well be a press outlet because I post things on Facebook. I don’t think transmitting things across the internet ought to count as a press activity.
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Because criminal organizations are the only organizations that the US government has ever surveiled?
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What about that dodgy Belarus stuff? Was that around the same time?
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I believe that @zikzak is saying that you sound like a bonkers conspiracy theorist. Which is kinda true. Like, a lot has happened since 2010. If WikiLeaks had any ties to Russia at the time, it was not at all known or obvious. So your post that links Manning to the Mueller investigation by way of deep state corruption and WikiLeaks is reminiscent of classic Glenn Beck Wearing Glasses chalkboard rants.
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Wikileaks isn’t even a wiki, FFS.
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I think from a legal protection standpoint the stuff you post to Facebook is press activity. It may not be good, or thoughtful press activity, but it is press activity. They engaged in some degree of editorial process. The decision to release the Afghanistan war logs rather than their lunch receipts is a process. Prior to releasing those logs they went through a minimization process with several major media outlets, notably the Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. Was that process sufficient, we seem to disagree, but it definitely existed. Afghanistan war logs: How the Guardian got the story | Afghanistan: the war logs | The Guardian The Iraq leaks went through a minimization process as well. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/10/22/wikileaks.editing/ The original State department cables were reviewed and redacted as well. Most major news outlets considered the things they put out to be worthy of report and it seems that your challenges are more directed at whether they are a good or bad press outlet rather than if they are publishing news.
It is very easy for legitimate political activity to be heavily impaired by grand jury activity. I’ll give an example from my life. I’m involved in planning a political protest action right now. The planning involves meeting with representatives from a bunch of different organizations, some of which have a very antagonistic relationship with powerful groups in this area. This is true of just about any large protest that isn’t purely spontaneous. If I found out that someone who had attended an early meeting was testifying before a grand jury it would be unreasonable for me to continue organizing with them. The actions aren’t illegal, but they are sensitive. That grand jury process would function to separate them and in all likelihood their entire group from the planning process. In a more concrete way prosecutors have historically used the open ended nature of the process to keep someone tied up in a way that undermines their ability to organize and sometimes just to pursue a normal living.
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I mean if you are simply asking is “does Wikileaks editorialize it’s leaks?” the answer is an unquestionable yes. And they always have. They have a database of leaks, and they have a team that releases public facing editorials on the content.
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Yeah absolutely. If this is tied to an investigation into Russia it’s gone way off the rails, but this is much more likely a fishing expedition for Assange himself.
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I guess more in terms of just dropping massive volumes of leaked material to the public. If they did the editorials that you mention, and included just relevant (and potentially redacted) selections of the documents, to me that is closer to what I think of as “press activity.”
The lines have obviously gotten blurred over the past years, what is and is not press. I tend to think of process more than simply “the act of publishing something.” I’m not sure I’d saw Wikileaks follows journalistic standards and practices? But neither does Fox News, and to a degree (a lesser one IMHO) neither does CNN or MSNBC these days. Woohoo, internet! It’s turning everything into shit!
Unless the investigators know something that you/we do not. I mean, they do have the apparatuses of state surveillance at their disposal. You don’t think anything motivated this other than a desire to harass Chelsea Manning?
