Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s fate was in the hands of a military judge Friday after nearly two months of conflicting portrayals of the soldier: a traitor who gave WikiLeaks classified secrets for worldwide attention and a young, naive intelligence officer who wanted people to know about the atrocities of war.
Judge Col. Denise Lind said she will start deliberating Friday night on the 21 charges Manning faces, but she did not say when she would rule. The most serious charge is aiding the enemy, which carries a potential life sentence in prison.
During closing arguments, defense attorney David Coombs said Manning was negligent in releasing classified material, but he did not know al-Qaida would see the material and did not have “evil intent,” a key point prosecutors must prove to convict Manning of aiding the enemy.
Prosecutors contended Manning, 25, knew the material would be seen across the globe, even by Osama bin Laden, when he started the leaks in late 2009. Manning said the leaks didn’t start until February the following year.
“Worldwide distribution, that was his goal,” the military’s lead prosecutor, Maj. Ashden Fein, said. “Pfc. Manning knew the entire world included the enemy, from his training. He knew he was giving it to the enemy, specifically al-Qaida.”
Meanwhile, one of Manning’s most visible supporters was banned from the trial Friday after the judge said someone posted threats online. Clark Stoeckley, a college art instructor from New Jersey, confirmed he was the one booted.
Stoeckley attended the court-martial often as a sketch artist, arriving each day in a white box truck with bold words painted on the sides: “WikiLeaks TOP SECRET Mobile Information Collection Unit.”
A tweet Thursday night from an account Stoeckley used said: “I don’t know how they sleep at night but I do know where.” It was removed Friday and Stoeckley told the Associated Press on Twitter he couldn’t comment.
Inside the courtroom, a few spectators smiled — as did Manning — when Coombs mocked a former Army supervisor who testified last week that Manning told her the American flag meant nothing to him and that she suspected before they deployed to Iraq that Manning was a spy. Coombs noted she had not written up a report on Manning’s alleged disloyalty, though had written ones on him taking too many smoke breaks and drinking too much coffee.
Manning also faces federal espionage, theft and computer fraud charges. The Crescent, Okla., native has acknowledged giving WikiLeaks about 700,000 battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and videos. But he says he didn’t believe the information would harm troops in Afghanistan and Iraq or threaten national security.
“The amount of the documents in this case, actually, is the best evidence that he was discreet in what he chose because if he was indiscriminate, if he was systematically harvesting, we wouldn’t be talking about a few hundred thousand documents — we’d be talking about millions of documents,” Coombs said.
Giving the material to WikiLeaks was no different than giving it to a newspaper, Coombs said.
“That’s giving information to a legitimate news organization in order to hold the government accountable,” Coombs said.
The government disagreed and said Manning would also be charged if he had leaked the classified material to the media.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday in a telephone press conference that if the aiding the enemy charge is allowed to stand, it will be “the end of national security journalism in the United States.”
He accused the Obama administration of a “war on whistleblowers” and a “war on journalism.”
