Today, 16 December 2011, is the first day of Bradley Manning’s pre-trial hearing. This will be held against the backdrop of President Barack Obama having already declared Manning guilty without any judicial process. Bradley Manning has also been subjected to extra-judicial punishment which amounted to torture during his 18 month detention.
wiseupforbradleymanning | Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English solidarity and support network: Free Bradley Manning!
UPDATE 2/3/12: Soldier charged with biggest leak of classified information in US history to face 22 counts, including aiding the enemy
Bradley Manning is to stand trial for allegedly giving more than 700,000 secret US documents to WikiLeaks for publication. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
A US army officer has ordered a court martial for Bradley Manning, the soldier charged in the biggest leak of classified information in American history.
Military district of Washington commander Major General Michael Linnington referred all charges against Manning to a general court martial on Friday, the army said in a statement... - Bradley Manning: US general orders court martial for WikiLeaks suspect | World news | guardian.co.uk
Almost Gone by Graham Nash and James Raymond - in support of Bradley Manning
A companion video for "Almost Gone" -- a new song by legendary singer-songwriter Graham Nash and musician James Raymond (son of David Crosby) -- is being released today in support of accused U.S. Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. The free download is available on Nash's website (www.grahamnash.com) and the Bradley Manning Support Network site www.bradleymanning.org...
Veterans and supporters of Bradley Manning demonstrate at gates of Fort Meade hearing
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND — Eighteen months after he was first accused of revealing information to WikiLeaks, PFC Bradley Manning appeared before an Article 32 investigating officer this morning. Supporters began gathering outside the gates of Fort Meade to call for Manning’s freedom and denounce the proceedings as unjust. Inside the tightly-controlled military court room, lead defense counsel David Coombs challenged the investigating officer, Army Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, to recuse himself due to conflicts of interest.
“Military officials have begun conducting their star chamber prosecution after abusing Bradley Manning of his rights for eighteen months,” said Jeff Paterson, an organizer with the Bradley Manning Support Network, who was speaking from the vigil at Fort Meade. “The investigating officer is not only biased to produce an outcome that is favorable to his employer at the Justice Department — he’s under pressure from his Commander-in-Chief, who has already inappropriately weighed-in on this case.”
Supporters have long argued that PFC Manning could not receive a fair hearing due to unlawful command influence from President Obama, who publicly declared in April that the former Army intelligence analyst “broke the law.”
Bradley Manning Support Network
Bradley E. Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed restricted material to the website WikiLeaks. He was charged in July that year with transferring classified data onto his personal computer, and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source. An additional 22 charges were preferred in March 2011, including "aiding the enemy", a capital offense, though prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. He was found fit to face court martial in April 2011, and currently awaits the first hearing.
Manning had been assigned in October 2009 to a unit of the 10th Mountain Division, based near Baghdad. There he had access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), used by the United States government to transmit classified information. He was arrested after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, reported to the FBI that Manning had told him during online chats in May 2010 that he had downloaded material from SIPRNet and passed it to WikiLeaks. The leaked material is said to have included 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables; footage of a July 2007 Baghdad airstrike; and footage of the May 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan.
Manning was held in maximum custody beginning in July 2010 in the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, which in effect meant solitary confinement, conditions that Amnesty International called harsh and punitive. In April 2011, 295 scholars, including legal scholars and philosophers signed a letter saying the conditions he experienced amounted to a violation of the U.S. Constitution; later that month the Pentagon transferred him to a medium-security facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, allowing him to interact with other pre-trial detainees.
An article 32 hearing will be held on December 16 in Fort Meade, Maryland.
Bradley Manning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
see also
"Bradley Manning and the Fog of War." By Amy Goodman
December 21, 2011: Accused whistle-blower Pvt. Bradley Manning turned 24 Saturday. He spent his birthday in a pretrial military hearing that could ultimately lead to a sentence of life … or death. Manning stands accused of causing the largest leak of government secrets in United States history...
WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder, editor-in-chief, and director. Kristinn Hrafnsson is the only other publicly known acknowledged associate of WikiLeaks as of 2011. Hrafnsson is also a member of the company Sunshine Press Productions along with Assange, Ingi Ragnar Ingason and Gavin MacFadyen.
The group has released a number of significant documents which have become front-page news items. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war and corruption in Kenya. In April 2010, WikiLeaks published gunsight footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi journalists were among those killed by an Apache helicopter, as the Collateral Murder video. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available to the public. In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
In November 2010, WikiLeaks collaborated with major global media organisations to release U.S. State department diplomatic cables in redacted format. The release was nicknamed CableGate referencing the Watergate scandal and implying that this release was as dramatic as the Presidential scandal. On 1 September 2011, it became public that an encrypted version of WikiLeaks' huge archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been available via Bittorrent for months, and that the decryption key (similar to a password) was available to those who knew where to look. WikiLeaks blamed the breach on its former partner, The Guardian, and that newspaper's journalist David Leigh, who revealed the key in a book published in February 2011; The Guardian argued that WikiLeaks was to blame since they gave the impression that the decryption key was temporal (something not possible for a file decryption key). Der Spiegel reported a more complex story involving errors on both sides. Widely expressed fears that the CableGate release could endanger innocent lives have so far proved unfounded.
WikiLeaks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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