Updates: 4/30/11-5/3/11

Democracy Now! features legal expert Glenn Greenwald reporting and commenting on Bradley Manning’s move from Quanico, VA to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he has been cleared as a medium security prisoner and will no longer be held in solitary confinement. Greenwald continues to emphasize that Manning’s treatment has been tantamount to torture and his right to a fail trial has been violated.

Democracy Now! also has an interview with the San Francisco activists who disrupted Obama’s speech with a protest song about Bradley. Due to the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the disruption, in particular the posting of a video on their website, the White House is threatening to ban their reporters from future access to presidential events. Multiple press outlets and activists have condemned this intimidation, which so far have resulted in the San Francisco Chronicle’s White House Correspondent being removed from the official press pool.

The Guardian’s editor, Chris Elliot, has a feature on the news coverage of The Guantanamo Files and the mechanics and ethics of reporting on classified information. He debunks the myths that these and other Wikileaks files put military personnel and others at risk; as he states, “To date, there has been no evidence of a single death connected to the publication of any of the WikiLeaks files since publication began last year.”

Firedoglake wonders outloud what will happen to Bradley now that Osama Bin Laden has been captured. There was information about the courier that lead to Osama Bin Laden’s death in the Gitmo Files, and this obviously didn’t hinder or aid him in eluding capture. Does this mean that the charges of “aiding the enemy” could potentially be dropped?

Truthdig columnist Robert Scheer chastises major newspapers for their attempts to distance themselves from Bradley Manning’s situation, when as he points out, they understand the importance of reporting on the information contained in the Wikileaks documents. So much so, in fact, that half of this year’s issues of the New York Times contain stories referencing Wikileaks documents.

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