Bradley Manning set for arraignment in Wikileaks case

PanARMENIAN.Net - The court martial of Army Private First Class Bradley Manning gets under way today, February 23 as the soldier prepares to enter a plea to charges he leaked classified information published on the Wikileaks website, Bloomberg reported.

Manning, 24, is set for arraignment at the U.S. Army’s Fort Meade in Maryland, where he will hear the charges read against him and be asked to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. A hearing in December resulted in a finding that the U.S. government had enough evidence to proceed to a court martial.

“The case is a drama that embodies either great heroism or great villainy, depending on who you talk to,” Steven Aftergood, director of a government secrecy program at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said in an interview. “Up to this point, we’ve been in a preliminary phase, and the arraignment begins the process in earnest.”

The defense of Manning by attorney David Coombs has included requests for government assessments of the damage the leaks allegedly did to national security and for depositions of dozens of witnesses, partly to establish whether the material was classified.

The 2010 WikiLeaks episode, in which hundreds of thousands of classified records and State Department cables were made public, spurred a drive to tighten government security.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told an audience in Washington last month that the administration is trying to develop a national insider-threat policy. Manning, who was stationed in Iraq at the time of the leaks, is charged with violations including aiding the enemy, which carries a possible life sentence.

President Barack Obama established a task force in October to develop a governmentwide program to detect and stop potential insider threats. He issued an executive order outlining responsibilities of federal agencies for securing classified information on their computer networks.