Manning, the Living Voice of the Dead

Somebody has successfully violated the secrecy of the most private process in the world. The U.S. Army soldier who transmitted the most sensitive documents to Julian Assange, defended himself by saying, “I acted in clear conscience.”

Somebody did it. We don’t know who, but someone has managed to break the secrecy of the most private process in the world: the hearings of Bradley Manning. Two weeks ago, the young soldier admitted to leaking the most explosive government documents to WikiLeaks: from “Collateral Murder,” a video in which an American Apache helicopter shoots at innocent civilians, to files concerning Guantanamo and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the United States’ diplomatic cables.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation, an American organization that helps WikiLeaks bypass the economic blockade on credit cards and collect donations, has just published on its website an audio file of Bradley Manning’s statement to the judge during his Feb. 28 preliminary hearing.

That file can be found here. It allows us to listen, for the very first time, to the actual voice of Bradley Manning, who explains that he acted for ethical reasons. He admitted to having transmitted the documents to WikiLeaks without pressure from Julian Assange’s organization. “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general,” he said in the courtroom.

The file, published by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, is a remarkable scoop for the organization, which seems to have managed to pierce the secrecy around the Manning trial, a kind of secrecy that makes it difficult to know what the Pentagon has against Bradley Manning and against WikiLeaks. During the hearings, recording, filming and typing on a computer were forbidden, which meant that journalists in the courtroom could only take notes manually.

According to some observers quoted in The Guardian, the confidentiality conditions of Manning’s preliminary hearings were even more stringent than those in the Guantanamo trials of al-Qaida members. There, the press and relatives of 9/11 victims, standing behind a window, could be present at the hearing. Audio was delayed by 40 seconds to allow the military to censor any classified information.

The investigations on Manning and the preliminary hearings have produced an outpouring of documents. Dozens of thousands of files are kept completely out of the reach of the WikiLeaks defense and of the journalists and the public. The Pentagon refuses to release even the acts read in court in front of the press, such as Bradley Manning’s statement to the court.