© Drawing by Clark Stoekley via Flickr
After more than 900 days of detainment in United States military jails for allegedly disclosing state secrets, the haunting imprisonment of accused WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning was discussed in court for the first time at the latest round of pretrial motion hearings that began on Nov. 27 in Fort Meade, MD. Below is an account of those court proceedings. The case will continue intermittently into 2013.--
If there's a bad time to discuss holiday shopping, it's while waiting for someone to describe being tortured.
I was soaking wet and still half asleep when our driver turned to the back seat of the press shuttle and said something so totally irrelevant and ill-timed that I knew right then and there that she was either innocently naïve or politely retarded.
"Can you believe it," she said,
"Christmas is already less than a month away."Festive fucking cheer is not particularly on the mind, at least not on this Tuesday morning at Fort Meade, Maryland. The sprawling 6.6-square mile United States Army base just outside of Washington, DC is the venue for the pretrial motion hearings in the case against Private First Class Bradley Manning. By the time the trial is over, a soldier considered a hero by some could be sentenced to life in prison. I was likely not the only one uninterested in having a holly jolly ol' time, but that didn't do anything to change the fact that our driver had just adjusted the FM dial to pick up "Santa Baby."
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When only 22 years old, Pfc. Manning was arrested at his barrack in Baghdad and dragged off to Kuwait, then to perhaps the worst locale yet - Quantico, Virginia - for the longest stretch of the two-and-a-half years of imprisonment that's been condemned by the United Nations and Nobel laureates as tantamount to torture. Pfc. Manning won't be court-martialed by a military judge until next March, and at that point he'll likely have spent over 1,000 days - ten percent of his life - in solitary confinement.
This, of course, is because the US says Manning took 250,000 diplomatic embassy cables and a trove of sensitive military documents and sent them to the website WikiLeaks. Among the documents Pfc. Manning allegedly leaked are the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs, secret diplomatic communications, and a video of US soldiers firing at Iraqi civilians and journalists from the air in a clip that was dubbed "Collateral Murder."
Comment: In light of this failure to connect Nancy Lanza to the Sandy Hook school, the perception managers are now painting her as a gun-toting survivalist who home-schooled her son Adam, "worried about economic collapse" and was "stockpiling".
We've come a long way from the police "confirming" that the gunman's mother was a kindergarten teacher and was among the dead the school...