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Private Manning pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the leak to WikiLeaks.
FORT MEADE, Md. — Pfc. Bradley Manning on Thursday confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, saying that he wanted the information to become public because more openness could “spark a debate about foreign policy” that he hoped would “make the world a better place.”
Appearing before a military judge for more than an hour, Private Manning read a statement recounting how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain files should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about foreign policy, downloaded them from a secure computer network and then ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.
“No one associated with WLO” — an abbreviation he used to refer to the WikiLeaks organization — “pressured me into sending any more information,” Private Manning said. “I take full responsibility.”
Before reading the statement, Private Manning pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the huge amount of material he leaked, which included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and a quarter-million cables from American diplomats stationed around the world.
The guilty pleas exposed him to up to 20 years in prison. But the case against the slightly built 25-year-old, who has become a folk hero among antiwar and whistle-blower advocacy groups, is not over. The military has charged him with a far more serious set of offenses, including aiding the enemy and multiple counts of violating federal statutes, including the Espionage Act. Prosecutors now have the option of pressing forward with proving the remaining elements of the more serious charges.
That would involve focusing only on questions like whether the information he provided counted as the sort covered by the Espionage Act — that is, whether it was not just confidential but also could be used to injure the United States or aid a foreign nation.
Private Manning described himself as thinking carefully about the kind of information he was releasing, and taking care to make sure that none of it could cause harm if disclosed.
The only material that initially gave him pause, he said, were the diplomatic cables, which he portrayed as documenting “back-room deals and seemingly criminal activity.”
But he decided to go forward after discovering that the most sensitive cables were not in the database. He was also motivated, he said, by a book about “open diplomacy” after World War I and “how the world would be a better place if states would not make secret deals with each other.”
“I believed the public release of these cables would not damage the United States,” he said. “However, I did believe the release of the cables might be embarrassing.”
Private Manning said that the first set of documents he decided to release consisted of hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Afghanistan and Iraq. He had downloaded them onto a disk because the network connection at his base in Iraq kept failing, and he and his colleagues needed regular access to them.
Those reports added up to a history of the “day-to-day reality” in both war zones that he believed showed the flaws in the counterinsurgency policy the United States was then pursuing. The military, he said, was “obsessed with capturing or killing” people on a list, while ignoring the impact of its operations on ordinary people.
Private Manning said he put the files on a digital storage card for his camera and took it home with him on a leave in early 2010. He then decided to give the files to a newspaper.
“I believed if the public — in particular the American public — had access to the information” in the reports, “this could spark a debate about foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
Army Private Admits Giving Military Files to WikiLeaks
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Army Private Admits Giving Military Files to WikiLeaks
