- Assange: Day Two Archived Message
Posted by sashimi
on February 26, 2020, 6:33 am
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(extract) With the sound of protestors permeating the walls of Woolwich Crown Court, Assange's defense presented the first part of its case on Tuesday, demolishing the U.S. government's extradition submission: * regarding Assange helping Chelsea Manning crack a password; i.e. allegedly participating in the theft of government documents; * the use of WikiLeaks Most Wanted List of stories as a way to supposedly "solicit" stories from Manning, * that Assange recklessly endangered the lives of U.S. informants. Assange attorney Mark Summers revealed that Assange's supposed attempt to help Manning "hack" a government computer for secret documents was actually an attempt to help her crack a password to download video games, movies and music videos, forbidden on military computers. Summers says Manning had legal access to classified material and did not need a user name or a password to get into the database. The Espionage Act indictment says Assange helped Manning sign in under an administrator's password in order to help get secrets, not the latest video game. The U.S. government's case is based on "lies, lies and more lies," Summers told the court. Summers said that there's no evidence Manning ever saw WikiLeak's wish list, and she provided material that wasn't asked for. Manning gave WikiLeaks the U.S. Rules of Engagement in Iraq to show that the Collateral Murder video had violated those rules, not because Assange had asked for it, Summers said. It is difficult to understand how a journalist asking sources to provide the information, even classified information, can be construed as a crime. Summers also gave a detailed explanation about why the government's assertion that Assange had endangered the lives of U.S. informants was false. He explained that Assange had instituted a Harm Mitigation Program to redact the names of informants and other people that might be at risk, a program so stringent that David Leigh of The Guardian complained to Der Spiegel, two publications partnering with WikiLeaks, that too much time was being wasted. A Spiegel journalist said it was the extreme measures he had ever experienced. Summers also told the court that The Guardian was responsible for publishing the password for the encrypted, un-redacted State Department cables that WikiLeaks and its media partners were slowly and carefully running out. When The Guardian made the entire archive available, Assange called the State Department to warn them. "You might think that would be something you would have known when the government submitted the extradition request," Summers told Baraitser. (/extract) -- https://consortiumnews.com/2020/02/25/assange-extradition-assange-helped-manning-crack-password-to-download-video-games-not-state-secrets-court-is-told/ |
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