About 80 people converged on Times Square Monday August 16 to demand that the US military drop charges against Army private Bradley Manning who is jailed in Quantico, VA.  The Army alleges Manning is the source who leaked the "Collateral Murder" footage of the 2007 incident where U.S. Apache helicopters gunners killed 12 Iraqi civilians.

World Can't Wait, Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Pakistan-USA Freedom Forum, and others gathered on short notice to speak to tourists and others outside the Times Square Military Recruiting Center.

The action was completely stopped by a very hard rain.  Some of us stayed around, joined by new arrivals, as the rain stopped.  People who had been following the Manning case, and Wikileaks revelations learned of the protest via Facebook.  Two philosophy professors came, though they had not protested the Iraq war since 2004, because they saw a feature on the covert US "war on terror" in Yemen, and were moved to come out again against the wars.

Attorney Leonard Weinglas spoke about the need for vigorous defense of whistle-blowers.  Weinglas had defended Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 on federal charges stemming from Ellsberg's leak of the "Pentagon Papers" exposing the US war crimes towards Vietnam, successfully.  Part of the reason, he said, was that so many people were vocally against the Vietnam War.