FT. MEADE, Md. (CN) - A military prosecutor capped off his day-long closing arguments in the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning by labeling the admitted WikiLeaks source as a "traitor."
The remark presents a stark contrast to the attempts of defense attorney David Coombs to characterize his client as "young, naive but good intentioned" man who grappled with ethical dilemmas.
"He was not a troubled young soul," Maj. Ashden Fein, the lead prosecutor, said at the close of five hours of summations Thursday. "He was a determined soldier with a knowledge, ability and desire to harm the United States in its war effort. And, Your Honor, he was not a whistle-blower. He was a traitor: a traitor who understood the value of compromised information in the hands of the enemy and took deliberate steps to ensure they, along with the world, received all of it."
The former intelligence specialist faces 22 charges connected with the disclosure of more than 700,000 military and diplomatic files, including battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. embassy cables, Guantanamo detainee profiles, and footage of airstrikes that killed civilians.
Manning said he hoped the publication of this information would spark widespread debate, reforms, and reportage about the way the U.S. conducts warfare and diplomacy.
He could face a life sentence without parole if convicted of "aiding the enemy" based on Civil War precedent that likens leak to the press with treason if an adversary receives the information. Press-freedom advocates and civil libertarians assail this interpretation of the law for its simplistic reliance on the mere access al-Qaida and other U.S. adversaries have to the Internet.
Prosecutors have said that a cartoon of this very point put Manning on notice of the "aiding the enemy" charge.
The image depicts a crude sketch of a Dilbert-style figure sitting at a computer, with an unattributed statistic in its caption: "Over the last ten years, the number of terrorist sites has jumped from less than 100 to as many as 4,000."
On top of this charge, Manning also faces 21 other charges - such as the Espionage Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and military violations - that could tack on more than a century behind bars.
His supporters, who have filled the courtroom with T-shirts bearing the word "truth," herald the mass leaks as a new frontier in whistle-blowing and data journalism, giving the public a broad view of how opaque social institutions function.
Maj. Fein dismissed the acts as "wholesale, indiscriminate leaking," and claimed that he "delivered these documents for notoriety."
Though he wore custom-made dog tags specifically branded with the word humanist, "the only person that Pfc. [Bradley] Manning cared about was himself," Fein said.
"Julian Assange found the right insider to mine" the military computers, he added, referring to the founder of WikiLeaks.
Prosecutors say Manning took cues on what to leak from the WikiLeaks' Most-Wanted List and its Twitter feed. Manning took a special interest in Icelandic affairs because that was where its chief Julian Assange was at the time, Fein said.
Casting WikiLeaks as "information anarchists," Fein said that Manning's chats with a user believed to be Assange depicted the website as "anything but a journalistic enterprise."
Although these chats never have been published, Fein quoted snippets that he believed supported his argument.
