The United States vs. Bradley Manning

Three years after his arrest in Iraq, last Monday proceedings began against Bradley Manning, who was accused in a U.S. military court of 22 charges, including “aiding the enemy,” after leaking almost 700,000 classified documents — the biggest leak of its kind in American history — to WikiLeaks. If he is found guilty, he could be given a life sentence without parole, to be served in a military prison. The best-case scenario is that he will spend 20 years behind bars because, according to one of his lawyers, he will plead guilty to 10 of the 22 charges leveled against him. Despite this, the U.S. court is insisting on trying him on charges of espionage and aiding the enemy. All the signs show that the court is looking for a harsh, precedent-setting punishment. But it could well backfire, because there are many people both at home and abroad who stand behind the young soldier for daring to reveal the shameful actions of his country. His revelations, they argue, were the first step toward creating healthy debate about the horrors of warfare and how to prevent their recurrence.

In 2009, when he began working for the U.S. intelligence services in Iraq as a data analyst at the age of 22, Manning had access to networks containing protected information. He was thus able to access tens of thousands of confidential documents stored on different databases. Some commentators suggest that his homosexuality isolated him from his peers and led him to withdraw into the world of the Internet and declassified documents.

Motives aside, it is true that he came across a number of examples of abuse and decided to make them public with the support of Julian Assange. He confessed to his friend Adrian Lamo that he had seen “almost criminal political backdealings […] incredible things, awful things … things that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C.” Lamo, frightened by the enormity of the issues, reported Manning to the authorities.

Bradley was detained and transferred to a military cell in Virginia in July 2010, where he was treated appallingly. He was “held for 23 hours a day in a sparsely furnished solitary cell and deprived of a pillow, sheets and personal possessions. He was allowed only one hour a day to walk and one hour of television a day. He was forced to stand nude for inspection when he was woken at five in the morning,” according to Amnesty International.*

While there can be no doubt that Manning committed a number of offenses and acted against U.S. interests, he nonetheless not only has the right to a fair trial, but also to be treated with dignity. It is thus logical that the abuse he has suffered, combined with the law’s lack of transparency and overzealousness, may end up damaging the credibility of U.S. justice and the Obama administration instead of helping their cause.

*Editor’s Note: While accurately translated, only the first sentence of this quote could be verified as a statement from Amnesty International.