BREAKING NEWS: Bradley Manning is dead
"Bradley Manning’s treatment focus of WikiLeaks hearing" by David Dishneau |
Associated Press, November 27, 2012
HAGERSTOWN, Md. — Bradley Manning, the Army private charged in the
biggest security breach in US history, is trying to avoid trial by
saying he has been punished enough by being locked up alone in a small
cell and having to sleep naked for several nights.
A UN investigator called the conditions cruel, inhuman, and degrading but stopped short of calling it torture.
Manning is expected to testify about his treatment during a pretrial hearing Tuesday at Fort Meade.
The intelligence analyst has not spoken publicly about his nearly
nine months at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., but he has
complained in writing about being confined alone in a 6-by-8-foot cell
for at least 23 hours a day. For several days in January 2011, all his
clothes were taken from him each night until he was issued a suicide
prevention smock.
The hearing is scheduled to run through Sunday.
Manning is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified
Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to
the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks while he was working as an
intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010.
The 24-year-old native of Crescent, Okla., allegedly told a
confidant-turned-informant in an online chat in 2010 that he leaked the
information, saying: ‘‘I want people to see the truth.’’
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Related: Previous suicide prompted tight security on Manning
Soldier in Leaks Case Says He’s Been Punished Enough
It was torture finding that item that was an AP piece in my printed Boston Globe. Neither article made it in the web version.
GI charged in WikiLeaks case admits making noose
Manning’s history showed risk of self-harm, counselors say
"Marine: Improper procedures used in Manning case" December 06, 2012
FORT MEADE, Md. — The Marine Corps’ top correctional administrator
said Wednesday that brig officials at Quantico, Va., used improper
procedures to recommend that an Army private charged with giving US
secrets to the WikiLeaks website be held in maximum custody.
Chief Warrant Officer 5 Abel Galaviz testified at a pretrial hearing
at Fort Meade
to determine whether the nine months that Private First Class Bradley
Manning spent in the brig amounted to illegal punishment, possibly
warranting a dismissal of the case.
Galaviz said the board used an unapproved form to convey its recommendations to the brig commander.
The testimony was the strongest evidence the defense has produced to
counter the government’s claim that the confinement conditions were
proper.
Nevertheless, Galaviz concluded that the brig commander, Chief
Warrant Officer 4 James Averhart, was justified in keeping Manning in
maximum custody.
Earlier Wednesday, a former supervisor of the brig denied Wednesday
that he was making light of Manning’s homosexuality when he referred to
the soldier’s underwear as ‘‘panties’’ in a memo. Marine Corps Master
Sergeant Brian Papakie testified as a prosecution witness on the seventh
day of the pretrial hearing.
The military contends Manning had to be confined to his 8-by-6-foot
cell at least 23 hours a day, sometimes without clothing, to prevent him
from hurting or killing himself during his confinement from July 2010
to April 2011.
Under questioning by defense lawyer David Coombs, Papakie said he
uses the word “panties” interchangeably with ‘‘skivvies’’ and
‘‘underwear’’ when discussing men’s undershorts.
‘‘I’ve always used the phrase, ‘Don’t get my panties in a bunch,’ which is what I tell the staff all the time,’’ he said.
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Ex-brig boss shocked by orders of Manning notifications
He continued to be stripped of his underwear at night, stood naked at attention the next morning
Punishment of WikiLeaks soldier ruled illegal
"Soldier pleads guilty in Wikileaks case" by Charlie Savage | New York Times, March 01, 2013
FORT MEADE, Md. — Private First Class Bradley Manning confessed in open court Thursday to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, saying he wanted the information to become public “to make the world a better place.”
After being tortured? Don't you have to throw that out?
Appearing before a military judge for more than an hour, Manning recounted how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain documents should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about the Iraq War, and ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.
“No one associated with WLO” — an abbreviation he used to refer to the WikiLeaks organization — “pressured me into sending any more information,” Manning said. “I take full responsibility.”
Before his statement, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the leak, which included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a quarter- million diplomatic cables.
The pleas exposed him to up to 20 years in prison. But the case against the slightly built, bespectacled 25-year-old who has become a folk hero among antiwar and whistle-blower advocacy groups is not over.
The military has charged him with a far more serious set of offenses, including aiding the enemy and multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act, and prosecutors have the option to press forward with proving the remaining elements of the more serious charges.
That would involve focusing only on questions like whether the information he provided counted as the sort covered by the Espionage Act — that is, whether it is “national defense information” that could be used to injure the United States or aid a foreign nation.
In a riveting personal history, Manning portrayed himself as thinking carefully about the categories of information he was divulging, excluding the sort that would harm the United States. He said he was initially concerned about diplomatic cables but after doing research learned that the most sensitive ones were not placed into the database to which he had access, and he concluded that those might prove embarrassing but would not cause harm.
Manning said the first set of documents that he decided to release were hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Afghanistan and Iraq that he had downloaded onto a disk because he needed them for his work, and the computer network connection kept going down. The reports, he decided, showed the flaws in the counterinsurgency policy the United States was then pursuing in both war zones.
The military, he said, had become “obsessed with capturing or killing” people on a list while ignoring what the operations were doing to ordinary people. The reports, he said, were not sensitive because they recounted events that were long over.
“I believed if the public, in particular the American public, had access to the information, this could spark a debate about foreign policy,” he said.
At first he tried to give it to a newspaper. Eventually, Manning released the information by uploading it to WikiLeaks.
How far they have fallen since the Pentagon papers.
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