FORT MEADE, Maryland - The U.S. government ended its case Tuesday against the Army intelligence analyst blamed for the biggest leak of national secrets in American history.
The prosecution called its final six witnesses in the case against alleged WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning, which was being followed by the defence calling witnesses and closing arguments. Then a military officer will decide whether to recommend that the 24-year-old be court-martialed on 22 charges, including aiding the enemy. If convicted, Manning could face life in prison.
Manning is accused of illegally leaking a trove of secret information to WikiLeaks, a breach that rattled U.S. foreign relations and, according to the government, imperiled valuable military and diplomatic sources.
The military has released a text file, purportedly discovered on a data card owned by Manning, boldly stating the importance of data that would make its way to the secrets-spilling website WikiLeaks.
"This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day," Manning wrote, according to digital-crimes investigator David Shaver.
Almost 500,000 classified battlefield reports were also on the card, Shaver said.
A half-dozen, buttoned-down young men and women favouring charcoal grey suits have come and gone behind the prosecutor's table -- apparently representatives of the Justice Department, CIA or other governments agencies.
Across the room were Manning's supporters, including a long-haired young man representing Occupy Wall Street and a pony-tailed, military veteran wearing a "Free Bradley Manning" T-shirt.
Attorneys for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange observed, as well as a representative of Amnesty International. A half-dozen journalists were present, alongside people in camouflage uniforms. They included the presiding officer, all three prosecutors, two of the defence lawyers and military police stationed along the back and side walls.
Until Monday, the defence largely focused on painting Manning as an emotionally troubled gay man serving during the Army's "don't ask, don't tell" era, and arguing that the classified material proved harmless in the open. Manning's lawyers have yet to acknowledge or deny his responsibility for leaking of hundreds of thousands of U.S. war and diplomatic cables and a classified military video of an American helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 11 men.
His lawyers argue the troubled young private should never have had access to classified material and that workplace security was inexplicably lax.
The prosecution said evidence showed that Manning communicated directly with Assange and bragged to someone else about leaking video of a 2007 helicopter attack to WikiLeaks.
Investigators pointed to one May 2010 exchange between Manning and a mathematician named Eric Schmiedl.
"Are you familiar with WikiLeaks?" Manning allegedly asked.
"Yes, I am," Schmiedl wrote.
"I was the source of the July 12, 2007, video from the Apache Weapons Team which killed the two journalists and injured two kids," Manning wrote, according to the prosecution.
Manning seemed to take in Monday's proceedings calmly.
Paul Almanza, the presiding officer, twice removed spectators and reporters from the hearing Monday for sessions dealing with classified information. By ruling the leaked diplomatic and military information should somehow remain secret, even though it has been published by media around the world, Almanza undermined the defence argument that no harm was done.
Manning supporters fumed. His defence also challenged thousands of cables found on Manning's workplace computers, arguing that some didn't match those published by WikiLeaks and that others couldn't be matched to the young private's user profile.
The 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst is a computer whiz who worked as a civilian software developer. He was the go-to guy for plotting data points and creating Excel spreadsheets in Baghdad, an intelligence officer testified.
But he may have met his match in the info-tech gumshoes who bored deep into several computer hard drives in search of incriminating evidence. Shaver and civilian contractor Mark Johnson are products of military or intelligence agencies with extensive government-funded training in their fields.
They said they found evidence Manning downloaded and emailed nearly half a million sensitive battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and video of the helicopter attack that WikiLeaks shared with the world and dubbed "Collateral Murder."
The digital forensic examiners littered their testimonies with the terms of their trade. Text files. Zip files. Hash values. Allocated and unallocated disk space. And much, much more.
They frequently mentioned Wget -- pronounced "double-you-get" -- a computer program for finding and downloading large amounts of data. They talked about Base64, a program that compresses digital documents for speedy transmission by removing all the spaces and punctuation marks.
"It may look like gibberish," Shaver conceded.
One defence lawyer, Capt. Paul Bouchard, sometimes seemed baffled by the technical terms. On Monday, Shaver politely corrected him after Bouchard repeatedly referred to server files as logs during a cross-examination. Lead defence attorney David Coombs looked displeased.
An exchange between Bouchard and Johnson drew chuckles from the gallery. The defence lawyer, seeking indications that supervisors ignored signs of emotional distress, asked Johnson if his forensic probe of files and electronic data had turned up any evidence of Manning's odd behaviour.
"Odd behaviour?" Johnson replied matter-of-factly. "No sir, it's a computer drive."
