Bradley Manning is escorted from a military vehicle to the court facility at Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP
For seven days, a makeshift court inside a sprawling military base in Maryland has been hearing evidence in a case that that has raised questions of freedom of speech, the practices of US army intelligence, gender identity and the place of gay personnel in the armed services.
Sitting sometimes in secret, at other times in a kind of pseudo-public forum, this idiosyncratic court has been considering whether a full court martial should be held for Bradley Manning, an army intelligence analyst with a troubled background who is alleged to be the source of the biggest leak of US state secrets in history.
Manning faces a potential life sentence if army investigators can prove he passed the information to WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website founded by the mercurial Julian Assange....read more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/23/bradley-manning-pre-trial-hearing
