Accused WikiLeaker Bradley Manning Speaks Publicly for First Time
Private First Class Bradley Manning, the American soldier accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified and confidential military and diplomatic documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, took the stand in a military court today to make his first public statements since his arrest in 2010.
Manning appeared confident and animated at a pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade in Maryland as he described the mental breakdowns and extreme depression he suffered during his first year in detention, from cells in Iraq and Kuwait to the Marine base at Quantico in Virginia. Within weeks of his arrest, Manning said, he became convinced he was going to die in custody.
“I was just a mess. I was really starting to fall apart,” the 24-year-old former Army intelligence analyst said. Manning said he didn’t remember an incident while in Kuwait where he bashed his head into a wall or another where he fashioned a noose out of a bed sheet as his civilian attorney, David Coombs, said he had, but Manning did say he felt he was “going to die… [in] an animal cage.”
“I certainly contemplated [suicide]. There’s no means, even if the noose… there’d be nothing I could do with it. Nothing to hang it on. It felt… pointless,” he said. Manning had been on suicide watch since late June 2010, a month after his initial arrest in Baghdad.
Manning faces 22 charges related to his alleged use of his access to government computers to download and pass along a trove of confidential government documents and videos to WikiLeaks, including the 2010 mass release of 250,000 State Department cables detailing years of private U.S. diplomatic interactions with the governments and citizens the world over. The unprecedented document dump became known as “Cablegate.”
Earlier this month Coombs wrote on his blog that Manning was willing to plead guilty to some lesser offenses. On Thursday the military judge in the case said eight lesser charges could be reviewed by Manning’s defense attorneys for a potential plea deal, but a response likely won’t be determined until December.
Prison life is unpleasant? Whodathunkit? This has got to be the worst defense since Lyle and Erik Menendez asked for leniency because they were orphans. But then again, when you have nothing else you throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks.
Last time I talked about young PFC Manning I got called a fascist. Well if believing in the rule of law makes me a fascist then so be it. I don’t think Manning deserves the death penalty or even life in prison.
But what he did does deserve punishment. He broke the law. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
What is really pathetic is that at least 90% of the Manning supporters don’t blame his commander in chief for the situation he is in.
And 10% of us are waiting for the CinC’s sealed state senate and college records “leaked” from the wiki scoundrels. Yawn. 😉
Had Obama lost the election, I’m sure Manning was on the Preezy Pardon list with the rest of those under the bus. (Blagho, Rezko?)
If Dubya was still in office they would be protesting outside the White House every day.
BTW – kinda funny how this case disappeared from the news for the last six months, ain’t it?
Hey, we just watched the SCoaMF win 51% of the electorate running on Big Bird and “free” birth control — so what the fuck do we know?
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time — don’t do it!
Awwwww……Dandy Tiger Country, just beautiful. Trump saved this winery, thank goodness for bazzillionaires.
http://www.trumpwinery.com/
Yep, that’s my area. With TheDonald near by. Lucky me.
If by saved, you mean bought up all the surrounding property and let them degrade, ruining the value of the property he wanted until he got it for a song, yeah.
I didn’t even know he could sing!
EIther him or his hairpiece. Only his hair coach knows for sure.
I don’t think that’s a hairpiece. With his money he could afford a realistic looking one.
Ewww, didn’t know that 😦 Is he putting a casino and a 55+ condo (errr, aka The Villages) there? I’m there!
Probably will. Maybe I’ll be there too. 🙂
If someone doesn’t take control of the situations we are in, something irreversible is going to fuck us all for an eternity! I’m not going down without a fight! 👿
I’m willing to give him a medal if he will break open a few more files and expose every lying cheating pos in the world. Done and Done. 👿
Since this thread is already NSFW (language), a tribute to myiq’s gravtar:
He didn’t just “commit a crime,” he put a lot of people in danger. He didn’t review everything he was leaking or consider the implications it would have on individuals. He didn’t know who Wikileaks were or what their intentions were. Much of the info was trivial personal diplomatic conversations between individuals, but he didn’t care if he might have started a war.
What astounds me about the whole thing, Private Manning and Wikileaks. is that the entire purpose of leaking classified info is to expose something illegal or unethical in the hopes of creating change. Their whole point seems to be simply to expose things for the sake of exposing things. Perhaps attempting to embarrass the US? I don’t know what their point was but they remind me of OWSies whose whole point seems to be to protest….something. So we now live in a world where people protest just to protest and leak info just to be leakers. It’s weird! Of course we just elected a President who is comprised of nothing but these empty concepts, almost like icons with nothing behind them. Change hope, protest! But ask people what kind of a world they are trying to create and they’re like, huh?? Don’t harsh my mellow man, I’m being all hip and radical.
Since I am and always have been an Anti-establishment type, I say the more we see how those bastards in power work the better it is for average Joe. Too much information is never bad. They have no right to their back room deals and under the table power.
Free Bradley Manning.
Imprison Obama.
So it’s okay to break the law if you have good intentions?
When the Republic is at stake! 👿
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Is it OK to break the law to expose lawlessness?
Should a whistleblower , or an undercover cop break the law to catch the bad guy?
Should the FBI break the law to stop a terrorist?
Should a president have a kill list?
Have we exposed any lawlessness? Seriously, I can’t find one single piece of valuable information released by Wikileaks.
Manning isn’t trying to argue that he did the right thing by breaking the law.
Neither whistle blowing nor undercover work is “breaking the law.”
The FBI shouldn’t break the law — nor should anyone else (including Manning).
Identifying the top leaders of the people you are at war with isn’t illegal in & of itself.
You seem to not understand the difference between agencies/people operating under laws you don’t like and “breaking the law.”
In other words, the ends justify the means. And that’s okay with you if they’re your ends. You’ll turn a blind eye to the means. But this is how the bad things happen – when we say oh it’s okay if my team does it because we’re the *good guys*.
Sorry. If it’s wrong it’s wrong.
And if you really believe it’s right, but you have to break the law to do it? Fine. Break the law. Then go to prison, because you can’t claim you didn’t know it was illegal. And hopefully the law will be changed to reflect the injustice of laws being used to protect the guilty from the consequences of their crimes.
But don’t try and sell me a bucket of shit like oh, I don’t like Da Man, so anything you do against Da Man is good. Because innocent people always get ground up in the cogs of your self-righteous machine.
^^This^^
THIS.
Please, tell me none of you have broken laws ?
What are the excuses you use?
“The woman tempted me”
Problem is, the leaks expose the government employees that are breaking the law. Anyone heard the word “Benghazi”? Why is there such a coverup if they weren’t breaking the law? How about the chemical peeps in Jordan looking for wmd in Jordan – 20 tons that may have shown up from Syria. Anyone think those may have been moved there from iraq years ago? I do. Look at asswipes like Carter and Brezinski and the shit storm we have to live with.their ignorant egos arming the fucking Afghans. Enough is enough for these creeps. When I earned a Presden’s Club trip to Marth’s hVineyard/Cape Cod they toured us around the area. The biggest most expensive
The most expensive and largest property belonged to the creep that sold landmines. It made me sick. 👿
Who owns information?
Bill Gates
Regardless of your opinion about releasing “classified” information, Manning has yet to be found guilty of anything. Yet he has been held in deplorable conditions for two years. That’s okay just because you don’t like him?
He was not chained up in a dungeon. He had food, water and a warm bed. He was not beaten or tortured. He was allowed to have visitors and to watch television.
He is accused of very serious offenses and is considered a security risk. He was put on a suicide watch after talking about . . . suicide.
Here is how his own attorney described his “deplorable” conditions:
The Fort Hood killer hasn’t been convicted of anything but he’s still locked up.
Do hyou think someone like him was capable of this crime by himself? How much info would have been released anyway after the dirty players decided we could have have a look at it. I like transparency on everything oter than the mos5t critical info that would put someone in danger and I’m not the liberal. I especially want to see what they don’t want the little people to see. 👿