David Coombs C-SPAN

David Coombs, the civilian lawyer representing Bradley Manning at his court martial for supplying WikiLeaks with a trove of US state secrets, has described the soldier's treatment in solitary confinement at Quantico marine base as criminal and a blot on the nation's history.

Making rare comments outside the courtroom, Coombs addressed an audience of Bradley Manning supporters in a Unitarian church in Washington on Monday night and lashed out at the military hierarchy for allowing the intelligence analyst to be subjected to nine months of harsh suicide prevention regime against the advice of doctors. "Brad's treatment at Quantico will forever be etched into our nation's history as a disgraceful moment in time," he said.

"Not only was it stupid and counter-productive, it was criminal. An entire group of individuals, who I have no doubt were honourable, chose to turn a blind eye to how he was being treated They cared about something more: the media impact."

Coombs made his criticism in his first and what will probably his only speech in a civilian setting since he became Manning's lawyer two years ago. He explained to the audience that he has consciously avoided all public engagements and interviews with the press partly on Manning's instructions and partly because the soldier "deserved an attorney entirely focused on the courtroom".

Manning was arrested in May 2010 for allegedly handing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and videos of helicopter attacks to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. He has effectively admitted to passing the information, but denies the most serious charge, that he "aided the enemy" by doing so.

The comments on Quantico are all the more poignant because the Article 13 hearing a defence motion alleging unlawful pre-trial punishment of the WikiLeaks suspect is still ongoing at the court martial in Fort Meade Maryland. Coombs had timed Monday night's speech to mark the end of the hearing and the transition from the motion phase to the trial phase of the proceedings, but there has been such lengthy witness testimony, including two days in the stand by Manning, that it has been extended and will reconvene on Wednesday.

Despite his excoriating remarks on Quantico, Coombs painted a generally optimistic picture of Manning's state of mind now and of his hopes for the future. He described the jail facilities at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where Manning was transferred in April 2011 from Quantico, as having "magical waters" that had healed his client.

Asked about Manning's current state of mind, Coombs said: "He is very excited about having his case move forward. He is very encouraged at this point by the way things are going, and confident they will ultimately turn out OK for him."

Coombs recalled one conversation in which he had asked Manning what he wanted to do in future. "He told me his dream would be to go to college, and then into public service and perhaps one day run for public office. I asked him why, and he said: 'I want to make a difference.'"

He went on: "I hope that some day soon Brad can go to college and give back in public service. But he doesn't have to worry about making a difference he has made a difference."

Coombs spent 12 years in active military duty and is a lieutenant colonel in the reserves. He told the audience that given his extensive experience of military justice he was convinced that a court martial system was more likely than the civilian courts to give Manning a fair trial.

"People are often suspicious that the military judge may be subject to pressure and the the system is built to obtain a certain outcome, but having in the state and federal courts I can tell you the court martial system is by fair the fairest."

Coombs made a stern warning about the first charge facing his client "aiding the enemy" a clause of the espionage act that carries a maximum sentence in this case of life in military custody. Speaking generally, he called the charge a "scary proposition" as it held up the threat of prosecution of anybody who passed information to the press even if they had no intention of that information being used by the enemy.

"Right there, you will silence a lot of critics of our government, and that's what makes our government great that we foster criticism and through it make changes. This is a very serious charge not just for my client but for all of us in America."

Coombs thanked on Manning's behalf the 72,000 people who have written personally to the soldier in custody, and the 14,000 people who have donated to his defence fund. One of those supporters, he said, was Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower from the Vietnam war era, who has spoken out on Manning's behalf.

History had judged Ellsberg very well, Coombs said. "I hope that history will judge PFC Bradley Manning in a similar light."

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

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LAWYER: Bradley Manning's Treatment Is A Stain On US History ...

savebradley via Flickr

Lawyers for the US soldier charged with passing a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks accused the military on Tuesday of withholding hundreds of emails over fears of a publicity nightmare.

The defence team for Private Bradley Manning, who could be jailed for life for "aiding the enemy" over the massive security breach, alleged that more than 1,300 messages were ignored by prosecutors for at least six months.

The emails relate to the conditions the 24-year-old trooper was held in during military detention at Quantico, Virginia, where he was sent after a spell in a US Army jail in Kuwait following his arrest while on duty in Iraq in 2010.

Manning's civilian lawyer David Coombs told a pretrial hearing that 84 emails were released to the defence team on July 25, but he later discovered that 1,290 other messages remained on file.

The government "chose to let these emails collect dust somewhere," Coombs said on the first day of the three-day hearing at a military base in Fort Meade, Maryland, 30 miles (48 kilometres) from the US capital.

Military prosecutors then suddenly announced that 600 other messages had been handed to Manning's legal team on Monday, ahead of the hearing, but Coombs persisted with his attack.

"It is the defence position that the government has been playing word games," the lawyer said, implying that the emails were held back because the government adopted a deliberately narrow definition of their relevance.

"That is the absurd nature of that excuse. That is 'the dog ate my homework' excuse," Mr Coombs added.

The defence maintains that Manning was mistreated at Quantico, and even alleged on Tuesday that the former intelligence analyst had been ordered by guards to stand at attention while completely naked.

Mr Coombs then took aim at top Marine officers responsible for running the jail, who he said had put their concerns about bad publicity ahead of their duty to provide fair treatment to detainees.

The emails go as high up the chain as General George Flynn, the then commanding general of the US Marine Corps, who insisted that Manning be placed on suicide watch.

Top officers at Quantico regularly sent emails to Flynn informing him of Manning's confinement, which the defence says was unnecessarily harsh, and told the Marine commander who the jailed WikiLeaks suspect's visitors were.

"They didn't want any negative publicity," Mr Coombs said, reading out an official list that placed media risks at the top of eight concerns at Quantico.

After his detention at the Marine Corps Brig from July 2010 to April 2011, Manning was transferred to a prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where he was placed under less restrictive conditions.

If the court finds he was abused, the case could potentially be thrown out, or any eventual sentence reduced.

However, Major Ashden Fein, lead counsel for the government at Fort Meade, denied that the emails were withheld, insisting the prosecution simply had more pressing issues to deal with.

Most of the emails amount to nothing more than "argument and conjecture" among the military commanders involved, he said.

"They were concerned about public affairs (media handling) but they were also concerned about Private First Class Manning," Fein said of officers at Quantico, describing Flynn as "being informed but not necessarily directing" control.

Colonel Denise Lind, the case judge, however said the months-long delay over disclosure of the emails remained unexplained.

"I still wonder why you waited until July," Lind asked Fein, before ruling that she would examine the estimated 700 emails from the original bundle that remain in government hands, before deciding if they too should be handed over.

The publishing by WikiLeaks of official documents, including military logs concerning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, triggered a diplomatic firestorm that hugely embarrassed American officials and rankled the nation's allies.

Manning, who is attending this week's hearing, has not yet entered a plea in the case and his trial now looks set to start in February five months later than originally thought.

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'US Withheld Hundreds Of Emails In The Bradley Manning ...

Chelsea Manning formerly known as Bradley Manning

Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, a former US Army Intelligence analyst who gave classified information to WikiLeaks in 2010 was ordered back to jail on Thursday for defying a grand jury subpoena.

Manning was jailed in early March for refusing to testify to a secret grand jury about WikiLeaks and was released last Thursday after spending 62 days behind bars.

A federal judge held Manning in contempt on Thursday and US Marshals took him back into custody for the second time this year for refusing to testify before a secret grand jury.

Manning said he was prepared to return to jail indefinitely rather than testify during a presser on Thursday before the trial.

No matter what happens today, Im not going to comply with this grand jury, Manning said Thursday.

Manning received a subpoena in late January to testify before a federal grand jury in a case in the Eastern District of Virginia this is the same district that the government accidentally revealed there was a sealed indictment against Julian Assange.

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton, a Reagan appointee, ordered Manning to jail after he refused to testify.

In 2010, Private First Class Bradley Manning (who later transitioned to Chelsea)stole State Department documents, many of them secret international embassy reports. Manning smuggled the security documents out on a CD labeled Lady Gaga, and handed them to WikiLeaks WikiLeaks subsequently took the sensitive cables and made them public.

In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for giving classified materials to WikiLeaks.

In April 2014 a Kansas judge allowed Bradley Manning to change his name to Chelsea.

In January of 2017, Obama commuted Mannings sentence from 35 years to 7 years Manning was released from prison in May of 2017.

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JUST IN: Chelsea (Bradley) Manning Ordered Back to Jail ...

Bradley Manning has received a prison sentence that was 10 years longer than the period of time after which many of the documents he released would have been automatically declassified. The military judge handed down the longest ever sentence for a leak of US government information.

Mr Manning, according to this logic, did more harm than the soldier who gave a Jordanian intelligence agent information on the build-up to the first Iraq war, or the marine who gave the KGB the identities of CIA agents and floorplans of the embassies in Moscow and Vienna. Mr Manning did three times as much harm in transmitting to WikiLeaks in 2010 the war logs or field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, as Charles Graner did. He was the army reserve corporal who became ringleader of the Abu Ghraib abuse ring and was set free after serving six and a half years of his 10-year sentence.

Among the 700,000 classified documents Mr Manning downloaded while stationed in Iraq was a video that showed a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad opening fire on a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists and their children, who had attempted to rescue a severely injured man. More devastating than the film was the cockpit chatter of the soldiers who joked as they shot people in the streets.

"Look at those dead bastards," said one. "Nice," said another.

The Apache crew has never been charged with any offence (all their adult targets were listed as insurgents) and neither has any other individual as a result of Mr Manning's revelations. But the shortened 17-minute version of the video has been viewed more than 3m times on YouTube.

So, the central question to answer in judging the proportionality of this sentence is whether the desire to punish a whistleblower driven by moral outrage stems from the alleged harm he did US military and diplomatic interests, or whether it derives more from sheer embarrassment. The judge presiding, Col Denise Lind, had already thrown out the gravest charge, that of "aiding the enemy". Col Lind had also limited the admissibility of evidence regarding the "chilling effects" that Mr Manning's actions had on US diplomacy by releasing 250,000 state department cables. A military witness conceded there was no evidence that anyone had been killed after being named in the releases.

Mr Manning's recent apology for his actions does not, and should not, detract from the initial defence he gave for them, when he spoke of his shock at the "delightful bloodlust" displayed by that helicopter crew, or his belief that stimulating a debate about the wars was the right thing to do. We know what his motives as a whistleblower were and we have applauded them. They are certainly not akin to treachery or any act fit to be judged if anything is by an espionage act rushed onto the statute book in 1917 after America entered the first world war.

Mr Manning exposed the abuse of detainees by Iraqi officers under the watch of US minders. He showed that civilian deaths during the Iraq war were much higher than the official estimates. If they were published today, these claims would be uncontentious. They have already slipped into the official history of this war. But the author of this orthodoxy will continue to pay for the record he helped establish by a prison term that he will serve well into the next decade, which is when the first date for his parole application becomes due. Mr Manning was seeking to hold his country and its army to the values they claim to uphold.

It is unclear what the US military hopes to achieve by securing a sentence that dwarfs those of other military convictions. Deterrence features large in its thinking. Whistleblowing will not only endanger your career, it wants to say, but your freedom for most of your adult life. In 2008, one could have hoped that the US had a president whose administration would distinguish between leaks in the public interest and treason. But this sentence tells a different story. Mr Manning's sentence, which is both unjust and unfair, can still be reduced on appeal. Let us hope that it is.

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Bradley Manning: a sentence both unjust and unfair ...