Bradley Manning is now my neighbor~! I live all of ten miles from Fort Leavenworth.
WikiLeaks Suspect Transferred to Fort Leavenworth
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 19, 2011
Updated: April 20, 2011 at 4:43 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Army private suspected of illegally passing U.S. government secrets to the WikiLeaks website was transferred Wednesday to an Army prison in Kansas from the Marine brig in Virginia where he has spent the past nine months.
After having skimmed Ralph Lopez' diary, I began to wonder about Bradley Manning's mother. I wondered how she was getting through this. I did a quick Google on his parents, only to find Bradley was being transferred to Fort Leavenworth.
An Army spokesman at the Pentagon, Col. Tom Collins, said Manning arrived safely at the Joint Regional Correctional Facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., on Wednesday afternoon. Over the coming five to seven days he will undergo an in-depth physical and behavioral assessment by Leavenworth staff, Collins said.
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Shortly after the Pentagon announced its decision to transfer Manning, the soldier's lawyer, David Coombs, wrote on his blog that his client's treatment at Quantico was substandard.
"While the defense hopes that the move to Fort Leavenworth will result in the improvement of Pfc. Manning's conditions of confinement, it nonetheless intends to pursue redress at the appropriate time for the flagrant violations of his constitutional rights by the Quantico confinement facility," Coombs wrote.
From
Wikipedia (not Wikileaks) I found what I was looking for in my initial search. Who is Bradley Manning? Who are his parents? What was his life like as a kid?
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 currently awaits a hearing to decide whether he will face a court martial.[2]
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Manning and an older sister were born in Crescent, Oklahoma, to an American father, Brian Manning, and his wife, Susan Fox, who was born in 1953 in Haverfordwest, Wales.[1]
His father had been in the United States Navy for five years, and his parents met when his father was stationed in Wales at Cawdor Barracks. Manning was raised in Crescent, where his father worked as an IT manager for a rental car agency.
He was small for his age—as an adult, he reached just 5 ft 2 in (1.57 m) and weighed 105 lb (47.6 kg)—good at the saxophone, science, and computer games, and even in elementary school had said he wanted to join the U.S. Army. One teacher told reporters that Manning was smart and opinionated, but was never in trouble.
He was one of the few people in his community who openly rejected religion; David Leigh and Luke Harding write that he would refuse to do homework related to the Bible, and remained silent during the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance.
They also write that his father was strict with him, which may have contributed to his becoming introverted and withdrawn, something that deepened when at age 13 he began to realize he was gay.[7]
There's too much at Wikipedia to blockquote. If you're interested in who Bradley Manning is as a human being aside from being the young man now housed in the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth do go read it.
I find this turn of events filled with irony as in 2009 there was much talk around here about the Guantanamo prisoners possibly being housed at Ft. Leavenworth. Below is a story from an alternative paper in Kansas City, MO.
Why can't we have Guantanamo's prisoners?
By CJ Janovy, Fri., Jan. 16 2009 @ 7:30AM
Last week, Kansas Senators Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts said no way do they want the suspected terrorists shipped to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
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"Transferring Guantanamo detainees to Fort Leavenworth would be unwise and unsafe," Brownback continued. "If the holding facility at Guantanamo Bay is closed, a new facility should be built, designed specifically to handle detainees." Building a whole new prison?
I wish I could just go over there and have a coffee with him and just ask him, "Bradley? Tell me what happened."
Also, I want to introduce you to our own kgosztola. His Profile page reads as follows:
kgosztola's Profile
I'm an intern for The Nation, editor for OpEdNews.com, writer for WLCentral.org, and I assist Greg Mitchell with his daily WikiLeaks blog. I contributed sections to Mitchell's books "The Age of WikiLeaks" and "Bradley Manning: Truth & Consequences."