U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was a traitor with one mission as an intelligence analyst in Iraq: to find and reveal government secrets to a group of anarchists and bask in the glory as a whistleblower, a prosecutor said Thursday during closing arguments.
Maj. Ashden Fein said Manning betrayed his country’s trust and spilled classified information to the WikiLeaks website, knowing the material would be seen by al-Qaida. Even Osama bin Laden had some of the digital files at his compound when he was killed, the prosecutor said.
“WikiLeaks was merely the platform which Pfc. Manning used to ensure all the information was available for the world, including enemies of the United States,” Fein said.
Manning is charged with 21 offenses, but the most serious is aiding the enemy, which carries a possible sentence of up to life in prison. His defense attorneys have argued there was no evidence he knew al-Qaida specifically looked at WikiLeaks, a key point prosecutors must prove to win a conviction on that charge.
Defense attorneys will present their closing arguments today.
Manning, 25, was not the troubled, naive soldier that defense attorneys have made him out to be, Fein said. He displayed a smiling photo of Manning from 2010 when he was visiting relatives in Maryland on leave.
Fein said: “This is a gleeful, grinning Pfc. Manning” who sent battlefield reports to WikiLeaks, accompanied by the message: “Have a good day.”
Manning, a native of Crescent, Okla., has acknowledged giving WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and videos in late 2009 and early 2010. But he says he didn’t believe the information would harm troops in Afghanistan and Iraq or threaten national security.
Fein, the military’s lead prosecutor, quoted from chat logs between Manning and convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo to try to show the soldier knew he would embarrass diplomats.
“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack,” Manning wrote to Lamo in a chat cited by Fein.
Lamo turned the soldier in to authorities in May 2010.
A military judge, not a jury, is hearing the case at Manning’s request. Army Col. Denise Lind will deliberate after closing arguments. It’s not clear when she will rule.
The verdict and any sentence will be reviewed, and could be reduced, by the commander of the Military District of Washington, currently Maj. Gen. Jeffery S. Buchanan.
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