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Military Judge Acquits Bradley Manning of Aiding the Enemy
From Survival and Beyond
Via Activist Post
Nathan Fuller at Bradleymanning.org has given us gracious permission to reprint his daily firsthand reports, which you can find below highlighted by date. Summaries, commentary, and videos provide a comprehensive chronicle of events from start to finish.
Pfc. Bradley Manning has been acquitted of the most serious charge against him: aiding the enemy. After over 1,000 days in confinement, some of which was tantamount to torture, Manning will not go down in history as the arch-villain that the government tried to portray him as.
However, Manning was found guilty on 19 of the lesser computer-related charges associated with the mechanics behind the leak itself. He also previously pled guilty to other charges, which on their own could be 10-20 years in prison. Now, with the new ruling, Manning is looking at a maximum 135-year sentence.
As the crackdown continues on journalists and whistleblowers alike, this should be counted as no small victory that at the least this heroic whistleblower was not defined as an enemy of the state. However, the ACLU and Amnesty International still rightly point out that the government has its priorities upside down by ultimately sentencing him under The Espionage Act, thus treating him and others as de facto enemies of the state. Meanwhile, truly egregious acts such as torture and other crimes against humanity are reluctantly, if at all, even investigated.
Manning’s full sentence could be issued tomorrow.
Bradley’s family issued a statement, which you can read below:
Via The Guardian:
While we are obviously disappointed in today’s verdicts, we are happy that Judge Lind agreed with us that Brad never intended to help America’s enemies in any way. Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform.
We want to express our deep thanks to David Coombs, who has dedicated three years of his life to serving as lead counsel in Brad’s case. We also want to thank Brad’s Army defense team, Major Thomas Hurley and Captain Joshua Tooman, for their tireless efforts on Brad’s behalf, and Brad’s first defense counsel, Captain Paul Bouchard, who was so helpful to all of us in those early confusing days and first suggested David Coombs as Brad’s counsel. Most of all, we would like to thank the thousands of people who rallied to Brad’s cause, providing financial and emotional support throughout this long and difficult time, especially Jeff Paterson and Courage to Resist and the Bradley Manning Support Network. Their support has allowed a young Army private to defend himself against the full might of not only the US Army but also the US Government.
PREVIOUS UPDATE:
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Defense closes argument, Bradley was humanist whistle-blower: trial report, day 22
By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. July 26, 2013
Defense lawyer David Coombs made his closing argument in Pfc. Bradley Manning’s court martial, portraying the Army private as a humanist who valued all human life, and a whistle-blower who felt the American public needed to see what he saw in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Coombs played the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, asking military judge Col. Denise Lind to watch it in the eyes of a young, naïve, idealistic soldier who couldn’t disregard human life, no matter whose it was. He narrated, “Nine lives were extinguished…did they need to die?”
Reviewing what he called the government’s “child’s logic,” Coombs pointed out several basic inconsistencies in its theories, such as the contention that Manning sought both notoriety and anonymity. He showed how prosecutors cherry-picked Manning’s comments, taking them out of vital context. The government brought up his chat IM with Adrian Lamo, asking,
If you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight-plus months, what would you do?
But the full quote is,
Hypothetical question: If you had free reign over classified networks over a long period of time, if you saw incredible things, awful things, things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C., what would you do?
By excluding Manning’s reference to “incredible things, awful things,” the government tried to paint him as reckless and eager to work for WikiLeaks no matter what the documents exposed. But the whole quote reveals Manning the whistle-blower, the humanist who witnessed horrifying things that he knew were being kept secret from his fellow Americans.
The government’s central claim is that Manning “systematically harvested” information for WikiLeaks, acting recklessly and indiscriminately, attempting to obtain and transmit as much information as possible. Coombs rejected that theory and presented another way of looking at it: Manning was actually highly selective, choosing documents he knew would inform the American people without harming sources or fellow soldiers. He could have, for example, downloaded Human Intelligence (HUMINT) reports from the Iraq and Afghanistan databases. Those identified our relied-upon sources, and if Manning had wanted to aid the enemy and harm the United States, he’d have sent those.
Instead, he downloaded Significant Activity (SIGACT) reports, historical accounts of past events used to memorialize key incidents and plot out patterns. These give Americans a better understanding of the war in Iraq, provide new details on previously uncounted civilian casualties, and don’t alert the enemy to any information they wouldn’t otherwise have. Prosecutors talked about how the enemy could look at incident reports to see how effective certain weaponry was, or could use Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs to learn how prisoners were captured – but Coombs pointed out that the enemy already knows this information. It isn’t revelatory to anyone in al Qaeda, or al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; it’s revelatory to the American public, from whom it’s been needlessly kept.
image source
Coombs showed how the government’s evidence went to a “negligence” argument – that Manning “should have known” that the enemy uses the Internet and therefore would find any information that WikiLeaks posted. Prosecutors used an Army report that says soldiers should “presume” the enemy visits WikiLeaks, and they argue that Manning was trained to assume the enemy would want classified information. But they also conceded that “should have known” is far too low a standard, and only “actual knowledge” is enough to convict him of aiding the enemy.
Coombs reviewed what he established with evidence and both government and defense witnesses, including the fact that Wget was not specifically banned and didn’t provide Manning with any greater access to documents, and that the Collateral Murder video was in David Finkel’s possession and therefore wasn’t closely held by the government.
Coombs closed,
Is PFC Manning somebody who is a traitor, who has no loyalty to this country, or the flag, and wanted to systematically harvest and download information as much information as possible for his true employer, WikiLeaks?
Is that what the evidence shows or is he a young, naive, good-intentioned soldier who had human life, in his humanist beliefs, center to his decision, whose sole focus was to maybe, I just can make a difference, maybe make a change? Which side of the version is the truth?
Read More at: Activist Post
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Source: http://www.survivalandbeyond.net/military-judge-acquits-bradley-manning-of-aiding-the-enemy/
