Bradley Manning’s WikiLeaks trial: Book parts delivered as it happens

Leftie publisher O/R Books is covering the Bradley Manning trial for a book slated to appear in October, “The United States vs. PFC Bradley Manning: A Graphic Account From Inside the Courtroom.” The chronicler is Clark Stoeckley -- he’s a WikiLeaks supporter, not an impartial observer, and his courtroom artist-style drawings have an undertone of sympathy for Manning.

Manning’s court-martial began Monday in Fort Meade, Md. Three years ago, Manning was arrested on suspicion of leaking more than 700,000 Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports and State Department cables when he was a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst.

Readers who pre-order the book will get weekly updates via email from the trial that will include drawings, notes and stories from inside the courtroom. Some of this material, but not all, will later be found in “The United States vs. PFC Bradley Manning.”

Looking ahead to what readers of the book can expect, O/R Books writes, “In the course of the trial, Private Manning insists that his release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs to WikiLeaks was an act of conscience, justified by the urgent need to reveal to the world the atrocities committed by the US military in the ostensible cause of freedom. At the prosecution table, military lawyers for the American government seek to set an example and discourage future whistle blowers by locking away Manning for decades, possibly the rest of his life.”

This is not the first book about the issue by O/R. In April 2012 it published “The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History” by journalist and civil rights lawyer Chase Madar; in November 2012 it published WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet” written with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann.

Assange, not surprisingly, supports Manning. In an open statement on WikiLeaks posted as the court-martial began, Assange explains exactly what Manning is on trial for: “The most serious charge against Bradley Manning is that he ‘aided the enemy’ - a capital offence that should require the greatest gravity, but here the US government laughs at the world, to breathe life into a phantom. The government argues that Bradley Manning communicated with a media organisation, WikiLeaks, who communicated to the public. It also argues that al-Qaeda (who else) is a member of the public. Hence, it argues that Bradley Manning communicated ‘indirectly’ with al-Qaeda, a formally declared US ‘enemy’, and therefore that Bradley Manning communicated with ‘the enemy.’”

The court-martial is scheduled to last 12 weeks; the book about it will be published about five weeks later.

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