U.S. doublethink on chemical weapons and the use of force in Syria

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. — George Orwell’s 1984

With increasing bellicosity, U.S. officials are accusing the Syrian regime of using chemical weapons in an incident in the suburbs of Damascus last week that killed hundreds of civilians. While few dispute that the attack took place, there are conflicting allegations over who carried it out, with the Syrian regime blaming armed rebels, and Syrian allies such as Russia leaving open the possibility that a third party may have been responsible.

The United States however unequivocally places the blame at the feet of the Bashar al-Assad regime. A senior Obama administration official said Sunday that there was “very little doubt” that Assad’s military forces had used the chemical weapons and that a Syrian promise to allow United Nations inspectors access to the site was “too late to be credible.”

The official, in a written statement, said that “based on the reported number of victims, reported symptoms of those who were killed or injured, witness accounts and other facts gathered by open sources, the U.S. intelligence community, and international partners, there is very little doubt at this point that a chemical weapon was used by the Syrian regime against civilians in this incident.”

Independent experts, however, point out that there is no way to be able to decisively assign blame simply based on the visual evidence provided by YouTube videos without forensic data. “It’s very difficult from a visual context to ascertain what’s going on,” said Federation of American Scientists fellow Charles Blair.

He continued:

In fact, it’s impossible to draw any sort of definitive conclusion. Some governments have relied entirely on visual confirmation to assert that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons but essentially what you need to do is you need to get people from the UN, for the prohibition of chemical weapons to go to these sites and conduct highly rigorous scientific investigations, and they determine only if an agent has been used or not used. But what they don’t tell us, which is the most important story, I think, that’s not being captured, is even if the UN team were to go into the area that got struck today, they could not verify nor are they charged with determining who was responsible for the act. So they can tell if you an act has occurred but we will never have this conclusive evidence of who was responsible for it.

What the UN team might be able to determine however is precisely what sort of chemical weapon was used, which could indicate who was responsible. The level of sophistication of the weapon could provide a clue as to whether it was manufactured by state or non-state actors, for example.

But the U.S. has already declared that any UN inspection now would be ineffective. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “the White House and Pentagon signaled the U.S. wasn’t backing away from a possible showdown despite apparent efforts by the Syrian government to ease tensions by letting U.N. inspectors visit areas near the capital where hundreds were killed, allegedly by chemical weapons.”

The Obama administration dismissed as too late the regime’s offer to let UN inspectors visit areas where chemical weapons were used. The U.S. concluded that evidence at the scene has likely been compromised due to continued Syrian shelling and the resulting dissipation of any poison gases.

With Obama having previously stated that the use of chemical weapons by Syria in the two-year old civil war would be a “red line” for the United States which could necessitate military action, the White House has said in recent days that the U.S. could launch an attack with or without UN Security Council backing.

“We’ll consult with the UN. They’re an important avenue. But they’re not the only avenue,” a senior administration official said.

The nonchalant attitude of the White House towards the UN is reminiscent of the Bush administration’s approach to the international body when the U.S. was gearing up for war against Iraq a decade ago. “If we need to act, we will act, and we really don’t need United Nations approval to do so,” George W. Bush said in March 2003. “We really don’t need anybody’s permission.”

Similarly, White House officials now say that Obama might prefer to work instead with international partners such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the Arab League, rather than the UN.

The legal basis for an attack on Syria, presumably, would be the crimes against humanity – including the alleged chemical weapons attack last week – for which the Assad regime is purportedly responsible. The use of chemical weapons in Syria would constitute a “crime against humanity” that would reap “serious consequences,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Friday.

“Any use of chemical weapons anywhere, by anybody, under any circumstances, would violate international law. Such a crime against humanity should result in serious consequences for the perpetrator,” Ban said.

But the U.S. has its own checkered past when it comes to compliance with international law in this regard, as evidenced by numerous war crimes carried out by U.S. forces in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. political system has also shown an inability to bring the committers of war crimes to justice, instead sending whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning to prison for decades simply for providing documentary evidence of these crimes.

Even when it comes to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the U.S. ratified in 1997, the U.S. record of compliance is spotty at best. The U.S. declared a huge domestic chemical arsenal of 27,771 metric tons to the OPCW after the CWC came into force in 1997 and despite efforts made toward destroying this arsenal still stockpiles several thousand metric tons of these weapons.

Russia has alleged that the U.S. has inhibited inspections and investigations of U.S. chemical facilities, and has accused the U.S.of not fully reporting chemical agents removed from Iraq between 2003 and 2008.

Further, WikiLeaks revealed in 2007 that the U.S. had at least 2,386 “non-lethal” chemical weapons deployed in Iraq. Appearing in a 2,000 page battle planning leak, the items are labeled under the military’s own NATO supply classification as “chemical weapons and equipment.”

As WikiLeaks explains,

In the weeks prior to the March 19, 2003 commencement of the Iraq war, the United States received a widely reported rebuke from its primary coalition partner, the United Kingdom, over statements by the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggesting that the US would use CS gas for “flush out” operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently Washington has been quiet about whether it has deployed CS gas and other chemical weapons or not.

The use of chemical weapons such as CS gas for military operations is illegal. The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997, drafted by the United Kingdom and ratified by the United States, declares “Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare”. Permissible uses are restricted to “law enforcement including domestic riot control.”

The U.S. use of depleted uranium in Iraq is another cause for concern. In Fallujah – which was targeted by U.S. forces in 2004 – the use of depleted uranium has led to birth defects in infants 14 times higher than in the Japanese cities targeted by U.S. atomic bombs at close of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As the Huffington Post reported in March, “ten years after the start of the U.S. invasion in Iraq, doctors in some of the Middle Eastern nation’s cities are witnessing an abnormally high number of cases of cancer and birth defects.”

A 2002 UN working paper on depleted uranium argued that its use may breach one or more of the following treaties: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of the United Nations, the Genocide Convention, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Conventions including Protocol I, the Convention on Conventional Weapons of 1980, and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Yeung Sik Yuen writes in Paragraph 133 under the title “Legal compliance of weapons containing DU as a new weapon”:

Annex II to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material 1980 (which became operative on 8 February 1997) classifies DU as a category II nuclear material. Storage and transport rules are set down for that category which indicates that DU is considered sufficiently “hot” and dangerous to warrant these protections. But since weapons containing DU are relatively new weapons no treaty exists yet to regulate, limit or prohibit its use. The legality or illegality of DU weapons must therefore be tested by recourse to the general rules governing the use of weapons under humanitarian and human rights law which have already been analysed in Part I of this paper, and more particularly at paragraph 35 which states that parties to Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 have an obligation to ascertain that new weapons do not violate the laws and customs of war or any other international law.

Despite the U.S.’s own record in using these legally questionable weapons, it is taking a hard line against Syria and appears to be moving towards armed conflict. Officials say that a list of possible targets for a military strike has been circulating in the White House since late last week. The list includes both chemical-weapons sites and broader military and government targets, depending on the type of action the president orders.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In recent days, the Pentagon has moved more warships into place in the eastern Mediterranean and U.S. war planners have updated military options that include cruise-missile strikes on regime targets, officials said. The White House held high-level meetings over the weekend, but officials said late Sunday that Mr. Obama had yet to decide how to proceed. …

Administration lawyers have been crafting legal justifications for an intervention without U.N. approval that could be based on findings that Mr. Assad used chemical weapons and created a major humanitarian crisis.

Whether a U.S. attack would quell or exacerbate this humanitarian crisis is an open question. There are indications that a military assault could spiral out of control, with Syrian allies reluctant to allow Western forces free reign to intervene in order to topple the regime. According to an analysis by BBC:

Any military action would immediately bracket the West with Israel, whose air and missile strikes on Syria this year have been held up by the regime as evidence that its internal troubles are part of a Western-Zionist-Salafist plot to destroy a citadel of resistance to Israel. …

The signs have always been that the regime would pull the whole house down around it before capitulating, and also that its strategic allies, especially Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, would not allow that to happen.

Further, as happened in Iraq, Western intervention risks fragmenting the country further, creating an uncontrollable situation and handing large parts of it to forces it regards as its enemies.

“The West faces the reality that the moderate opposition elements it has been trying to boost have proven neither cohesive, credible nor effective on the ground,” the BBC points out.

The opposition has largely consisted of Islamist factions, many linked to al-Qaeda. Intervening on their behalf could lead to a host of unintended consequences, including the possibility of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal falling into the hands of terrorist groups.

With nothing but bad options, the best hope would likely involve an immediate ceasefire by all sides to the conflict. This, however, is a remote possibility that would be further set back by an armed intervention by the United States.

Any U.S. intervention would also likely lead to more civilian casualties and refugees, exacerbating what is already a grave humanitarian crisis.

Bradley Manning, political prisoner

Whistleblower Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison today, despite the government’s failure to provide a single example of any real harm to have come from his leaking of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

In handing down the sentence, Judge Col. Denise Lind said that “Manning had reason to believe the information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation,” but no evidence was ever produced demonstrating how the information had actually done so.

Although Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, who had headed a special task force assessing the damage caused by the leaks, testified last month that an Afghan national was killed as a result of the disclosure of battlefield reports from Afghanistan, Judge Lind ruled that the testimony was inadmissible because Carr could not identify the individual by name.

That was the one and only case in which the government concretely alleged that Manning’s leaks had brought harm to someone, and the military judge ruled it inadmissible. In contrast, hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, senseless deaths for which no policymakers or generals have ever apologized or been held accountable.

Even outright war crimes such as the Haditha massacre or the “Collateral Murder” incident that Manning exposed have by and large gone unpunished. Indeed, with Manning’s sentence today, it seems clear that the only people who can expect to go to prison are those who expose crimes, not those who commit them.

The government itself has essentially acknowledged that its persecution of Manning has less to do with the actual harm to have come from his actions than it does with fact that they want to make an example of him. In arguing for a 60-year prison sentence for the Army private on Monday, military lawyers said a stiff sentence was necessary to send a message to other conscientious soldiers or government employees who might be considering exposing government wrongdoing.

“This court must send a message to those who release confidential information,” prosecutor Army Capt. Joe Morrow said to Judge Lind. “There is value in deterrence, Your Honor. This court must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information.”

As Nathan Fuller of the Bradley Manning Support Network explained,

The prosecution insisted there has to be deterrence and we need to set an example out of Bradley Manning. They made it clear that anyone else thinking of releasing classified info should look at Manning. They want to go above and beyond what would be considered a reasonable sentence.

The harsh sentence handed down today solidifies Manning’s status as a political prisoner of the United States government. While there is no single internationally agreed upon designation of what constitutes a political prisoner, the intergovernmental organization Council of Europe last year agreed upon one of the most useful and balanced definitions ever put forward. The resolution adopted last year by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe includes the following criteria:

a. if the detention has been imposed in violation of one of the fundamental guarantees set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols (ECHR), in particular freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and association;

b. if the detention has been imposed for purely political reasons without connection to any offence;

c. if, for political motives, the length of the detention or its conditions are clearly out of proportion to the offence the person has been found guilty of or is suspected of;

d. if, for political motives, he or she is detained in a discriminatory manner as compared to other persons; or,

e. if the detention is the result of proceedings which were clearly unfair and this appears to be connected with political motives of the authorities.” (SG/Inf(2001)34, paragraph 10).

It’s clear that Manning meets most if not all of these criteria, especially points “C” and “E”. Considering the fact that even the government acknowledges that the damage done to “national security” by his leaks was more theoretical than concrete and that not a single individual was harmed by the information he released, it is difficult to comprehend how a 35-year sentence is truly justified.

In other words, the length is clearly out of proportion to the offenses he was convicted of.

Further, the proceedings were unfair from the beginning, as Manning’s rights were violated every step of the way and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, President Barack Obama, declared his guilt long before the trial even began.

In short, Bradley Manning is a political prisoner and he should be recognized as such by leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch, as well as international organizations such as the EU and the Organization of American States.

Emergency demonstrations in support of Manning and calling on President Obama to issue a presidential pardon are taking place today, including one this evening at the White House.

Did Manning’s court-martial meet international fair trial standards?

“Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”

— Universal Declaration of Human Rights

With a sentence expected to be handed down in Bradley Manning’s court-martial this week, the presiding judge, Col. Denise Lind, is coming under criticism for possible lack of judicial independence, calling into question the fairness of the trial and any sentence that he receives.

Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that throughout the trial, it has been “disappointing to see that almost every ruling, whether they’re major or minor, seems to go against the defense.” Others have noted that despite spending three years in pretrial confinement, Lind ruled that the delays had been “reasonable.”

Before the trial even began, President Barack Obama declared Manning’s guilt by flatly stating, “He broke the law.” The president’s declaration was widely picked up by the media, likely having significant influence over the public perception of Manning’s case, as well as potentially sending a message to the judge, a direct subordinate of Obama as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces.

As Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, “The impropriety of Obama’s public pre-trial declaration of Manning’s guilt (‘He broke the law’) is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?”

He called it “reckless in the extreme for him to go around decreeing people guilty who have not been tried: especially members of the military who are under his command and who will be adjudged by other members of the military under his command.”

Steven Aftergood, a classified information expert at the Federation of American Scientists, told Politico.com, “The comment was not appropriate because it assumes that Manning is guilty. The president got carried away and misspoke. No one should mistake a charge for a conviction — especially the nation’s highest official.”

Beyond simply inappropriate, the president’s comment may have breached the United States’ commitments to international fair trial standards. According to Article 14(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, “Everyone charged with a criminal offense shall have the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.”

As the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights explains this provision of the ICCPR, “The presumption of innocence must … be maintained not only during a criminal trial vis á vis the defendant, but also in relation to a suspect or accused throughout the pre-trial phase. It is the duty of both the officials involved in a case as well as all public authorities to maintain the presumption of innocence by ‘refrain[ing] from prejudging the outcome of a trial.’”

Obama’s declaration may have had an undue command influence over the proceedings, a possibility that has been compounded by the fact that Judge Lind was given a promotion while the trial was underway. As the Washington Post reported last month, “Lind has already been informed that she will take up a new position, as a judge on the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals, when the Manning trial ends.”

Attorney Michael Ratner said that he found the promotion “pretty extraordinary” considering the context of the case and the possible conflicts of interest involved.

“I don’t know whether it’s—I don’t think it’s necessarily illegal,” he said, “but it does—it’s interesting to me that she’s going upstairs during the very trial that’s going on, and given that promotion.”

Lind’s promotion raises the possibility of whether there may have been a quid pro quo. Is it possible that she was promised the appellate court job contingent upon her decisions in the Manning case? This, of course, speaks to the question of judicial impartiality and independence, key components of international fair trial standards. As the Lawyers Committee explains,

Independence presupposes a separation of powers in which the judiciary is institutionally protected from undue influence by, or interference from, the executive branch and, to a lesser degree, from the legislative branch. …

While independence primarily rests on mechanisms aimed at ensuring a court’s position externally, impartiality refers to its conduct of, and bearing on, the final outcome of a specific case. Bias (or a lack thereof) is the overriding criterion for ascertaining a court’s impartiality. It can, thus, be prima facie called into question when a judge has taken part in the proceedings in some prior capacity, or when s/he is related to the parties, or when s/he has a personal stake in the proceedings. It is also open to suspicion when the judge has an evidently preformed opinion that could weigh in on the decision-making or when there are other reasons giving rise to concern about his/her impartiality.

Another key component of international fair trial standards is the right to a speedy trial as outlined in Article 9 (3) of the ICCPR, which states:

Anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release. It shall not be the general rule that persons awaiting trial shall be detained in custody, but release may be subject to guarantees to appear for trial, at any other stage of the judicial proceedings, and, should occasion arise, for execution of the judgement.

Despite this requirement, Manning spent his entire pre-trial period of three years in jail. This, despite the fact that the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations has held that confinement of more than six months is incompatible with the ICCPR.

Manning’s mistreatment during that unlawful pre-trial detention was also a cause for concern, with his prolonged solitary confinement regime “constitut[ing] at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture,” according to Juan Mendez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

The treatment, which included prolonged solitary confinement, forced nudity and denial of meaningful exercise or work opportunities, also constituted a breach of the ICCPR, which states that “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.”

Another issue that arose during Manning’s court-martial, raising questions of whether it abided by international standards, was the lack of transparency that surrounded many aspects of the case.

Article 14 of the ICCPR provides for the right to a fair and public hearing, but Manning’s court martial was surrounded by secrecy and security, with Judge Lind and the military declining to even release official transcripts of the proceedings.

Many other documents were withheld or heavily redacted and significant portions of the sentencing testimony against Manning were closed to the public. Because of this, it remains unknown what damage the government claims that he caused by sending classified material to WikiLeaks.

His supporters maintain that Manning was acting in the public interest, but the court secrecy means that there is little public evidence about whether his leaks on balance helped or hurt the world.

“The public’s ability to understand the sentence is going to be permanently impaired by that fact that, unfortunately, there are large pieces of this that are going to be off the public record,” said Eugene Fidell, a visiting professor in military law at Yale Law School. “There are going to be missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.”

With a potential 90-year prison sentence being handed down by Judge Lind this week and the possibility of a long-term campaign for his freedom, it’s worth remembering that Manning’s rights have been violated every step of the way and that the U.S. has systematically abrogated fundamental components of international fair trial standards.

NSA surveillance routinely violating U.S. and international law

The Washington Post is reporting that the National Security Agency has broken its own privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, citing top-secret documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Most of the infractions involved illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, ranging from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls, according to the Post.

In one instance, the NSA decided it would not report the unintended surveillance of Americans to the FISA court. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a “programming error” confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt.

The NSA audit that Snowden provided to the Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications.

In other words, the NSA – which was granted greatly expanded legal authority in 2008 by Congress in the FISA Amendments Act – has been routinely flouting Americans’ legal protections with impunity for years.

“The number of ‘compliance incidents’ is jaw-dropping,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. “The rules around government surveillance are so permissive that it is difficult to comprehend how the intelligence community could possibly have managed to violate them so often.”

He pointed out that “at least some of these incidents seem to have implicated the privacy of thousands or millions of innocent people.”

The incidents are not only infractions of of U.S. law, but also international law.

As Privacy International has pointed out:

Human rights conventions and national constitutions almost universally call for the protection of the right to privacy – the challenge is ensuring that governments comply with this requirement, particularly with respect to new technologies and in countries that lack the rule of law.

The modern privacy benchmark at an international level can be found in Article 12 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which specifically protects territorial and communications privacy. Numerous other international human rights treaties recognize privacy as a right: Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966, Article 14 of the United Nations Convention on Migrant Workers, and Article 16 of the UN Convention of the Protection of the Child. Regional conventions that recognize the right to privacy includes Article 10 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, Article 11 of the American Convention on Human Rights, Article 4 of the African Union Principles on Freedom of Expression, Article 5 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, Article 21 of the Arab Charter on Human Rights, and Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

An April 2013 report issued by the United Nations about the threat that government surveillance poses to the enjoyment of basic human rights found that state surveillance of communications is ubiquitous and such surveillance severely undermines citizens’ ability to enjoy a private life, to express themselves freely and enjoy other fundamental freedoms.

UN Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue noted that in the current era, “the State now has a greater capability to conduct simultaneous, invasive, targeted and broad-scale surveillance than ever before.”

The report touched on various problems in the use of surveillance, including the lack of judicial oversight, unregulated access to communications data and extra-legal surveillance. In addressing these concerns the UN “underlines the urgent need to further study new modalities of surveillance and to revise national laws regulating these practices in line with human rights standards.”

Toward this end, civil society groups, industry and international experts in communications surveillance law, policy and technology have developed the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, formally launched last month.

According to the Preamble of the International Principles,

Privacy is a fundamental human right, and is central to the maintenance of democratic societies. It is essential to human dignity and it reinforces other rights, such as freedom of expression and information, and freedom of association, and is recognised under international human rights law. Activities that restrict the right to privacy, including communications surveillance, can only be justified when they are prescribed by law, they are necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and are proportionate to the aim pursued.

Before public adoption of the Internet, well-established legal principles and logistical burdens inherent in monitoring communications created limits to State communications surveillance. In recent decades, those logistical barriers to surveillance have decreased and the application of legal principles in new technological contexts has become unclear. The explosion of digital communications content and information about communications, or “communications metadata” — information about an individual’s communications or use of electronic devices — the falling cost of storing and mining large sets of data, and the provision of personal content through third party service providers make State surveillance possible at an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, conceptualisations of existing human rights law have not kept up with the modern and changing communications surveillance capabilities of the State, the ability of the State to combine and organize information gained from different surveillance techniques, or the increased sensitivity of the information available to be accessed.

The frequency with which States are seeking access to both communications content and communications metadata is rising dramatically, without adequate scrutiny. When accessed and analysed, communications metadata may create a profile of an individual’s life, including medical conditions, political and religious viewpoints, associations, interactions and interests, disclosing as much detail as, or even greater detail than would be discernible from the content of communications. Despite the vast potential for intrusion into an individual’s life and the chilling effect on political and other associations, legislative and policy instruments often afford communications metadata a lower level of protection and do not place sufficient restrictions on how they can be subsequently used by agencies, including how they are data-mined, shared, and retained.

In order for States to actually meet their international human rights obligations in relation to communications surveillance, they must comply with the principles set out below. These principles apply to surveillance conducted within a State or extraterritorially. The principles also apply regardless of the purpose for the surveillance — law enforcement, national security or any other regulatory purpose. They also apply both to the State’s obligation to respect and fulfil individuals’ rights, and also to the obligation to protect individuals’ rights from abuse by non-State actors, including corporate entities. The private sector bears equal responsibility for respecting human rights, particularly given the key role it plays in designing, developing and disseminating technologies; enabling and providing communications; and – where required – cooperating with State surveillance activities. Nevertheless, the scope of the present Principles is limited to the obligations of the State.

The Principles include 13 key points, summarized here:

Legality: Any limitation on the right to privacy must be prescribed by law.

Legitimate Aim: Laws should only permit communications surveillance by specified State authorities to achieve a legitimate aim that corresponds to a predominantly important legal interest that is necessary in a democratic society.

Necessity: Laws permitting communications surveillance by the State must limit surveillance to that which is strictly and demonstrably necessary to achieve a legitimate aim.

Adequacy: Any instance of communications surveillance authorised by law must be appropriate to fulfill the specific legitimate aim identified.

Proportionality: Decisions about communications surveillance must be made by weighing the benefit sought to be achieved against the harm that would be caused to users’ rights and to other competing interests.

Competent judicial authority: Determinations related to communications surveillance must be made by a competent judicial authority that is impartial and independent.

Due process: States must respect and guarantee individuals’ human rights by ensuring that lawful procedures that govern any interference with human rights are properly enumerated in law, consistently practiced, and available to the general public.

User notification: Individuals should be notified of a decision authorising communications surveillance with enough time and information to enable them to appeal the decision, and should have access to the materials presented in support of the application for authorisation.

Transparency: States should be transparent about the use and scope of communications surveillance techniques and powers.

Public oversight: States should establish independent oversight mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability of communications surveillance.

Integrity of communications and systems: States should not compel service providers, or hardware or software vendors to build surveillance or monitoring capabilities into their systems, or to collect or retain information.

Safeguards for international cooperation: Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) entered into by States should ensure that, where the laws of more than one State could apply to communications surveillance, the available standard with the higher level of protection for users should apply.

Safeguards against illegitimate access: States should enact legislation criminalising illegal communications surveillance by public and private actors.

With the new revelations exposed by the Post along with all the other Snowden leaks from recent months, it is clear that many – if not all – of these 13 principles are being violated routinely by the NSA’s surveillance activities.

To sign on to the International Principles, click here.

Click here to tell Congress to end the U.S. surveillance state.

Manning’s apology: An Orwellian concession that 2+2=5

Courtroom sketch of Bradley Manning (Reuters)

In a plea for leniency from military judge Col. Denise Lind yesterday, U.S. political prisoner Bradley Manning apologized for releasing thousands of classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, dubiously conceding that he may have hurt people by doing so.

“I am sorry that my actions hurt people,” he told the judge. “I’m sorry that they hurt the United States.”

It was not clear however exactly what he meant by hurting people, since the government has been unable to demonstrate that any harm came to a single person as a result of his leaks – despite many grandiose claims to the contrary.

When Judge Lind opened the sentencing portion of Manning’s court-martial last month, retired Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, who had headed a special task force that spent more than 10 months assessing the damage caused by the leaks, testified that one Afghan national was killed as a result of the disclosure of battlefield reports from Afghanistan. He based this claim on a Taliban statement that the group had killed the Afghan.

But on cross-examination, Carr acknowledged that his task force was unable to identify the individual by name and Judge Lind ruled that the testimony would not be admitted into the record.

That was the one and only case in which the government concretely alleged that Manning’s leaks had actually harmed someone, and the military judge ruled it inadmissible. In contrast, hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, senseless deaths for which no policymakers or generals have ever apologized or been held accountable.

Yet, much like Winston Smith at the end of the novel 1984, Manning found himself yesterday acknowledging falsehoods as truths in a desperate attempt to secure a merciful sentence from the presiding judge, a woman who quite literally holds his life in her hands. Like Smith, Manning was essentially saying “two plus two equals five,” in a final acquiescence that it is the State that determines what is true and what is not, regardless of verifiable, objective reality.

By apologizing for “hurting the United States,” what the whistleblower may have really meant is that he is sorry for embarrassing the U.S. government. After all, what he did was to expose war crimes and atrocities, as well as malfeasance, corruption and a complete lack of accountability in the government, and it is for that “crime” that he is being punished.

The fact is, when WikiLeaks first exposed the story of the 2007 Apache helicopter massacre in Baghdad with the release of the “Collateral Murder” video in 2010, it was simply providing documentary evidence for what had long been an open secret: war crimes and atrocities were commonplace in U.S.-occupied Iraq.

The video had in fact long been known about – and sought after – by the Reuters news agency, which had lost two of its employees in the massacre. Despite a Freedom of Information Act request for the video, which Reuters wanted to examine in order to improve the safety of its journalists working in Iraq, the Pentagon denied the video’s existence and refused to release it.

It took the courage of Bradley Manning to bring the evidence of this war crime to light.

But yesterday he expressed regret for doing so.

“In retrospect I should have worked more aggressively inside the system,” Manning said to the judge. “I had options and I should have used these options.”

While it is understandable that Manning would strive to show contrition to the judge in the face of a possible 90-year prison sentence, it is unclear exactly what he means by saying that he could have effected change by working within the system.

The fact is, numerous soldiers have spoken out about crimes that they have witnessed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan both from within the system and from without, and no one is held accountable. Just two years prior to the WikiLeaks-Manning disclosures, dozens of veterans participated in the Winter Soldier hearings in Maryland in which they offered first-hand accounts of atrocities they had witnessed or participated in during their service.

Clifton Hicks and Steve Casey, for example, testified about their experiences in a “free-fire zone” where everyone was considered enemy combatants regardless of age or any other factor. In November 2003, according to Hicks, an AC-130 gunship opened fire on an apartment complex, completely destroying it and killing an unknown number of civilians.

Atrocities such as these have long been open secrets within the context of the U.S.’s military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. All that Bradley Manning did by exposing them in his release of “Collateral Murder,” as well as the Iraq and Afghan war logs, was to strip the U.S. government of “plausible deniability.”

The “Cablegate” disclosures were just plain embarrassing, exposing routine U.S. spying on allies and aggressive lobbying on behalf of U.S. corporations like Monsanto.

“Unfortunately, I can’t go back and change things,” Manning said yesterday. “I can only go forward. I want to go forward. Before I can do that, I understand that I must pay a price for my decisions and actions.”

Sadly, he may indeed pay a very high price. But what’s perhaps even sadder is that no one else involved in this saga – whether the war criminals he exposed or his captors who mistreated him for the first year of his unlawful pre-trial incarceration – will pay any price at all.

Bluster on Russia reveals U.S. double standards on extradition, human rights

Announcing President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel a planned bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, White House press secretary Jay Carney yesterday offered several justifications for the diplomatic snub.

“Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last twelve months, we have informed the Russian Government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda,” the press secretary said.

Almost as an afterthought, Carney added: “Russia’s disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship.”

While the bilateral U.S.-Russian relationship has been strained for some time and there are real concerns regarding Moscow’s recent crackdown on civil society, the timing of the announcement – just a week after Russia granted the NSA whistleblower one year of asylum – appeared to be a thinly veiled rebuke intended to punish Moscow for failing to bend to Washington’s dictates. After all, the other areas constituting a “lack of progress” were apparent long before the summit was even scheduled, and the only new factor in the strained relationship is the Snowden affair.

The Kremlin said it was “disappointed” by the U.S. decision, with Putin’s foreign affairs adviser saying the move showed the U.S. could not develop ties with Russia on an “equal basis.”

Russian foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov added that Russia was not to blame over the Snowden affair.

“This decision is clearly linked to the situation with former agent of U.S. special services Snowden, which hasn’t been created by us,” he said.

He pointed out that there is not even an extradition agreement in place between Russia and the United States, largely due to the intransigence of Washington, and therefore there is no legal basis for the U.S. to demand extradition from Moscow in the first place.

“For many years, the Americans have avoided signing an extradition agreement,” Ushakov said, “And they have invariably responded negatively to our requests for extradition of people who committed crimes on the territory of Russia, pointing at the absence of such agreement.”

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken many of the recent stories regarding the NSA’s dragnet surveillance, noted that the U.S. in fact has a long record of refusing to extradite individuals accused of very serious crimes to a whole range of countries, many of which actually have formal extradition treaties in place with Washington.

In a February 28, 2007 article, for example, the New York Times reported:

A senior U.S. official said Wednesday that the United States would refuse any Italian extradition request for CIA agents indicted in the alleged abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan, a case investigated by the European Parliament.

“We’ve not got an extradition request from Italy,” John Bellinger, a legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, told reporters after meeting in Brussels with legal advisers to EU governments.

“If we got an extradition request from Italy, we would not extradite U.S. officials to Italy.”

Or, as the Washington Post reported on July 19, 2013:

A former CIA operative detained in Panama this week at the request of Italian authorities over his conviction in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan was released Friday and had boarded a flight to the United States, U.S. officials said.

Robert Seldon Lady’s release from Panama appeared to avert the possibility that he would be extradited to Italy, where he faces a sentence of up to nine years in prison for his role in the CIA capture of a terrorism suspect who was secretly snatched off a street in Milan and transported to Egypt.

Lady, who left Panama on Friday morning, was “either en route or back in the United States,” Marie Harf, State Department deputy spokeswoman, told reporters at a midday briefing.

Bolivia has also faced difficulty in extraditing fugitives from the United States, as The Guardian reported on September 9, 2012:

The view that Sánchez de Lozada must be extradited from the US to stand trial is a political consensus in Bolivia, shared by the government and the main opposition party alike. But on Friday night, the Bolivian government revealed that it had just been notified by the Obama administration that the US government has refused Bolivia’s extradition request:

“‘Yesterday (Thursday), a document arrived from the United States, rejecting the extradition of people who have done a lot of damage to Bolivia,’ leftist [President Evo] Morales, an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, said in a speech.

“Calling the United States a ‘paradise of impunity’ and a ‘refuge for criminals,’ Morales said Washington turned down the extradition request on the grounds that a civilian leader cannot be tried for crimes committed by the military …

Then of course, there is the long-running case of former CIA employee and terrorist mastermind Luis Posada Carriles, a criminal who is being harbored by the United States despite requests from Venezuela for his extradition to face trial on 73 counts of murder.

The United States has refused to extradite him to Venezuela because he allegedly faces possible torture by the authorities there, according to his lawyers.

Ironically, the torture issue is also one of the concerns that Russia has expressed regarding the case of whistleblower Edward Snowden, prompting U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to awkwardly assure Moscow that the U.S. government will not torture or kill Snowden upon his return to the United States.

“We…understand from press reports that Mr. Snowden has filed papers seeking temporary asylum in Russia on the grounds that if he were returned to the United States, he would be tortured and would face the death penalty,” Holder wrote in a letter to his Russian counterpart. “These claims are entirely without merit,” he wrote, adding that “torture is unlawful in the United States.”

Of course, what Holder left unsaid is that although torture is unlawful in the United States, it has still been a widespread policy and those who torture others or high-level officials who authorize torture in violation of the law are granted official impunity by the U.S. Justice Department.

As Human Rights Watch pointed out in a 2011 report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” although substantial information exists warranting criminal investigations of Bush and senior administration officials, the U.S. Justice Department has failed to initiate a single investigation of these crimes.

“There are solid grounds to investigate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tenet for authorizing torture and war crimes,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.  “President Obama has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime. His decision to end abusive interrogation practices will remain easily reversible unless the legal prohibition against torture is clearly reestablished.”

More recently, the United States was accused of torture in its treatment of political prisoner Bradley Manning, who is awaiting his sentence upon his conviction for exposing embarrassing state secrets of the United States government.

Manning’s solitary confinement regime during his first year of incarceration “constitute[d] at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture,” said Juan Mendez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. “If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture,” he told the Guardian in 2012.

Regarding Manning’s conviction last week, Russian Commissioner for Human Rights Konstantin Dolgov said that the United States is applying double standards in Manning’s case “without paying attention to the observance of human rights.”

“This double standard that we see in the U.S. authorities’ assessment of approaches to this situation [around Manning] raises questions,” said Dolgov. “If you demand full observance of freedom of speech from others, in principle, you should apply this position to yourself. If the applied standard is different, this cannot help but cause complaints on the part of both other governments and human rights institutions.”

Disregarding these apparent double standards, human rights groups have praised the U.S. decision to cancel the Obama-Putin summit, focusing nearly entirely on the premise that the decision was prompted by American concerns over the human rights situation in Russia. U.S.-based NGO Freedom House welcomed yesterday’s announcement, stating in an email,

According to the White House statement announcing the cancelation, the “lack of progress” in U.S.-Russia bilateral relations includes the human rights and civil society situation in Russia in the past 12 months. Indeed, it was during this period that the most serious crackdown against civil society and Russia’s opposition since the break-up of the Soviet Union has occurred.

A series of restrictive laws passed by the Russian Duma are meant to silence dissent against the regime and cripple civil society. In addition, we have seen the prosecution of opposition leaders, including Aleksei Navalny; the disgraceful posthumous conviction of lawyer and whistleblower Sergey Magnitsky; the aggressive campaign against non-governmental organizations; the banning of adoptions of Russian orphans by American citizens; the expulsion of the US Agency for International Development; and the outrageous campaign targeting the LGBT community. Together these actions and policies represent a full-bore and utterly deplorable campaign against human rights and democratic standards engineered by the Putin regime.  Enormous differences over Syria and the Snowden case are further reason for canceling the visit.

“I applaud the President’s decision to cancel his bilateral meeting with Putin and hope that when he goes to St. Petersburg for the G20 summit that he’ll meet with Russian civil society activists,” said Freedom House President David J. Kramer.  “Obama’s decision to cancel his Moscow visit should signal to Putin that there are costs to his bullying, unrestrained drive to silence critics and eliminate serious opposition.”

Of course, what Freedom House has overlooked is the distinct possibility that the cancellation in fact has very little to do with human rights concerns, and nearly everything to do with Moscow’s refusal to hand over Snowden to the U.S. justice system where he will almost certainly find himself suffering the same fate as imprisoned whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Similarly, Amnesty International cited human rights concerns in Russia in its statement regarding the cancelation of the summit. Rather than discussing the merits of Snowden’s asylum in Russia or the U.S. obligation to respect Moscow’s decision regarding his extradition, Amnesty focused its criticism on the White House for not condemning Russia’s human rights record more forcefully. Frank Jannuzi, Amnesty International USA deputy executive director, issued the following statement:

President Obama said he canceled his summit with President Putin because there has been a lack of progress on human rights and civil society in Russia. That is an understatement. Russia continues to backslide on human rights. The United States should press Russia to respect freedom of expression and not allow backroom discussions on other priorities to override the urgent task of protecting the Russian peoples’ basic rights and dignity.

Curiously, just a month earlier, Amnesty was among Snowden’s most vocal supporters in his efforts to seek political asylum, harshly condemning the U.S. government for its ruthless persecution of the whistleblower.

“The U.S. authorities’ relentless campaign to hunt down and block whistleblower Edward Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum is deplorable and amounts to a gross violation of his human rights,” Amnesty International said in a press release on July 2.

“The U.S. attempts to pressure governments to block Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum are deplorable,” said Michael Bochenek, Director of Law and Policy at Amnesty International. “It is his unassailable right, enshrined in international law, to claim asylum and this should not be impeded.”

Renewed international support for Manning in wake of ‘short-sighted’ verdict

Supporters of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning hold signs to show support during a demonstration outside the main gate of Ft. Meade July 30, 2013 in Maryland. (AFP Photo / Alex Wong)

Acquitted of the most serious charge of “aiding the enemy,” U.S. political prisoner Bradley Manning has been found guilty of 20 charges in total, including theft, computer fraud and a newly conceived crime of “wanton publication.”

Manning, who provided classified information to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, including video evidence of a U.S. war crime in Baghdad, now faces the possibility of up to 136 years behind bars. The sentencing phase, which is underway, could take a month before a final penalty is decided.

As soon as Manning’s verdict was handed down last week, support for his cause and calls for leniency from Judge Col. Denise Lind in his sentencing poured in from around the world. An open letter from 17 Members of the European Parliament called for President Obama to pardon the young Army private, who spent three years in pre-trial incarceration – much of it in conditions amounting to torture in violation of international law.

“As Members of the European Parliament, who were elected to represent our constituents throughout Europe, we are writing to express our concerns about the ongoing persecution of Bradley Manning, the young U.S. soldier who released classified information revealing evidence of human rights abuses and apparent war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan,” reads the letter.

Rather than causing harm, Bradley Manning’s release to WikiLeaks of the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diaries shone much needed light on those occupations, revealing, amongst other abuses, the routine killing of civilians. The bleak picture painted by these war diaries contrasts greatly with the rosy progress reports being provided to the public by military and political leaders. PFC Manning has said he felt that if the American public had access to this information, this could ‘spark a domestic debate’ on American foreign policy ‘as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan’. Far from being a traitor, Bradley Manning had the best interests of his country in mind.

The Iraqi people continue to suffer the consequences of this war, even after the withdrawal of foreign troops, with millions of homeless refugees and the resumption of sectarian violence. Meanwhile, eleven and a half years after the U.S invaded Afghanistan, that nation has yet to form a functioning democracy or to free itself from the Taliban and fundamentalist warlords.

Russian Commissioner for Human Rights Konstantin Dolgov said that the United States is applying double standards in Manning’s case “without paying attention to the observance of human rights.”

“This double standard that we see in the U.S. authorities’ assessment of approaches to this situation [around Manning] raises questions,” said Dolgov. “If you demand full observance of freedom of speech from others, in principle, you should apply this position to yourself. If the applied standard is different, this cannot help but cause complaints on the part of both other governments and human rights institutions.”

He also expressed doubts that the U.S. will take into account international human rights in determining Manning’s punishment. “I think that [Manning’s] sentence will not likely take into account the view the international human rights organizations,” Dolgov said.

Amnesty International welcomed Manning’s acquittal on the “aiding the enemy” charge, but regretted that the U.S. government continues its persecution of the whistleblower, which it said demonstrates misplaced priorities on national security.

Noting that the hundreds of thousands of documents Manning leaked included videos and dossiers that revealed human rights violations and breaches of international humanitarian law by U.S. troops and the CIA, Amnesty said that it undermines accountability when the U.S. government is so selective about who it chooses to investigate and prosecute.

“The government’s pursuit of the ‘aiding the enemy’ charge was a serious overreach of the law, not least because there was no credible evidence of Manning’s intent to harm the USA by releasing classified information to Wikileaks,” said Widney Brown, Senior Director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty International.

She added:

The government’s priorities are upside down. The US government has refused to investigate credible allegations of torture and other crimes under international law despite overwhelming evidence.

Yet they decided to prosecute Manning who it seems was trying to do the right thing – reveal credible evidence of unlawful behaviour by the government. You investigate and prosecute those who destroy the credibility of the government by engaging in acts such as torture which are prohibited under the US Constitution and in international law.

Any sentence imposed for the other charges must take into account information relating to Manning’s reasonable belief that he was exposing serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, Amnesty said.

Brown also noted that Manning’s overzealous prosecution – not to mention his gross mistreatment during three years of illegal pre-trial confinement – was most likely intended to provide a warning to other potential whistleblowers who might be considering exposing the rampant criminality and corruption of the U.S. government.

“It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Manning’s trial was about sending a message: the US government will come after you, no holds barred, if you’re thinking of revealing evidence of its unlawful behavior,” Brown said.

This of course would qualify Manning as a political prisoner and/or prisoner of conscience under Amnesty International’s own definition of the term, but to this date, for some confounding reason, the human rights group has declined to designate the imprisoned whistleblower as such.

As Amnesty International has previously explained its use of the term “political prisoner,”

In AI’s usage, the term includes any prisoner whose case has a significant political element: whether the motivation of the prisoner’s acts, the acts in themselves, or the motivation of the authorities. “Political” is used by AI to refer to aspects of human relations related to “politics”: the mechanisms of society and civil order, the principles, organization, or conduct of government or public affairs, and the relation of all these to questions of language, ethnic origin, sex or religion, status or influence (among other factors). The category of political prisoners embraces the category of prisoners of conscience, the only prisoners who AI demands should be immediately and unconditionally released, as well as people who resort to criminal violence for a political motive. In AI’s use of the term, here are some examples of political prisoners:

a person accused or convicted of an ordinary crime carried out for political motives, such as murder or robbery carried out to support the objectives of an opposition group;

a person accused or convicted of an ordinary crime committed in a political context, such as at a demonstration by a trade union or a peasants’ organization;

a member or suspected member of an armed opposition group who has been charged with treason or “subversion”.

A definition of “political prisoner” adopted last year by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe includes the following criteria:

a. if the detention has been imposed in violation of one of the fundamental guarantees set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols (ECHR), in particular freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of expression and information, freedom of assembly and association;

b. if the detention has been imposed for purely political reasons without connection to any offence;

c. if, for political motives, the length of the detention or its conditions are clearly out of proportion to the offence the person has been found guilty of or is suspected of;

d. if, for political motives, he or she is detained in a discriminatory manner as compared to other persons; or,

e. if the detention is the result of proceedings which were clearly unfair and this appears to be connected with political motives of the authorities.” (SG/Inf(2001)34, paragraph 10).

It’s obvious that under any number of these criteria, Manning would qualify as a political prisoner, if not a prisoner of conscience. He was motivated by his conscience and out of concern over the evidence of war crimes, corruption and general wrongdoing committed by his government that he was privy to as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq. Further, the potential sentence he faces of 136 years in prison would clearly be out of proportion to the offenses for which he has been convicted.

Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, who has been one of WikiLeaks’ most vocal defenders and has nominated Manning for a Nobel Peace Prize, noted the perverted sense of justice being displayed by the United States by prosecuting the whistleblower but not the crimes that he exposed.

“Let’s not forget,” she said, “that nobody has been held accountable for the war crimes that the whole world was able to see depicted in the video, collateral murder. No one has been held accountable for that except the whistleblower and that’s absolutely outrageous.”

“I find it very strange that even if you can actually see soldiers shooting and killing a wounded person nobody has been questioned so may be its time to figure how the U.S. legal system works so somebody could be held accountable for that,” she added.

WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange called last week’s judgment “a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism.”

Noting that the verdict was the first ever espionage conviction against a whistleblower, Assange said it was “a short sighted judgment that can not be tolerated and must be reversed.”

“It can never be that conveying true information to the public is ‘espionage,’” he added, further noting that the Obama administration has systematically been “chipping away democratic freedoms in the United States.”

Bradley Manning’s mother, Susan Manning – who has health problems – has said she believes she may never see him again, but urged her son to “never give up hope.”

She said: “I know I may never see you again but I know you will be free one day. I pray it is soon. I love you Bradley and I always will.”

Her sister, Sharon Staples, said that the family is now “praying for leniency” as the judge considers Manning’s punishment.

In an online campaign, nearly 3,000 Americans have volunteered to serve any sentence that Manning receives. “Bradley Manning provided information to the American people which our own government would not provide,” the pledge reads. “He did us all a favor and in turn I am willing to serve part of his sentence.”

Other campaigns in support of the political prisoner include a #ThankManning letter-writing initiative spearheaded by Amnesty4Manning, as well as rallies and vigils being held across the United States and around the world.