MANNING SENTENCED TO 35 YRS W/PAROLE ELIG AFTER 8 YRS

N.Y. TIMES

A military judge sentenced Pfc. Bradley Manning on Wednesday to 35 years in prison for providing more than 700,000 government files to WikiLeaks, a gigantic leak that lifted the veil on American military and diplomatic activities around the world.

The sentence is the longest ever handed down in a case involving a leak of United States government information for the purpose of having the information reported to the public. Private Manning, 25, will be eligible for parole in about seven years, his lawyer said.
The sentencing phase of Manning's trial revealed that contrary to the claims of pundits and politicians, Manning had no blood on his hands -- the Departments of Defense and State were unable to tie his releases to the deaths of any U.S. informants.....

[His attorney]told a group of supporters gathered outside Manning's courtroom that the conditions at Fort Leavenworth "did not look anything like Quantico," where Manning spent months in solitary confinement and was forced at times to strip down naked at night.
UN special rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez found after a 14-month investigation that Manning's treatment at Quantico was cruel, inhuman, and degrading. Lind said the conditions had been "excessive" in relation to the government's legitimate interest in holding Manning. She granted the soldier an additional 112 days credit for enduring those conditions, which will also be applied to shorten his sentence.
....Manning will also be within driving distance of his sister Susan, who testified during the trial about their life growing up with two alcoholic parents.
But Manning also faces a spartan, monotonous life in prison

His detractors, noting that Manning could not possibly have had time to read through the 700,000 documents he leaked, claim that he recklessly put his fellow soldiers and U.S. informants at risk.
His leaks included a video of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed civilians including two Reuters journalists, 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables, and 500,000 battlefield action reports from Iraq and Afghanistan


Manning Apologizes at WikiLeaks Trial 
  

 Manning,  25 years old, apologized to the U.S. at his court-martial . “I’m sorry that my actions hurt people. I’m sorry that it hurt the United States,” Manning said, adding that, at the time of the leaks, he did not believe that the information would cause harm. Earlier , an Army psychologist testified that Manning’s struggle with gender identity in a hostile workplace caused him to feel a great amount of pressure. “You put him in that kind of hypermasculine environment, if you will, with little support and few coping skills, the pressure would have been difficult to say the least,”

Read it at The Guardian
.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Our first look at WikiLeaker Pfc. Bradley Manning in a wig and makeup comes through a photograph attached to an email sent to Manning's therapist, Capt. Michael Worsely. The photo was released by the U.S. military the day that Manning apologized for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks at his court-martial. Manning, who is transgender, had discussed his gender identity with his therapist and said that he joined the military in the hope that a career there might "get rid of it." 

Read it at Gawker

August 15, 2013 5:55 PM

DAY OF RECKONING. MANNING GUILTY, BUT NOT OF AIDING THE ENEMY

Bradley Manning, the army private who gave classified documents to WikiLeaks, has been acquitted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge against him, but convicted of multiple violations of the Espionage Act and stealing government property. The prosecution had argued that Manning should have known the leaked documents would make their way to al Qaeda, while Manning’s defense argued that he was a well-intentioned but naive whistleblower. He faces up to 136 years in prison,

While advocates of open government celebrated his acquittal on the most serious charge, the case still appears destined to stand as a fierce warning to any government employee who is tempted to make public vast numbers of secret documents. Private Manning’s actions lifted a veil on American military and diplomatic activities around the world, and engendered a broad debate over what information should become public, how the government treats leakers, and what happens to those who see themselves as whistle-blowers.
Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, adding, “Whistle-blowers always know they are taking risks, and the more they reveal the bigger the threat is against them.”

Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who testified in Private Manning’s defense, praised the judge for making an “extremely important decision” that he portrayed as denying “the prosecution’s effort to launch the most dangerous assault on investigative journalism and the free press in the area of national security that we have seen in decades.”

But, he said, the decades of imprisonment that Private Manning could face “is still too high a price for any democracy to demand of its whistle-blowers.”

 

 

Give Manning a plea deal in classified leaks case

Mark Wilson/GETTY IMAGES - U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning (C) arrives for a hearing on Nov. 28, 2012 in Fort Meade, Maryland.

EUGENE ROBINSON WASHINGTON POST

The treatment of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning has been excessively harsh, as far as I can tell. If he is found guilty of leaking more than 700,000 classified documents, he deserves some punishment — probably — but should not be at risk of spending the rest of his life behind bars. Apparently.
I have to throw in all those qualifiers because Manning’s prosecution has been largely a secret process. Portions of his court-martial, which opened Monday at Fort Meade, will be secret as well — the important parts, presumably. The public may never know whether justice is properly done unless someone leaks the details of this trial about leaks.

But we do know that Manning has offered to plead guiltyto a host of charges that could bring up to 20 years in prison. Rather than agree to what strikes me as more than adequate punishment, prosecutors insist on trying to convict him under the 1917 Espionage Act as, essentially, an enemy of the state. Which I don’t believe he is.


Julian Assange

I say this even though Manning is allegedly responsible for the biggest unauthorized release of classified documents in the nation’s history. The material was disseminated by the Web site WikiLeaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, has taken asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Assange fears that if he allows himself to be extradited to Sweden to face pending rape charges, U.S. authorities will eventually take him into custody — and give him the same treatment they’re giving Manning.
Since his arrest in May 2010, Manning has been held in isolation for months at a time and given such rough handling that the judge presiding over his trial, Army Col. Denise Lind, has granted him 112 days’ credit toward his eventual sentence if convicted.

I have struggled to sort out my feelings about this case. The only remotely comparable situation that comes to mind is that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg, too, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act; a federal judge dismissed the charges after learning of heavy-handed and illegal investigative tactics by the Nixon administration. Ellsberg is remembered as a whistleblower, not a criminal. For revealing what the government really thought about the Vietnam War — as opposed to the lies it was telling the American people — he should be considered a hero.



And Ellsberg [above] has been arguing that Manning should be seen in the same light. Manning said in pretrial proceedings that he wanted to “spark a domestic debate over the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” Such a debate was already raging, but some of the material Manning allegedly leaked clearly told us things we had a right to know.
There was a video showing a helicopter raid in Baghdad in which bystanders, including journalists, were killed. There was evidence of unreported civilian deaths in Afghanistan. There were files indicating a lack of documentation for detainees sent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
But there was also a blizzard of diplomatic cables, some of which ended up being published without redaction of sensitive information such as the names of sources.


Before the Army opened the court martial of Bradley Manning, accused of giving 700,000 classified government and military files to the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, protesters at Fort Meade in Maryland called for his release.

One difference between Ellsberg and Manning, I suppose, is that Ellsberg’s leak was more focused; the secret Pentagon study he slipped to The Post, the New York Times and other papers amounted to 7,000 pages, as opposed to Manning’s alleged 700,000.
A more meaningful difference, perhaps, is that Ellsberg knew the material he was leaking showed the fundamental bankruptcy of U.S. policy in Vietnam, proving that officials did not believe their own rhetoric about “winning” the war. I doubt Manning understood a fraction of what he allegedly leaked.
Any such large, unsifted release of U.S. diplomatic cables is bound to include disclosures that put lives in danger. WikiLeaks and the news organizations that published some of the information tried to make appropriate redactions. Manning allegedly just threw it all out there, heedless of the consequences.
That kind of callous disregard, for life as well as the law, deserves punishment. But I believe “heedless” is the right word; it’s not at all clear that he wanted to give aid and comfort to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Unless the government really believes he was a spy working for the enemy — which I doubt — he shouldn’t be prosecuted as one.

The government should make a plea deal. Twenty years is enough penalty to deter other potential leakers — and enough time to begin crafting history’s verdict on Pfc. Bradley Manning.