FT. MEADE, Md. (CN) - Pfc. Bradley Manning should not serve an effective life sentence as prosecutors have recommended, defense attorneys told the military court Monday.
With Manning's acquittal of aiding the enemy and convictions under the Espionage Act and other laws, prosecutors have called for the 25-year-old soldier to face a sentence of 60 years in prison for disclosing the biggest trove of confidential files in U.S. history, including battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables from around the globe, and profiles of Guantanamo detainees.
Manning has said for months that he made the disclosures to provoke debate about the conduct of U.S. diplomacy and warfare, and that he carefully selected categories of files that he believed would not damage national security.
Indeed, the prosecution's sentencing case could not trace a single death to any particular disclosure. Witnesses offered evidence that the U.S. government minimized the risk of harm by shuttling people out of harm's way if their names were disclosed by the leaked cables, and conducted a nine-month operation to warn Afghan villagers about the risk of possible retribution. The United States "moved heaven and earth" to protect exposed sources in some of these cases, according to Capt. Joe Morrow, an Army prosecutor.
The court heard "concrete examples" of harm during classified session, he added.
Manning's attorney David Coombs characterized the testimony of these witnesses as "speculative at best," and said that to call these impacts "ongoing, or continuing, or getting worse as time goes by is to ignore reality."
However, Coombs added: "Whenever you're talking about more than 700,000 pages of documents, something that Pfc. Manning could not have read in their entirety, certainly there are risks."
During the sentencing phase, the court closed testimony for every mention of a particular diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. Supporters of Manning have pointed to the role they believe the disclosures have played in the toppling of Western-backed autocrats during the so-called Arab Spring, bringing the Iraq War to an end, and uncovering information about civilian deaths and drone warfare.
Instead of touching upon these points, his defense attorneys focused on Manning's psychological state and the alleged failures of his chain of command. The court heard testimony that Manning sent distraught emails about his gender identity and displayed visible emotional turmoil that went ignored by his supervisors.
One of these supervisors, former Master Sgt. Paul Adkins, found Manning huddled on the floor of the supply room after having carved the words "I WANT" on the vinyl of a chair. Adkins returned the soldier directly to work.
"The utter failure to take any action at that point is inexcusable," Coombs argued. After punching a fellow soldier in the face later that night, Manning was finally disciplined with a reduction in rank from intelligence specialist to private first class, his current rank.
In an Army investigation that immediately followed the leaks, at least 15 officers, including Adkins, received letters of reprimand.
Prosecutor Morrow bristled at this line of argument on Monday, urging the court to impose a sentence that he said would keep the WikiLeaks source in prison for the rest of his life.
"This is a case about Pfc. Manning, Your Honor," he said. "The Army is not on trial. The command is not on trial. Mr. Adkins is not on trial. Behavioral health is not on trial."