The US government alleges that Private First Class Manning, 25, dumped state secrets "into the lap of the enemy" by giving hundreds of thousands of classified documents to
Wikileaks in what prosecutors are calling the largest leak of state secrets in the nation's history.
Manning faces
21 counts, the most serious among them being knowingly giving intelligence to al-Qaeda by passing the classified documents to Wikileaks. The government accuses Manning of "aiding the enemy" by indirectly giving al-Qaeda access to them and will attempt to prove that Osama bin Laden personally ordered an aide to download documents from Wikileaks, including some of the material Manning leaked.
In an hour-long opening statement for the prosecution, Capt. Joe Morrow accused Manning of seeking "notoriety." The prosecution sought to closely link Manning with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming Manning was directly involved with editing video footage of the crew of a US aircraft firing upon and killing civilians, first responders and children in Baghdad, the so-called
'collateral murder' video.
"This is a case about what happens when arrogance meets access to sensitive information," Morrow declared.
Defense attorney David Coombs followed Morrow with his opening statement. Coombs called Manning "young" and "a little naive, but good-intentioned in that he was selecting information that he thought would make a difference."
Manning, who has been jailed for more than three years now under
conditions described as
"cruel, inhuman and degrading" by the United Nations, has already
pleaded guilty to 10 lesser criminal charges, explaining that he leaked classified documents to expose the US military's "bloodlust" and disregard for the lives of innocent men, women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning maintains that he did not know that leaking the documents would harm the US.
Among the material in the documents leaked by Manning are files detailing US war crimes in
Iraq and
Afghanistan, as well as documents proving that
150 innocent men and boys were knowingly imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.
The leaked files also detail US cover-ups of
child rape,
torture, the
killing of civilians in countries against which the United States has not declared hostilities, the
killing of journalists, State Department
spying on US allies and the UN, and other offenses.
While the architects and perpetrators of many of the crimes revealed by Manning and Wikileaks have gone unpunished or even protected by the US government under both the Bush and Obama administrations, the government has chosen to
aggressively pursue those who blow the whistle on such crimes.
"Hypocrisy lies at the heart of the trial of Bradley Manning,"
writes Gary Younge in the
Guardian. "It is an outrage that soldiers who killed innocents remain free but the man who exposed them is accused of 'aiding the enemy.'"
Manning has been
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize each year since 2011 for exposing "a long history of corruption and war crimes" and for helping "motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements."
Daniel Ellsberg, a former US military analyst who in 1971 leaked the
Pentagon Papers, which proved that the Lyndon B. Johnson administration lied to Congress and the American people about US involvement in the Vietnam War, recently called Manning "an extraordinary American who went on record and acted on his awareness that it was wrong for us to be killing foreigners."
"I think he saved American lives," Ellsberg
said at a Saturday demonstration outside Ft. Meade.
But to conservative politicians, pundits and right-wing media, Manning is a
traitor who some even believe should be
executed.
Because military judge Col. Denise Lind previously found that Manning's pretrial treatment was
illegally harsh, she credited 112 days toward whatever prison sentence, if any, he will serve.
