Berkeley Tables Vote on Calling Wikileaker a Hero

The Berkeley City Council put off a vote Tuesday night on whether to bestow hero status on a U.S. soldier who allegedly released classified information to WikiLeaks.Some council members in this famously liberal city said they were concerned about the way the resolution was written and wanted more time to investigate.

Others said it was premature to hail Pfc.

Bradley Manning as a hero when he has not admitted to being the source of the leaks.

The proposed resolution is the latest in a long line of provocative political statements by leaders in Berkeley, a city of 100,000 across the bay from San Francisco that was the epicenter of the anti-war movement in the Vietnam era.

The resolution proposed by the city's Peace and Justice Commission praises Manning for exposing "war crimes" by allegedly leaking a 2007 video of a laughing U.S. Apache helicopter crew gunning down 11 men in Baghdad, Iraq, including a Reuters news photographer.

Military investigators also suspect the 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified Afghan and Iraq war reports and an untold number of secret U.S. diplomatic cables onto a Lady Gaga CD and a computer memory stick while stationed in Iraq.

Wikileaks published the war reports earlier this year and began releasing the cables late last month.

"We obviously think Manning's a hero," said Jeff Manning, a project manager for Courage to Resist, the group that authored the resolution as part of its mission of supporting anti-war members of the U.S. armed services.

"If he's going to have a shot at justice in a military courtroom we have to move more people to think the same way."

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