Manning to Face More Serious Charges in Leak

Private Manning admitted in court on Thursday that he had provided about 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group, in the most extensive leak of confidential and classified material in American history. But he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges in what is known as a “naked plea” — one made without the usual agreement with prosecutors to cap the potential sentence in return.

After the plea, prosecutors and their boss, the commanding general of the Washington Military District, had the option of settling for the 10 charges to which he had admitted his guilt and proceeding directly to sentencing. Instead, they said they would continue with plans for a court-martial beginning June 3, with 141 prosecution witnesses scheduled to testify.

“Given the scope of the alleged misconduct, the seriousness of the charged offenses, and the evidence and testimony available, the United States intends to proceed with the court-martial to prove Manning committed the charged offenses beyond the lesser charges to which he has already pled guilty,” said a statement from the military district.

Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale, said the prosecutors’ decision suggested that they believed that his admissions, as extensive as they were, did not capture the full seriousness of his crimes or guarantee an adequate sentence. Most important, he said, the government wants to deter others from taking advantage of the Internet and portable storage devices to follow his example and leak government secrets on a grand scale.

“They want to scare the daylights out of other people,” Mr. Fidell said.

On Thursday, Private Manning, slight and bespectacled and dressed in a crisp Army uniform, was permitted to read a 35-page statement he had written to explain how he came to deliver to WikiLeaks voluminous archives of war reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, detainee assessments from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a quarter-million diplomatic cables and video showing helicopter gunships killing civilians in Iraq.

His statement allowed him to put on the record his political motives — he said he leaked the material in part “to spark a debate about foreign policy” — which have drawn support from a long list of critics of American policies and open-government advocates around the world. Private Manning may also have won some points with the judge, Col. Denise R. Lind, for not forcing the government to prove that he supplied the documents to WikiLeaks and for acknowledging that he broke the law.

But the confession, to the unauthorized possession and transmission of “protected information,” appears to have done nothing to alter the government’s determination to make an example of him or to limit the sentence he will ultimately serve. The military prosecutors’ statement said they would seek to prove all the charges to which Private Manning pleaded not guilty: aiding the enemy, violating the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, larceny and the improper use of government information systems.

Perhaps the biggest battle in what is expected to be a 12-week trial will be over the prosecutors’ attempt to prove the rare charge of aiding the enemy — in the words of the charging document, that Private Manning did “without proper authority, knowingly give intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means.” That charge can carry the death penalty, but since prosecutors have ruled that punishment out, he would face a maximum sentence of life without parole if convicted.

The government has said that some of the documents that Private Manning gave to WikiLeaks ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden, and the prosecution and defense sparred on Friday over whether and how that evidence would be presented at trial. Prosecutors said they wanted a witness who participated in the 2011 raid that killed Bin Laden to testify in disguise at the trial.

In his testimony on Thursday, Private Manning went out of his way to suggest that while he corresponded online with someone from WikiLeaks who he assumed to be the group’s founder, Julian Assange, no one from the organization directed his actions.

That could be significant for a continuing federal grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks in Alexandria, Va. Prosecutors are exploring whether Mr. Assange or his associates conspired with Private Manning to break any laws. Mr. Assange, now hiding out in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face sexual offense charges, has maintained that he merely publishes documents that others provide to the group.

Reached by The Associated Press, Mr. Assange called Private Manning a political prisoner and accused the United States of trying to punish critics of its military and foreign policies.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/us/manning-to-face-more-serious-charges-in-leak.html?partner=rss&emc=rss