The Vietnam war whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and the film-maker Michael Moore have launched an international campaign to demand the release of Bradley Manning, the American soldier charged with passing classified material to WikiLeaks.

Demonstrations are planned in the US, Canada and Australia over the next three days in support of Manning, an army intelligence analyst who is being held at a military prison in Virginia.

The leaks include a cache of documents – published in the Guardian as the Afghan war logs – drawn from 76,000 pages of military records made public by WikiLeaks to challenge the US government's assertion that the fight against the Taliban is being won.