Supporters rally outside Ft. Meade, April 10, 2013, calling for an end to the secrecy surrounding Bradley’s trial.

The LA Times editorial board argues that the Bradley Manning trial “smacks of overkill”, and it is time for the government to make a deal. With this week’s ruling against the prosecution, Judge Lind has stated it will be up to the government to prove that Bradley Manning had reason to believe the released documents would harm national security:

In arguing that Manning aided the enemy, the government’s case apparently will rest on the assertion that some WikiLeaks material made its way to a digital device found in the possession of Osama bin Laden. This is an ominously broad interpretation. By the government’s logic, the New York Times could be accused of aiding the enemy if Bin Laden possessed a copy of the newspaper that included the WikiLeaks material it published. (Read more…)

Bradley Manning has done more for peace than Obama, states Ron Paul:

While President Obama was starting and expanding unconstitutional wars overseas, Bradley Manning, whose actions have caused exactly zero deaths, was shining light on the truth behind these wars,” the former Republican presidential contender told U.S. News. “It’s clear which individual has done more to promote peace. (Read more…)

In the pre-trial hearing last week, the military reprimanded journalists leaking an audio recording of Bradley Manning’s statement. New rules have been put in place to restrict media access to the trial. The New York Times reports:

Military authorities, meanwhile, said that while court was in session they would ban cellphones and air cards and turn off the wireless Internet in a media center where reporters and activist bloggers watch a closed-circuit feed from the courtroom. The steps were a response to the release on the Internet by the Freedom of the Press Foundation of a bootleg recording of Private Manning’s statement in February.Colonel Lind emphasized that recordings were not allowed at any court-martial proceeding. (Read more…)

Read the Bradley Manning Support Network’s report here, and please sign the petition to increase media access to the upcoming trial!

Solidarity vigil for Bradley on Wednesday, April 10th, 7:30 am to 9:00 am in front of the Fort Meade Main Gate at Reece Road and US 175 (map). Bradley Manning will be back in court next week for a pre-trial hearing that will address classification issues related to evidence that will be introduced during the trial. A vigil will be held in the early morning of April 10th, and we encourage supporters to carry signs advocating for better media access to the trial. (Read more…)

Issue 1178 (Billie Joe cover), page 48. March 14, 2013

Rolling Stone magazine publishes full feature on Bradley Manning. As we’ve written previously, Rolling Stone posted an excerpt and subsequent online coverage of their feature on Bradley Manning. The piece, which covers Manning’s full detention but focuses on his Quantico treatment and hearing, is now online in full.

Manning’s pretrial detention hearing last December went on for nearly three weeks. On January 8th, 2013, Col. Denise Lind, the military judge who is hearing Manning’s case at Fort Meade, ruled that a portion of his treatment at Quantico was “excessive” and did amount to illegal pretrial punishment. Lind gave Manning less than four months off his eventual sentence, but she did not throw out the case as his lawyers had requested. This ruling, though offering a small victory for the defense, served to uphold the government’s central argument that whatever Manning may have endured at Quantico was justified in service to the far more important goal of keeping him alive so he could stand trial.

Norman Solomon documents “An Outpouring of Love and Support for Bradley Manning to Receive the Nobel Peace Prize.” In the Huffington Post, former third-party presidential candidate Norman Solomon explains why so many support Manning:

As a U.S. Army private — seeing massive evidence of official deception, human rights abuses and flagrant killing of civilians — Bradley Manning did not just follow orders. Instead, he became a whistleblower, supplying vast troves of documents to WikiLeaks, exposing duplicity that had enormous impacts from Iraq and Afghanistan to Egypt and Tunisia.

He then quotes dozens of the more than 35,000 who’ve signed a RootsAction petition to award Bradley Manning with the Nobel Peace Prize, for which he’s been nominated for a third straight year.

P.J. Crowley condemns the “aiding the enemy” charge against Bradley Manning. Crowley, the former State Department spokesman who lost his job after criticizing Manning’s treatment in Quantico, doesn’t understand the argument that thousands of supporters around the world see, that Bradley Manning is a whistleblower who doesn’t deserve jail time. But he does see that the military is a “bully” in its aggressive persecution of Manning.

Proceeding to trial, at present planned to start on 3 June, will further erode the credibility of the US military justice system, already damaged by the continued existence of Guantánamo (and now confronted with detainee hunger strikes as well). As I wrote two years ago in the Guardian, after leaving the department of state, “actions can be legal and still not smart“.

Read the full piece here.

WikiLeaks announces press conference, Monday April 8, at 9 AM at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. The conference, which WikiLeaks announced in a tweet, will deal with “Special Project K” – we don’t know yet what that entails, but check back here for a report from the press conference.

Priti Gulati Cox condemns the Obama administration for jailing the messenger in its persecution of Bradley Manning. In an op-ed for Al Jazeera, Cox criticizes the military’s “aiding the enemy” charge against Manning:

I interpret the word “enemy” in his “aiding the enemy” charge to mean “truth”. If you ask the hundreds of thousands of surviving Iraqis and Afghanis facing a volatile and uncertain future, they are likely to look you in the eye and tell you that Bradley did aid the truth, by revealing it to the world. A banner at a recent rally held in support of Manning in Afghanistan read:

“BRADLEY MANNING, YOU ARE A HERO OF SUFFERING AFGHANS.”

You see, truth has become a dirty word in the mainstream lexicon. Truth is the embarrassing enemy here. So, maybe it is no wonder that the government is being so secretive about one of the most, if not the most important criminal case in American military history, and is afraid of having anything said in that courtroom be made public.

Read the full piece here.

DOJ confirms that its investigation of WikiLeaks is still “ongoing.” Responding to a FOIA request to journalist Alexa O’Brien, a DOJ spokesman could not provide documents on the agency’s investigation of WikiLeaks because it remains active.

O’Brien’s story continues:

Many see an Obama administration’s recent strategy document re-framing WikiLeaks by associating the media organization with cyber-crime and intellectual property theft for the publication of “computer files provided by corporate insiders indicating allegedly illegal or unethical behavior at a Swiss bank, a Netherlands-based commodities company, and an international pharmaceutical trade association” as an attempt to bypass constitutional challenges to prosecuting publishers.

Read the rest of the article here.

Bradley Manning demonstrating his solitary confinement conditions. Courtroom sketch by Clark Stoeckley, Bradley Manning Support Network.

New York Times criticizes the “theater if state secrecy” surrounding Bradley Manning’s trial. Though it took months of public pressure and its own public editor’s admonishing to get its reporters to cover the legal proceedings, the New York Times has joined calls for transparency in Bradley’s court-martial. Already on the Center for Constitutional Rights’ legal petition for public and press access, the Times yesterday covered the “veil of secrecy in what is supposed to be a public proceeding.”

Reporter David Carr writes about the

pattern of what reporters and lawyers say is reflexive and sometime capricious withholding of information on the government’s part. In Private Manning’s case, the issue before the court — whether leaking classified documents can be cast as aiding the enemy — has profound civic implications. People can disagree about what should happen to government employees who do the leaking, but it makes sense that such a fundamental question be debated with as much sunlight as possible.

Carr explains the importance of press access:

This is not an effort to complain about tough working conditions for reporters. The principle behind an open trial is a contract with the public, and news outlets act as proxies. And the suggestion that leaking documents is tantamount to aiding and abetting the enemy would be a very troubling precedent for news media organizations.

He continues, quoting the CCR’s Michael Ratner and the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington, who says that the “military commissions at Guantánamo have, under pressure, become far more open and accommodating to coverage than the Manning proceedings.” (Read more…)

FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola criticized Carr’s article for failing to mention how long it took the Times to send a reporter to Fort Meade, noting that if they had done so from the case’s inception, the public would know much more about this long-standing wall of secrecy.

Government Accountability Project’s Jesselyn Radack also criticizes how late the Times is to report on the secrecy at Fort Meade, but she applauds Carr for understanding and conveying the importance of public and press access to documents in Manning’s case.

Citizen Radio spends full hour on Bradley Manning and solitary confinement. Field reporter Marc Kilstein uses Manning’s own words, reports from his testimony on his treatment in Quantico, and other stories and information about solitary confinement in a compelling exploration of how that treatment affects prisoners psychologically.

Listen to the segment here.

Local newspaper op-ed: ‘Whistle blowers guard democracy.’ In an opinion piece for the AuburnPub.com, Roland Micklem writes about how Bradley Manning’s exposure of war crimes is a vital check on covert government operations, the only real way to hold powerful officials accountable.

At [Manning’s] pre-trial hearing, he stated that he was obeying the dictates of his conscience; that the American public should be made aware of the abuses arising from the implementation of our foreign policy, and of the disconnect between our democratic and humanitarian ideals and our treatment of the innocent people who happened to be in the way of our war of aggression.

These local op-ed pieces are emerging more and more frequently, a sign that support for Manning is growing across the U.S. (Read more…)

Kevin Gosztola argues in The Nation that Bradley Manning is a classic whistleblower. In an article entitled, Bradley Manning Tried to Warn Us About the Crisis In Iraq. Will We Listen to Him Now?, Gosztola writes that while the establishment media largely focused on Manning’s personal issues, they should have covered what he actually revealed, and why it’s so significant.

He concludes:

Manning is not a leaker. He is a whistleblower who disobeyed military codes and US law governing the handling of classified information. He has pled guilty and accepted responsibility for his acts of civil disobedience. But the Obama administration has an interest in casting him as a leaker, having prosecuted a record number of other “leakers” and also fought to keep an increasing amount of information it claims is sensitive to “national security” secret. It has failed to address the problem of over-classification while at the same time clamping down on the free flow of information between government employees and members of the press.

If the Manning case is seen as part of a larger trend toward reestablishing—and even expanding—the ability to protect state secrecy, it becomes clear that his prosecution is not simply about a soldier acting on decisions he did not have the authority to make. It is about whether Americans are going to allow the government to persecute an individual because he or she had the courage and audacity to reveal corruption that government officials wished to keep hidden out of sight. Manning wished to warn Americans of the unseen consequences of a dangerous foreign policy. Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, it is clear that he was right.

As we wrote yesterday, almost none of those reflecting on the tenth anniversary of Iraq have mentioned that it was a cable released by Manning and published by WikiLeaks that helped speed up the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Finally, Democracy Now’s full show today explores the Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation, using WikiLeaks-released Iraq war logs, which Manning released. The investigation found new links between U.S. General David Petraeus and secret Iraqi torture centers.

Bradley Manning supporters held vigil this week, March 19, 2013, outside of Creech Air Base in Nevada. Activists included members of CODEPINK and Veterans for Peace. Creech is also home for a large Air Force drone program, which is an ongoing focus for peace and justice organizers.

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg

Bradley Manning’s statement on giving documents to WikiLeaks has confirmed what we’ve been saying for nearly three years: Bradley is a whistleblower who released documents exposing atrocities and abuses as an act of conscience. But beyond merely validating supporters’ efforts, the statement is garnering Bradley new supporters as more and more understand that he did the right thing.

FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola has spoken to three high-profile whistleblowers who have already supported Bradley, but who have since his statement come out in support even more clearly and at greater length: Daniel Ellsberg, Jesselyn Radack, and Thomas Drake hail Bradley Manning as a whistleblower who deserves thanks, not aggressive persecution.

Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, exposing the U.S.’s duplicity in Vietnam, said Bradley is the “one person, who investigated [the crimes he witnessed], and acted on what he saw.”

He compared his own case with Bradley’s and explained their duty not to military brass but to the people they served:

It was up to us to do it and the reason that so many would withdraw from it were the very obvious risks. In his case, not in his statement but in his earlier three years ago statements, he said I am ready to go to prison or even being executed for putting these out and that I recognize as the same mood I was in in 1969 and 1971. In his case, he came to that realization at 22. I was twice his age, forty, when I really realized that and I am giving credit for being more experienced. Well, I give him credit for coming to the same right judgment at such an early age. But, in both cases, it took a war to make us see the light and to see that our duty was not primarily to our boss or even to the president but rather to the Constitution and to the country.

Jesselyn Radack, a former Department of Justice ethics adviser who blew the whistle on the FBI’s handling of John Walker Lind, and who now represents fellow truth-tellers for the Government Accountability Project, calls Bradley a classic whistleblower:

Manning was doing a deliberative thought process about how to get this information into the public, which I think is a goal of a lot of whistleblowers. They want to remain anonymous and they want to get the information out there to the public. In that sense, he very much fits the profile of a classic whistleblower.

Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping, and who was also prosecuted by the Obama Administration under the Espionage Act, says Bradley’s statement should dispel doubts about his motives:

If there was any remaining doubt regarding his motives or intentions, they were fully dispelled in his statement. I mean, it’s crystal clear where he stood in regards to why he did what he did blowing the whistle.

In addition to comparing Bradley’s case with his own, Drake makes a point of calling Bradley’s releases “disclosures” instead of leaks:

Leaks are political. He’s revealing the dark side of our foreign policy and all the corruption and crap that went on under the cover of war and how far we went afield.

Finally, he praises Bradley’s motives:

“What’s so pristine about Manning’s actions,” Drake concludes, “is that he said, ‘You know what, the only way we’re going to get clarity on this, the only way we’re going to have any real discussion is you got to get the evidence out there. The evidence of what we’ve been doing,’—and so he did.”

Issue 1178 (Billie Joe cover), page 48. March 14, 2013

The current issue of Rolling Stone magazine (March 14, 2013) features the ten-page article, “The Trials of Bradley Manning,” by Janet Reitman. Though not mentioned on the front cover (which Billie Joe Armstrong fills), it’s the longest piece in the issue, and it details Manning’s Army tenure, his decision to release documents, and most prominently, the horrors he suffered at the Quantico Marine brig and the subsequent hearing seeking accountability for that torture.

While the full piece is currently only available in print, you can read an excerpt here, introducing readers to Manning’s months of pretrial abuse:

Thus began Manning’s journey through the exceedingly murky realm of military pretrial detention, a nearly three-year ordeal punctuated by months of legalized torture, not unlike what enemy detainees­ endured at Guantánamo Bay. Though not the standard treatment for U.S. soldiers, even those accused of war crimes, Obama administration officials deemed it “appropriate” for Manning, who, in many regards, “ceased to be a ‘soldier’ from the moment he crossed the line and revealed the secrets of the war,” observes Kristine Huskey, the director of the Anti-Torture Program at Physicians for Human Rights. “In doing that, he became, in effect, the ‘enemy.’ And once you’re the enemy, you can be subject to treatment that is not for people on our side.”

Rolling Stone subscribers can access the entire piece online.

Furthermore, Reitman, who’s previously covered Jeremy Hammond, the young activist on trial for hacking the emails of private intelligence firm Stratfor that WikiLeaks published, is continuing to write about Manning online.

In Bradley Manning Explains His Motives, she details Manning’s statement taking responsibility for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, setting the narrative about him straight along the way:

Manning has often been cast as a naïve young man who was manipulated by Assange, Berg or others into giving them the information. In accepting his guilt, he made it clear that no one pressured him into doing it. “The decision to send was my own,” he said. “And I take full responsibility.”

In another article, Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?, Reitman explores Manning’s revelation that he’d attempted to discuss the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs with the Washington Post and the New York Times before turning to WikiLeaks:

If nothing else, this chapter of the Manning case should spark some hard questions about the value of the press as a check on governmental power, and the extent to which the mainstream press has ceded ground to organizations like Wikileaks.

Also, Bradley Manning is featured first in Rolling Stone’s new installment, The New Political Prisoners: Leakers, Hackers and Activists.

You can read Michael Hasting’s Rolling Stone interview with Julian Assange here.

Bradley Manning supporters highlight the government’s attack on truth-telling. Photo credit: Mary F. Calvert/ZUMAPRESS.com

Until recently, with Bradley Manning’s historic statement in court taking responsibility for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, mainstream media outlets had largely ignored or paid only passing attention to the biggest leak case in U.S. history. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that when they do report on it, in addition to typically taking government arguments as fact, they frequently get basic information about Manning and his legal proceedings wrong.

These pernicious mistakes can malign Manning’s character and obscure the public’s understanding of his case. It’s left to lesser-known but far more attentive writers and legal experts who’ve been following this case more closely (some since its inception) to correct their mistakes to keep the record straight.

For instance, the Wall Street Journal recently published L. Gordon Crovitz’s error-filled piece claiming that Bradley “doesn’t explain what he was blowing the whistle on” in his plea statement, and that “The documents didn’t disclose government wrongdoing.” This leads Crovitz to claim, “Building a case that Pfc. Manning knowingly gave intelligence to the enemy seems open and shut.”

Trevor Timm, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, corrects Crovitz’s many mistakes here, covering the many wrongdoings WikiLeaks’ releases exposed, the government’s unprecedentedly broad interpretation of “aiding the enemy,” and the fact that the war logs were significantly and responsibly redacted upon their initial publishing.

Jesselyn Radack, of the Government Accountability Project, focuses on Crovitz’s legal errors here, including his misunderstanding of the Espionage Act, basic whistleblower law, and why WikiLeaks should be protected as a news organization.

The Wall Street Journal’s hit piece comes in the wake of another mainstream press article rife with factual inaccuracies – former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s recent op-ed. We corrected Keller’s most harmfully false claim: he suggested that that Bradley’s motives in his statement might have been “shaped” by supporters, when in fact they tracked quite well with his chat logs from three years prior.

The Nation’s Greg Mitchell similarly showed why Keller’s motive claim was wrong, as does FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola along with several other corrections.

Professor Falguni Sheth explains how Keller’s piece was a character assassination of Bradley Manning, and the WSWS’s Naomi Spencer documents Keller’s errors and calls his piece a smear.

Finally, Jesselyn Radack contrasts Keller’s destructive piece with another op-ed in the New York Times, in which Floyd Abrams and Yochai Brenkler warn of the dangerous impact Bradley Manning’s case could have:

If successful, the prosecution will establish a chilling precedent: national security leaks may subject the leakers to a capital prosecution or at least life imprisonment. Anyone who holds freedom of the press dear should shudder at the threat that the prosecution’s theory presents to journalists, their sources and the public that relies on them.