From The Guardian UK: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/22/bradley-manning-wikileaks-1000-days-detention
The WikiLeaks suspect’s prosecution has been conducted with a complete absence of transparency – with worrying implications
Ed Pilkington
guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 February 2013
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.
There’s something else that binds us – disparate though our reporting styles and personal politics might be – and that’s the daily struggle to do our jobs properly, confronted as we are by the systemic furtiveness of the US government. It’s an irony that appears to be lost on many of the military lawyers who fill the courtroom at Fort Meade. A trial that has at its core the age-old confrontation between a government’s desire for confidentiality and the public’s need to know, is itself being conducted amid stringent restrictions on information.
Continue reading at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/22/bradley-manning-wikileaks-1000-days-detention
