The man who provided the video of the US military massacring civilians in Baghdad to WikiLeaks has been formally charged. Private 1st Class Bradley Manning who is 22 years old and is being charged with leaking classified information. He is currently being held in Kuwait and faces up to 52 years in prison.

The US military is claiming that Manning released classified information “with reason to believe that the information would cause injury to the United States,” according to a release from US Division Center in Iraq.

Manning is an intelligence analyst in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division in Iraq. He was arrested after he foolishly admitted to an online acquaintance that he had internal military and State Department documents and communications which included the original massacre.

The online person who turned him in also revealed that Manning had supplies Wikileaks with footage showing a May 2009 US air strike near the village of Garani in Afghanistan that killed more than 100 people including children.

A US military “investigation” revealed the troops who committed the massacre were not guilty of a war crime because the civilians were supposedly in the company of insurgents; and there for fair gme for killing. The public backlash over the incident was intense sparking much anger from Americans and many around the world.

Bradley Manning stands no chance of walking away from this charge. No doubt the Obama administration and the US military are going to make an example of him. They are going to show that if you expose the true nature of the imperialist occupation of Iraq and its murderous consequences, you will suffer the penalty.

The people who should be on trial here are those who murdered the civilians, those who covered it up, the person who turned Manning in the military, the people prosecuting him and the Obama administration.

This is another prime example of how much free speech one has under capitalism and its lackeys.