With an 8-0 vote and one abstention, the Berkeley City Council tabled a motion that would have honored Pfc. Bradley Manning as a hero.
Manning is accused of providing thousands of secret documents to the leak site Wikileaks.com.
The site's founder, Julian Assange, was also granted bail by an English court on Tuesday. Sweden will appeal that decision today.
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Jailed Pfc. Bradley Manning -- the man accused of leaking secret foreign policy documents to Wikileaks.com -- may get a hero's recognition, if a Berkeley petition passes city council.
The leaked documents have, of course, been a source of consternation and debate in many corridors of power -- and at kitchen tables.
Is the transparent display of information a threat to democracy, or a direct cause of it? Are Manning and site founder Julian Assange guilty of sabotage and sedition, or are they serving the greater good by exposing alleged 'war crimes'?
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Berkeley City Council will weigh those arguments as a petition before it is voted on tonight.
According to TGDaily, [The petition] cites Marjorie Cohn, professor of International Human Rights Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, as saying: "If Manning did what he is suspected of doing, he should be honored as an American hero for exposing war crimes and, hopefully, ultimately, helping to end this war."
Berkeley has weighed in before on national issues, including an unwanted U.S. Marines recruitment office and the enforcement of United Nations treaties regarding human rights.
