The People's Record

Pfc. B. Manning has now spent more than 1,000 days imprisoned without trial. The legal limit for military court is 120 days. 

Manning allegedly released classified cables to Wikileaks, including the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan War logs, the Iraq War logs, State Department cables & Guantanamo Bay files. 

The soldier has been imprisoned in conditions which Juan Mendez, a UN Special Rapporteur on torture deemed “cruel, inhumane & degrading”. Manning faces 22 charges. The most significant charge is that of “aiding the enemy.” If convicted of “aiding the enemy,” they would serve life in prison without parole. 

The leaks have revealed indiscriminate murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the murder of two Reuters journalists among a group of unarmed civilians in Baghdad, prisoner abuse & torture in Iraq, US officials covering up child abuse by private contractors, such as DynCorp, in Afghanistan, hundreds of innocent people are being held at Guantanamo, an official account of civilian deaths in Iraq & Afghanistan that the Obama administration previously maintained didn’t exist (between 2004 and 2009, the U.S. government counted a total of 109,000 deaths in Iraq, with 66,081 classified as non-combatants), the inner-workings of Obama’s then-secret drone campaign in Yemen among other incidents of corruption & crimes against humanity.

Manning has become the face of Obama’s war on whistleblowers, an attempt to shield the government’s war crimes & human rights violations.