Bradley Manning sentencing concludes, closing arguments on Monday: trial report, day 35
Vigil at Fort Meade 12 Aug 13
By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. August 16, 2013.
Both the defense and prosecution rested their sentencing cases, bringing Bradley Manning’s court martial another step closer to its conclusion. The government presented one stipulation of expected testimony, of Special Agent David Shaver, for its entire rebuttal case. The parties will make closing sentencing arguments Monday, beginning at 1:00pm ET, after which point military judge Col. Denise Lind will deliberate.
The stipulation for David Shaver, forensic expert, comprised his summary of emails and encrypted chats between Bradley Manning and Daniel Clark, and one email from Manning to Tyler Watkins from November 28, 2009, with the subject line, ‘Happy Thanksgiving belated.’ Shaver compiled 27 messages, which span from August 23, 2009, to May 2010.
The judge then issued her special findings, but not aloud. She gave ten copies to the public, and ten to the press. We’ve published a PDF of the findings here.
In the findings, Judge Lind explicated her reasoning for each of Manning’s convictions, but not for her decisions to find him not guilty of Aiding the Enemy, or to acquit him of Espionage for the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, or to find him not guilty entirely of stealing and transmitting the Farah airstrike video.
Judge Lind will announce when she has reached a sentence, and then give the press and public some notice before she reads that sentence into the record. She will likely sentence Bradley Manning on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.
I can’t read all of those charges. How many times does she have to say the same thing????? The government doesn’t like to be embarrassed. We get it!
If people in the government and military would “just do the right thing”, they wouldn’t have to be embarrassed! But, the government got caught, and the “powers that be” are embarrassed.
No one should go to prison over this, except the people, who “did the wrong things.”
Totally agree one of the worse things to do is humiliate an Empire, The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they don’t want anything. At least they vote that way on election day. Andres Pope
Wasn’t there a point in the pretrial when judge Lind indicated she does not want the trial of Bradley Manning to turn into a debate about foreign policy? I can’t find a reference to it other then on an aljazeera blog. It seems like ignoring some of the possibly illegal U.S. gov. actions indicates Lind’s approval of selective prosecution, it’s ok for the government to look the other way when favoured people violate the law but aggressively prosecute others. Selective prosecution makes it easy for the gov to prosecute a whistle-blower while ignoring the crimes brought to light by the whistle-blower. A pretty clear example of selective prosecution is the Thomas Drake case, as far as I know very little was done to investigate the likely fraudulent billion dollar SAIC contract Drake exposed to the public. It would have been nice to see the Lawrence Franklin espionage case brought up at trial, leaking classified documents on Iran to the Israel lobby as Franklin did seems like pretty blatant espionage yet he got 10 months house arrest. Oh well, maybe it’s best to view it all as a farce designed for our entertainment.