Courtroom sketch by Clark Stoeckley, drawn in November 2012
This week, another pretrial hearing is taking place at Fort
Meade in the court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier
who the United States military is prosecuting for disclosing
information to WikiLeaks. It begins today and will take place
over a period of at least two days. Except, for this hearing,
the public will only be able to witness the first hour or so of
proceedings and then the rest of the pretrial hearing will be a
closed session without the press or public present.  It is the
second closed session in recent months. A portion of the
proceedings were closed on March 1 to deliberate over whether
the defense should be allowed access to a Defense Department
“operator”—”John Doe”—who was part of the raid that killed Osama
bin Laden and allegedly uncovered digital media with copies of
documents Manning disclosed to WikiLeaks.  David Dishneau, who
has been regularly covering the proceedings for the Associated
Press, writes “government sec