UPDATE, Thursday, February 28 (Brett Brownell): In a military courtroom in Fort Meade, Maryland, on Thursday, Bradley Manning pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him. The AP reports he admitted to sending classified material to WikiLeaks, but he pleaded not guilty to the charge of "aiding the enemy."
In addition to the plea, Manning was permitted by Judge Denise Lind to read a 35-page personal statement explaining his role in releasing the classified information: "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. "I believed that these cables would not damage the United States. However, I believed these cables would be embarrassing."
Lind will decide whether to accept his guilty plea, which carries a maximum of 20 years in prison. Meanwhile, the prosecution can still decide whether to pursue a court martial on the remaining 12 charges, which include a possible life sentence.
What about Manning's controversial treatment by the military justice system? For much more on how this case has unfolded, read on.
At a judicial hearing at Fort Meade in Maryland on November 7, Bradley Manning, the imprisoned Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, offered to plead guilty to a subset of the charges against him. The offer was first submitted on October 17, but due to the strict secrecy surrounding the case and minimal media coverage the details only came to light with that hearing. On Tuesday, more hearings are scheduled to begin, and for the first time they are expected to include testimony from Manning himself.
Adam Klasfeld, a reporter for Courthouse News Service, was one of just two credentialed reporters in the courtroom when the plea was revealed. (The other was Kevin Gosztola.) "It's surreal to see so little coverage in a case about the largest intelligence disclosure in U.S. history," Klasfeld said in an email. He also noted that there was confusion in the media about Manning's plea; some news outlets had overlooked the fact that Manning had agreed to a "naked plea" deal, which could reduce the charges, if accepted by the court. As Manning's attorney David E. Coombs explained in a blog post:
PFC Manning has offered to plead guilty to various offenses through a process known as "pleading by exceptions and substitutions." To clarify, PFC Manning is not pleading guilty to the specifications as charged by the Government. Rather, PFC Manning is attempting to accept responsibility for offenses that are encapsulated within, or are a subset of, the charged offenses. The Court will consider whether this is a permissible plea.
Specific details about Manning's plea are as yet unknown. But according to Klasfeld, following the hearings in early November a military spokesman at Fort Meade told him that details of Manning's plea will come out in December during scheduled arguments. The spokesman also told Klasfeld that, as part of the deal, Manning may admit to "everything except the global address book"—a list of US government contacts and emails that was compromised. That means Manning would take responsibility for leaking a large cache of files from various US military databases in the war zones, Guantanamo Bay, and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as leaking video of an air strike by a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad on July 12, 2007—later turned into worldwide news by WikiLeaks—in which 12 people were killed, including two Iraqi civilians employed by Reuters.
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