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Bradley Manning Admits to Giving Classified Docs to WikiLeaks, Faces 20 Years in Prison

Feb. 28, 2013 9:16pm Jason Howerton

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 08: Pfc. Bradley E. Manning is escorted from a hearing, on January 8, 2013 in Fort Meade, Maryland. Manning attended a motion hearing in the case of United States vs. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, who is charged with aiding the enemy and wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet. He is accused of sending hundreds of thousands of classified Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and more than 250,000 diplomatic cables to the website WikiLeaks while he was working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010. Credit: Getty Images

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — Bradley Manning, the Army private arrested in the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history, pleaded guilty Thursday to charges that could send him to prison for 20 years, saying he was trying to expose the American military’s “bloodlust” and disregard for human life in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military prosecutors said they plan to move forward with a court-martial on 12 remaining charges against him, including aiding the enemy, which carries a potential life sentence.

“I began to become depressed at the situation we found ourselves mired in year after year. In attempting counterinsurgency operations, we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists,” the 25-year-old former intelligence analyst in Baghdad told a military judge.

He added: “I wanted the public to know that not everyone living in Iraq were targets to be neutralized.”

It was the first time Manning directly admitted leaking the material to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks and detailed the frustrations that led him to do it.

The slightly built soldier from Crescent, Okla., read from a 35-page statement through his wire-rimmed glasses for more than an hour. He spoke quickly and evenly, showing little emotion even when he described how troubled he was by what he had seen.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, accepted his plea to 10 charges involving illegal possession or distribution of classified material. Manning was allowed to plead guilty under military regulations instead of federal espionage law, which knocked the potential sentence down from 92 years.

He will not be sentenced until his court-martial on the other charges is over.

Manning admitted sending hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports, State Department diplomatic cables, other classified records and two battlefield video clips to WikiLeaks in 2009 and 2010. WikiLeaks posted some of the material, embarrassing the U.S. and its allies.

He said he was disturbed by the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the way American troops treated the populace. He said he did not believe the release of the information he downloaded onto a thumb drive would harm the U.S.

“I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general,” Manning said.

Manning said he was appalled by 2007 combat video of an assault by a U.S. helicopter that killed 11 men, including a Reuters news photographer. The Pentagon concluded the troops mistook the camera equipment for weapons.

“The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team happened to have,” Manning said, adding that the soldiers’ actions “seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.”

FILE – In this Nov. 28, 2012 file photo, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, center, steps out of a security vehicle as he is escorted into a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md., for a pretrial hearing. A military judge hears closing arguments on Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2012, on whether a private charged with sending classified material to WikiLeaks suffered illegal pretrial punishment during nine months in a Marine Corps brig. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning s lawyers claim his treatment was so egregious that all charges should be dismissed. Credit: AP

As for the State Department cables, he said they “documented backdoor deals and criminality that didn’t reflect the so-called leader of the free world.”

“I thought these cables were a prime example of the need for a more open diplomacy,” Manning said. “I believed that these cables would not damage the United States. However, I believed these cables would be embarrassing.”

The battlefield reports were the first documents Manning decided to leak. He said he sent them to WikiLeaks after contacting The Washington Post and The New York Times. He said he felt a reporter at the Post didn’t take him seriously, and a message he left for news tips at the Times was not returned.

Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said Thursday of the purported phone call: “This is news to us.”

The Obama administration has said the release of the documents threatened valuable military and diplomatic sources and strained America’s relations with other governments. The administration has aggressively pursued people accused of leaking classified material, and Manning’s is the highest-profile case.

Manning has been embraced by some left-leaning activists as a whistle-blowing hero whose actions exposed war crimes and helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring in 2010. He has spent more than 1,000 days in custody.

The soldier told the court that he corresponded online with someone he believed to be WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange but never confirmed the person’s identity.

WikiLeaks has been careful never to confirm or deny Manning was the source of the documents.

Reached by telephone in Britain on Thursday, Assange would not say whether he had any dealings with Manning but called him a political prisoner and said his prosecution was part of an effort by the U.S. to clamp down on criticism of its military and foreign policy.

Assange himself remains under investigation by the U.S. and has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for the better part of a year to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex-crimes allegations.

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Comments (32)

pandora665
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 6:26pm
War doesn’t adhere to cultural norms, only those involved set what is acceptable or unacceptable behavior within the group, hand the guy over to his peers and they can decide the social punishment is appropriate in relation to his transgression.

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watashbuddyfriend
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 3:52pm
Did the GOOD of his actions outway the BAD? Kinda exposed the goings-on in WashDC!

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GilbertAcct
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 2:04pm
http://youtu.be/5rXPrfnU3G0

Watch the video here… Tell me who you think should be punished… Murderers or whistleblowers?

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- blinknight
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 7:25pm
  Manning is not a whistle blower. He was an angry little man trying to hurt his country. He did not grab some report showing some damning evidence. He basically did the equivalent of ripping open every filing cabinet he could reach so he could grab files to stuff in a garbage bag, neither knowing nor caring what was in them. That is not the action of a whistle blower.
  
  Report this comment
deb7505
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 2:02pm
Hey lib, war is hell. Get over it. Manning should swing, period!

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- GilbertAcct
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 2:10pm
  Deb… What if the footage would have been of US soldiers lining up a few dozen 7-year olds and executing them. Would your opinion of Manning be different? Why or why not? If your opinion would be different, where is the line?
  
  Report this comment
- Classical Liberal
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 3:12pm
  Watch the video deb. once you do, it won’t take long for you to come to our point of view. This incident was the worst kind of military cover up and manning exposed it. He is being punished because he bravely stepped on all the wrong toes.
  
  Gilbertacct, I don’t know why the blaze isn’t stopping you from posting links to the video but you’re a bro to keep posting it. Keep fighting.
  
  Report this comment
- Gremlin1974
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 4:09pm
  If the footage showed the mowing down 7 year old children, which it decidedly did not, then those soldiers should be punished. However, Private Manning chose to ignore his chain of command and the rules and regulations and let his liberal political opinions dictate his actions and in doing so he made himself a traitor, period.
  
  Report this comment
- Classical Liberal
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 5:16pm
  Gremlin, he weighed the risks and decided blowing the whistle on this massacre was worth the risk of life impisonment. That was his choice. A better America would agree that he was right to show us the truth.
  I hope that more Americans can come to realize that the truth is more important than jingoism.
  
  Report this comment
- GilbertAcct
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 5:55pm
  Gremlin, you miss my point. Where is the line? The chain of command thing is beside the point here. You say the soldiers who mowed down 18 people in the actual video should not be punished… but if they mow down 7 year olds they should be punished. Where is the line? I posted a lengthy response to your comments below, but the Blaze apparently didn’t like it. Don’t have time to reproduce it, so read this article and let me know your thoughts:
  
  http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt419.html
  
  Report this comment
ultraright
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 1:08pm
Why is this chipmunk still wearing the uniform?!! Give him the uniform of the occutards and then throw him in a cell with Big Daddy Hunk-O-Love until death do they part.

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mike taylor
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 12:04pm
This is all Wrong! This man is traitor and deserves to die. He is worst then Benedict Arnold. @20 years isn’t Justice.

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- Classical Liberal
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 1:13pm
  The blaze is refusing to allow me make a post to this article. It seems they want to control what opinions are expressed by the on there websites comments. The only comments getting through are ones that trash Manning.
  
  After seeing the video for myself, I came to the conclusion that manning is a patriot to risk his freedom to expose this travesty to the American public. It’s no wonder the American public did not rise up in anger over the video. Most Americans have not even seen it!
  
  Report this comment
oxycontinxx
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 11:53am
manning deserves 100 YEARS. but first take that US military uniform off of him…….he does NOT deserve to wear it.

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- Gremlin1974
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 4:05pm
  All manning deserves in a single bullet fired by one of the six rifles pointed at he center of his chest while he is tied to a pole or the sound of a trapdoor opening beneath him.
  
  Regardless of the folks that want to watch a video from the safety of their mom’s basement and try to judge men under combat conditions and try to use that as an excuse for what this traitor did, what is the old expression, “two wrongs don’t make a right.”?
  
  Report this comment
bjornskis
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 11:17am
this man should pay the ultimate price for his crime.

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Nesty1972
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 11:13am
The question still. Why is this guy not in front of an execution squad?!!! This is high treason. He is responsible for violence and death of many soldiers…AAAAhhhhhhh…..I will have a stroke and news like this will be the cause.

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GilbertAcct
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 10:20am
Here is the video of this event. Decide for yourself.

http://youtu.be/5rXPrfnU3G0

As for me, I find it ironic that the truth can be such a crime. Yes, if US troops go and murder innocent people and the footage gets out, it can “strain America’s relations with other governments”. Why shouldn’t it? If soldiers from Canada came in helicopters and slaughtered a bunch of Texans because they had guns, don’t you think that should “strain” our relations with that government? Republicans in America are raging gun rights activists (and rightly so), but of course they are okay if brown people in the Middle East are slaughtered just for carrying a weapon. No evidence, no trial. “Bloodlust” was the correct term used by Manning.

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Spartazoo
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 9:07am
Does he qualify for a federally funded execution?

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- zorro
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 10:15am
  I can’t believe this guy was still alive. Why hasn’t he been executed with a bullet in the back of his head?
  
  Report this comment
DougHuffman
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 7:58am
Swing traitor. Don’t try to incriminate Wikileaks/Assange. MOLON LABE Lord of Lies Flies

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- Fubared
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 11:30am
  We could go the Chi-Com route and just bill his next of kin for the bullet.
  
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thegodfather
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 7:39am
Manning’s next tweet to Wikileaks……”My roommate Bubba using too much toilet paper”

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omega309
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 7:03am
BLAZE SHOULD NOT have even a picture of him showing. Let alone in the uniform he/she has desecrated

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- HumbleMan
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 10:59am
  Yup. I don’t want to see him or hear his name, except to read he’s been hanged. I still don’t understand why we are paying to keep him alive.
  
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Gremlin1974
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 3:23am
The only thing the traitor should be facing is a rope.

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- Classical Liberal
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 4:46am
  Let me guess, you didn’t watch the video.
  
  If you did, you would have thrown up your dinner all over your keyboard.
  
  Report this comment
- GilbertAcct
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 10:26am
  Of course none of these imbiciles watched the video. They don’t want to see soldiers murdering innocent civilians and children, because then they might be forced to question their worship of the military industrial complex.
  
  Reading some of these comments makes me cringe just as much as watching that video… Manning has the balls to get the truth out and people here want him murdered just like those journalists. Unbelievable.
  
  Report this comment
- Gremlin1974
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 3:59pm
  Actually to both of you I have seen the video in the past. The simple fact that you are ignoring is that he released far more than the video of this one very unfortunate incident. He did not report it to his superiors as he should have, he did not get it to the JAG office as he should have if ignored by his superiors, yes he tried to call a congressman which is actually the very wrong thing to do with this kind of thing. Instead he let his liberal political views influence his decision making as a soldier and tried to embarrass the branch of the military to which he has sworn an oath. You speak as if he released just illegal or inappropriate things, he did not, he released classified information to someone who he was not approved and made himself a traitor to his country.
  
  Yes, the events in the video are horrible, however I was not sitting in either seat of that gunship, and unlike you I am not willing to play armchair general.
  
  Private Manning disregarded procedure and broke his oath by his own admission. He released information that could have put other soldiers lives in danger and for that he should pay the price of a traitor. I will happily once again put on the uniform for a day if I could be on this traitor firing squad.
  
  To you two armchair generals I would say this; it is very easy to watch a video after the fact and make snide remarks and accusations about decisions. It is much harder to make those decisions when people are actively trying to kill you.
  
  Report this comment
repairsea
Posted on March 1, 2013 at 12:47am
Free food, housing, dental and medical. He can file a weekly law suit against the CO and get a nice nest egg going since the prison facilities payout rather than accrue the court costs. He will understand the expression everything is pink in the dark. He can use the library to earn multiple degrees. When he gets out, he can go on disability and collect checks with subsidized government housing… just like everyone criminal. Now that is a story.

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- Classical Liberal
  Posted on March 1, 2013 at 4:56am
  Yup. Sounds like a great substitute for Americas childish concept of freedom.
  
  Watch the video, before an apache gunner has you in his sights.
  
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AUsername
Posted on February 28, 2013 at 11:38pm
i wonder if anonymous will hack the records and get him set free early.

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