Private First Class Bradley Manning, the soldier responsible for leaking over 700,000 documents containing classified information to Wikileaks, will finally face military trial this week at Fort Meade, Maryland. Colonel Denise Lind will ultimately decide the soldier's case.
From
Reuters:
Manning, an intelligence analyst, was arrested in May 2010 while serving in Iraq. He was charged with downloading intelligence documents, diplomatic cables and combat videos and forwarding them to WikiLeaks, which began releasing the information that year.
Manning testified in February that he had released the files to spark a domestic debate on the military and on foreign policy in general.
"I take full responsibility for my actions," he said at the time. "I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience."
One of the leaked U.S. military videos showed a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad. They included two Reuters news staff, photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.
The judge in the case, Colonel Denise Lind, said last month she would close parts of the trial to the public to protect classified material. Rather than face a jury, Manning has chosen to have Lind decide his case.
Manning pleaded guilty in court in February to 10 lesser charges that he was the source of the WikiLeaks release. But prosecutors rejected the pleas and are pursuing the original charges.
Last November, Manning took the stand in a
pre-trial hearing to recount what his legal defense had described as "unlawful pretrial punishment,” an attempt that was aimed at convincing the judge to dismiss the charges. His attorney presented a partial plea offer at that time - not a plea agreement or government deal, rather, an acceptance of responsibility for a subset of charges through a process known as "pleading by exceptions and substitutions." While the judge accepted the language in it, prosecutors ultimately decided to move forward with the original charges on all 21 counts. The most serious one includes that of "aiding the enemy."
