Reuters via Yahoo! News

As a military judge considered sentencing for convicted U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, prosecutors argued that his leaks of classified information to the WikiLeaks website changed the way the military allowed intelligence analysts to access data.

Manning, 25, on Tuesday escaped a life sentence with no parole at his court-martial when Judge Colonel Denise Lind acquitted him of aiding the enemy, the most serious of 21 criminal counts against him. But he still faces the possibility of 136 years in prison on 19 other charges.

The slightly built Army private first class was working as a low-level intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2010 when he was arrested and charged in the biggest leak of classified information in U.S. history - a trove of 700,000 battlefield videos, diplomatic cables and other files.

Following Tuesday’s verdict, the court-martial at Fort Meade, Maryland, moved into the sentencing proceeding on Wednesday with arguments by military prosecutors and Manning’s lawyers.

A prosecutor, Major Ashden Fein, said Manning’s leaks “have impacted the entire system” for granting defense analysts access to classified information.

Manning’s attorneys were expected argue that the Army private was not trying to jeopardize U.S. national security. He did not testify during his trial or during the first day of his sentencing hearing.

The first prosecution witness, retired Brigadier General Robert Carr, said that allowing young analysts such as Manning to have access to classified information was “hugely important” to the U.S. military.

Bradley Manning, the Army private arrested in the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history, pleaded guilty Thursday to charges that could send him to prison for 20 years, saying he was trying to expose the American military’s “bloodlust” and disregard for human life in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military prosecutors said they plan to move forward with a court-martial on 12 remaining charges against him, including aiding the enemy, which carries a potential life sentence.

“I began to become depressed at the situation we found ourselves mired in year after year. In attempting counterinsurgency operations, we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists,” the 25-year-old former intelligence analyst in Baghdad told a military judge.

He added: “I wanted the public to know that not everyone living in Iraq were targets to be neutralized.”

It was the first time Manning directly admitted leaking the material to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks and detailed the frustrations that led him to do it.

More: Army Judge Accepts Guilty Pleas in WikiLeaks Case

FORT MEADE, Md., Feb. 27 (UPI) — Defense attorneys at the WikiLeaks trial of U.S Army Pfc. Bradley Manning have asked a military judge to block emails found on Osama bin Laden’s hard drives.

The prosecution wants to use the emails found at the bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan as evidence that Manning “aided the enemy,” a charge that carries a potential life sentence, Courthouse News Service reported.

…Prosecutors said they want to call nine witnesses to testify to the chain of custody from bin Laden’s hard drive to an FBI agent to a Quantico, Va., laboratory for forensic analysis.

Those emails have not been made public, and the defense is expected to challenge their authenticity.

Defense attorney David Coombs said the government must prove that Manning knew that the files he reportedly leaked could potentially have fallen into the hands of an “enemy.”

So in Manning’s mind it OK to steal and leak sensitive documents to WikiLeaks but when it comes to the govt prosecution bringing out emails from OBL he’s all against it.

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai (Pashto: ملاله یوسفزۍ‎ Malālah Yūsafzay, born 12 July 1997) is a school student and education activist from the town of Mingora in the Swat District of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. She is known for her education and women’s rights activism in the Swat Valley, where the Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. In early 2009, at the age of 11/12, Yousafzai wrote a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC detailing her life under Taliban rule, their attempts to take control of the valley, and her views on promoting education for girls. The following summer, a New York Times documentary was filmed about her life as the Pakistani military intervened in the region, culminating in the Second Battle of Swat. Yousafzai began to rise in prominence, giving interviews in print and on television and taking a position as chairperson of the District Child Assembly Swat. She has since been nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Desmond Tutu and has won Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize. A number of prominent individuals, including the Canadian Minister of Citizenship, are supporting a petition to nominate Yousafzai for the Nobel Peace Prize.

On 9 October 2012, Yousafzai was shot in the head and neck in an assassination attempt by Taliban gunmen while returning home on a school bus. In the days immediately following the attack, she remained unconscious and in critical condition, but later her condition improved enough for her to be sent to a hospital in the United Kingdom for intensive rehabilitation. On 12 October, a group of 50 Islamic clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her, but the Taliban reiterated its intent to kill Yousafzai and her father, Ziauddin.

Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning

Bradley Edward Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed classified material to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. He was charged with a number of offenses, including communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source and aiding the enemy, a capital offense, though prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. He was arraigned in February 2012 at Fort Meade, Maryland, where he declined to enter a plea. The trial is expected to begin in February 2013.

Assigned to an army unit based near Baghdad, Manning had access to databases used by the United States government to transmit classified information. He was arrested after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, told the FBI that Manning had confided during online chats that he had downloaded material from these databases and passed it to WikiLeaks. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 United States diplomatic cables; and 500,000 army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs. It was the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public. Much of it was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.

Manning was held from July 2010 in the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, under Prevention of Injury status, which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused international concern. In April 2011, 295 academics – many of them prominent American legal scholars – signed a letter arguing that the detention conditions violated the United States Constitution. Later that month the Pentagon transferred him to Fort Leavenworth, allowing him to interact with other detainees

Counselor: Manning’s History Showed Self-Harm Risk

An Army private charged with sending U.S secrets to the website WikiLeaks had a history of suicidal thoughts and aloof behavior that outweighed a psychiatrist’s opinion that he was no risk to intentionally hurt himself, two former counselors testified Sunday.

Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Jordan and Marine Master Sgt. Craig Blenis testified on the sixth day of a pretrial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, near Baltimore. The hearing is to determine whether Manning’s nine months in pretrial confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., were so punishing that the judge should dismiss all charges. The 24-year-old intelligence analyst is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the secret-spilling website in 2009 and 2010.

The counselors, both of whom worked in the brig, sat on a board that recommended to the brig commander that Manning remain in maximum custody and on either injury-prevention or suicide-risk status — conditions that kept him confined to his cell 23 hours a day, sometimes with no clothing.

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Army Private Charged in WikiLeaks Security Breach Says He Felt Like Caged Animal

An Army private charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history testified Thursday that he felt like a doomed, caged animal after he was arrested in Baghdad for allegedly sending classified information to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks.

Pfc. Bradley Manning testified on the third day of a pretrial hearing at Fort Meade, outside Baltimore. His lawyers are seeking dismissal of all charges, contending his pretrial confinement in a Quantico, Va., Marine Corps brig was needlessly harsh.

Before he was sent to Quantico in July 2010, Manning spent some time in a cell in a segregation tent at Camp Arifjan, an Army installation in Kuwait.

“I remember thinking I’m going to die. I’m stuck inside this cage,” Manning said under questioning by defense attorney David Coombs. “I just thought I was going to die in that cage. And that’s how I saw it — an animal cage.”

The compact, 24-year-old intelligence analyst looked youthful in his dark blue dress uniform, close-cropped hair and rimless eyeglasses. He was animated, often swiveling in the witness chair and gesturing with his hands.

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Judge Gives Bradley Manning Permission to Plead Guilty for WikiLeaks Dumps

A military judge in Maryland has accepted the terms under which alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning has proposed to plead guilty.

The terms would allow Manning to plead guilty to 7 of the 22 charges he’s currently facing for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified government documents to the secret-spilling site in 2009 and 2010.

The 7 offenses together carry a total maximum prison term of 16 years in prison, presiding officer Col. Denise Lind said during a pretrial hearing at Fort Meade on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

Manning hasn’t formally submitted a plea yet; he was simply seeking approval from the court that the terms under which he contemplated entering a plea were acceptable.

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Accused WikiLeaker Manning Said He Was Punished Before Trial - Baltimore Sun

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is due back at Fort Meade this week, where lawyers for the alleged WikiLeaker plan to argue that he was punished at a military brig before his case had been heard — grounds, they say, to dismiss all charges against him.

By the time he arrived at the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Va., Manning was world famous. The former intelligence analyst, who lived in Maryland before enlisting in the Army, had been accused of giving hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

While being held at Quantico pending trial, his lawyers contend, Manning was singled out for punishment, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Constitution. He has been charged with violating the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy.

Manning, 24, is the only suspect arrested in the largest leak in U.S. history. He is accused of sending raw field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world and a video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad to be published by WikiLeaks. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.

To some, Manning is a traitor; to others, a hero. His alleged mistreatment at Quantico, where he was held from July 2010 to April 2011, drew concern from Amnesty International, the British government and the United Nations’ anti-torture watchdog, among others, and helped to make him an international cause celebre.

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economist.com

A LEGENDARY Ecuadorean leader, José María Velasco, once declared “give me a balcony and I will become president”. He did, five times, only to be overthrown by the army on four occasions. Rafael Correa, who resembles Mr Velasco in his histrionic populism, clearly hopes that his decision on August 16th to grant Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, asylum at Ecuador’s embassy in London—and the use of its balcony to address his supporters (pictured)—will boost his chances of winning another term at an election due in February. The affair has certainly granted Mr Correa a rare moment of global celebrity. But whether it will redound to his long-term advantage is not clear.

Since coming to power in 2007, Mr Correa has enjoyed durable popular support by leading what he calls a “citizens’ revolution” in a country that was a byword for political instability. He has used an oil windfall and money saved by defaulting on bonds to boost social spending. He has combined this with bouts of theatrical anti-Americanism. He refused to renew an agreement allowing an American anti-drug base in Ecuador. He has teamed up with communist Cuba and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in an anti-American alliance known as ALBA (meaning “dawn” in Spanish). When WikiLeaks published a cable in which the American ambassador in Quito, Heather Hodges, alleged that the president knew that his police chief was corrupt, Mr Correa expelled her.

In June Mr Assange took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, a flat in a redbrick mansion-block behind Harrods department store, to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for possible indictment for sexual assault. (He says the sex was consensual.) In granting him asylum, Mr Correa claims to be defending freedom of speech. The foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, last month described the Swedish accusations as “hilarious”, claiming that they were a ruse to facilitate Mr Assange’s onward extradition to the United States, where he might face the death penalty. But international lawyers argue that this would be harder from Sweden than from Britain. The United States has not indicted Mr Assange, although it is trying Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of passing thousands of confidential cables to WikiLeaks, for “aiding the enemy”.

Some of Mr Correa’s opponents argue that he is using the Assange case to wrest the initiative within ALBA from Mr Chávez, who has been ill with cancer. Earlier this year, Mr Correa called for sanctions against Britain because of its refusal to negotiate about its sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, and boycotted a 34-country Summit of the Americas in protest at Cuba’s exclusion.

tnr.com

Ideologically speaking, supporters of Bradley Manning—the 24-year-old army private expected to face a court martial beginning either in November or January for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks—are a fairly predictable bunch: libertarians, antiwar activists, hackers, whistleblowers. (As one Manning supporter put it to me: “Bradley is Welsh, so we started looking around in Wales.”) But what’s sometimes escaped notice is that much of the public support that Manning has received has actually come from certain segments of the LGBT community. After it publicly emerged that Manning was gay (the rumors that circulated after his arrest were confirmed by a New York Times profile in August 2010), many activists offered him their support. In the Washington Blade, Rainey Reitman, a digital freedom activist who is also gay called for the gay community’s engagement: “[A]s queer activists have long known, there is power and transcendence in choosing truth, even when that truth makes others uncomfortable.”

But if Manning—who has endured an extended period of difficult detention conditions, including several months in solitary confinement at the military prison at Quantico, and more than a year in a medium-security facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—has become something of a gay hero, it has not been without heated debate. At New York City’s gay pride parade in June, a motley crew of about 25 assembled under a banner that read “Coming out with the Truth is Never Easy,” and wore neon pink stickers emblazoned with a black silhouette of Manning’s face and the slogan “gay hero.” One onlooker called out “Traitor!” as the threadbare group marched down Fifth Avenue. Clearly, not everyone in the gay community is happy about the association. In fact, the debate over Manning illustrates the discord among gay activists about the direction in which the movement—beyond Manning—is headed.

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