Manning plea statement: Americans had a right to know 'true cost of war'

[marmar]

(Guardian UK) Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of the biggest unauthorised disclosure of state secrets in US history, has pleaded guilty to being the source of the leak, telling a military court that he passed the information to a whistleblowing website because he believed the American people had a right to know the "true costs of war".

At a pre-trial hearing on a Maryland military base, Manning, 25, who faces spending the rest of his life in military custody, read out a 35-page statement in which he gave an impassioned account of his motives for transmitting classified documents and videos he had obtained while working as an intelligence analyst outside Baghdad.

Sitting at the defence bench in a hushed courtroom, Manning said he was sickened by the apparent "bloodlust" of a helicopter crew involved in an attack on a group in Baghdad that turned out to include Reuters correspondents and children.

He believed the Afghan and Iraq war logs published by the WikiLeaks website, initially in association with a consortium of international media organisations that included the Guardian, were "among the more significant documents of our time revealing the true costs of war". The decision to pass the classified information to a public website was motivated, he told the court, by his depression about the state of military conflict in which the US was mired. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/28/bradley-manning-trial-plea-statement

[sabrina 1]

1. What a concept. The American people had a right to know what was being done in

their name. Poor Manning, he really believed all that 'patriotism' stuff. He believe we were the 'good guys' in Iraq and elsewhere, because Bush and his propaganda machine formally known as the US media, told him so.

Well, he's learned his lesson now. What he revealed in the War Logs was what was supposed to happen, NOT what our leaders tell us publicly, and he foolishly exposed the lies.

Let that be a lesson to anyone else who believed the lies and then saw the truth. And I'm sure it has been.

Shameful to see the whistle-blower being persecuted like this while the war criminals are protected, ironically as the leaked cables proved beyond a doubt.

Regardless, he knew what the consequences would be and still did the right thing. If only there were thousands more like him, imagine, war criminals would be prosecuted and torture would be regarded as a crime here, among other things.