Manning gave military files to WikiLeaks for 'people to know'

American Pfc. (private first class, in the army) Bradley Manning has confessed in open court to providing vast archives of military and diplomatic files to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, saying that he released the information to help enlighten the public about “what happens and why it happens” and to “spark a debate about foreign policy.”

Appearing before a military judge, Manning read a statement recounting how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain documents should become known to the US public to prompt a wider debate about foreign policy, downloaded them from a secure computer network and ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.

“No one associated with WLO” – an abbreviation he used to refer to the WikiLeaks organisation – “pressured me into sending any more information,” Manning said. “I take full responsibility.” Before reading the statement, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the leak, 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 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a quarter-million cables from US diplomats stationed around the world.

The guilty pleas exposed him to as long as 20 years in prison. But the case against the slightly built, bespectacled 25-year-old, who has become a folk hero among anti-war and whistle-blower advocacy groups, is not over. The military has charged him with a far more serious set of offences, including aiding the enemy and multiple counts of violating federal statutes, including the Espionage Act.

Prosecutors have the option of pressing forward with proving the remaining elements of the more serious charges.

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 things that initially gave him pause, he said, were the diplomatic cables, which he portrayed as documenting “backroom 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 US,” he said. “However, I did believe the release of the cables might be embarrassing.” 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.

Ignoring the impact

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.

Manning said he put the files on a digital storage card for his camera and took them 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.

Manning said he first called The Washington Post and spoke to an unidentified reporter for about five minutes. He decided that the reporter did not seem particularly interested because she said The Post would have to review the material before making any commitment.

Manning eventually decided to release the information by uploading it to WikiLeaks. To do so, he said, he used a broadband connection at a Barnes & Noble store because his aunt’s house in a Maryland suburb, where he was staying, had lost its Internet connection in a snowstorm. In February 2010, after he returned to Iraq, Manning sent more files to WikiLeaks, including a helicopter gunship video of a 2007 episode in Iraq in which US forces killed a group of men, including two Reuters journalists, and then fired again on a van that pulled up to help the victims.

Manning said the video troubled him, both because of the shooting of the second group of people, who “were not a threat but merely good Samaritans,” and because of what he described as the “seemingly delightful blood lust” expressed by the airmen in the recording. He also learned that Reuters had been seeking the video without success.

Manning said he copied the files from the secure network onto disks, which he took back to his quarters and transferred to his personal laptop before uploading them to WikiLeaks – initially through its website and later using a directory the group designated for him on a “cloud drop box” server.

Manning was increasingly engaged in online conversations with someone from WikiLeaks who he said he assumed was a senior figure like Julian Assange, its founder, whose name he mispronounced as “as-sahn-JAY.” He said he greatly valued those talks because he felt isolated in Iraq. But, in retrospect, he said the relationship was “artificial.” He did not elaborate.

The judge, Col Denise Lind, pressed Manning to explain how he could admit that his actions were wrong if his motivation was the ‘greater good’ of enlightening the public. Manning replied, “Your Honour, regardless of my opinion or my assessment of documents such as these, it’s beyond my pay grade – it’s not my authority to make these decisions” about releasing confidential files.