from the answering-questions-of-patriotism dept.
Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old U.S. Army soldier who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of internal memos about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been held by the government for two and a half years. On Thursday he pleaded guilty 10 of 22 charges brought against him, and now he has released an official statement. Here’s an excerpt: “On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by special link. … I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to the Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying ‘It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information– perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day. After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday.”
