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| In this courtroom sketch, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning watches at left as his defense attorney, David Coombs, right, speaks in front of military judge Army Col. Denise Lind on the opening day of Manning's court martial in Fort Meade, Md., Monday, June 3, 2013. Manning, who was arrested three years ago, is charged with indirectly aiding the enemy by sending troves of classified material to WikiLeaks. He faces up to life in prison. |
FORT MEADE, Md.
(AP) -- Pfc. Bradley Manning put U.S. military secrets into the hands
of Osama bin Laden himself, prosecutors said Monday as the Army
intelligence analyst went on trial over leaking hundreds of thousands of
classified documents.
Manning's lawyers
countered by arguing that he was a "young, naive but good-intentioned"
soldier whose struggle to fit in as a gay man in the military made him
feel he "needed to do something to make a difference in this world."
Manning,
25, has admitted turning over the material to the anti-secrecy website
WikiLeaks, pleading guilty earlier this year to charges that could bring
20 years behind bars. But the military pressed ahead with a
court-martial on more serious charges, including aiding the enemy, which
carries a potential life sentence.
Prosecutors
said they will present evidence that bin Laden requested and obtained
from another al-Qaida member Afghanistan battlefield reports and State
Department cables published by WikiLeaks.
"This
is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of
thousands of documents from classified databases and then dumped that
information onto the Internet into the hands of the enemy," prosecutor
Capt. Joe Morrow said.
He said the case is "about what happens when arrogance meets access to sensitive information."
Wearing
his dress blue uniform, the slightly built Manning peered through his
small eyeglasses at a slide show of the prosecutor's hour-long opening
statement, watching on a laptop computer at the defense table. The slide
show also was projected on three larger screens in the courtroom, which
had seats for only about 50 people.
Later,
almost motionless, the soldier from Crescent, Okla., sat forward in his
chair, looking toward his defense attorney, David Coombs, throughout his
25-minute opening statement.
Coombs said
Manning struggled to do the right thing as "a humanist," a word engraved
on his custom-made dog tags. As an analyst in Baghdad, Manning had
access to hundreds of millions of documents but selectively leaked
material, Coombs said. He mentioned an unclassified video of a 2007 U.S.
Apache helicopter attack that mistakenly killed civilians, including a
Reuters photographer.
"He believed this
information showed how we value human life. He was troubled by that. He
believed that if the American public saw it, they too would be
troubled," Coombs said.
Coombs did not address
whether bin Laden ever saw any of the material. The soldier has said he
did not believe the information would harm the U.S.
Coombs
said Manning struggled privately with gender identity early in his tour
of duty, when gays couldn't openly serve in the military.
"His
struggles led him to feel that he needed to do something to make a
difference in this world," Coombs said. "He needed to do something to
help improve what he was seeing."
Later in the
day, the court also heard from two Army investigators and Manning's
roommate in Iraq, who testified the soldier was online whenever he was
in their quarters.
Manning chose to have his
court-martial heard by a judge instead of a jury. It is expected to run
all summer. Much of the evidence is classified, which means large
portions of the trial are likely to be closed to reporters and the
public.
Federal authorities are looking into
whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can also be prosecuted. He has
been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition
to Sweden on sex-crimes allegations.
In
February, Manning took the stand and read from a 35-page statement in
which he said he leaked the material to expose the American military's
"bloodlust" and disregard for human life in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The
case is the most high-profile prosecution for the Obama administration,
which has been criticized for its crackdown on leakers. The six cases
brought since Obama took office are more than in all other presidencies
combined.
The WikiLeaks case is by far the
most voluminous release of classified material in U.S. history, and
certainly the most sensational since the 1971 publication of the
Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department history of U.S. involvement
in Vietnam.
The 7,000 pages of the Pentagon
Papers showed that the U.S. government repeatedly misled the public
about the Vietnam War. Their leak to The New York Times set off an epic
clash between the Nixon administration and the press and led to a
landmark Supreme Court ruling on the First Amendment.
The
material WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of
abuses against Iraqi detainees, a U.S. tally of civilian deaths in Iraq,
and America's weak support for the government of Tunisia - a disclosure
that Manning supporters said helped trigger the Middle Eastern
pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
The
Obama administration has said the release of the material threatened to
expose valuable military and diplomatic sources and strained America's
relations with other governments.
Manning's
supporters - including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg - have
hailed him as a whistleblowing hero and political prisoner. Others say
he is a traitor who endangered lives and national security.
Some
20 Manning supporters were in the courtroom, including Princeton
University professor and civil rights activist Cornel West and Medea
Benjamin, a member of protest group Code Pink.
"I
think it's a show trial," Benjamin said. She and others complained
about the small courtroom, saying the government was trying to make it
look as if Manning had less support than he really has.
"It's
important to support him," said Anne Wright, a retired Army colonel. "I
spent 29 years in the military, and what Bradley Manning has done is
exposed government corruption and brutality."
Supporters were told by the military to turn their TRUTH T-shirts inside out before entering the courtroom.
