The Martyrdom of Bradley Manning

[Geee]

Weekly Standard:

An intriguing aspect of the WikiLeaks saga is the story behind the arrest and public unmasking of Private Bradley Manning.


In late May of last year, Manning was arrested by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. At the time, he was stationed in Iraq at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad. Just 22 years old, Manning was an intelligence analyst, and while he wasn’t immediately charged with any crime, the Army had reason to believe that he was involved in leaking classified information to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Just one month earlier, WikiLeaks had posted the gun-sight video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq which the site titled “Collateral Murder.” It was the first high-profile leak in what would become a sustained campaign by WikiLeaks against the American government.

With Manning in custody, the Army was trying to figure out the scope of his offenses when, in July, WikiLeaks released a compendium of 77,000 American military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. The Army believed that Manning was behind these leaks, too. In the course of their investigation, they discovered that Manning had downloaded 260,000 State Department cables from the Net-Centric Diplomacy database on SIPRnet. When WikiLeaks published these documents in December, Manning was suspected of having handed them over as well.