Prosecutors charged yesterday that accused traitor Bradley Manning worked closely with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to put military secrets into the hands of US enemies — including Osama bin Laden.
“This is a case about a soldier who harvested hundreds of thousands of documents and dumped them on the Internet, where they would be available to the enemy,” Army Capt. Joe Morrow said during the first day of Manning’s court-martial at Fort Meade, Md.
Prosecutors said they have evidence bin Laden asked another al Qaeda terrorist to download Afghanistan battlefield reports and State Department cables that Manning had leaked to the Web site.
The slight, bespectacled Army Pfc., 25, has admitted handing over more than 700,000 documents to Assange in what authorities say was the largest intelligence breach in US history. He faces a possible life sentence if convicted.
The case, Morrow said, comes down to “what happens when arrogance meets access to sensitive information.”
Morrow said Manning and the publicity-loving Assange exchanged personal contact information to expose US secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, argued the intelligence analyst was a “naive but good-intentioned” soldier whose struggles as a gay man in the military led him to “do something to make a difference in this world.”
A Christmas Eve 2009 bomb attack on a US convoy that killed one member of an Iraqi family and wounded four others was a catalyst for Manning, Coombs argued.
“He was troubled by that. He believed that if the American public saw it, they, too, would be troubled,” Coombs said.
The feds are looking into whether Assange can also be charged. He has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations.