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…)