martial

Military court to review tight secrecy in Bradley Manning case

A military appeals court will be asked tomorrow to decloak the prosecution of Bradley Manning, an Army private accused of handing thousands of classified documents to Wikileaks.

Prosecutors have insisted on intense secrecy in the case. No transcripts of the legal proceedings have been published. No court orders have been disclosed. To date, even the government's written legal arguments remain off-limits to the public.

So far, at least, military courts have been perfectly happy to accede to those requests in Manning's court martial. A trial judge, Denise Lind, rejected requests for access to the records, as did the … Read more

Manning's attorney says WikiLeaks disclosures weren't harmful

Bradley Manning's attorney has suggested that the hundreds of megabytes of U.S. government data his client allegedly handed to WikiLeaks didn't really harm national security after all.

A new document filed in Manning's criminal case provides an early glimpse at the defense's legal strategy in advance of a preliminary hearing on December 16.

The filing, which defense attorney David Coombs made public today, requests a copy of a White House "report detailing the rather benign nature of the leaks and the lack of any real damage to national security" caused by WikiLeaks. It … Read more

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em iPhone game

SmackBots is a button-mashing robot-fighting game that's more than a little reminiscent of the classic childrens' game "Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots."

The interface makes great use of the iPhone and iPod Touch: you tap on the right side of the screen to swing your right fist, the left for your left, and both sides to block, and you tilt your device to move left or right. You fight against one other robot at a time, in two-minute rounds (best two out of three), and you choose your difficulty, either "Just Smacking Around" or "… Read more

Your opponents are your friends

FaceFighter is a fairly simple, comically violent fighting game with a goofy twist: you create your own opponents, using pictures from your iPhone camera or photo albums--so that means you can bruise and brawl with just about anyone, whether your boss, your best friend, or a celebrity from a magazine. FaceFighter's foe-creation interface is intuitive and easy: you start with a pic, scale and rotate to line up the eyes and mouth, and then scale and rotate again to determine the face's borders. FaceFighter comes with two built-in enemies (Big Ben and Enemy Mime), but you'll quickly … Read more