FT. MEADE, Md. (CN) - A former master sergeant who ignored a picture of WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning dressed as a woman faced tough questions Tuesday.
"This is my problem. I've had signs of it for a very long time," Manning had said in an April 24, 2010, email to his then-supervisor, former Master Sgt. Paul Adkins. "It's caused problems within my family. I thought a career in the military would get rid of it."
This point echoes the thesis of "Flight into Hypermasculinity," a scientific study profiling transgender armed service members. The paper's author, former Air Force psychologist George Brown, found that his patients told him that they joined the military, in their words, "to become a real man," only to experience the return of their repressed identities. A copy of this study was found in Manning's housing unit in Iraq.
Speaking of hiding this identity, Manning prophetically wrote in the lengthy email, "Now, the consequences of it are dire, at a time when it's causing me great pain in itself."
The subject line of the email read, "My problem."
A black-and-white copy of the attached photograph, displayed in court, showed Manning wearing what appeared to have been a straight blonde wig and bright lipstick. He appeared to have taken the photograph of himself staring into a camera from inside a car.
David Coombs, Manning's lead attorney, has spent the better part of the two days of the defense sentencing case pressing supervisors in the intelligence unit to agree that they made the wrong choice in letting the young soldier deploy to Baghdad.
There, Manning had unprecedented access to a huge trove of military and diplomatic files. He ultimately uploaded more than 700,000 of these to WikiLeaks, including U.S. embassy cables, Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports, Guantanamo detainee profiles, and footage of airstrikes that killed civilians.
Had this email become widely circulated, Manning would almost certainly have lost his top-secret clearance and have been discharged from the military.
At the time of its transmission, the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy was still active, and a ban on transgender soldiers continues to this day. The military justifies this ongoing prohibition on so-called "medical" restrictions, which shoehorn "transsexualism" into what it calls "psychosexual conditions." These include "exhibitionism, transvestitism, voyeurism and other paraphilias."
Manning said shortly after this topic first came up in his court-martial that he currently prefers to be addressed as male.
Adkins did not forward this email to his supervisor, Capt. Steve Lim, until November, nearly half a year after Manning's arrest.
Justifying that decision today, Adkins said, "I really didn't think at the time that having a picture floating around of one of my soldiers in drag was in the best interest of the mission, the intel mission, Sir."
As a Shia analyst, Manning had analyzed one of the most active insurgent groups in Baghdad.
"I felt that he was still producing products that allowed us to neutralize the Shia threat," Adkins said.
In questioning Adkins, one of the prosecutors, Capt. Angel Overgaard, adopted a more progressive stance toward Manning's gender identity than the military currently has on the books.
Overgaard asked Adkins: "Regardless of his cross-dressing in that email, did you still trust him to do his job?"
"I did," Adkins replied.
