Free Bradley Manning Banners Hung From Wrexham A483 Bridge

Banners were hung from a foot bridge on the A483 near Pandy in Wrexham today to show solidarity for US soldier Bradley Manning.

The banner drop was held to coincide with Manning’s court appearance at Fort Meade, Maryland, USA today for a pretrial motions hearing.

Manning was arrested in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of having passed classified material to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks and has remained in detention ever since.

Civil rights campaigners and Manning’s lawyers have accused the prosecution and US government of preventing him from having a fair trial on a number of counts.

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, said that the US military had subjected him to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” for 11 months, which included holding him in “excessive and prolonged isolation.”

Previous support for Bradley Manning in Wrexham has seen banners hung at the Plas Coch roundabout, stalls and vigils in town, solidarity letter-writing and a bilingual gig at Saith Seren in April for the soldier who lived in Haverfordwest for several years as a teenager and still has close family in the area.

Genny Bove of WISE Up for Bradley Manning and Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum who put up the banners said: “I hung the banners today to draw attention to Bradley’s plight in the hope that people who see them will be inspired to find out more about the case, especially given his Welsh connections.

“The files Bradley is accused of passing to WikiLeaks have revealed the ugly truth about the wars being fought in our name. As an anti-war activist who has also been a whistleblower, I stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, both of whom are being persecuted for speaking truth to power.”