Bradley Manning may face death penalty
Bradley Manning, the US soldier who has spent 10 months in solitary confinement on suspicion of having transmitted a huge trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, now faces a possible death penalty.
The intelligence specialist, who is being held in the maximum security jail on Quantico marine base in Virginia, has been handed 22 additional military charges as part of his court martial process.
They come on top of initial charges of having illegally obtained 150,000 secret US government cables and handing more than 50 of them to an unauthorised person that carried a possible sentence of up to 52 years in prison.
Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, said that the most serious of the new charges was the Article 104 offence of "aiding the enemy". The charge carries a potential death sentence....
David House, a researcher at MIT who is one of very few people to have visited Manning in prison, told the Firedoglake news website that the "aiding the enemy" charge was similar to Richard Nixon's heavy-handed treatment of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Nixon called Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America" and said he was "providing aid and comfort to the enemy".
"Today we see the Obama administration continuing the legacy Nixon started by declaring whistleblowers as enemies of the state. It is a sad and dangerous day for transparency advocates everywhere," House said.