Private First Class (PFC)
Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence analyst, has been in custody and held in solitary confinement since May 2010, when he was arrested in Iraq on suspicion of leaking the
Collateral Murder video. The video shows the July 2007 US attack in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, shot from the gun-sight of one of the US Apache helicopters involved. Around a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, were killed. Two children in a van driven by a rescue party were seriously injured in a further US attack. The US initially claimed that all the dead were Iraqi 'insurgents' and that the killings took place in a 'battle'. Reuters had been trying to obtain the footage from the primary helicopter involved since August 2007, but it was
WikiLeaks that eventually released the video evidence of what really happened that day.
Bradley Manning has been charged with leaking this footage. He was initially held in Kuwait before being moved to a military jail in Virginia, US. He is also suspected of being the source of the
Afghan War Diary, the
Iraq War Logs and 250,000 previously secret
diplomatic cables to and from US embassies around the world.
Until Julian Assange hit the headlines big time a few weeks ago, Bradley Manning's name and his plight had been barely mentioned in the mainstream British media once the initial interest in the release of the Collateral Murder video had died down. Manning has been even less frequently referred to by members of Britain's anti-war movement, something that can and should change, especially here in Wales given Bradley Manning's close connections: his mother is Welsh and his early teenage years were spent here.
