Bradley Manning Defense Issues Closing Statements

JUST GOES TO SHOW WHAT LENGTHS A CRIMINAL (AUTHORITARIAN) GOVERNMENT WILL GO TO TO KEEP THE TRUTH FROM BEING OUTED!

Nathan Fuller at Bradleymanning.org has given us gracious permission to reprint his daily firsthand reports, which you can find below highlighted by date. Summaries, commentary, and videos provide a comprehensive chronicle of events from start to finish.

Defense closes argument, Bradley was humanist whistle-blower: trial report, day 22

By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. July 26, 2013

Defense lawyer David Coombs made his closing argument in Pfc. Bradley Manning’s court martial, portraying the Army private as a humanist who valued all human life, and a whistle-blower who felt the American public needed to see what he saw in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Coombs played the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, asking military judge Col. Denise Lind to watch it in the eyes of a young, naïve, idealistic soldier who couldn’t disregard human life, no matter whose it was. He narrated, “Nine lives were extinguished…did they need to die?” 

Reviewing what he called the government’s “child’s logic,” Coombs pointed out several basicinconsistencies in its theories, such as the contention that Manning sought both notoriety and anonymity. He showed how prosecutors cherry-picked Manning’s comments, taking them out of vital context. The government brought up his chat IM with Adrian Lamo, asking, 

If you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight-plus months, what would you do?

But the full quote is,

Hypothetical question: If you had free reign over classified networks over a long period of time, if you saw incredible things, awful things, things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C., what would you do?

By excluding Manning’s reference to “incredible things, awful things,” the government tried to paint him as reckless and eager to work for WikiLeaks no matter what the documents exposed. But the whole quote reveals Manning the whistle-blower, the humanist who witnessed horrifying things that he knew were being kept secret from his fellow Americans...
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