FT. MEADE, Md. (CN) - Pfc. Bradley Manning's massive disclosure of military secrets to WikiLeaks proved that "the emperor" - here, the U.S. classification system - "has no clothes," a defense attorney said at the end of a landmark court-martial.
Manning, a 25-year-old 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.
On Thursday, the lead prosecutor, Maj. Ashden Fein, called him a "traitor," "hacker" and "anarchist" who worked for WikiLeaks, almost immediately upon his deployment, to undermine the U.S. war effort and become notorious.
Defense attorney David Coombs mocked the prosecutor's "diatribe" as a patchwork of "cherry-picked" quotations and "child's logic." He added that the government's depiction of his client as a scheming saboteur was fundamentally incompatible with the defense's view of him as "young, naive but good intentioned."
"One of us is not telling you the truth," Coombs said. "There is no way to look at the facts and see what Maj. Fein said yesterday."
Both the defense and prosecution quoted Pfc. Manning telling an online confidant at the age of 22, "If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months what would you do?"
Defense attorney David Coombs began his opening arguments with the second half of the quote, in which Manning says he saw "incredible things, awful things, things that belonged on the public domain."
"That is a whistle-blower," Coombs said. "That is somebody that wants to inform the American public."
The only witness who cast Manning as disloyal to the United States was a former supervisor whom the young soldier had punched in the face. Spc. Jirleah Showman testified that Manning told her, "The flag means nothing to me," but she never wrote anything down about the alleged incident.
Coombs said Showman's hostility toward Manning gives her a motive to lie, and noted that every other witness who commented on their impressions of Manning described him as a promising intelligence analyst whose ideals alienated him from the fold.
The proof of Manning's good intentions lies in how he spoke in private chats, when he thought nobody was watching, about his ambitions, he added.
Before he deployed, Manning told an online stranger: "I can apply what I learn to provide more information to my officers and commanders, and hopefully save lives." The soldier added: "I feel a great responsibility and duty to people... It's strange, I know."
This optimistic outlook soured as Manning's deployment progressed and he became more familiar with military bureaucracy.
A former sergeant deployed in Manning's unit testified that Manning had once been troubled by an assignment to find protesters distributing "anti-Iraqi" literature that evidence showed was actually a scholarly critique of financial corruption within the new regime.
In an online chat, Manning said his supervisor insisted on continuing to hand these protesters over to Iraqi Federal Police who had a reputation for indefinitely detaining and torturing political dissidents.
Defense attorneys also trace Manning's disillusionment to a Christmastime incident in which insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device, killing a bystander but leaving the soldiers unharmed. Manning says his troops celebrated their good fortune, but he was concerned with the Iraqi dead.