FORT MEADE, Md. — An Army private charged in the biggest security breach in U.S. history testified Thursday that he felt like a doomed, caged animal after he was arrested in Baghdad on accusations of sending classified information to the website WikiLeaks.
Speaking publicly for the first time about his May 2010 arrest and subsequent confinement, Pfc. Bradley Manning testified about his time in a cell in a segregation tent at Camp Arifjan, an Army installation in Kuwait.
“I remember thinking I’m going to die. I’m stuck inside this cage,” Manning said in response to questions from defense attorney David Coombs. “I just thought I was going to die in that cage. And that’s how I saw it - an animal cage.”
Manning was later sent to a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., in July 2010. His lawyers are seeking dismissal ofall charges, contending his pretrial confinement at Quantico was needlessly harsh.
Manning’s testimony came on the third day of a pretrial hearing at Fort Meade, the sprawling Army post between Washington and Baltimore.
The compact, 24-year-old intelligence analyst looked youthful in his dark-blue dress uniform, close-cropped hair and rimless eyeglasses. He was animated, often swiveling in the witness chair and gesturing with his hands.
Speaking in emphatic bursts, sometimes stumbling over his words, Manning said that at Quantico, where he was held for nine months in highly restrictive maximumcustody, “I started to feel like I was mentally going back to Kuwait mode, in that lonely, dark, black hole place, mentally.”
Manning said he never sank that low but grew frustrated after five months of spending up to 23 hours a day in a windowless, 6-by-8-foot cell.
“It was pretty draining. Tiring,” Manning said.
He described it as “boredom. Complete, out-of-mymind boredom.”
Manning is trying to avoid trial in the WikiLeaks case. He argues he was punished enough when he was locked up alone in a small cell for nearly nine months at Quantico, where he also had to sleep naked for several nights.
The military contends the treatment was proper, given Manning’s classification then as a maximum-security detainee who posed a risk of injury to himself or others.
Earlier Thursday, a military judge accepted the terms under which Manning was willing to plead guilty to eight charges for sending classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.
Col. Denise Lind’s ruling doesn’t mean the pleas have been formally accepted. That could happen in December.
But Lind approved the language of the offenses to which Manning would admit.
She said those offenses carry a total maximum prison term of 16 years.
Manning made the offer as a way of accepting responsibility for the leak.
The government has not said whether it will proceed with the remaining counts, including violating the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy, which are more difficult to prove, experts say. Both require evidence of intent - and in the case of the Espionage Act, an intent to injure the United States.
Lind’s ruling “gives the government a chance to make a decision about what they want to do with the more serious charges,” said Michael Navarre, a military law expert. “They now will have been able to extract some punishment for some of the charges he’s pled to. The question is do they want to spend the time and the money to go forward with the more serious charges?There’s always been a question of whether or not the government could prove the more serious charges.”
Another military law specialist, Eugene Fidell, at Yale Law School, said that “anybody can plead guilty and hope the government won’t bother them anymore.” But, he said, “I assume” the government would proceed. “Why wouldn’t they?”
Under the proposal, Manning would admit to willfully sending the following material: a battlefield video file, some classified memos, more than 20 Iraq war logs, more than 20 Afghanistan war logs and other classified materials. He would also plead guilty to wrongfully storing classified information.
In extensive online chats obtained by prosecutors, Manning purportedly communicated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange aboutthe material.
Information for this article was contributed by David Dishneau of The Associated Press and by Julie Tate and Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 11/30/2012