Bradley Manning is at the center of the WikiLeaks controversy. But who is he?

In January 2010, more than 130 people gathered to celebrate the opening of Room B-28, a “hacker space” in the basement of the computer science building at Boston University. The room had two rows of computers running open-source software, and, in conformity to the hacker ethic, its walls were painted with wildly colored murals, extensions of the free expression to be practiced there. That was the reason for the power tools, too — in case someone wanted to build something amazing and beautiful, such as the musical staircase, under construction now, that chimes when you step on it.

One of the visitors was a young Army specialist named Bradley Manning, on leave from duty in Iraq. He had been working with computers, modifying code, since he was a kid. David House, founder of the hacker space, said he immediately sensed that Manning “was in the community,” someone who understood how technology could be empowering. This was the sort of world Manning hoped to inhabit one day, friends said. He had joined the Army so the GI Bill would finance his education. He had his eye on a PhD in physics.

Days later, he would be on a plane back to Baghdad and a culture where rule-breaking was not celebrated. And eight months after that, House — who had chatted with the man for barely 15 minutes — went to visit him in the brig at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, where Manning was being held as the prime suspect inthe largest national security leak in U.S. history.

He is accused of violating military computer security and leaking classified information to the insurgent Web site WikiLeaks. He faces 22 charges, including “aiding the enemy,” a capital crime. The material includes a video of an Apache helicopter firing on civilians in Baghdad, daily field reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a quarter-million cables from U.S. diplomats around the world. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has called the cable leaks “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests.”

Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/who_is_wikileaks_suspect_bradley_manning/2011/04/16/AFMwBmrF_singlePage.html

This article will appear in the Washington Post Magazine on Sunday and was written by Ellen Nakashima.

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through struggling with his gay identity and his terrible family problems. No one really cared about him and he really his remarkable that he managed to survive it all.

From reading this I would blame our State Department and Military for not securing the information. It was all out there loosely guarded until a young man who was upset with what were doing in Iraq and who felt that the information he was coding in his Army service needed to get out there so people could see what was going on.

To me he's definitely a Whistle Blower. He brilliant in computers programming/coding who exposed a flaw in our intelligence gathering information from State Department that a Spy from another country could have used against us. Bradley has exposed this and they are trying to railroad him into Court Martial.

If anyone has time...this article is worth a bookmark to read over the weekend. It answers "Who is Brandley Manning."

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