The now 24 year old United States Army soldier was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq, suspected of allegedly passing classified material to the website WikiLeaks. According to Wikipedia, he was charged in July 2010 with transferring classified data onto his personal computer, and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source. In March of this year, another 22 charges were filed, including "aiding the enemy," which is a capital offense, though, for now, prosecutors aren't seeking the death penalty.
According to the WikiLeaks website, ''WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to our journalists. We publish material of ethical, political and historical significance while keeping the identity of our sources anonymous, thus providing a universal way for the revealing of suppressed and censored injustices.''
According to the April 10th guardian.uk.com article, ''Bradley Manning: top US legal scholars voice outrage at 'torture''', over 250 of America's most prominent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting Manning's treatment, calling it ''degrading and inhumane'', as well as illegal, unconstitutional, and perhaps even torturous.
Bradleymanning.org is a website dedicated to freeing the man. A quick surf of the net produces hundreds of hits for blogs, articles and other online content discussing the controversy. Several human rights groups have voiced their opposition against Manning's treatment, including Amnesty International.
Interestingly, Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, widely considered America's most expert liberal authority on constitutional law, is among those who've signed the letter of protest. Barack Obama was a student of Tribe's; as well Tribe was a key supporter of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.
Tribe's involvement, along with hundreds of other legal scholars can perhaps only be described as a stinging embarrassment to Obama, who was himself a professor of constitutional law. But so far, Obama has been fairly reticent on the issue, being quoted only as having said about Manning's treatment that it was ''appropriate and meets our basic standards.''
In the guardian.uk.com article, Tribe was quoted as saying Manning's treatment was wrong ''in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences.''
Even with that being said, and despite all of the cries for greater leniency, despite the fact that America's justice system is built on the foundation of ‘innocent until proven guilty', it's seemingly difficult to have sympathy for one who's committed what many deem as heinous acts against the American government and the American people, acts whose consequences can only be described as harmful, far reaching and difficult to measure - not just now, but for years to come. It's impossible to know how many future acts of terrorism, suffering and other treachery could result from Manning's actions. In posts at the democraticunderground.com, this point of view is summed up in a few succinct sentences: ''The guy leaked classified info. He's lucky he's still breathing.''
