Bradley Manning has spent more than 1,000 days in jail, and only recently has he finally faced trial for charges stemming from his leaking of thousands of US government and military documents to WikiLeaks. He pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges without a plea deal, and now likely faces 20 years in jail. He also gave a speech at the trial, outlining why he did what he did, but while transcripts of the speech were made available, recordings of the supposedly-public trial were not released.But one individual managed to sneak in a recording device, and released audio to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has the full audio as well as .mp3 and .ogg downloads available. (The Foundation also has an embed available, but I can't get it to work.)The video above, by Laura Poitras, matches one of the key points of Manning's testimony–his reactions to the so-called "collateral urder" video, which shows an Apache helicopter crew kill a group of suspected insurgents, which actually turned out to be civilians and Reuters journalists–to the video itself. It's pretty chilling stuff.The Foundation's entire statement is worth reading, but this paragraph stood out:We hope this recording will shed light on one of the most secret court trials in recent history, in which the government is putting on trial a concerned government employee whose only stated goal was to bring attention to what he viewed as serious governmental misconduct and criminal activity. We hope to prompt additional analysis of these proceedings by other journalistic institutions and the public at large. While we are not equipped (technically or as a matter of human resources) to receive leaked information nor do we plan on receiving them in the future, we are proud to publish and analyze this particular recording because it is so clearly matches our mission of supporting transparency journalism.The analysis and discussion that the Foundation calls for is exactly what's at the core of the entire Manning saga. The War on Terror has given the past two White House administrations an incredible ability to obfuscate information and kill discussion.That lack of questioning, from citizens and the press, is why the Bush administration was so easily able to sell a lie about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to sell the Iraq war, and it's why Obama spends more time shooting hoops than answering questions about kill matrices.It's a sad state of affairs when the biggest whistleblower in this time of bloated counterterror budgets and secrecy must wait more than three years to plead guilty to his crimes, but it's even sadder–and perfectly fitting–that someone had to sneak out the tape of him doing so.@derektmead
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