Outreach: ACLU
Just sent to the Maryland and DC chapters of the ACLU:
Dear ACLU Maryland and DC,
I’m trying to organize a campaign (via bradleymanning.org) to support (and hopefully free) Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence specialist now imprisoned in Kuwait for leaking the “Collateral Murder” video and other material.
I would like to inquire, on a merely informational basis, if the ACLU might consider representing Mr. Manning should his case result in legal proceedings. As this is a whistleblower case with wide implications for the Espionage Act, free speech and the various US-led wars, the “affects a large number of people” criterion of the Union’s selection of who to represent seems to be met.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Best regards,
Mike Gogulski
Bratislava, Slovakia
The New York branch only takes requests via telephone, fax or snail mail. Would someone here be so kind as to contact them?
Mike,
As a follow-up to my earlier post, you may also want to get in touch with famed whistleblower and blogger Sibel Edmonds. You can do that by utilizing the following weblink: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/contact/. Not only is Ms. Edmonds very familiar with the perils of being a federal whistleblower (her story is as fascinating as it is harrowing), but from what I understand she has also put together a kind of whistleblowers’ coalition. Considering the seriousness of Mr. Manning’s plight, we can use all the help we can get.
Best regards,
Chris H.
LBC/CA
P.S. I’ll see what I can do about phoning ACLU-NY tomorrow.
Chris,
Good of you. I wound up reading some Edmonds/Ellsberg material earlier tonight, and send a message to the whistleblowers’ organization she founded several years back. They should be interested, and hopefully I’ll get a reply. Meanwhile, their website hasn’t been updated since 2007, so it’s not really clear what’s going on there.
Thanks for trying to phone. It’d be good to establish some kind of contact point within the ACLU.
You should also contact the Center for Constitutional Rights or the National Lawyers Guild.
Could you contact them please, and report here what you learned?
Hasn’t Wikileaks already mobilized some attorney to help Bradley? I believe the Pentagon refused them access to him.