Death Penalty for Bradley Manning, the Alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower?

by Andy Worthington, CommonDreams.org, March 3, 2011

Manning, who is is held at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, is waiting to hear whether a mental health hearing requested by his attorney will be allowed to proceed. His mental health has been in question due to the perceived severity of his solitary confinement, and the undoubted pressure exerted on him by the administration, which has been humiliated by WikiLeaks’ revelations over the last nine months, including the “Collateral Damage” video, the Afghan and Iraqi war logs, and the diplomatic cables whose release dominated headlines in the closing months of 2010. I discussed the concerns about Manning’s mental health in my articles, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?, Psychologists Protest the Torture of Bradley Manning to the Pentagon; Jeff Kaye Reports and Former Quantico Commander Objects to Treatment of Bradley Manning, the Alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower.

 

As well as being charged with “aiding the enemy,” Manning has also been charged with “five counts of theft of public property or records, two counts of computer fraud, eight counts of transmitting defense information in violation of the Espionage Act, and a count of wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing it would be accessible to the enemy … Five additional charges are for violating Army computer security regulations.”

According to the Guardian, “Pentagon and military officials say some of the classified information released by WikiLeaks contained the names of informants and others who had cooperated with the US military in Afghanistan, endangering their lives. According to the officials, the US military attempted to contact many of those named and take them into US bases for their own protection. Military officials told NBC News that a small number of them have still have not been found, with one official quoted as saying: ‘We didn’t get them all.’”

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