Chelsea Manning

Bradley Manning will make a rare statement before his defense finishes arguments in his sentencing hearing next week, his lawyers said Friday. The 25-year-old faces up to 90 years in prison for the largest leak of classified government information in US history. Manning did not make a statement at his trial. Defense attorney David Coombs said Manning will give a statement Wednesday. The defense team is set to begin presenting evidence Monday. The former military intelligence analyst gave more than 700,000 documents and some battlefield video to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks while working in Iraq. He was convicted last month of 20 counts, including federal Espionage Act violations and theft.

The aunt who helped raise Bradley after his parents’ marriage collapsed, says: ‘If anyone was going to get themselves arrested for leaking hundreds of thousands of secret documents and end up in jail for it, it was going to be our Bradley. 'He just seemed to have a burning sense of wanting to right any injustice from such a young age. ‘He’d had a very tough childhood in many ways and he’d had to grow up too quickly. His childhood was cut short by all the unhappiness he experienced as a boy.’ Mrs Staples believes the world will one day see Bradley’s actions as heroic. She said: ‘How many people wish the Nazi death camp guards who looked the other way had done what Bradley did?

A military judge has reduced Army Pfc. Bradley Manning's maximum possible sentence in the WikiLeaks case to 90 years in prison. Manning had faced up to 136 years in prison after he was convicted of charges related to his disclosure of classified information to the anti-secrecy website. But the judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, found during his sentencing hearing Tuesday that a number of the charges refer to the same actions and therefore were duplicative for sentencing purposes.

A play about the American soldier who passed military secrets toWikiLeaks has won an award for drama. The Radicalisation Of Bradley Manning by Tim Price has been announced as the first winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Drama. In the play, Manning's life is charted from his teenage years in Wales to the present day, convicted of espionage in the US. The £10,000 award is the first of a new drama category of Britain's oldest literary awards. It was launched last year by the University of Edinburgh in partnership with the National Theatre of Scotland and in association with the Traverse Theatre.

Top government officials testifying in open court for Manning's sentencing in recent days have cited no credible evidence his leaks led directly to any deaths. They have instead spoken to diplomatic sources placed at risk and strayed foreign relations. In the words of one official, some allies got "chesty." Nevertheless, the most explosive claim about Manning's leaks -- that battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan got U.S. sources killed -- seems to have been settled. The prosecution's first witness was Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, who led the Department of Defense's review of the WikiLeaks releases. Not a single death could be linked to names in the WikiLeaks files, Carr testified. After more than a year of searching, the task force found a single instance where the Taliban claimed to have killed an Afghan source because of WikiLeaks. But then they discovered the cables did not actually contain the source's name. "The name was not there," Carr said.