Why Bradley Manning Will Be Punished the Hardest for WikiLeaks

Poor Soldier Manning

The two lead players in WikiLeaks made judicial news yesterday. Lawyers for Julian Assange, the founder of the “whistle-blowing news site,” announced they were going to appeal against the decision of a London court. The court decided last week that Assange can be extradited to Sweden to be questioned on charges of assault and unprotected sex with two Swedish women. Thanks to the appeal, Assange will probably remain in Britain for months. Assange is free on bail and resides in a massive country house in the English countryside.

The other lead player is Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old American soldier, suspected of being the source of the large-scale WikiLeaks leaks. While working as an intelligence analyst on an American base near Baghdad in the spring of 2010, he supposedly leaked tens of thousands of military and diplomatic documents by taking them from an internal computer network and delivering them to WikiLeaks. But Manning talked about it too much and was ratted out.

And for this, it seems the young soldier will be paying a continuously rising price. Manning has been locked away since May of last year — first in Kuwait, and since July on a military basis in Quantico, VA. The circumstances he lives in are definitely more painful than those of Assange. Manning is locked away 23 hours a day in an empty cell measuring 12 feet by 6, with only a bed, a tap and a toilet. He cannot keep personal items. He is not allowed to talk to anybody, and the prison guards have to check every five minutes whether or not he is trying to commit suicide.

And this is only the beginning of Manning’s suffering. He was already accused of illegally obtaining secret documents and passing them along to unauthorized individuals, a felony for which he can be charged with up to 52 years of imprisonment. But yesterday, the American army formulated 22 new charges against him. The most important one among them is that Manning is now also accused of helping the enemy. If he is convicted of this, Manning could face life imprisonment or the death penalty, even though military prosecutors do not intend to demand the latter.

It was not specified who the enemy is in this case. WikiLeaks responded in a Twitter message that the charge suggests this enemy could well be WikiLeaks. A serious misstep: Even though Assange never mentioned that Manning was the source of the American telexes, people close to WikiLeaks strongly suspect that the American government used Manning to get Assange extradited. Even the Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who distanced herself from Assange, seems convinced of this: “It is most likely they are trying to break him to get to Julian Assange,” she told De Standaard.*

But there is no hard evidence of this. The American television network NBC announced last week that “American investigators did not find any proof of a direct connection between Assange and Manning.” NBC received this information from a military source. If this is in fact correct, the chance is extremely small that Assange will ever be extradited to the U.S. and end up in Guantanamo, as he dramatically preaches.

So there is a good chance that “poor private Manning” will become the biggest victim of WikiLeaks, while Assange receives most of the attention. But this does not mean that the entire world is staying indifferent. Both Amnesty International and the UN rapporteur against torture have questioned the Guantanamo-like circumstances in which Manning is being held. There is the Bradley Manning Support Network, which raises money to help pay for trial costs and more. But all the world stars, who are lined up to pay Assange’s bail, still have not organized a march on Quantico.

Even Assange himself is ambiguous about his support for Manning, at least if we are to believe Daniel Domscheit-Berg. In his book “Inside WikiLeaks” he wrote that Assange originally “promised the best lawyers for Manning.” “But his aid action got stuck in an early stage. When I asked Assange for names of lawyers, I did not receive any answer. And from the promised $100,000 in support, not much remained either.”

*Editor’s note: This quotation, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.