He wanted to “spark a domestic debate,” said in a firm voice Private First Class Bradley Manning as he exposed for the first time Thursday his motivation for one of the largest leak of confidential documents in American history.
Reading for more than an hour a statement written in prison, the former intelligence analyst in Iraq, 25 years old, explained why he became the “mole” of WikiLeaks passing it between November 2009 and May 2010 U.S. military documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
” I believe that if the general public … had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate as to the role of the military and foreign policy in general,” he told Judge Denise Lind, during a preliminary hearing in his trial scheduled to begin in early June .
He also announced his intention to plead guilty to 10 lesser counts of misusing classified information, but considers himself innocent of the most serious charges, including that of “aiding the enemy,” punishable by life in prison.
During his hearing, Manning, passionate about geopolitics and information technology, presented himself as a young private committed to 20 years in the military to “experience the world as it is” and receive a scholarship to go to college. But, with the realities of the conflict, he was gradually facing an army that did not seem to give value to human life.
The blunder committed by an Apache helicopter firing at civilians in Iraq in July 2007, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters staff, which he leaked in a video, gave him a feeling of “exquisite bloodlust” of the military. “We became obsessed with the capture or elimination of human targets.”
Risking to pose as a white knight, alone against all, he described the long process that led him to the court martial. As a private first class (the lowest rank in the U.S. Army), he had access as an analyst on multiple protected databases with data on hundreds of thousands of government and private sector employees working for the army.
Two of them were Sigacts, identifying daily incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. For him these were “some of the most important documents of our recent history.” The Sigacts include every firefight involving American forces and roadside bomb explosions.
According to him they were not confidential information in two or three days after the incident because “the unit was no longer on the scene of the incident or was no longer in danger.”
“I was interested to documents which I was absolutely sure they would not cause harm” to the security of the United States, pleaded the young man.
After trying in vain to contact the Washington Post, the New York Times and the free newspaper Politico, he turned to WikiLeaks. He considered the website created by Julian Assange a means of “revealing illegal activities and corruption.”
He then released other leaks but assured that nobody had ever pressured him for disseminating classified documents: “The decisions were mine and I take full responsibility for my actions,” he claimed.
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