He was back in the news last week, and the New York Times takes a look back at this sad story:
Private Manning said the first set of documents he decided to release consisted of hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Afghanistan and Iraq.... Those reports added up to a history of the “day-to-day reality” in both war zones that he believed showed the flaws in the counterinsurgency policy the United States was then pursuing. The military, he said, was “obsessed with capturing or killing” people on a list, while ignoring the impact of its operations on ordinary people. [...]
Private Manning eventually decided to release the information by uploading it to WikiLeaks. To do it, he said, he used a broadband connection at a Barnes & Noble store because his aunt’s house in a Maryland suburb, where he was staying, had lost its Internet connection in a snowstorm.In February 2010, after he returned to Iraq, Private Manning sent more files to WikiLeaks, including a helicopter gunship video of a 2007 episode in Iraq in which American forces killed a group of men, including two Reuters journalists, and then fired again on a van that pulled up to help the victims.Private Manning said the video troubled him, both because of the shooting of the second group of people, who “were not a threat but merely good Samaritans,” and because of what he described as the “seemingly delightful blood lust” expressed by the airmen in the recording. He also learned that Reuters had been seeking the video without success.
