<nettime> Wikileaks - time to switch the focus: save private Manning!

["Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

For weeks and months now attention has been focused by the mainstream
media, but also by the alternative ones, including nettime, and including
me, on the personage Julian Assange, and on Wikileaks.org in general. I
think it is great time attention and indignation is shifted towards the
fate of the guy who is really paying a high price for his alleged role in
the whole affair: Bradley E. Manning, languishing with a deteriorating
health, in a military jail in Quantico, Virginia, while being held in
solitary confinement and under conditions that easily qualify as torture.

It is fairly obvious that Bradley Manning is sooner or later expected by
his tormentors to 'break' and 'admit' that Wikileaks and Julian Assange
were not so much the recipients of the leaks as the instigators and
engineers of the same, opening the way for indictment in the US of Julian
Assange and possibly a number of other people branded as 'associates'. If
and when that will have been achieved, Bradley Manning can look forward a
very long time in detention - the rumor has 52 years, something he's
unlikely to survive - and his fate also forsaken for that of more famous
defendants.

I believe this is grossly unfair and calls for redress. Without denying
the importance of watching developments around Wikileaks and what happens
with its somewhat quixotic supremo, I am getting worried and upset by the
fact that this gets far more attention, concern, and I dare say sympathy,
at the expense of pressure and campaigning in favor of Bradley Manning,
who, like every other defendant, deserves human conditions of detention
and a fair trial.

Let's say "Goodbye Julian!" for some time and focus our efforts on Bradley
Manning. He is, whatever the merits of his case, the true underdog here.


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