Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was sentenced on Wednesday by a
military judge to 35 years in prison after having been convicted of espionage
for leaking classified U.S. military and diplomatic materials to the anti-secrecy
group WikiLeaks in 2010.
Bradley Manning, who is now 25, will likely be moved to the
Army’s central prison in Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. Bradley Manning’s lawyers are
planning to file appeals against his conviction and are petitioning his
release, a highly unlikely situation.
Bradley Manning's legal team is also asking the White House
to pardon their client and Bradley Manning himself wrote a letter to President
Obama to ask for pardon.
Below is the text of Bradley Manning’s letter to President
Obama requesting pardon as read by defense attorney David Coombs following Bradley
Manning’s sentencing on Wednesday:
"The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer
to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret
military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of
what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to
meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We
consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we
engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent
civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting
responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national
security and classified information in order to avoid any public
accountability.
In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the
definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due
process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the
Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war
on terror.
Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally
questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of
patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American
soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of
democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the
Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many
of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag
large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if
my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to
hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified
information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to
others.
If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time
knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.
I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men
are created equal."
