No Link Between Bradley Manning and Assange

NBC news Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reports that the Pentagon acknowledges that its investigators “have been unable to make any direct connection between” Manning’s alleged leaking of the documents in question, and Assange. If this is true it will likely present serious obstacles to US-based criminal proceedings against Assange.

According to The Registar, NBC news, citing unnamed investigating officials, state US authorities have been unable to find conclusive proof that Wikileaks' vast stashes of secret material – the Baghdad attack-copter videos, Afghanistan and Iraq "war logs" and now the endless mountains of US diplomatic cables being drip-fed by the site – were passed to it by Private Bradley Manning, incarcerated for over 260 days in a US Marine Corps brig (jail) in Virginia.

Meanwhile, Manning, has been subjected to sleep deprivation, barred from exercising in the slightest, and recently, improperly placed by the Quantico base commander on suicide watch - meaning his clothing and his reading glasses were removed. This was "punishment" for "disobeying" the orders of the guards. However, after news of this order got out and the resultant publicity over it, the commander rescinded the order, even being upbraded by the Pentagon for allegedly overstepping his authority. A useful indication that public pressure in this case can help.

The blatant aim of this abuse, now being investigated by a UN human rights investigator, has been to crush his spirit, in hopes of getting him to agree to implicate Julian Assange into inducing him to leak the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, visual tapes of Iraq and Afghan war reports, as well as the helicopter murder, now known as the "Collateral Murder" video, and US State Department cables, all of which have been undermining the US war effort and the US diplomatic agenda.

They are failing, it seems, because Manning has more ethics than those that have incarcerated him without a trial for half a year.