Bradley Manning He is Not The Big Bad Munster but A Kid
Manning reportedly joined the Army to help pay for college
There is so much to learn from this young man and from the way our government uses it's soldiers. Here we have millions of leaks together with the Snowden case and no one has taken responsibility for any of it. They have sent Manning originally with outrageous charges that if found guilty he would have faced the firing squad. The government is made to drop the worse of them but they just stock it up like they didn’t know for sure what he did and if found guilty of something it might just covered what ever he was guilty of. I found the following on the BBC and is something to start knowing this gay individual and why he acted the way he did. I can’t criticize him because the one to blame is not a kid but the big collecting machine the government continues to build on the NIS.
No one else but Manning is paid any price. If the crime is so big how can it only involve only one person. Who did he answer to? Who gave him the responsibility, who oversaw what he did?
US Pte First Class Bradley Manning lip-synced to Lady Gaga while he downloaded thousands of classified documents from military servers, according to a computer hacker he befriended.
Now, the 25-year-old soldier faces up to 90 years in prison after being convicted of 20 of 22 charges against him in connection with the leaks. He was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy.
As an intelligence analyst in the US Army, Pte Manning was given access to a large amount of highly sensitive information.
But as a private first class, he was very low-ranking with a relatively meagre wage.
According to his friends, he had become frustrated with a military career that appeared to be stagnating.
'Funny little character'
And his personal life appears to have hit a downward spiral after he was posted to Iraq in 2009.
Pte Manning joined the army in 2007 after drifting through low-paid jobs.
He had been brought up in Crescent, a small town in Oklahoma. His father, Brian, had reportedly spent five years in the military.
But his parents divorced when he was a teenager, and he moved with his mother to Haverfordwest in south-west Wales.
As a teenager, he was said to have been a hothead who was often teased for being a geek.
"He would get upset, slam books on the desk if people wouldn't listen to him or understand his point of view," a classmate from Oklahoma, Chera Moore, told the New York Times.
A friend from his schooldays in Wales, James Kirkpatrick,told the BBC he was a "funny little character, really on the ball" who was obsessed with computers.
Some reports say he had a difficult time in Wales, and suffered abuse for being gay.
Turned in
After finishing school, he returned to the US and joined the army. Friends say he enlisted to help pay for college.
He was deployed to Iraq in October 2009. But messages he posted on Facebook suggest he was far from happy.
He wrote in early May 2010 on the site that he was "beyond frustrated with people and society at large".
Other status updates followed, among them: "Bradley Manning is not a piece of equipment."
A week earlier, he had written: "Bradley Manning is now left with the sinking feeling that he doesn't have anything left."
Some of the postings appear to refer to a recent breakdown of a relationship.
But weeks later his words appeared prophetic when he was arrested by military investigators on suspicion of stealing secret information.
Self-confessed computer hacker Adrian Lamo told the world's media how Pte Manning had confessed to the data theft during conversations they had on the internet.
"Listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history," Pte Manning wrote, according to a transcript of their messages published on Wired's website.
"Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis… a perfect storm."
Mr Lamo went to the authorities with the messages.
During a sentencing hearing at his court martial in August 2013, a military psychiatrist testified that Pte Manning had struggled with his gender identity and wanted to become a woman at the time of the leak.
In March 2011, the US Army charged Pte Manning with 22 counts relating to the unauthorised possession and distribution of more than 720,000 secret diplomatic and military documents.
Among the files he passed to Wikileaks was video footage of an Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
An apt location
Wikileaks released tens of thousands of documents relating to the Afghan war.
The website later disclosed thousands of sensitive messages written by US diplomats and military records from the Iraq war, causing growing embarrassment to the US government.
Pte Manning told the court he had leaked the documents to spark a public debate in the US about the role of the military and about US foreign policy.
Officials say Fort Meade was chosen because its military court is one of the largest in the Washington area.
But the base is also the home of the National Security Agency, the high-security code-breaking and intelligence service.
For a man accused of the largest leak of official secrets in modern times, the location could hardly be more apt.
BBC
Adam Gonzalez
Comments