Trial Portrays Two Sides of Private in Leak Case

By CHARLIE SAVAGE Published: June 3, 2013

FORT MEADE, Md. — The court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, whose secret release of a vast archive of military and diplomatic materials put WikiLeaks into an international spotlight, opened here Monday with dueling portrayals of a traitor who endangered the lives of his fellow soldiers and of a principled protester motivated by a desire to help society who carefully selected which documents to release.

The contrast between the government’s description of Private Manning and his lawyer’s underscored the oddity at the heart of the trial, which is expected to last as long as 12 weeks: There is no doubt that he did most of what he is accused of doing, and the crucial issue is how those actions should be understood.

In February, Private Manning pleaded guilty to nine lesser versions of the charges he is facing — and one full one — while confessing in detail to releasing the trove of documents for which he could be sentenced to up to 20 years.

But his plea was not part of any deal and prosecutors are going to trial because they hope to convict him, based on essentially the same facts, of 20 more serious offenses — including espionage and aiding the enemy — that could result in a life sentence.

Since his arrest three years ago, Private Manning, 25, has been embraced as a whistle-blower and hero by many on the political left, including Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers four decades ago. On Monday, dozens of supporters demonstrated in the rain outside the base’s main entrance, many holding placards with his picture.

His case has inspired social media activism that has helped raise $1.25 million for his defense from more than 20,000 people, according to the Bradley Manning Support Network. Supporters have planned rallies this week in three dozen cities, including sites in the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy and South Korea.

Inside the courtroom on Monday, as Private Manning sat quietly, David Coombs, his defense lawyer, told the judge that his client had been “young, naïve, but good-intentioned” and that he had tried to ensure that the roughly 700,000 documents he released would not cause harm.

“He was selective,” Mr. Coombs said. “He had access to literally hundreds of millions of documents as an all-source analyst, and these were the documents that he released. And he released these documents because he was hoping to make the world a better place.”

But a prosecutor, Capt. Joe Morrow, said that Private Manning was no ordinary leaker who made a particular document public, but rather someone who grabbed classified databases wholesale and sent them to a place where he knew adversaries like Al Qaeda could get to them.

“This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy — material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk,” Captain Morrow said.

The court-martial comes amid a focus on the Obama administration’s aggressive record on leaks. The administration has overseen an unprecedented six leak-related prosecutions, and last month it emerged that the Justice Department had secretly obtained calling records for reporters with The Associated Press and for a Fox News reporter; the department also portrayed the Fox reporter as having violated the Espionage Act as part of an application for a search warrant seeking his personal e-mails.

In his 58-minute opening, Captain Morrow cited logs of searches and downloads from Private Manning’s classified work computer, deleted files from his personal laptop including chat logs he contended were between Private Manning and a person he said was the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and other such records to show the pace and scale of his downloads.

Most of the assertions in Captain Morrow’s portrayal dovetailed with Private Manning’s confession in February, but there remain a few factual disputes. Among them is that he has pleaded not guilty to leaking to WikiLeaks some 74,000 e-mail addresses for troops in Iraq, but Captain Morrow said that list had been downloaded on a computer Private Manning had used.

Captain Morrow also argued that the private started helping WikiLeaks in late November 2009, shortly after his arrival in Iraq. The military has suggested that he might have sent a video of an airstrike that year in Garani, Afghanistan, in which numerous civilians died, to WikiLeaks around then. Private Manning has admitted sending WikiLeaks the video, but said he did not do so until late March 2010.

In his defense, Mr. Coombs said Private Manning started sending files to WikiLeaks later, in January 2010, after a roadside bombing in Iraq on Dec. 24, 2009. Everyone in his unit celebrated, Mr. Coombs said, after learning that no American troops had been seriously hurt, and their happiness did not abate — except for Private Manning’s — when they learned that members of an innocent Iraqi family had been injured and killed. From that moment, Mr. Coombs contended, things started to change and he soon “started selecting information he believed the public should see, should hear” and sending them to WikiLeaks.

Captain Morrow also emphasized that Private Manning had uncovered an intelligence report warning that foreign adversaries could be gaining access to the information posted on WikiLeaks. He said the government would show that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, had obtained an archive of wartime incident reports in Afghanistan that Private Manning gave to WikiLeaks. And he argued that some of Private Manning’s searches were in response to a 2009 WikiLeaks “most wanted” list.

But Mr. Coombs rejected the notion that Private Manning was working for WikiLeaks or intended to aid terrorists.

Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer observing the trial, said that he found it “striking” that the government focused on the “enemy” as the audience for leaks. Citing as an example the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib prison torture photographs in 2004, he observed that “sometimes what may be helpful to the enemy is also indispensable to the public in a functioning democracy.”