User:Geraldshields11/sandbox/Manning

wikileaks

On February 28, 2013, Pfc. Bradley Manning confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to WikiLeaks. He pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the huge amount of material he leaked, which included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and a quarter-million cables from American diplomats stationed around the world. He read a statement recounting how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain files should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about foreign policy, downloaded them from a secure computer network and then ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.

When Col. Denise Lind, the judge, asked Private Manning to explain how he could admit that his actions were wrong, Private Manning replied, "Your Honor, regardless of my opinion or my assessment of documents such as these, it's beyond my pay grade -- it's not my authority to make these decisions about releasing confidential files."

Manning put the files on a digital storage card for his camera and took it home with him on a leave in early 2010. He then decided to give the files to a newspaper. He first called The Washington Post but the reporter was not interested then he tried to contact The New York Times by calling a phone number for the newspaper's public editor and leaving a voice mail message that was not returned. In January 2010, he called the public editor's line at Bloomberg News but got no response. Later, Manning copied the files and uploading them to WikiLeaks, through its Web site, and later using a directory the group designated for him on a "cloud drop box" server. Manning was frustrated that WikiLeaks did not publish files about 15 people for printing "anti-Iraqi" pamphlets. After uploading the files, he was increasingly engaged in online conversations with someone from WikiLeaks, who Manning said he assumed was a senior figure, like Julian Assange, its founder, but, in retrospect, he said the relationship was "artificial."