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.