Bradley E. Manning (born December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed restricted material to the website WikiLeaks. He was charged in July that year with transferring classified data onto his personal computer, and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source. An additional 22 charges were preferred in March 2011, including "aiding the enemy," a capital offense, though prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty. He was found fit to face court martial in April 2011, and currently awaits the first hearing.
Manning had been assigned in October 2009 to a unit of the 10th Mountain Division, based near Baghdad. There he had access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), used by the United States government to transmit classified information. He was arrested after Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, reported to the FBI that Manning had told him during online chats in May 2010 that he had downloaded material from SIPRNet and passed it to WikiLeaks. The leaked material is said to have included 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables; footage of a July 2007 Baghdad airstrike; and footage of the May 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan.
Manning was held in maximum custody beginning in July 2010 in the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico, Virginia, which in effect meant solitary confinement, conditions that Amnesty International called harsh and punitive. In April 2011, 295 scholars, including legal scholars and philosophers signed a letter saying the conditions he experienced amounted to a violation of the U.S. Constitution; later that month the Pentagon transferred him to a medium-security facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, allowing him to interact with other pre-trial detainees.
An article 32 hearing will be held on December 16 in Fort Meade, Maryland.
From : www.wikipedia.org
