why is bradley manning rotting in prison without going to …

Well first off he has been to the initial hearing to determine if he is to be court martial-ed... it was even in the news. (And they recently announced that he will be going to a full court martial.)

Second due to the severity of the crimes involved, (you are aware that one of the charges is "aiding the enemy" right? That can get you the death penalty in the military.) anyone charged with these crimes is not released prior to the trial. In a treason case the person would not be released, or any other criminal case that can grant the death penalty.

Manning was a low ranking member of the Army with clearance to help protect his unit. (Spent 12 hour shifts, with other analysts, in a secure room reading over classified documents.) He was a specialist who was getting ready to be dishonorably discharged from the military (demoted several times prior for multiple discipline issues including attacking a female soldier.) when they found out he had been leaking information to a foreign company. (He was turned in by a hacker he had been bragging too about this who asked people in the hacking community about it and everyone told him to turn Manning in... as even they felt what he was doing was wrong.)

His reasons for releasing the documents (per interviews) were because he felt he was not getting the respect he felt he deserved from the officers that were above him in the chain of command and to impress his boyfriends college friends. (Btw it was well known in his unit that he was gay/had gender identity disorder, but the funny thing is that no one really cared about that.) In addition, he did not just release records that showed wrongdoing on the part of the government itself... the first thing he released (the apache footage) was on an incident that had been known about for years, had been investigated, and even the footage he released (which was editted and had a large section removed from the middle of it) showed that the reporters (which were not wearing any identifying clothing or insignia, and insurgents would take cameras on attacks to film them as well) were with insurgents with RPG's and at least one assault rifle.

And the later files he released he did not even review what it was he was releasing, he just mass dumped over 500,000 classified documents. (That he used an automated program to gather) Which included such things as most vulnerable target lists for the U.S. infastructure, lists of villages/informants that helped the U.N. and Nato forces, methods people had used to escape countries like Iran (including a step by step route which would put the people who helped them in danger), and things of this nature... which have been published in the press since. (And the press cited they got the documents from Wikileaks)

The worst part is that there are channels he could have gone through if he had found actual criminal actions/or even questionable ones from the military. Due to the actions of Daniel Ellsberg back during the Vietnam war, there are now contact numbers (that are outside a persons chain of command, in some cases to another section of the government entirely, such as Congress) that every person with access to classified data are given. And they are required to report anything that is questionable. Manning did not do this... instead within a month of his assignment overseas, he started leaking files.

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why is bradley manning rotting in prison without going to ...