Bradley Manning Trial FAQ – WikiLeaks

Who is Bradley Manning?

When is the trial?

How long is the trial?

What is Bradley Manning accused of?

What is the potential sentence?

What is the status of the federal investigation against Julian Assange and six other founders, owners or administrators of WikiLeaks?

What is the scope of the WikiLeaks/Manning investigation, which US officials have described as unprecedented both in its scale and nature

How does secrecy in the Manning trial compare to secret trials in Guantanamo Bay?

What legal actions has WikiLeaks taken in relation to BM?

How can Manning be charged with Aiding the Enemy?

What does the Manning trial mean for press freedoms?

Where can I find Bradley Mannings plea statement?

Twenty-five-year-old Bradley Manning is alleged to be the source of a trove of written and audiovisual material detailing, inter alia, war crimes, corruption, torture and human rights violations published by WikiLeaks. Manning is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He has won numerous prizes, including The Guardian "Person of the Year" award in 2012. The material concerned every country in the world. It detailed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people (the majority civilians) in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. Details of the execution of an Iraqi family and its cover-up ultimately precipitated the end of the Iraq War, after the Iraqi government refused to renew US immunity from prosecution. The material also revealed the existence of US death squads in Afghanistan. More

Manning was deployed as an army intelligence analyst in Iraq. He was arrested in May 2010 at the age of 23. For the first nine months the US army placed Manning in conditions of pre-trial punishment which the UN Rapporteur on Torture found to be inhuman and degrading, in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture. The military judge ruled in January 2013 that Manning had been subjected to unlawful pretrial punishment for 112 days at the Quantico marine brig.

The trial commenced on 3 June 2013. Pre-trial hearings began on 16 December 2011. http://www.bradleymanning.org/learn-more/bradley-manning

The trial is scheduled to last twelve weeks.

View the infographic comparing prosecutions charged dates versus the timeline set out by the Manning plea. Read the charge sheet here

The most serious charge against Bradley Manning is Aiding the Enemy, a capital offence. Although the prosecution has stated that they will seek a life sentence and not the death penalty, it is within the discretion of the court to pursue it nonetheless.

The criminal US investigation against WikiLeaks was most recently confirmed to be ongoing by the Department of Justice spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia, Peter Carr, on the 26th March 2013. The federal investigation into the WikiLeaks publication and its Australian publisher Julian Assange in connection with Mannnings prosecution will establish a precedent. If successful these efforts will criminalise national security journalism.

The various limbs of the Manning/WikiLeaks investigation progress in parallel and inform one another. Prior to the recent confirmation, the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, spoke about the WikiLeaks investigation to the press here and here), as did the Department of Justice spokesman Dean Boyd.

More: http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html#WHATLAWS

WikiLeaks Grand Jury 10-GJ-3-793

The WikiLeaks Grand Jury empaneled in Alexandria, Virginia since 2010 is the mechanism through which the Obama administration is determining how to shape its criminal prosecution against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in connection with the material allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning. The WikiLeaks grand jury has the number 10-GJ-3-793. "10" is the year it began, "GJ" stands for grand jury, "3" refers to a conspiracy statute, and "793" to the Espionage Act as encoded in US law.

The military prosecutors in the Manning case are using transcripts from 10-GJ-3-793 WikiLeaks grand jury testimony against Bradley Manning in the military trial. Bradley Mannings lawyer requested to view this evidence but was denied access to it.

Australian embassy cables describe the WikiLeaks grand jury thus: "active and vigorous inquiry into whether Julian Assange can be charged under US law, most likely the 1917 Espionage Act". US officials told the Australian embassy ["the WikiLeaks case is unprecedented both in its scale and nature". According to these diplomatic communications, the WikiLeaks grand jury casts the net beyond Assange to see if any intermediaries had been involved in communications between Assange and Manning".

Grand juries confer special powers on prosecutors and the rules of evidence are not as strict as in a trial. Witnesses to the grand jury can be compelled to testify because they cannot refuse to do so on grounds of self-incrimination. Australian diplomatic communications stated that Grand juries can issue indictments under seal, and that theoretically one could already have been issued for Assange. In this particular case, it would be more likely that an indictment would become known at the point of extradition proceedings, should these take place, in the UK or Sweden.

FBI Criminal investigation against WikiLeaks

As of a year ago, approximately 20% of the FBI classified investigation file into WikiLeaks pertained to Bradley Manning. 8,741 pages (636 documents) related to Bradley Manning out of 42,135 pages (3,475 documents) relating to WikiLeaks. The remaining FBI file involved at least eight civilians related to the WikiLeaks disclosures, including the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks. The FBI investigation includes damage assessments.

The FBI conducted illegal operations as part of the WikiLeaks investigation. One unlawful FBI WikiLeaks operation became known to the public after WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson revealed the incident in a live interview on national television. The information was subsequently confirmed by Icelands Minister of Interior, Ogmundur Jonasson. A parliamentary inquiry took place in February 2013 in relation to the FBIs WikiLeaks activities in Iceland. The FBI agents and prosecutors were expelled from the country and Icelandic authorities formally suspended their collaboration with the FBI. The FBI had allegedly attempted to entrap WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The operation in Iceland was conducted in secret. It involved six FBI officers and two US prosecutors, one of which was a prosecutor at 10-GJ-3-793, the WikiLeaks grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia. The unlawful methods of the FBI investigation should not come as a surprise given that they are led by Neil MacBride, whose prosecutorial tactics involves claiming that US criminal law applies in foreign jurisdictions.

On July 28, 2010, one month after Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq, the FBI opened an official criminal investigation into the editor and chief of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, partnering with the joint investigation of the US Defense Department and the US Department of States Diplomatic Security Service. The investigation then grew into a whole of government investigation, involving interagency coordination between the Department of Defense (DOD) including: CENTCOM; SOUTHCOM; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA); Headquarters Department of the Army (HQDA); US Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) for USFI (US Forces Iraq) and 1st Armored Division (AD); US Army Computer Crimes Investigative Unit (CCIU); 2nd Army (US Army Cyber Command); Within that or in addition, three military intelligence investigations were conducted. Department of Justice (DOJ) Grand Jury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of State (DOS) and Diplomatic Security Service (DSS). In addition, Wikileaks has been investigated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Office of the National CounterIntelligence Executive (ONCIX), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the House Oversight Committee; the National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the PIAB (Presidents Intelligence Advisory Board).

Source: Bradley Manning pre-trial hearing

Trials of accused terrorists in Guantanamo Bay are more transparent than the Manning trial. In the case of offshore trials in Guantanamo Bay, the military court committed to providing journalists with contemporaneous access to the material filed in court. Where information has been withheld at Guantanamo Bay proceedings, journalists can challenge the decision to keep the information secret. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of court records filed in the Manning case have been kept secret by the court and attempts to make them public have been dismissed. Although journalists have been been able to access portions of his pre-trial proceedings, the government refuses to provide its existing official court transcript of these public portions to the public. Instead, independent journalists have had to collect, piece together and report the trial in the absence of the governments compliance with the right of public access to criminal proceedings. These efforts are not funded by the US tax payer, but paid instead by donations. The most exhaustive record of Mannings court proceedings and the investigation against WikiLeaks is independent journalist Alexa OBriens site.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is crowd-funding donations so that a court stenographer can be hired to take transcripts of the trial. Donations are tax-deductable in the US. https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/

The right of public access to the Manning hearings is protected by the First Amendment. Bradley Mannings lawyer was denied access to documents used by the prosecution. Journalists have not been allowed to view the documents filed in the proceedings.

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have filed several petitions and complaints to the military court in relation to access in the Manning trial.

If Manning is convicted of the aiding the enemy offence, it would set a precedent that disclosing classified information to a publication is akin to communicating with Al Qaeda. The prosecution will call several operatives involved in the summary execution of Osama bin Laden to testify in secret. The prosecution has stated to the court that they would be pursuing this charge even if Manning was alleged to have submitted the information to The New York Times instead. Numerous prominent lawyers and journalists have opposed the pursual of this charge, including the spokesman for the US State Department under Hillary Clinton, PJ Crowley.

The charges against Manning and the potential or existing sealed indictment against Julian Assange carries with it the criminalisation of the news-gathering process and a calculated crippling of the First Amendment. The aiding the enemy charge implies that any press organisation, and any editor, anywhere in the world can be prosecuted for espionage, that is for divulging information that may be read by a person that the US has designated as an "enemy". In practice, this means that any information that is made available by a publisher on the Internet which the US government deems to be harmful to its national security can trigger the criminal prosecution of the publisher, even if it is a foreign publisher.

The US governments attempts to establish that the alleged WikiLeaks source and its publisher engaged in a conspiracy has been re-employed in the case of the US governments espionage subpoena of FOX news reporter James Rosen. The Manning trial and the WikiLeaks investigation marked the beginning of the sharp decline of press freedoms under Obama.

It can be found here.

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Bradley Manning Trial FAQ - WikiLeaks