Marchers want WikiLeaks suspect freed from prison
Andrew Frey (center) of Manhattan, Kan., was one of the marchers who came to Leavenworth on Saturday to protest the government’s handling of the case of WikiLeaks suspect Pfc. Bradley Manning.
About 250 demonstrators from across the nation gathered in Leavenworth on Saturday in a rally supporting the man charged with leaking classified military information to a website.
They credit past rallies and Internet efforts with getting Army Pfc. Bradley Manning transferred in April from harsher prison conditions to a new facility at Fort Leavenworth.
Now they are trying to get him released, they said. They marched for blocks in the hot sun outside the fort waving signs and banners and chanting “Free Bradley Manning.”
Supporters say they have raised $150,000 for Manning’s legal defense and are planning rallies nationwide and an Internet effort worldwide. They think they can apply enough pressure to free Manning.
“It’s going to take a movement like nothing we’ve seen since Vietnam,” said Jeff Paterson of Oakland, Calif., project director for Courage to Resist, a group that works to help military personnel who get in trouble for speaking out or refusing to fight.
Before the march, those gathered listened to spokespeople for a wide range of allied groups including anarchists, anti-war activists, gay rights activists and others.
Paterson and others said that if Manning is guilty, he is a whistleblower who revealed information that should be made public, including a video shot from the cockpit of a helicopter that shows American airmen shooting down a group of men in Baghdad.
Supporters also say diplomatic cables he leaked helped catalyze democratic revolts across the Middle East.
Manning was an intelligence specialist in Baghdad during 2009 and early 2010, when the Army alleges he downloaded classified documents that included details of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that landed on the WikiLeaks website.
Since then the information has been regarded as politically embarrassing and a grave breach of military security.
Before his transfer to Fort Leavenworth, Manning was in solitary confinement in a Marine jail in Quantico, Va. He was forced to sleep in boxers with no blankets or pillow because he was deemed at risk for suicide.
The detention conditions caused State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley to call the treatment “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid.” Crowley was forced to resign days later.
Supporters say they also hope to raise money for billboards supporting Manning in Kansas City and other cities.
He could go to a military trial late this year, they said.
I think Webster Tarpley's take on Wikileaks as an IPS-like intelligence operation is instructive. The movement of well heeled liberals to spring Manning is purely diversionary while Obama's City of London and Wall Street controllers continue to loot this nation with impunity.
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