Bradley Manning pleads guilty to some WikiLeaks charges (+video)

Under any “aiding the enemy” charge, government prosecutors are likely to show that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden asked aides to provide him with WikiLeaks revelations.

“The US government is planning to call an American, possibly one of the 22 Navy Seals involved in the Abbottabad [Pakistan] raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to give evidence at the trial of Bradley Manning about how he discovered digital material later revealed to contain WikiLeaks disclosures,” the Guardian newspaper reports.

“By showing that Bin Laden personally asked for, and received, four files' worth of the WikiLeaks material supplied by Manning [according to lead prosecution lawyer Ashden Fein, as cited by the Guardian], the prosecution would prove one element of the first charge it has preferred against the soldier – that he ‘knowingly gave intelligence to the enemy through indirect means.’ ”

In his statement Thursday, Manning denied that “he had reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

During the months Manning worked with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Iraq, it was apparently easy for him to find, download, and copy sensitive military information. Writing in an online chat, he claims to have had “unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months.”

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file,” he boasted. “No one suspected a thing … I listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”

“Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis,” Manning wrote. “A perfect storm.”

“No one suspected a thing,” he wrote to a former computer hacker who eventually tipped off the FBI and Army officials. “I didn’t even have to hide anything.”

For several months, Manning was held in virtual isolation on suicide watch, sometimes without regular clothing, in a constantly lighted cell at the maximum-security military prison in Quantico, Va.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, ordered that 122 days be taken off any eventual sentence due to the treatment Manning received.

Before providing information to WikiLeaks, Manning reportedly shopped his story to The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico – unsuccessfully in all cases.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since June to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning pertaining to alleged sex crimes.

The court martial on the more serious charges Manning faces is scheduled to begin in June.

Previous

1 | 2