Developing Story–US Soldier Murders 16 Afghan Civilians in their beds

This story is just now coming in.

Al Jazeera

MSNBC

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan—A U.S. service member killed at least 15 members of two Afghan families as well as a 16th person before turning himself in, witnesses and officials said Sunday. Nine of the dead were children, and three were women, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a statement.

The soldier, who has yet to be identified, reportedly left his base in the early hours Sunday and went to two villages just a few hundred yards away. He then opened fire on Afghan civilians sleeping in ther homes, Minister of Border and Tribal Affairs Asadullah Khalid told Reuters. The service member entered three homes in the villages in Kandahar province, he said.

I want to remind everyone that we are in the very early hours of this thing and information that we are seeing is second-third-and fourth-hand.  What we know is a damn sight less than what we don’t know.  As information comes in, the story will evolve and things that we thought were true an hour ago will be known to be wrong tomorrow.  Ideas that we discard now in favor of others will turn out to have been correct.

NATO ISAF has categorically denied that this was a night raid by Special Forces.  One Soldier, most likely an American, has turned himself into his unit.  Reuters has reported that persons living in the village stated that they saw several foreign military personnel, possibly drunk, do this.

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A Future Arizona Resident

Here:

Marine Sgt. Gary Stein first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights. Then he declared that he wouldn’t follow orders from the commander in chief, President Barack Obama.

While Stein softened his statement to say he wouldn’t follow “unlawful orders,” military observers say he may have gone too far.

The Marine Corps is now looking into whether he violated the military’s rules prohibiting political statements by those in uniform and broke its guidelines on what troops can and cannot say on social media. Stein said his views are constitutionally protected.

***

“Just because I’m a Marine doesn’t mean I don’t have free speech or can’t say my personal opinion about the president or other public official just like anybody else,” Stein said. “The Constitution trumps everything else.”

Actually, no it doesn’t.

“I think that it’s been pretty well established for a long time that freedom of speech is one area in which people do surrender some of their basic rights in entering the armed forces,” said former Navy officer David Glazier, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Wonder how long it is before this moron is court-martialed.

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My taxes support things with which I do not agree

I usually accept that.  I understand that giving military aid to Israel at a level that is pretty close to aid to the whole rest of the region is something I can’t really stop.  Never mind that Israel in my lifetime, and particularly under Likud, has consistently worked at cross purposes to US national security goals and perogatives in the region.  That’s a fight I’m never going to win.  Hell, I’m not even going to be allowed in the ring for it.  There are weapons programs that I think should be cancelled, and I’m not a fan at all of subsidies for ethanol, among various things I would refuse to fund.  I understand that I don’t get to pick and choose.

But there are some fights that are worth fighting.  When I was in the Army in Europe, the first hour of the Rush Limbaugh show was on Armed Forces Radio for an hour every day.  That’s still the case today.  Back then, he was a LOT more popular than he is today, and whether I liked it or not, there was something to the point that, due to his popularity stateside, the Armed Forces Radio and TV Service had an obligation to play his show if they were to maintain their standard of popularity without respect to political viewpoint.  Particularly after a bunch of whackjob Republicans (there used to be other kinds, I swear) in the House of Representatives made a stink about how our troops were being denied the right to listen to him.  Leaving aside the fact that no one I knew except a couple of right-winger Medical Officers were fans, there was a point.  Kind of.  Just to make sure we’re all clear, very few people I know listened to AF Radio over there at all.  Today, with eight channels on Armed Forces TV (there was one when I was in Germany) there’s even less reason to listen to the radio.  That’s just the way the world is for everything.  I listened to NPR when I was over there, but when I was in Afghanistan the last time, I streamed NPR over the internet when I could do so.  To my knowledge, Limbaugh’s TV show was never on Armed Forces Television.

But today, there is no point to maintaining his show on AFRTS.  He is nowhere near as popular as he used to be.  His market penetration is but a fraction of its former level.  His show has always been  a showcase of racism, bigotry, and misogyny.  Additionally, it’s an element of a climate that conservatives, both in and out of the military use to prop up the claim that the military is conservative or has conservative leanings.  Now that the last trappings of popularity have fallen away from him, that is the last vestige of reason for his continued presence on AFRTS.  It’s past time that we got rid of this hour of denigrating the women and minorities who serve honorably by a man who dodged the draft and is a convicted felon and drug addict.  You all need to write and call your Congresspeople and Senators.  This is one of those things that we can actually win.  We should not be using taxpayer money to support hate speech, and certainly not to the military.

 

EDIT: H/T to commenters Svensker and JGabriel in thread—HERE is the Whitehouse.gov petition to SECDEF Panetta to remove the Rush Limbaugh show from AFRTS.  I’ll note that petitions are great, but you should also call your Congresscritters and it wouldn’t hurt to call the White House comment line at (202) 456-1111 and leave a message.

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From Way Downtown…Bang!

Via Spencer Ackerman at the Wired Danger Room, the United States Navy has three words for you:  Working. Railgun. Prototype.

The idea behind the Electromagnetic Railgun is to fire a bullet at hypersonic speeds using dozens of megajoules of electricity. The Navy wants it to guard the surface ships of the 2020s, unsubtly boasting to adversaries that messing with the ships will lead to bullets shooting across hundreds of miles of ocean in mere minutes. The Office of Naval Research says it will give sailors “a dramatically increased multimission capability,” like fire support for land strikes over long, long distances beyond the reach of enemy defenses, and defense against “cruise and ballistic missiles” that target ships. No wonder the railgun’s official motto is “Velocitas Eradico” — “Speed Kills.”

Lab tests have pleased the Navy, if not Congress. In December 2010, the Office of Naval Research fired a shot with 33 megajoules of energy, a world record, sending a 23-pound bullet 5500 feet in a single second. The Senate Armed Services Committee still found the science too impractical, and recommended killing the railgun, until a Navy congressional counterstrike revived the program.

Now that the Navy has an actual prototype railgun to shoot, the plan is to hook it up to sensors and cameras to test its performance at 20 and 33 megajoules’ worth of energy. Its goal is produce accurate shots from 50 to 100 nautical mile distances, which the Navy wants by 2017.

Sadly, we don’t have 80-ton mechs to mount one of these on yet.  There are also other umm…”technical drawbacks”:

Even railgun advocates concede there are a host of other challenges the hypersonic weapon will have to overcome. Its barrel will have to withstand repeated fires without wearing out. (The Navy wants to up firing rates to 10 per minute.) It’s got to fire smart bullets without frying the guidance systems during a blast. (The Navy says both BAE and General Dynamics are starting to design “a next-generation thermally managed launcher.”) And it’s got to be affordable. (The Navy has spent $240 million on the railgun so far, and it expects to spend about as much through 2017 on tests — before buying a single one of the things.)

And yeah, I know, a naval railgun’s gonna be a “real big help” in policing the nebulous Af-Pak border regions and all, but there is a civilian technology upside:

Another big problem: the current generation of Destroyers can’t produce the power to fire the railgun without diverting juice from the propulsion systems. One of the goals of the railguns over the next five years is to create workarounds, so the guns will be relevant to their intended ships. Those include “an intermediate energy store using energy-dense batteries, similar to [those on] hybrid cars,” Ellis told reporters on a Tuesday conference call. “That enables us to put the railgun on ships that don’t have larger power supplies.”

Advances in battery storage technology that could say, make electric cars more widespread with batteries that are cheaper and more efficient wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing.

Also, railgun. Because RAILGUN, that’s why.  Velocitas Eradico, indeed.

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Practically Frothing For War

The redemption of Rick Santorum as Serious Foreign Policy Thinker(tm) comes courtesy of Michael Ledeen in the WSJ.

After leaving the Senate in 2007, Mr. Santorum wrote about foreign policy frequently for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he was a fellow until June of 2011. In essays written for the center, he acknowledges that terrorists are indeed inspired by radical Islam—but he wants to work with Muslims who do not wage jihad, subjugate women or oppress minorities. He’s specific about the radicals: They are evil men who have perverted the meaning of “martyrdom,” changing it from the act of dying for one’s faith to killing others to advance the dominion of one’s faith.

His opposition to tyranny abroad has been a constant in his political career. Even in the final days of his losing 2006 re-election campaign, Mr. Santorum never stopped calling for action against Iran and Syria. Apparently, Pennsylvanians weren’t impressed by his Iran Freedom and Support Act, enacted in 2006, which imposed sanctions on the regime and authorized $100 million annually for the democratic opposition, or his 2003 Syria Accountability Act.

But today he looks prescient and gutsy. Back then, the Bush administration was trying to run away from such ideas. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at one point turned to a Democrat, then-Sen. Joe Biden, to block Mr. Santorum’s Iran bill, before it finally passed. But Mr. Santorum’s basic vision has prevailed.

And so it goes.  Clearly the Murdoch machine is hedging their bets when it comes to the very real possibility that the man who will carry the GOP’s standard into battle against President Obama is going to be a know-nothing fundamentalist dipstick.  So like Bush 43 before him, the same “scholars” who told us that it didn’t really matter that the Republican candidate is a moron because he would be surrounded by a brain trust of great minds led by the necessary vision and will to “win” are hard at work constructing the exact same fantasy with Iran as their target.

Ledeen and his crew of bloodthirsty ghouls have been after “regime change” in Iran now for over a decade.  To see him latch his lamprey maw onto Santorum’s back to try to ride him into a war with Tehran should be setting off alarm bells in the head of every American old enough to vote.  They want war, and Rick Santorum is the best way to get it.  Ledeen allowed out of his crypt to try to sell Santorum as Commander-in-Chief means that not only is the GOP establishment making plans for Santorum vs Obama in the fall, but that when it comes to all the truly important boxes to be checked, that Ricky will do for them just fine.

The GOP establishment will prevent Santorum from winning over Romney?  Really?  At best they are hedging pretty damn hard, and at worst they are sabotaging the increasingly failtastic Mittens to get the man they wanted all along.  If “probability of deciding to go to war with Iran” is your top criteria for picking a GOP nominee, then Santorum’s the clear choice.  If Murdoch and the neo-cons are backing him, the notion that Santorum will crash and burn long before Tampa is no longer so assured, is it?

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Afternoon Open Thread

Good on President Obama for apologizing for this.

President Barack Obama apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the burning of Qurans by NATO troops, calling the act “inadvertent” and “an error,” Karzai’s office and National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said Thursday.

“We will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, including holding accountable those responsible,” Obama said in the letter, which was delivered by Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has erupted in violent demonstrations since the troops’ burning of the Islamic religious material at the beginning of the week.

Two American troops were killed Thursday by a man wearing an Afghan National Army uniform, a U.S. official said, asking not to be named discussing casualties.

The gunman is thought to have been acting in conjunction with a protest taking place outside the base, the official said.

And really, everyone on the other side of the aisle wouldn’t have bothered if it had happened under a Republican.  We never would have heard about it, most likely.

Open thread.

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Crossing The Rubin Con: Endless Wargasm

Jennifer Rubin pauses from her Romney cheerleading day job to go after the 51% of America that actually learned a lesson from the decade of wars we’ve been thrust into, as the latest Pew Research poll finds there’s not too much support for backing up an Israeli attack on Iran.  With only 39% of Americans wanting the US to follow Israel into the Hot Gates of Thermopylae Tehran, Rubin chastises the Dems for not being explodey enough:

It’s stunning, actually, that in the event of a conflict between the revolutionary, jihadist state Iran and our democratic ally Israel, Democrats want us to be neutral.

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman doesn’t want to make Israel an “election” issue. Maybe before lecturing Republicans to clam up she should work on educating her own party about the U.S.-Israel relationship and about the menace of a nuclear-armed Iran. It is embarrassing for the Democratic Party’s finger-wagging chairwoman to be saddled with a constituency that is so indifferent to the plight of the Jewish state. As for Obama, it seems he’s right in sync with opinion in his party on Israel. And that is a big problem for the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship, the survival of the Jewish state and the continued credibility of the United States, which under two administrations has vowed that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.

Once again, I am struck as to how Rubin seems to have completely omitted our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the country’s memory, and how we arrived at them, and that she has no issues with Israel dictating foreign policy to us.  Indeed, she is “stunned” to find that after nine years in Iraq and ten going on eleven in Afghanistan, that the American public really isn’t terribly keen on going to war with Iran and want us to stay out of an Israel-Iran fight, and want us to not invest another lost decade’s worth of blood and treasure just because Israel gets trigger-happy.

Besides the ridiculous notion that people who don’t want war are somehow not only “indifferent” towards the Israel but ostensibly against Israel’s very survival itself, I have to ask if all it took to get the US to invade Iran was Israel attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, why hasn’t Israel simply done it already if the Iranian nuclear program is such an existential threat?

Also, it’s not like the United States is truly “neutral” anyway, nor are we just standing around doing nothing to support an ally.  America is applying tough economic sanctions and has gotten the European Union to go along with them.  These sanctions get much tougher in another five months or so when the clause that the US will no longer do economic business with countries that do buy oil from Iran fully kicks in.  Hell, even FOX News is admitting the sanctions are working.  Oh, and yes, we have carrier groups hanging out in the region as well just in case Iran does something stupid, and in fact to specifically prevent Iran from doing anything stupid.  It seems to me that Israel is choosing not to act for a reason, and that reason is the sanctions are working.

But Rubin blithely insists war is the only option and goes after anyone who believes in any other approach to Iran, when President Obama is calmly proving that this just isn’t the case in reality.  After a decade of blood and trillions of dollars, America is getting tired of having its patriotism questioned by armchair Alexanders who engage in nothing but endless wargasm.  Certainly the Post’s readers deserve something slightly more nuanced than Rubin’s cartoon-inspired approach to international relations.

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I Think That’s Some Sort Of Bomb Iranian Mix

Well, since John Yoo is on vacation this week or something waterboarding herds of unicorns and John Bolton’s Mustache is busy with trying to adapt drone controls for use by facial hair (hard to fly straight and hit the red button at the same time when you’re only a mustache) to bomb Syria, it’s up to Niall Ferguson at the Daily Beast to yell LET’S BOMB IRAN as loudly as possible at the Village today.

The single biggest danger in the Middle East today is not the risk of a six-day Israeli war against Iran. It is the risk that Western wishful nonthinking allows the mullahs of Tehran to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Because I am in no doubt that they would take full advantage of such a lethal lever. We would have acquiesced in the creation of an empire of extortion.

War is an evil. But sometimes a preventive war can be a lesser evil than a policy of appeasement. The people who don’t yet know that are the ones still in denial about what a nuclear-armed Iran would end up costing us all.

It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.

And really, Ferguson’s entire argument is “We could so take Iran because our aircraft carriers have more hit points.”   Also, the whole “Oil at $160 a barrel if war breaks out” thing is so 2008 because the Saudis can just make more, or something.  It’s like the last 11 years never happened, and he’s just expecting us to buy the argument and go “LET’S DO IT!” like we’re playing Team Fortress 2.  Our bombs are filled with awesome cartoon sound effects and FREEDOM, so it’s cool anyway because AMERICA!

Meanwhile, the really awesome part is 49% of Americans are already on board with Operation Here We Go Again, so before you have a good laugh at Niall here, understand that the universe has spotted him a hell of a spread.

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PFC Manning to be Court-Martial’ed

In what has to be the least surprising military justice story of, well, ever, the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington has referred all charges against PFC Bradley Manning to trial by General Court-Martial

The most serious of these charges is a specification of Aiding the Enemy, which has been referred for a potential life sentence.  A judge will be chosen, and then will begin to hear motions from both the Accused and the Government.  All those motions that one would expect, such as the inevitable motions for sentence credit for pre-trial confinement and for confinement against policy and any other such, including petitions by the Accused for various things such as assignment at government expense of certain experts, formal demands for any exculpatory information and so forth, voire dire parameters and so on will be heard then.  That Judge will set a trial date, and at some point in the future, selection of a jury, called a Panel of Members will begin.  I have no information at this time as to whether or not PFC Manning will avail himself of his right to have Enlisted representation on his panel.  A couple of Lawyers of my acquaintance are in disagreement as to whether or not to go this route.   One believes that it depends on the case, the other believes that since the Enlisted will be at least Sergeants First Class (E-7) , that nothing good can ever come of having career NCOs on the panel, especially when following orders or military bearing or personal discipline may be implicated by the charges.  “First Sergeants don’t like screw-ups”.

A couple of notes here to explain some quirks about Courts-Martial (yes, that is the proper plural):  First, this Court-Martial does not actually exist yet as a legal body.  It has to be convened first, which is why the Commanding General is called the Convening Authority.  That is why there was no Military Judge to whom PFC Manning could complain about the conditions of his confinement at MCB Quantico.  It’s not like a civilian court where a Lawyer can go to a Judge and make complaints to force the Government to do something.  Up until the Court Martial is actually convened (the appointment of a Military Judge generally being the point) the Military Judge has no authority over the case because Good Order and Discipline, the very reason for the Military Justice system in the first place, is under the responsibility and authority of the Commander.  Also, there is a special kind of plea bargaining called a pre-trial agreement available to military Accused.  In this PTA, the Accused will agree to maximum limits on potential sentence in exchange (usually) for giving up some rights to appeal.  Not all appeals rights may be abdicated, but some can.  If such a PTA is in place (and all plea bargains are made with the Convening Authority, not the Trial Counsel (prosecutor)) then the Accused may plead Not Guilty and take his chances.  Any charges for which he is acquitted would not be punished, and any charges convicted would be subject to limits of no more than specified in the pre-trial agreement.  If such a PTA exists, that fact will be kept secret until after the guilt phase of the trial so as not to prejudice either the Military Judge or the Members Panel.

If anyone reading this is a member of the military bar, please feel free to correct me.  I’m pretty sure I’ve missed some important aspect or another.

 

O/T—One of my favorite actors of all time, Ben Gazzara  has died.  He was 81 years old.

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Our Continuing Moral Decay, and I Blame Scott Beauchamp

Every time I listen to wingnuts talk about family values, I wonder just what kind of fucked up family they come from. We’re used to hearing conservatives talk about the corruption of the American soul, and usually the corruption they are talking about is stuff they just don’t like- women controlling their own bodies, someone saying fuck on a tv show, gay people and brown people breathing, etc. I really did think, though, that at one point, there were a few things we all, from every political persuasion, agreed on. Torture got tossed off that list during the Bush years, and now it appears that conservatives have decided that desecrating corpses (heckuva job, CNN) and urinating on the dead should also be yanked off the list of things we all abhor. I wish I was surprised, but I’m really not. Fortunately, the military still at least is pretending to take this seriously.

And remember- the people defending this are the EXACT same people who wanted you to believe soldiers never told an off color joke in a cafeteria, or ran over a dog, or the other stuff they furiously attacked Beauchamp for a couple years ago.

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File Under the heading of “The Least Surprising Military Justice Episode In The History Of Mankind”

The Article 32 Investigating Officer for PFC Bradley Manning’s case has recommended that a General Court Martial be convened to try PFC Manning on various charges stemming from accusations that he unlawfully downloaded to a non-secure information system (Army-speak for ‘computer’) and then caused that information to be delivered to one or more persons who were not authorized to access it.

I don’t have any information on specific charges that the IO recommended be formally placed against PFC Manning at this time.   HT to commenter IM, who, having actually read the above-linked article, noticed that the IO has recommended that all 22 of the previous charges go forward to full General Court-Martial.

Nor do I have any information about a timeline for this case.  As soon as I find something new, I’ll let you all know via update.

Also too, this is an open thread as well.

Also Also too too, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) has summarily denied Julian Assange’s and the Wikileaks organization’s writ appeal to demand that the Army grant their lawyer (who supposedly has a TS/SCI clearance) access to ALL court documents as well as reserve a place for their lawyers at PFC Manning’s impending General Court-Martial.  Source

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Early Morning Open Thread

One of my good and dear friends is about to be discharged with 100% disability from the Army.  At 32 years old, he can’t remember what day it is, and sometimes he can’t remember if he’s back here in the states, or in Germany, or in Afghanistan where he got hurt.

Traumatic Brain Injury is the signature wound of these current wars.  Gerald, who is one of the smartest people I know, just chatted with me on Facebook and couldn’t remember that I was retired, or that one of the last official acts I carried out was pinning his Sergeant’s stripes on him.  Because he couldn’t remember being a Sergeant, unless he sees the rank on his chest.His wife, Lisa tells me that he occasionally can’t remember her name.  “I can see that he knows I’m important to him, but he struggles with that sometimes.”

We spent over a trillion dollars on the Iraq war and got nothing out of it but 4500 dead, 30,000 wounded, and a country that’s a hell of a lot closer to Iran than we started, and in so doing, we’ve almost certainly lost ourselves the war in Afghanistan for lack of resources there.  I personally know of two men who died of wounds—bled to death—in Afghanistan because we didn’t have the air ambulance assets we needed there.  When Republicans ask me why I hate them so, I think of Gerald who can’t remember his wife and I think of Sam and Chris who bled out in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan waiting for help that never came.  I think of so many other crimes, and I think of other brothers that won’t ever come home either, but especially I think of them.

Consider this an open thread.

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Manning Update

The Trial Counsel has rested in PFC Bradley Manning’s Article 32 hearing at Fort Meyer, VA. Today the Defense may begin to rebut the Trial Counsel’s case. This is not a trial, but more like a Grand Jury hearing (with a jury of one), except that the Defense has the right to call witnesses, present evidence, and cross examine Trial Counsel’s witnesses. The Defense is under no obligation at all to put on a Defense, but given the vigorous defense and cross examination of Government witnesses so far, there is no reason to believe that PFC Manning’s defense team will slow down now.
MSNBC has a story about how lawyers and counselors who specialize in gender identity issues have been concerned with the Defense’s focus on PFC Manning’s apparent gender identity disorder.

Yesterday, as the Government concluded their presentation, their final witness was former SPC Jihrleah Showman, who testified that she was Manning’s immediate supervisor in his work and that she witnessed his deterioration and reported it multiple times to the company First Sergeant, (E-8) Paul Adkins.  Adkins has since been administratively demoted to Sergeant First Class (E-7).  They demoted him administratively for his failures of leadership in this episode.  The more I learn about this story, the more I am convinced that Manning’s chain of command failed him at multiple levels.  Adkins, in particular, had multiple episodes in which he is shown to have known or believed that Manning had no business being downrange or handling classified information.  He was reduced administratively, which pretty much torpedoes his career, but I believe he should’ve been court-martial’ed.  As a senior NCO, he cannot be given any punishment under Article 15, UCMJ, so the only criminal proceedings he could face would be a full court-martial.  I do believe that a case could probably be made that his negligence rises to a the level of criminality, but the Convening Authority for him probably didn’t agree and so went with administrative punishment.

NONE of that—the gender identity issues, the mulitple failures of his chain of command to properly supervise and discipline, the failures of the other Soldiers, Officers, and NCOs in the T-SCIF in Iraq excuse Manning’s knowing behavior.  The RCM 706 board returned a finding that Manning was able to assist in his own defense, and that will mitigate against a case of insanity.  It seems that is the direction that Manning’s defense team is heading.  They haven’t cross examined the technical witnesses extensively or at all except to ask one of them whether or not anything on Manning’s portable hard drive seemed “strange” to which the investigator replied “it’s a computer drive, Sir.”  They have, however, extensively cross-examined the witnesses who interacted with Manning on a daily basis, and introduced documentation regarding his supposed gender identity disorder as well as the multiple failures of leadership that I’ve mentioned above.

The hearing is expected to continue through the week, and at some point in the next thirty to sixty days, the Investigating Officer, who is presiding at this hearing, will make a report to the Convening Authority regarding what disposition he recommends.  It is entirely within the purview of the CA to dispose of these charges as he sees fit, and that decision is not subject to review.

 

UPDATE:  According to Joe Gould, the Army Times reporter covering the hearing, Mr. Coombs, PFC Manning’s attorney, has called only two witnesses of the 48 he had on his list, and has rested his presentation.  He made a motion to continue the hearing directly to closing arguments, but the Trial Counsel requested adjournment until tomorrow.  Coombs apparently agreed to this (if I read his tweets correctly) and both sides will present final arguments tomorrow.  The Investigating Officer will have until the 16th of January to present his findings and recommendations to the Convening Authority, the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, unless he requests more time to prepare.  I have found nothing at this time regarding the two witnesses Mr. Coombs called.  Apparently, according to Mr. Gould, 10 of the Government’s witnesses were also on the Defense list.

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Manning Update

PFC Bradley Manning’s Article 32, UCMJ hearing is currently ongoing at Fort Meade, MD.
Unlike a civilian Grand Jury proceeding, to which the Article 32 process is consistently compared,  in an Art. 32 hearing, the Defense gets to put on witnesses, introduce evidence, and to cross-examine Prosecution witnesses.  Many military defense attorneys consider the Article 32 hearing to be a freebie in that they get to see the Trial Counsel’s hand, and they are under no obligation to do anything at this point.  Others see it as a mini-trial, at which to take a stab at reducing the number of charges against the accused, and possibly preventing referral altogether.  Mr (LTC, AR) David Coombs, MAJ Matthew Kemkes, appear to be taking the second course of action, including petitioning the Army Court of Criminal Appeals to remove the Art. 32 Investigating Officer, LTC Paul Almanza from the case.  The ACCA summarily dismissed the petition on Friday.

The most reliable source I’ve found has been the Army Times.  Army Times is an independent paper owned by Gannett.  In addition to their own staff writers, they have included coverage from the Associated Press, have used Reuters for other things in the past, and so might use them here as well.  The Manning coverage in Army Times has all been in front of the paywall.   NBC/MSNBC ran a story by Jim Miklaszewski yesterday in which they stated that Manning was charged with Treason and was facing the death penalty.  Neither of these statements are true.

On a side note, any time the word ‘wikileaks’ appears in the URL, it’s blocked on a government computer.  I understand the reason for this—if there is any classified information that the user were to open, then he has introduced classified onto an unclassified platform, and how do you prove, 100% absolutely reliably that it came from outside and is not the result of an actual “spill”?  You can’t.  I understand that.  I just think that the implementation was clumsy.

I’m at work and getting ready to go to a soul-sucking staff meeting, to say nothing of actually being at work, so I won’t be taking the usual level of activity in this thread that I try to take until later.

 

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“The Case of Dakota Meyer”

Nothing I can add, but I wanted to share Amy Davidson’s New Yorker post:

... Meyer became the first living Marine since Vietnam to receive the Medal of Honor. At the White House ceremony, President Obama, with whom Meyer had shared a beer the previous afternoon, talked about how “down to earth” he was:

When my staff first tried to arrange the phone call so I could tell him that I’d approved this medal, Dakota was at work, at his new civilian job, on a construction site. He felt he couldn’t take the call right then, because he said, “If I don’t work, I don’t get paid.” So we arranged to make sure he got the call during his lunch break. I told him the news, and then he went right back to work. That’s the kind of guy he is…. Dakota is the kind of guy who gets the job done.

Why, though, was Meyer working a construction job? That turns out to be a complicated story…

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