WikiLeaks:Bradley Manning

Bradley Manning was born in Crescent,Oklahoma in 1987 which is thirty-five miles north of Oklahoma City.Crescent City was a very conservative,Christian community and Bradley,with his inquiring mind,questioned the prevailing attitudes.At a young age,he was very smart and opinionated with a passion for computer games.From his father Brian,Bradley inherited a fascination for the latest technology and a fervent patriotism.His father was a strict,severe parent who contributed to Bradley growing introverted and withdrawn.Such introversion deepened with puberty when he realized he was gay.Bradley's father left the family when his teenage years began and his mother returned to her native country of Wales with him. In Wales,he was prone to being bullied for being a little different and at times he would lash out at his fellow students.As a means to increase his own self-esteem,Bradley grew increasingly passionate about computers and geekery.He spent lunch in the school computer club designing his own website.At fifteen,he was still patriotic but critical of U.S. foreign policy.He was against the Iraq war in 2003 and believed Bush wanted to safeguard the oil supply for his corporate backers.At seventeen,he returned to Oklahoma to live with his father and worked for Zoto,a photo-sharing company.

After discovering that Bradley was homosexual,Brian Manning threw his son out of his house.Homeless,jobless(fired from Zoto for being quirky and personal issues),Bradley would follow his father's footsteps and enlist in the military.They Army put him through specialist training for military intelligence work at Fort Huachuca,Arizona.Upon graduation in 2008,he was sent to Fort Drum in upstate N.Y.and waited to go to Iraq armed with security clearance that would give him access to two top-secret databases.

Seven months after his arrival at Contingency Operations Station Hammer in Iraq,there was a seminal moment that appears to have ignited Manning's anger.Manning had to investigate who some "bad guys" were who were distributing and printing "anti-Iraqi literature"The Iraqi police were refusing to work with U.S. forces over the matter so Manning got the leaflet and had it translated into English.He was astonished to find that it was in fact a scholarly critique against Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki that tracked the corruption rife within his cabinet.He immediately took the information to his officer and explained what was going on.His office didn't want to hear this information and wanted Manning to shut up and assist the Iraqi police in finding more detainees.After that incident was added to others, Manning saw himself completely against everything he was part of with the Army.He wanted the information and truth to come out. He started to feel that it was important to get the information out into the public domain.He started to believed that information should be free and  distrust of authority as a positive trait.He eventually turned tho WikiLeaks because he admired the 500,000 steam of pages they presented to the public domain on 9/11 messages.Manning also understood that the messages were dumped anonymously from a National security Agency database.

More from WikiLeaks (David Leigh and Luke Harding).