FT. MEADE, Md. (CN) - Several military officials who once supervised WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning retreated from their past criticism of those who signed off on sending the soldier to Iraq, as the defense sentencing case kicked off on Monday.
Sending Manning to perform intelligence analysis in Baghdad gave the young soldier the access he needed to disclose more than 700,000 confidential files, including U.S. embassy cables, Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports, Guantanamo detainee profiles, and footage of airstrikes that killed civilians.
Earlier this year, the young soldier said that he leaked the files because he wanted to spark debate about the conduct of U.S. diplomacy and warfare, not for any mental health reasons.
To mitigate their client's sentencing exposure on Monday morning, however, attorneys for Manning focused more on the young soldier's psychological state than his transparency aims. Manning's struggles with anxiety, depression and gender identity have been a regular topic of his court-martial.
Capt. David Moulton, a doctor who sat on the "sanity board" that cleared Manning as competent to stand trial, is expected to testify this week.
As proceedings began, the lead prosecutor, Maj. Ashden Fein, tried to get access to the sanity board's report to use against Manning. "It's the defense that is the gatekeeper," Fein said. "If the defense raises a mental health condition, they open the door."
Lead defense attorney David Coombs said that he was offering mental health evidence only to provide "context and circumstances" behind Manning's disclosures. Giving prosecutors the sanity board's report would be unfair because Manning was forced to participate in it, Coombs said.
The military judge, Col. Denise Lind, ordered the defense to hand prosecutors that report, but she allowed the redaction of any statements that Manning made to the board in keeping with medical privacy restrictions.
As its first witness in the sentencing case, Manning's defense called Col. David Miller, the former brigade commander who testified about the "scrubbing" process that recruits must pass in order to deploy.
At least three of Manning's supervisors were removed or reshuffled around the time of his deployment, Miller acknowledged. In one instance, a major had to be replaced by a captain. Miller agreed that this was atypical, but he downplayed the shakeups as unrelated.
The major in question, Cliff Clausen, had been removed from his position as commander of the S2 shop, shorthand for the intelligence analysts, in December 2009.
That same month, Manning had an angry outburst in a counseling session in which he flipped over a table, damaging computer equipment in the process. A soldier at the scene had to restrain Manning from grabbing a weapon, the court heard.
Manning kept his security clearance and never received a "derog," or derogatory, for the incident.
Insisting that these two events were unrelated, Miller testified that Clausen had been pulled because his intelligence reports were not up to snuff, not because of any failures as a supervisor. The colonel defended the decision not to remove Manning's security clearance after the 2009 outburst.
"We're not in an environment of someone made a mistake, kick them to the curb," Miller said.
Manning's attorneys claim that the Army adopted this forgiving attitude only because of staffing shortages.
Corroborating that, Clausen said that the S2 shop was roughly one-third "under strength."
"There was a pressure on the whole unit to deploy," Clausen added.
