Yesterday, October 18, 2012, concluded Bradley Manning’s latest motion hearing. The parties agreed to submit a defense set of questions and a prosecution affidavit to prevent the defense from bringing dozens of witnesses. Judge Lind ruled on yesterday’s litigation, and announced that the next hearing will start October 30. (Read Day 1 notes here.)

By Nathan Fuller. October 19, 2012.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

An agreement on defense witnesss

The second day of Bradley Manning’s latest motion hearing started at 1 PM ET and, protracted by several conference delays, didn’t adjourn until 9:00 last night. In these private conferences, the defense and prosecution worked together to obviate the need for the defense to bring upwards of 60 government representatives to testify about their department’s involvement in delaying Bradley Manning’s pretrial proceedings. The defense wanted the original 60 or so witnesses to ask if the prosecution had repeatedly contacted those agencies in an effort to speed up their activity on the case.

The parties agreed that the defense would submit questions of fact regarding whether the prosecution was sufficiently diligent in propelling the pre-arraignment proceedings forward. The prosecution will respond with an affidavit answering those questions. The prosecution will also provide the defense with contact information for a few outlying potential witnesses, whom the defense will speak to out of court to determine if they need to testify as well.

Re-arranged speedy trial motion schedule

This agreement will also bifurcate the speedy trial motion, initially scheduled for the October 29-November 2 hearing. That hearing will now start instead on October 30 and will feature government witnesses: Master Sergeant Carlisle, Colonel Carl Coffman, and Bert Hagett. The speedy trial motion will continue at the December 10-14 hearing, instead of interfering with the November 27-December 2 Article 13 hearing, which will include several other witnesses.

David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers

Earlier in the afternoon, before back and forth arguments led to the idea of an alternative agreement on witnesses, Judge Lind made rulings on yesterday’s litigation. She ruled that she would take judicial notice of the fact that David Finkel’s book The Good Soldiers was published in 2009, but she wouldn’t judicially notice the fact that it included a verbatim transcript in key sections. While in yesterday’s litigation Judge Lind appeared to agree that it does in fact include a word-for-word transcription in many sections, today she said that taking judicial notice would essentially be making a defense argument – and that point, she said, was for the defense alone to make.

Government statements on WikiLeaks

Then she ruled on the defense’s request to submit several statements by government officials regarding the lack of harm from WikiLeaks’ releases. Judge Lind said that Geoff Morrell’s 24 April 2011 statement on the release of Guantanamo Files, President Obama’s 27 July 2010 statement on the Afghan War Logs, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ 16 August 2010 letter to Senator Carl Levin are legally admissible.

However, she said Defense Secretary Gates’ 30 November 2010 news briefing comments, State Secretary Hillary Clinton’s 1 December 2010 remarks to the Kazakh Foreign Minister, State Secretary Clinton’s 4 December 2010 off-camera comments to CNN, Vice President Joe Biden’s 16 December 2010 interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, and Representative John Conyers’ 16 December 2010 remarks to Congress were not admissible. She said this set of remarks, as opposed to the admissible first three, conveyed personal or political beliefs, instead of official government statements.

We’ll have more soon on what we expect the government witnesses to testify to in a preview of the October 30-November 2 hearing.