Salon.com > David Dishneau

Bradley Manning’s trial delayed in WikiLeaks case

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 19:50:00 +0000

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) -- The trial of an Army private charged with sending U.S. secrets to the website WikiLeaks is being pushed back from February to March.

Military judge Col. Denise Lind announced the change Sunday at a pretrial hearing at Fort Meade for Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning's trial was set to begin Feb. 4. But Lind says pretrial proceedings will push the start date back to either March 6 or March 18.

The hearing is to determine whether the highly restrictive conditions Manning experienced for nine months were justified. The defense claims the restrictions were so punishing that the case should be dismissed.

Two psychiatrists have testified that the brig commander kept Manning tightly confined despite their recommendations to ease them.

The 24-year-old is charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy. He could get life in prison.

Marines defend making WikiLeaks suspect sleep nude

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 21:01:00 +0000

The Army private suspected of giving classified U.S. documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks was stripped of all clothing for two nights to keep him from hurting himself in his military jail cell, a Marine Corps spokesman said Friday.

The brig commander issued the order Wednesday, the same day Pfc. Bradley Manning was hit with a new charge -- aiding the enemy -- that could carry the death penalty.

Manning's civilian lawyer, David Coombs, called the treatment degrading. He said the brig commander, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Denise Barnes, issued the order without consulting the brig's mental health providers. Coombs has repeatedly complained that Manning's strict confinement conditions are punitive, a charge the military had denied.

"There can be no conceivable justification for requiring a soldier to surrender all his clothing, remain naked in his cell for seven hours, and then stand at attention the subsequent morning," Coombs wrote on his blog.

But 1st Lt. Brian Villiard said Barnes was striving to keep Manning safe, secure and able to stand trial.

"The circumstances required that his clothing be removed as a precaution to ensure that he didn't harm himself," Villiard said.

Discovery hostages planned escape as gunman was killed

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:33:00 +0000

As the three hostages at Discovery Channel's headquarters appeared ready to make a run for it, police said Thursday that a SWAT team officer quickly shot and killed the increasingly agitated gunman who had explosives strapped to himself, ending the four-hour standoff.

After several hours of negotiations, the tactical officers moved in. Authorities saw the hostages begin to move on building security cameras and heard a "pop" they believed to be a gunshot or an explosive device, Montgomery County Police Chief Thomas Manger said. That's when an officer shot the gunman, James J. Lee, in the lobby of the building in Silver Spring, just outside the nation's capital. None of the hostages were hurt.

"For most of the time, the hostages were laying on the ground, and he didn't engage them much other than saying on the phone, 'I don't care about these people,'" Manger said.

Lee had said he hated the company's shows such as "Kate Plus 8," claiming they promoted population growth. Lee said the environmental programming did little to save the planet.

Manger said police planned to negotiate as long as necessary, but acted when officers believed the hostages were trying to escape.

Oil spill work stalls as Bonnie races toward Gulf

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:38:37 +0000

Work to permanently choke off BP's broken oil well stalled Friday as Tropical Storm Bonnie raced toward the Gulf of Mexico and dozens of ships evacuated the area.

Engineers are so confident in the stability of an experimental plug -- which has mostly throttled the oil for more than a week -- that they won't open it even if the storm hits directly. They'll likely lose sight of the temporary cap for at least a few days.

The storm blossomed over the Bahamas and was to enter the Gulf of Mexico by the weekend, and a tropical storm watch was issued early Friday for the northern Gulf coast from Destin, Fla., to Morgan City, La.

The rough weather could delay by another 12 days the push to plug the broken well for good using mud and cement, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen and BP officials conceded. Even if it's not a direct hit, the rough weather will push back efforts to kill the well by at least a week.

"While this is not a hurricane, it's a storm that will have probably some significant impacts, we're taking appropriate cautions," Allen said in Mobile, Ala.

Bonnie had maximum sustained winds near 40 mph Friday as it swirled about 80 miles south-southeast of Miami.

Weather threatens to shut down BP’s Gulf well work

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:24:00 +0000

Rain storms moving toward the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday threatened to shut down undersea efforts to seal BP's ruptured well, interrupting work just as engineers get close to plugging the leak with mud and cement.

Retired U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said tropical weather could force crews on the water to abandon their watch over the experimental cap that's been bottling oil a mile below the surface of the water for nearly a week.

Scientists have been closely watching to determine if the cap is displacing pressure and causing leaks underground. If they can't observe the cap because of bad weather -- for up to four days, Allen said -- they could decide to reopen the cap to avoid missing signs the well is buckling.

Forecasters say the storm system will likely move into the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend, although it appears to be weakening. Right now, it has a 60 percent chance of becoming a tropical depression or storm within the next 48 hours.

In Florida, crews were removing protective boom intended to buffer the state's inland waterways in the Panhandle from oil. High winds and storm surge could carry the boom into sensitive wetlands, damaging those areas.

Alleged Army whistleblower Bradley Manning felt angry and alone

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:21:00 +0000

With his custom-made "humanist" dog tags and distrust of authority, Bradley Manning was no conventional soldier.

Ostracized by peers in Baghdad, busted for assaulting a fellow soldier and disdainful of the military's inattention to computer security, the 22-year-old intelligence analyst styled himself a "hactivist."

On Tuesday, the U.S. Army charged him with multiple counts of mishandling and leaking classified data and putting national security at risk.

Manning is suspected of leaking a classified video that shows a group of men walking down the street in Iraq before being repeatedly shot by Apache helicopters.

In a series of online chats in late May with a fellow computer geek, Manning claimed he had leaked a staggering 260,000 classified diplomatic reports, along with secret video of U.S. service members killing civilians, to the whistleblower website Wikileaks.org.

Whether or not Manning was the source, Wikileaks in April posted a video clips shot from a cockpit in 2007, of excited, laughing U.S. troops gunning down a group of men that included a Reuters news photographer and his driver. An internal military investigation concluded the troops acted appropriately, despite having mistaken camera equipment for weapons.