Read and Hear Bradley Manning's Full (Redacted) Statement on the Wikileak

Bradley Manning's brave lawyer just published the full statement that the young private read aloud in his pretrial hearing last month, detailing how and why he gave government secrets to WikiLeaks.

Bradley Manning's brave lawyer just published the full statement that the young private read aloud in his pretrial hearing last month, detailing how and why he gave government secrets to WikiLeaks. It is, predictably, redacted, but much to our surprise the censorship is scant. It appears that only a handful of individual and organization names got the black out treatment. Otherwise, it's a pretty raw, however carefully worded account of Manning's infamous info heist and resulting relationship with WikiLeaks. Assuming he's actually the one who wrote the 34-page document, it's also the first time we've heard Manning's voice in quite some some time. It's terribly detailed and jargon-filled, banal at times but inevitably revealing.

Normally, this sort of document would be old news by now. Manning read the statement at Fort Meade almost two weeks ago, but because the trial is shrouded in such secrecy, details trickled out almost exclusively from the Twitter accounts of the few civilians and reporters in the courtroom. While we've heard about some of the more revealing passages — the one where Manning explained how he tried giving the documents to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets before going to WikiLeaks, for instance — the intimate details that the full document reveals are fascinating. (Update, Tuesday morning: There's audio now, too, some of which we've embedded below.) We've hand-selected a few passages and embedded the entire statement at the bottom of this post.

Manning's leak may or may not be the weather's fault