Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of the biggest unauthorised disclosure of state secrets in US history, has admitted for the first time being the source of the leak, telling a military court that he passed the information to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks because he believed the American people had a right to know the “true costs of war”.
At a pre-trial hearing on a Maryland military base, Manning (25), who faces spending the rest of his life in military custody, read out a 35-page statement in which he gave an impassioned account of his motives for transmitting classified documents and videos he had obtained while working as an intelligence analyst outside Baghdad.
Sitting at the defence bench in a hushed courtroom, Manning said he had been sickened by the apparent “bloodlust” he had witnessed in a video of a helicopter crew involved in an attack on a group in Baghdad that turned out to include Reuters correspondents and children.
He believed the Afghan and Iraq war logs published by WikiLeaks, initially in association with a consortium of international media organisations, were “among the more significant documents of our time revealing the true costs of war”.
The decision to pass the classified information to a public website was motivated, he said, by his depression about the state of military conflict in which the US was mired, hoping the revelations could “spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general”. – (Guardian service)