Bradley Manning Trial - Day Two

Demonstrators outside of Ft. Meade on Monday

Early in Tuesday's legal proceedings against Bradley Manning at Ft. Meade, Maryland, the man who turned Manning in to the U.S. government, wired.com's Adrian Lamo, testified.  He will not be back.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation has raised the funds necessary (I contributed) to hire a court stenographer to provide daily transcripts of the proceedings.  The U.S. Army and Federal government are also transcribing the trial, but have stated their transcripts will not be made available to the public or press.  Here is a link to the transcript of yesterday's trial.

Kevin Gosztola is continuing his live blog updates from the trial at firedoglake.

At facebook yesterday, where I posted a link to my PA article on day one, my good friend Matt Murphy claimed Manning had divulged information which endangered U.S. troops in a direct way:

This case pulls me in a couple different directions. On one hand he was doing what he felt morally obligated to do. On the other he transferred classified information about troop movements to the enemy. That is the one that gets me. With as media driven as al Qaida and other groups have shown themselves to be how many other soldiers did he put in jeopardy? Either way I don't see this ending well for him. Unfortunately what he saw as a moral duty violated both the UCMJ and the US code.

I replied:

What evidence do you have that Manning "transferred classified information about troop movements to the enemy"? I've never seen any evidence of that.

Matt replied:

Part of a battlefield log, which is one of the document types that he leaked is the daily reports of personnel and where they are at including movement of units in theatre. 

I googled "Bradley Manning leaked battlefield log,"  and came up with this:

Bradley does not deny leaking the materials, which include 500,000 battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, he called the “War Logs”.  

He was horrified at what he was seeing and reading about what the US was doing through his job.  

He wanted to provoke public debate about US actions in the wars.  

At a pre-trial hearing in February of this year he said, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the [Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”

What "battlefield logs" Manning released weren't related to anything having to do with active troop movements or future battle plans, from what I have been able to determine.

There are many myths about what damage Manning may have done.  Here is an article on aspects of this, Seven Myths About Bradley Manning, by Chase Madar, who is covering the trial for The Nation.

Here's a short youtube on the Manning trial Madar made recently:


Here is Democracy Now's segment on the trial's beginning, from this morning's edition:

American police and intelligence agencies announced they are monitoring blog posts such as this one closely over the course of the trial [emphasis added]:

The military legal matter expert took multiple questions this morning from reporters. One of the questions related to something that happened yesterday, where Manning supporters were told to turn their black “Truth” T-shirts inside out.  

What the legal matter expert said is that the base had brought in military police from other bases to help with security. One of the officers had apparently taken initiative and thought, since there are strong feelings on both sides, it would be a good idea to have supporters turn the shirts inside-out. This would decrease the possibility that a supporter and opponent of Bradley Manning sat next to each other and got into arguments.  

He went on to add that the military police “can’t read someone’s mind.” They do a “threat assessment.” They knew on Saturday there would be 1600 people who would come. There were demonstrations. They read the comments on the Internet (on stories covering Bradley Manning) and see comments and determine whether they need to follow through on any of them for security.  

What happened yesterday “wasn’t a very targeted decision.” He said it would not happen again.

He's referring to the T-shirt episode, not the internet monitoring.

Hi!