Bradley Manning: 1,000 days in detention and secrecy still reigns

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/23/bradley-manning-1000-days-in-detention-and-secrecy-still-reigns/



Bradley Manning: 1,000 days in detention and secrecy still reigns
By Ed Pilkington, The Guardian
Saturday, February 23, 2013 3:23 EST

On Saturday Bradley Manning will mark his 1,000th day imprisoned without trial. In the course of those thousand days, from the moment he was formally put into pre-trial confinement on 19 May 2010 on suspicion of being the source of the WikiLeaks disclosures, Manning has been on a long and eventful journey.

It has taken him from the desert of Iraq, where he was arrested at a military operating base outside Baghdad, to a prison tent in Kuwait. From there he endured his infamous harsh treatment at Quantico Marine base in Virginia, and for the last 14 months he has attended a series of pre-trial hearings at Fort Meade in Maryland, the latest of which begins next week.

For the small band of reporters who have tracked the prosecution of Private First Class Manning, the journey has also been long and eventful. Not in any way comparable, of course; none of us have been ordered to strip naked or put in shackles, and we have all been free to go home at night without the prospect of a life sentence hanging over us.

But it’s been an education, nonetheless. Though we are a mixed bag – a fusion of traditional outlets such as the Washington Post and Associated Press and new-look bloggers such as Firedoglake and the Bradley Manning support network – we have been thrown together by our common mission to report on the most high-profile prosecution of an alleged leaker in several decades.

[snot]

1. K&R'd.

Exemplifying the lack of transparency in the proceedings against Manning:

"The most egregious example of this over the past 1,000 days was the moment in January when the military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, issued her ruling in an Article 13 motion brought by Manning’s defence. This was the complaint that the soldier, while at Quantico, had been subjected to a form of pre-trial punishment that is banned under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

* * * * *

"It was an important moment in the narrative arc that is the Bradley Manning trial. Technically, Lind had the power to dismiss all charges against the soldier; she could have, though none of us expected that she would, let him walk out of that court and into freedom. (In the end she knocked 112 days off any eventual sentence).”

"So my fellow reporters and I awaited with intense interest Lind’s judgment, though also with some trepidation. We’d sat through the spectacle of Lind reading out to the court her rulings, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. The judge has a way of reading out her decisions at such a clip that it is almost impossible to take them down even with shorthand or touch typing.

"In the event, Lind spent an hour and a half without pause reading out a judgment that must have stretched to 50 pages, at a rate that rendered accurate reporting of it diabolically difficult. No copy of the ruling has – then or now – been made available to the public, presumably on grounds of national security, even though every word of the document had been read out to the very public that was now being withheld its publication."